Alberto Venegas Ramos, historian and researcher, publishes his new editorial project where he reviews electronic entertainment from a retrospective perspective.
The book ‘Interactive Past. Memory and History in the Video Game ’is already on sale in Spain. Written by the historian and researcher Alberto Venegas Ramos at the hands of the publisher Sans Soleil Ediciones, they bring to bookstores a volume that covers the videogame industry from a historical perspective; from the past to the evolution of the environment and how these changes have led us to the most current present. From FreeGameTips we have been able to speak with the author to learn more about his new publication.
As defined by the publisher, after analyzing productions such as Red Dead Redemption, Assassin’s Creed or Call of Duty, “this book addresses these and other questions, demonstrating the ability of the medium to analyze our present and understand how we remember the past. A pioneer in the study of videogames, he presents a novel approach to the relationship established between history, memory and their video games ”.
‘Interactive Past. Memory and History in the Video Game ‘, already on sale in bookstores and department stores.
Bound in rustic format with flaps, the book has 262 pages and is priced at 17.10 euros from the publisher’s website; also available in bookstores across the country. Venegas Ramos offers this medium his vision after months of writing and editing. Now, ‘Interactive Past. Memory and History in the Video Game ’is already a reality.
FreeGameTips: On the raison d’être of the book: what was your general purpose?
Venegas Ramos: The idea behind this book is twofold, on the one hand it is personal, to gather and structure in a coherent unit all my work done on memory, history and video games in a single work, and on the other hand it is professional, offer an essay, to date the only one in our language on this topic, on a fact that attracts more attention every day, the representation of the past in the video game and its uses
Writing a book of this kind presents difficulties. What have been the biggest barriers that you have encountered when materializing this volume?
The same difficulties that any work of historical fiction drags: the balance between the form and the tradition of a medium, in this case the video game, and the studio’s aspiration to represent the past as it was, an impossible goal to achieve. In this difficult balance between offering a fun, attractive and profitable work and being responsible with the material in question, there is a whole spectrum that exemplifies just that: the variety of options and approaches that the video game medium has today.
What can we find in this book and why would you recommend it to an enthusiast of the medium?
In this book you will find the answers to two fundamental questions, how does the video game represent the past? And why does it? The enthusiast of the medium will be interested, for example, in knowing how Chinese studies imagine and shape their own past and what relationship this has with current politics, interesting scenarios such as the role that the video game has had in the civil war in Syria are also explored or the place that World War II occupies in the American imaginary and where the video game is found in said imaginary.
And not only this, but also the reasons behind the reconstruction of the past that we can go through in Assassin’s Creed or Wolfenstein. I believe that Past Interactive manages to put into words the reasons that exist behind the use of historical scenery in video games, one of the most popular scenarios in the medium.
References | Sans Soleil Editions
