UNCORRECTED PROOF Digital Entertainment Gaming as a Site for (Informal) Historical Learning? A Reﬂection on Possibilities and Limitations Pieter Van der Heede Abstract Over the past few decades, digital entertainment gaming has become very 1 popular among a global audience of players, including a signiﬁcant number of school- 2 aged young adults. Some of the most popular digital entertainment games offer a 3 (ﬁctionalized) representation of historical events. This chapter offers a reﬂection 4 on how digital entertainment gaming can be adopted to advance historical learning 5 and the development of processual historical thinking skills. I do so by analyzing 6 historical digital games as cultural artefacts embedded in a broader digitized media 7 ecology, and digital games as integrated into formal school history curricula. 8 Keywords Digital entertainment games · Historical learning · Historical thinking · 9 Informal learning 10 Since becoming a popular pastime during the 1970s and 1980s (Malliet & de Meyer, AQ1 11 2005), digital gaming has become one of the most prominent forms of cultural expres- 12 sion in our contemporary digitized global society. For example, as shown by market 13 research companies Newzoo and Statista respectively, the global games market gener- 14 ated a total revenue of 148.8 billion dollars in 2019 (Nesterenko, 2019), whereas the 15 number of people playing digital games worldwide, including a signiﬁcant number 16 of school-aged young adults, is expected to grow to over 2.7 billion by 2021 (Gough, 17 2019). Given this increased popularity of digital gaming, and the general observa- 18 tion made around the turn of the century that digital games are often underpinned by 19 designs that mirror fundamental learning principles (Gee, 2003), a signiﬁcant number 20 of scholars has attempted to study how digital games can be adopted to foster various 21 learning processes (Whitton, 2014). In this chapter, I reﬂect on how digital entertain- 22 ment gaming can be embraced to foster historical learning in particular, especially 23 in relation to the development of processual historical thinking skills (e.g. Seixas & 24 Morton, 2013). I do so by assessing how digital games can foster historical thinking 25 both informally as procedural artefacts that are embedded in a broader ecology of 26 digitized and networked connectivity, and formally as integrated in school history 27 P. Van der Heede (B ) Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, Netherlands e-mail: vandenheede@eshcc.eur.nl © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Carretero et al. (eds.), History Education in the Digital Age, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10743-6_9 1 505854_1_En_9_Chapter  TYPESET DISK LE  CP Disp.:22/7/2022 Pages: 17 Layout: T1-Standard Author Proof