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«Encyclopedic Games» as a Way of Historical Reflection
This paper is devoted to the analysis of the specifics of historical reflection in computer games. The author shows how games can accumulate history, reflect on it, transform it for the sake of game conventions, and also change cultural memory in some way. Gameful historiography is sometimes associated with the concepts of "edutainment" and "serious game", which have as their goal the teaching of historical material. However, the author’s term “encyclopedic game” is used in the study to designate such types of games that in their essence can be “read” as a form of reliable knowledge, but at the same time, they were created as independent products with a partially fictional world. The main objective of the study is an attempt to identify ways of organizing historical material in the form of a computer game. During the study, the author describes the general features of the history of games and its problems, justifies the use of the term “encyclopedic game”, and identifies various types of “encyclopedicism”. As a result, the author concludes that the "encyclopedic game" is a unique form of medium of computer games that can embody the history of everyday life and mentality in the "total" form.