Nutritious Games

When I was very young I, like many kids, thought subjects like history were dull and impenetrable. A series of meaningless dates and events to memorise for the sake of writing history reports. But by the time I was a young adult my attitude had done a 180 - I was a full blown history nerd, thinking about empires, battles, revolutions and more. I was hooked. At the start of every obsession there was a gateway drug, and mine was video games. Specifically, games like Age of Empires, Civilization and Total War not only had heavy historical inspiration to draw you into the source material, the voluminous flavour text means you’re constantly teased into sinking further into the rabbit hole of learning more. The Civilopedia and Age of Empires’ History section contain books’ worth of information. I remember the exact moment I crossed the point of no return, when one evening, instead of playing the game, I spent hours reading about the Britons and their longbowmen in the Hundred Years War.…