AMA - Dr Chris Kempshall, BlackMill Games Historian working on 'Gallipoli'
Hello r/WarCollege!
I'm Dr Chris Kempshall, the historian at BlackMill Games, and am extremely excited to be doing this!
To give you a bit of background – I’m predominantly a historian of the First World War with a particular focus on allied relations, a topic that I covered in my 2018 book British, French, and American Relations on the Western Front, 1914-1918.
But I also have undertaken a great deal of research around the ways in which history (and the First World War in particular) is portrayed in video games! This was the topic of my 2015 book The First World War in Computer Games and a bunch of academic book chapters and articles. One of which will, I think, be of interest to a lot of you: Killing to commemorate, dying to remember? Authenticity and the practice of memory in Isonzo.
I’m currently an Associate of the Imperial War Museum Institute, a Fellow of the Institute for Historical Research, and a Senior Research Fellow for the Centre for Army Leadership, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. I am also a former President for the International Society for First World War Studies.
I joined BlackMill Games in June 2024 and since then have been working away behind the scenes on Gallipoli which has been amazingly good fun!
We’ll be holding this AMA for an hour from 2pm BST / 3pm CET. I’ve copied in below some extra details that we circulated in advance on the BlackMill discord channel:
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Today at 15:00 CET our in-house historian, Chris Kempshall (@ChrisKemp), will be hosting an AMA on the history of Gallipoli on r/WarCollege! https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/ You can submit your questions in gallipoli-ama beforehand or jump over to the post when he goes live. Now before you send in your questions, here are some notes:
- Check the FAQ to see if your question is not already answered.
Steam FAQ: https://steamcommunity.com/app/3065940/discussions/2/809101030974337139/ Reddit FAQ: https://www.reddit.com/r/WW1GameSeries/comments/1c0gqv9/faq_ww1_game_series/
- Questions that ask why the games won't be combined into one big game or if we'll make the games free will be ignored. We've answered them before.
- Offensive/rude questions will ofc also be ignored and can lead to a ban
- Try to refrain from questions regarding potential future projects or too much about the more technical aspects of the game. Chris is a historian, not a dev.
- Submitting a question is not a guarantee that it will be answered/discussed. (There might be other AMA's in the future, so we might tackle them then!)