David Hussey

David Hussey is a gaming, cultural and digital historian. He began his time at the University of Waterloo in 2009 as a Computer Science major before transferring into History in 2011. He has used his experience in both these areas to integrate digital components like programming and big data into his research and is a firm believer in the digital humanities as an important part of the future of the Arts. As a Masters of History major, his goal over the majority of his academic career at the University was to research the intersections between video games and history. He’s written exhaustively on these topics for games research sites Play the Past, First Person Scholar, and of course his own academic work. He’s found that there are two avenues for this research, history in video games and history of games.

In the former subsection, he’s done research on how history is portrayed in the Assassin's Creed series along with other historical games like L.A. Noire, Call of Duty 2, and Valiant Hearts: The Great War. Video games have the incredible ability to captivate audiences and create immersive experiences and he believes that they have great potential in teaching and understanding history.

As for history of games, he’s looked at how early video games are representative of the Space Race and Cold War. Most recently, his Masters thesis did an in depth historical account of Canada's video game history keying in on the growth of the industry, public response and government intervention.