Playing History: the history game series that won a 2010 award

Serious Games Interactive (SGI) made Playing History as a series of educational adventure games set in historically significant periods. Players meet major historical figures and experience history in the making. SGI had earlier built the Global Conflicts series, which it designed to be closer to a simulation than a game. Playing History reverses the balance: the main aim is learning through exploratory discovery, and adventure elements are strong.

Two episodes were announced in 2010, the first for autumn and the second for winter. Episode I, The Plague, covers the Black Death and is meant for 8 to 13 year olds, who learn facts about the plague and fourteenth-century Europe through challenges and mini-games. Episode II was titled The Slave Trade.

Playing History won the first European Best Learning Game competition in the category Best Professional Game with a Budget over 40.000 Euros.

The series is built to support knowledge of people, events and societies of significance in the past, of the distinctive features of life then, and of the diversity of people in the past, including class differences, traditions, values and morals. The idea is that students place their studies within a chronological framework and build a mental map of the past.

A web portal gave students and teachers an online community. Teachers could monitor playtime and activities and see the end results.

The address playinghistory.eu still loads in November 2026 under the name Playing History, with menu entries for About, Learning material and Login/Play. Its front screen is loaded through Flash embeds, a format that browsers no longer support, so no working version of the game is confirmed.

SGI's own website, seriousgames.net, is online and describes a studio in Copenhagen that develops educational and serious games in digital, blended and physical formats. Its case list names projects such as Active Avatars for Sønderborg Kommune, Groundhog Day for Ørsted, Immune Patrol for the WHO and Licence To Recruit for Maersk, sorted by public, corporate and NGO clients. Neither Playing History nor Global Conflicts appears on the page. The studio's address is listed as Ryesgade 106A in Copenhagen, and it presents itself as an expert in developing educational and serious games, with a digital format described as a fully digital experience that stands on its own.