About Maarten Collewijn

Maarten Collewijn has a Master of Arts in Military History from the University of Amsterdam. Born in 1976, he has been playing computer games since he was 9 years old. Playing the computer game Red Storm Rising taught him a lot about the cold war. When he was studying history he became aware that a lot of history is being taught through computer games. He wrote his Master’s thesis on Computer Wargames where he researched the relation between history and computer (war) games. It has become his mission to educate the public about history through gaming.

Here you can find a copy of the Masterthesis on the relation between wargames and history. The main research question of this thesis is: “What sources of information are being used by computergame developers to add historical content to a (war) game?

During his research Collewijn discovered that many game developers put a lot of effort into making their games historically accurate. A growing number of gamers find it interesting to play games which are true to the reality of the time.