Game designer Liam Liwanag Burke describes Dog Eat Dog as a ”fun, compelling game about colonialism and assimilation in the Pacific Islands.” That’s right – Burke created a fun roleplaying game about the inequality inherent to colonialism and its consequences. One player acts as the Occupation (all of it...
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In this post I read the ruleset of Papo & Yo as an example of the same kind of creative manipulation of immersion I located in the Odyssey in my last post. My argument for better living through epic springs from a model of immersion that at its simplest level finds in the experience of having one’s immediate reality...
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In this post I outline an argument for trying to study immersion as I described it in my last post. To put that argument simply, the reason to study immersion as identification is that to do so allows us cultural traction over an essential part of the experience of practomime–a part that composers and performers have been...
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In my previous installment, I argued that one could look at the re-release of Netrunner by Fantasy Flight Games and compare it to the original Wizards of the Coast version, released sixteen years ago, in order to take a zeitgeist measurement of the social and technological milieu’s that spawned each iteration. While last...
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In the posts in this series so far I’ve demonstrated that games condition humanities. The rulesets of the past, beginning (from the perspective of the traditional canon of Western literature) with the homeric epics, enable the performances of the present; those performances iterate the rulesets, inviting future performances in...
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I’m teaching HIST3812: Digital History (Games and Simulations for Historians) this term. Past experience has taught me that whenever I actually try to force students to learn some digital skills – to do digital history – I encounter pushback and resistance. Why that should be is fodder for another day, but I...
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I promised to deal with one last problem in my “Games are Humanism” line of argument (now that the non-essentiality of the academic ruleset and the incipient humanism of even the least self-aware performance have been established): if we grant that playing BioShock can be doing humanities, where does that leave games...
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