Welcome to Assassin’s Creed Week presented by Play the Past, where for a whole week, Play the Past will push content on the most popular historical video game series ever. Part I introduced the Week and asked why Assassin’s Creed mattered. Part II of the Assassin’s Creed Week series will look at how the series...
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Welcome to Assassin’s Creed Week. After my plans for reading week fell through, I figured I would put some time into finally writing out some thoughts I have had on the Assassin’s Creed series and never had the chance to put to digital paper. So from Monday to Friday this week, I will be posting something about...
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This will be the first in a four-part series that reflects on a Composition II course taught in Spring 2013 called 20th Century PC Games. The course’s primary goal is to teach students academic writing conventions (as a continuation of Composition I), but it is also designed to do so by teaching students to analyze and write...
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Enemies within the scope of the real world are difficult to choose for video games. With science fiction games, like Halo, or fantasy games, like Skyrim, universally acceptable enemies like aliens or dragons can be used without any sort of outcry from the public. Some modern shooters have turned to former superpower, Russia, or...
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Videogames are inextricably bound to ideology. In most cases, this is not by design, but simply because game developers tend to create virtual worlds that reflect the particular way in which they see the real world. As Ian Bogost (2006) has noted, these ideological frames are rarely explicit, making it all the more important...
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Leading up to the new Millennium, western countries rushed to recount the history of the 20th century in what Jay Winter, one of the leading historians in the field of memory studies, has called the memory boom. During this time, the big conflicts of 20th century were remembered in public history. The Second World War, in...
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We talk a lot about how history is represented in games and about how games can be used to teach history, but I’d love to spark a conversation here about how games themselves can actually be a form of scholarship in their own right. That is, can we imagine getting to a point where a historian might compose a game or a simulation...
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Collaboratively edited and authored, Play the Past is dedicated to thoughtfully exploring and discussing the intersection of cultural heritage (very broadly defined) and games/meaningful play (equally broadly defined). Play the Past contributors come from a wide variety of backgrounds, domains, perspectives, and motivations (for being interested in both games and cultural heritage). More information on all of our contributors can be found here. A full rundown of our community and commenting policy can be found here. If you are looking to get in contact with us (for whatever reason), point your browser here and drop us a line.
