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...
read more
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...
read more
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...
read more
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...
read more
The other week when I was teaching a lovely group of 7th graders, I demonstrated how a colonial buzz saw toy works. Grasping both handles firmly, I spun the toy’s wheel around its string a few times and then firmly pulled the handles away from the wheel. I let the string unwind and then repeated this motion – spinning,...
read more
One of the most anticipated games of 2012 to be reworked from it’s original design was Netrunner: Android, released by Fantasy Flight Games. Based on the critically acclaimed 1996 original game by Richard Garfield, known to many as the designer behind the collectible-card-game behemoth Magic: The Gathering, Netrunner:...
read more
So is it still humanities if the player, invited to interrogate the méconnaissance that constitutes the epistemology of what s/he perceives as interactivity, says “Meh”? It seems hard to deny that the vast majority of players of BioShock have never thought about the Death-Disarm sequence as a critique of their...
read more
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.
