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Last week I ran a historical ARG created for a conference called Interacting With Immersive Worlds. The conference was, among other things, a coming out party for the Ontario Augmented Reality Network, which is the new home (and funder) of the history games research I’ve been describing in this highlyContinue Reading

OR, The Nefarious Pop-ups of Mr. Ting AKA, Chapter 2 of TECUMSEH’S CURSE A TRUE Story of Historical ARG Design Where YOU Are Invited To Comment and Thus EVER SO SLIGHTLY Affect The Ending “I know it’s a game, and you know it’s a game, but the game doesn’t knowContinue Reading

A True Story of Digital Heritage Hijinks and Augmented Reality Adventure Where YOU Write The Ending Chapter 1: Rebuffed! One of the most difficult tasks people can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games. —Carl Jung The year is 2008. The month is AprilContinue Reading

One of the classic books in the field of computer gaming and learning is James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. I often see the title abbreviated as What Video Games Have To Teach Us–an understandable shorthand, but one that allows, I think, forContinue Reading

Mark Sample recently posted a short talk he gave at the 2011 MLA, called “Criminal Code: The Procedural Logic of Crime in Videogames.” There is a lot in this little talk that’s worth reading. (I applaud Mark’s call for humanists to do close readings of code,  something we tried toContinue Reading

The great U.S. historian Richard Hofstadter on play and the intellectual: [The intellectual] may live for ideas, as I have said, but something must prevent him from living for one idea, from becoming obsessive or grotesque. … Piety, then, needs a counterpoise, something to prevent it from being exercised inContinue Reading

Why is it that when we set out to talk about history and play, we always end up talking about games? One thing that attracted me to the blog you’re reading right now, besides the terrific set of co-conspirators Ethan has assembled, was its title and the broad set ofContinue Reading