The historical stories told within the animus of Assassin’s Creed are about the clash of cultures. The Assassins and the Templars are represented in the game’s version of history by those same Assassins and Templars (Assassin’s Creed), the forces of enlightenment and repression in Renaissance Italy...
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NOTE: THIS PAPER CONTAINS SPOILERS The Second World War was possibly the most devastating conflict in human history. For Europe, it would take years before the continent was put back together. As for the United States, it became the most powerful nation in the years immediately after the Second World War. The country was in the...
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We often treat serious games as a relatively recent or unexpected development. Certainly there is still a fair amount of hype about the potential practical uses of videogames, particularly in the realm of education. While such discourses of progress and potential are certainly not unfounded, it is important to remember that...
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In my last two posts about the shooting mechanic, I tried to demonstrate that an understanding of immersion as the player’s identification with the ruleset that conditions his or her performance can help us find ways that even as entrenched a mechanic as shooting can, together with the shaping of player-immersion and...
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Gilles Roy is an educational workshop designer at the National Film Board of Canada, interested in film animation, games, and teaching history. You can find him on the twittosphere @gillesroy. “Once upon a time in the wild, Wild West… “ …a game publisher decides that it needs to save a once-successful game license from...
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The cat’s meow in tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) for the last several months has been Monte Cook’s Numerera. Set one billion years in Earth’s future during a time known as the Ninth World, Numenera is a Kickstarter-funded science fantasy RPG that embraces as its core concern one of the fundamental dynamics of most tabletop...
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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.
