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 fundamentalContinue Reading
I’m going to use two examples in this post, Call of Duty and Mario Kart, in order to further my continuing humanistic analysis of the shooting mechanic. In my last post I argued that the concept of “emersion” might be very useful as a way to describe variations of theContinue Reading
As I discussed in a previous post, videogames tend to take a very deterministic view of technological development. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the concept of the “Tech Tree.” While dedicated players and modders are usually quick to point out other flaws or deficiencies in games (often holdingContinue Reading
The following is a guest post from Richard Bell, a graduate student studying history at Stanford University interested in the political culture of early modern Britain and the history of imprisonment. Note: Gone Home is a game of investigation and discovery, and as such is best experienced with as little foreknowledge asContinue Reading
“We will bury you!” – Mistranslated quotation of Nikita Khrushchev, 1956 “We will bury them!” – Rhino Tank, Red Alert 2 Introduction The Cold War defined generations. In the more than 40 years that the Cold War took place, the world witnessed the Korean War, the McCarthy trials,Continue Reading
A few weeks ago my colleague Colin Fanning (who coauthored this post with me) forwarded me a call for papers for an edited scholarly volume on Minecraft, the beloved and near-ubiquitous sandbox game by Mojang. Initiated by Nate Garrelts, Associate Professor of English in the Department of Languages and Literature atContinue Reading
Sierra On-Line’s 1995 Phantasmagoria by Roberta Williams has not aged well. Its dated graphics, preset viewpoints, and one-button point-and-click interface mark it as the pinnacle of a short-lived movement in gaming that was quickly supplanted by more modern polygonal 3D graphics, free-look exploration, and real-time motion controls. Bernard Perron citesContinue Reading
Luke Pullen is a long-time player of strategy and role-playing games with a BA in Classics and German from the University of Tasmania. He is interested in the ways games portray past and present cultures as functioning systems. Luke sternly disapproves of “this Twitter business”, but can be contacted viaContinue Reading
How then do we understand our relationship, as players, to the games that for better or worse constitute mainstream game-culture? It would be easy enough to sidestep this question, and instead focus on the amazing things that the enormous “rest” of game-culture is doing. For the future of game-culture, indeed,Continue Reading
The Civilization franchise includes some of the games most oft-studied by academics, those here at Play the Past included. One of the most salient features in the representation of history created these games is the “Tech Tree,” the representation of the technological and scientific progress of the player’s civilization overContinue Reading