This guest post is by Christopher Sawula, who is a graduate student in History at Emory University. He is interested in early American class and culture and is a Mellon Fellow at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. You can find him on twitter at @CGSaw or at his blog,Continue Reading
If you’re of a certain age, owned an NES, and were really into RPG’s, chances are you probably owned- or at least knew someone who owned- the Nintendo Power Strategy Guide for Final Fantasy. Full of “play to win strategies straight from the pros”, the guide provided intrepid explorers ofContinue Reading
Our open call for contributors has brought in a few fresh faces writing about very cool things, like Zelda’s historians, war gaming, and a post colonial take on Age of Empires. I’d stress there are still a bunch of neat pitches that came in that are in the works, soContinue Reading
The following is a guest post from David R. Hussey, a 4th year History major at the University of Waterloo. He previously wrote about timelines in Zelda. “We spend all day broadcasting on the radio and TV telling people back home what’s happening here. And we learn what’s happening hereContinue Reading
My next task, as I see it, is to take my definition of immersion as identification with a practomimetic ruleset and demonstrate its usefulness for understanding the kinds of practomime we encounter most frequently. As I never tire of pointing out, the vast majority of what we call art isContinue Reading
The following is a guest post from Zach Whalen Assistant Professor of English, University of Mary Washington his teaching and research focuses on the critical study and practice of digital media in a variety of genres, including video games, electronic literature, comics, and transmedia. You can find him on twitter @zachwhalen. In theContinue Reading
This is a mostly serious and occasionally tongue-in-cheek open response to Kevin Bacon’s (@fauxtoegrafik) thoughtful and honest blog post “Nameless Gameless.” I’m hoping it will spark some open dialogue between a variety of folks interested in cultural heritage and meaningful play (and of course, those tricky games). Bacon, the Digital Development OfficerContinue Reading
The following is a guest post from Nicholas Kratsas, an undergraduate student in Social Studies at Cleveland State University, interested in cultural anthropology and gender studies. You can find him on Twitter @the_kostas Jason Rohrer’s Passage is a game about life. It is a colorfully pixilated experience in which aContinue Reading
In an intensely personal game like Papo & Yo, I think the connection between immersion and identification becomes more obvious than it is anywhere else. To play Papo & Yo is to identify with the game’s designer, Vander Caballero, because the player-character of the game, Quico, is a metaphor forContinue Reading
The following is a guest post from Angela Cox, a graduate student in English at the University of Arkansas. You can follow her on twitter at @KQscholar. She previously wrote for Play the Past on Space Quest. The very title of the Age of Empires series invites postcolonial readings. Reading real-time strategy (RTS)Continue Reading