I’ve been thinking a bit about the unit operations (discrete, interlocking units of meaning). In particular the unit operations of cultural heritage organizations. What do libraries, archives and museums do in games, and how do they do it? I have pulled a few examples out from the game Magic theContinue Reading
This guest post is by Cornelius Holtorf, Professor of Archaeology at Linnaeus University in Kalmar, Sweden. He is currently investigating the archaeology of time travel and long-term communication strategies regarding final depositories of nuclear waste. Contact: cornelius.holtorf@lnu.se Reliving the past and “time traveling” are widespread pastimes in early twenty-first-century society.Continue 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. Technological development is often conflated with creative possibility in videogames; arguments from players, designers, and scholars have suggested that as, videogames become more technologically capable ofContinue Reading
In a comment on my last post Rebecca demonstrated that the thought-experiment of narrative knitting is not at all ridiculous–there are several knitting practices that create emergent stories as they provide meaningful variations on the known patterns. Rebecca cited the symbolism of many of the traditional patterns, and the wonderfulContinue Reading
The videogame industry, like other computer and tech industries, tends to have a very buzzword-heavy culture. Certain phrases just seem to resonate with game makers, who latch on to them, often overusing or even misusing them. As some people have already pointed out, the new videogame buzzword seems to beContinue Reading
The following is a guest post from David Hussey, a 4th year History major at the University of Waterloo. Considering the audience of this website, most of what’s next is likely unnecessary but I’m going to lay it all out anyway. The Legend of Zelda is one of the mostContinue Reading
Updated : Feb. 13, 2018. Over the last eight years, in over 300 posts and articles, Play the Past has come to be a rather fantastic project. It’s a great body of work. I often find myself telling people that they need to read something from the blog on closeContinue Reading
I’m here in lovely Madison, along with such luminaries as Jeremiah McCall (I was lucky enough to catch up with him over a beer [well, more than one] last night) at Games+Learning+Society 9.0. Before happy hour, yesterday, at the Playful Learning Summit that kicked things off this year, my colleague SteveContinue Reading
I ended up like this, last time: “the ruleset of knitting is not humanistic because its narrative varies so little.” In this post, I want briefly to explore some of the implications of that statement. Or, really, I want to try it on for size. First of all, the converseContinue Reading
It’s officially summer, on my calendar at least, and so I’m going to change my format to something a little lazier. Shorter posts, more questions, fewer “I argue in this post”s and “as I demonstrated”s. What is the relationship of immersion to flow? By flow, I mean of course CziksentmihalyianContinue Reading