With the notion of playing HALO as doing humanities broached, it’s time to discuss the precise nature of the humanistic study in which HALO-players engage. Several times already I’ve alluded to the fashioning of Western selves. In this post, I’ll read a single performance moment of HALO: Combat Evolved within aContinue Reading
For my birthday this past October, my girlfriend bought me a copy of Skyrim for XBox. For those not familiar, Skyrim is the latest installment of the ‘Elder Scrolls’ series of open-world role playing games set in a Dungeons and Dragons-informed mythic backdrop. It’s a standard RPG, where the playerContinue Reading
There are things you can do, and can’t do, to undergraduate students, I’ve discovered. Recently heard in class: Math? You want us to do math? But… but… we’re history students! This of course is my continuing digital antiquity class, ‘Cities and Countryside in the Ancient World’. I have them playingContinue Reading
The proposition with which I closed my last post, that we might get gamers to read Sophocles, seems, to be sure, wildly impractical. So let me backpedal on that a bit, and try to lead up to it along another path. What if we got them to play HALO? Here’sContinue Reading
Thanks to the game Babylonian Twins, iPhone and Android users can explore creative renditions of monuments in and near ancient Babylon, including the legendary hanging gardens, the Ishtar gate and processional way, and the ziggurat some believe to be the Biblical Tower of Babel. As players guide the twin princes Nasir andContinue Reading
In my last few posts I’ve outlined a massive undertaking: convince the gamers of today (in the Warkian sense, really, of everybody who practices in modern culture, with the caveat that Plato recognized the same dimension of culture 2500 years ago) to be humanists through a demonstration that their livesContinue Reading
In this post I continue on from the notion I oultined in my last one that a ludic understanding of a much broader range of cultural activity than we generally place under the rubric “play” might let us use Gregory Nagy’s insights into the interaction of rulesets and performances toContinue Reading
Each year, over 40 million people travel to see the sights in New York City. I see tourists everyday; they arrive by bus, train, and plane, find a place to stay, take their chances on the subway and/or hail taxi cabs, and spend time visiting museums, monuments, restaurants, and bars.Continue Reading
The future belongs to crowds. Don DeLillo observes this in Mao II (1991), as his characters watch a mass wedding of six thousand couples in Yankee Stadium. In light of the Occupy Movement, los indignados, the Arab Spring, and ongoing protests and marches throughout the world, it’s tempting to sayContinue Reading
In my last post I suggested that the approach to homeric epic developed by Gregory Nagy beginning with The Best of the Achaeans, when considered in relationship to the rulesets of play-practices that digital culture and above all digital games make more apparent every day, provide an opportunity to describeContinue Reading