Three week ago, I set off with some gaming buddies on a five hour road trip to Indianapolis, Indiana, to attend Gen Con, the largest RPG gaming convention in the United States. Billing itself as “The Best Four Days in Gaming,” the con is a gigantic gaming whirlwind of crowds,Continue Reading
So at the end of the Rules of the Text series, I put forward the claim that “playing the past is an absolutely essential part of living the present.” Testing that claim is the purpose of Epic Life. Thus I mean in Epic Life to take the formulations I madeContinue Reading
…cross-posted at ElectricArchaeology.ca to see what the archaeology crowd thinks… One of the things I want my students to engage with in my ‘cities and countryside in antiquity’ class is the idea that in antiquity, one navigates space not with a two dimensional top-down mental map, but rather as aContinue Reading
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure to attend and present at the Connections conference held at the National Defense University in Washington D.C. You may remember that Matt Kirschenbaum wrote a summary of his experience at the 2011 Connections conference, and I hope to add to that venerableContinue Reading
This is a guest article by Namir Ahmed, a Masters Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Western University, London ON. He’s also the Project Coordinator for the Sustainable Archaeolgy Animation Unit, where he does really fun stuff related to the digitization and visualization of cultural heritage. He doesn’t have a blogContinue Reading
The premise of the game High Tea is simple: buy opium from Bengal, India, smuggle that opium into Chinese ports and sell it for silver, and use silver to buy tea for Britain. If players, acting as nineteenth-century British merchants, don’t meet the increasing demand for tea, then the moodContinue Reading
“No no no, that’s not the way it happened. Shall I start again?” If you are unfamiliar with this phrase you likely haven’t played the 2003 Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. It’s a great platformer, but aside from that, I have always enjoyed this little narrative flourish in how the game deals with your inevitableContinue Reading
It’s summertime, and while that doesn’t automatically mean I have nothing to do but lounge around all the time in workout gear watching Food Network cooking shows and tweeting about it, it usually means I have a bit more time and headspace to mull over new ideas than I doContinue Reading
This post serves two purposes: first, to review the posts of the Rules of the Text series and to recapitulate their argument and its relation to the two examples that have dominated the series: A Song of Ice and Fire (aka Game of Thrones) and Mass Effect; second, to prepareContinue Reading
In October of 1989, the then German Democratic Republic (better known to many as ‘East Germany’) celebrated its 40th Anniversary amidst the growing presence and pressure of popular protests calling for wide-scale reform of the often harsh and repressive regime led by the aged, though still able, General Secretary ErichContinue Reading