Locations carry a great deal of narrative potential for us, even in everyday life. Locations carry meaning in themselves and communicate temporal significance through their changes. Certain places evoke particular memories of times that were different. When one goes back to their hometown after an extended time away, we immediately mark theContinue Reading
Registration is now open for the annual Connections interdisciplinary wargaming conference to be held July 23-26 at the Center for Applied Strategic Learning at National Defense University in Washington DC. Connections serves the professional community of practice around wargames, conflict simulation, and serious games. Let me reproduce the official inviteContinue Reading
This week I’m at the Games+Learning+Society conference at the lovely University of Wisconsin Madison, in the charming company of Play the Past colleagues Kevin Ballestrini and Jeremiah McCall. I promise yet another dreary post about the Great Chain of Practomime in two weeks’ time, but for today something brief, andContinue Reading
The very large differences in the ways players of Mass Effect have viewed the way choice works in the trilogy deserve attention from a practomimetic perspective first because they represent critical perspectives worth refining. Second, and more importantly, however, those differences demand attention because of their affective nature, in lightContinue Reading
When Trevor and I started writing a series based on the 2008 version of Sid Meier’s Colonization, we knew that the issues we wanted to discuss were already controversial. Trevor’s initial post discussed the fervor with which bloggers reacted to the game’s release, and he argued that games about colonizationContinue Reading
I have spent much of my free time lately poking through the core rulebook for Adventurer Conqueror King (ACKS for short), a new fantasy RPG published by a company called Autarch LLC. ACKS is what I like to think of as a classic Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) retro-clone on steroids.Continue Reading
This post contains spoilers about the endings of the three Mass Effect games. Part 1 is here. In the final moments of Mass Effect 3 the player is confronted with the notorious choice of the three paths (though it is very possible only to have two paths, and even toContinue Reading
There is a lot of interest in making educational games and history games are no exception. This post kicks off an occasional series of co-authored posts by myself and Marjee Chmiel. Marjee has extensive credentials as an educational game designer and educator. She developed an array of educational games forContinue Reading
Rob Zacny, a freelance writer who often specializes in computer games, recently wrote a piece for the new GameSpy series ‘Command Lines’ titled ‘Quick-Loading Kills Strategy Games‘. Detailing the practice of using save games and constant re-loads to overcome obstacles found in many strategy games, Zacny states that not onlyContinue Reading
My original plan for this essay was to analyze the problem spaces filled in by Hegemony and evaluate briefly how defensibly this problem space was presented in light of what ancient evidence suggests about ancient battle. Playing the game, reading the manual, and, most importantly, engaging in the process ofContinue Reading