This post contains spoilers about the endings of the three Mass Effect games. We still don’t know what, if anything, will change either in superficial or in substantive ways, about the ending of the Mass Effect saga. But Mass Effect as it stands demands analysis. Perhaps the practomime is asContinue Reading
This post is the second in a multi-part series on the issues raised by Longbow Games’ ancient real time strategy series, Hegemony. Jeremiah McCall will continue this series in the next installment. Hegemony: Philip of Macedon was released in 2010 and was followed by Hegemony Gold, which included the PeloponnesianContinue Reading
In my previous post examining religious elements in Minecraft, I looked at the presence of pilgrimage in the Minecraft Middle Earth project. Today I want to continue this line of thought and now look at video game recreations utilizing the Minecraft game system and how these recreations take on characteristicsContinue Reading
I haven’t had the opportunity to move forward in my thinking about Mass Effect enough to feel that I can write a good post about the central issues I to which referred in my last one, but in the intervening period my attention was grabbed by something very much worthContinue Reading
In the 1993 afterward to The Bluest Eye (1970), Toni Morrison explains the origins of her devastating debut novel. It began in 1962 with an examination of racial self-loathing. “I focused,” Morrison writes, “on how something as grotesque as the demonization of an entire race could take hold inside theContinue Reading
This contribution from guest writer Jim McNally, President and Lead Designer at Longbow Games, is the first in a multi-part series on the issues raised by Longbow Games’ ancient real time strategy series, Hegemony. Hegemony: Philip of Macedon was released in 2010 and was followed by Hegemony Gold, which includedContinue Reading
In an unusually redemptive reading of the widely disparaged Atari VCS game E.T. (1982), Ian Bogost observes that the game perfectly (though perhaps not intentionally) captured the essence of Spielberg’s hit movie. “It was a film about alienation, not about aliens,” Bogost writes in How to Do Things with Videogames.Continue Reading
Two weeks have passed since the CEO of BioWare attempted to quiet the fans of Mass Effect with an announcement that the Mass Effect 3 development team would be working on a modification to the game’s ending. The announcement was gracious, and whether because internet rage tends to die downContinue Reading
In the Fall term this year, I will be teaching a course on games and simulation for history (Hey Carleton students! Sign up for HIST3812 now!). What with all the chaos of a term coming to an end, I haven’t begun to think about what such a syllabus might lookContinue Reading
Last week I proposed that the design of historical simulation games around problem spaces provides guidelines for how one can meaningfully critique them as historical interpretations. This week moves to the flip side of the coin: how the concepts and functioning of problem spaces illustrated so well in historical simulationContinue Reading