As I’ve worked on these posts, I’ve been torn about how much of other scholars’ work to bring in, or, as I was taught to say in grad school, to adduce. It seems to me that the moment most readers of blogs see a reference to a book they haven’tContinue Reading
What simulation games do best as interpretations is present the past in terms of problem spaces. This is a concept I have co-opted from games and learning theorists (most notably Henry Jenkins and Kurt Squire) for use in thinking about how we teach and learn about the past and useContinue Reading
Before beginning, I ask a moment of your time to view the short video below: For anyone who played the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), the above depiction should be instantly recognizable as the very popular boxing game, ‘Punch-Out!!’. What might not be so obvious, at least until the videoContinue Reading
In preparation for a book chapter on Colonization we thought we would take the opportunity to blog through and invite a broader discussion of some of the ideas that we hope to engage with in that chapter. This is the second in a series of post which we will co-write.Continue Reading
If a rule, in general, is a constraint placed on an agent by the agent’s cultural situation, then in a cultural zone understood as appropriate for play that general sense of “rule” transfers nicely to a sort of constraint that allows a player to make choices (cf. Sid Meier’s famousContinue Reading
In my introductory post for this series on tabletop role-playing games (which dropped last December), I sketched out a brief portrait of my background with RPGs and laid down a marker for my main goal. To quote from the previous post, I want “to turn a more thorough and criticalContinue Reading
In a previous post I asked if the game Colonization was offensive enough. That post explored my own experience playing the game as a way to think through what the game means and what it says. As a result of that post, Rebecca Mir, an M.A. candidate at Bard GraduateContinue Reading
A certain amount of knowledge is required for players to navigate video games, whether this means remembering the weak points of the different splicers in BioShock, or remembering the buttons to press to play Epona’s song in Ocarina of Time. This knowledge is gained throughout play, rather than presented toContinue Reading
George RR Martin titled A Song of Ice and Fire advisedly, I think, with reference to the bardic traditions of European culture that gave us also the Iliad, the Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Song of Roland among many others. As I’ve demonstrated, those bardic traditions worked like games. That weContinue Reading
Civ IV was the first, and at the moment, also the last of the Civilization games to include religion as a component in the games model of history. I imagine that the developers have always found themselves in a tricky spot. Clearly Religions have played a critical role in worldContinue Reading