The prisoners in Plato’s Cave don’t want to get up. The chains are superfluous, as they would be if applied to a player on an BioShock binge, or even on a Duck Hunt one. The interactivity of the contests I talked about in my last post is the real chain,Continue Reading
This is a guest article from Jeremy Antley who is currently pursuing his doctoral research on Russian Old Believers that immigrated to Oregon in the 1960’s. When not rummaging through the archives or taking care of his two dogs in Portland, Oregon, he also takes time to write about allContinue Reading
So I went into my local gamestore, looking for something to play on the Wii. I wanted a point and click adventure. “What?” said the gormless young man. “Point and click. You know… for kids!” Needless to say, they didn’t appear to have any. In which case, I thought I’dContinue Reading
The Assassin’s Creed franchise has held the honor of being one of the most highly debated video games in regard to its historical accuracy and educational worth. There are hundreds of forums dedicated to pointing out the inaccuracies and comparing history against the game play. Every named character has beenContinue Reading
The cave-culture game that Plato outlines as the most immersive part of what the prisoners do as they sit watching the shadow-puppet play is in fact from one perspective the first recorded game of Duck Hunt. Socrates: I said, “ . . . if they [that is, the prisoners ofContinue Reading
When game’s don’t have histories we make them up. Something as trivial as pac man can get us to do it. Just a little guy chased by ghosts in a quest to eat little white dots can prompt us to make up elaborate, and dark narratives that we wear onContinue Reading
The current debate over badges as a tool for learning assessment has gotten me thinking about one of the current features of the assessment system in university classes. We do not reward people for progressing through learning. Rather, they begin the class with a potential A and gradually lose pointsContinue Reading
Two weeks ago I tried to demonstrate that giving students a perspective from which to see their learning as practomime–that is, as a play practice–constitutes an interruption of the usually-closed mimetic cultural system that Plato identified in his allegory of the cave, and that Irrational Games lets the player ofContinue Reading
[This is a guest article from Amanda Visconti, a Literature Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland. In addition to her work on the UMD iSchool ARG Team, she serves as Webmaster for the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) and is co-organizing a humanities game unconference, THATCamp GamesContinue Reading
[This is a guest article from Amanda Visconti, a Literature Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland. In addition to her work on the UMD iSchool ARG Team, she serves as Webmaster for the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) and is co-organizing a humanities game unconference, THATCampContinue Reading