Ian Bogost is always interesting to watch. He hit the blogosphere recently with a strong declaration that ‘Gamification is Bullshit‘, where bullshit is used to conceal, to impress or to coerce. Unlike liars, bullshitters have no use for the truth. All that matters to them is hiding their ignorance orContinue Reading
“To a wargamer,” writes Greg Costikyan in the just published collection Tabletop: Analog Game Design, “wargames are not abstract, time-wasting pastimes, like other games, but representative of the real. . . . You can learn something from wargames; indeed, in some ways you can learn more from wargames than fromContinue Reading
This is the second post in a four part series exploring how the story of Orson Scot Card’s book Pastwatch gets readers to play with and explore their own models of the past. The first post discussed the way the book’s claim that we are living in an altered historyContinue Reading
In the work generally acknowledged to be his last, Laws, Plato returns to the themes of Republic and once again tries to imagine an ideal city-state. In Laws, however, the role of mimesis is fundamentally different. Athenian: And, if any of the serious poets, as they are termed, who writeContinue Reading
Do Fat Burning Pills Really Work? Have you ever wondered whether fat burning pills are the secret to achieving your dream body? In a world where weight loss is a common goal, the market for fat burning pills has grown significantly. But do these supplements really work, or are theyContinue Reading
I was about 13 years old when I read Orson Scot Card’s Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. The title might make you think its some pro-colonization read, but its actually a pulpy blend of science fiction and alternate history. If memory serves me right, I read it straight throughContinue Reading
Even as Plato condemns the cave-culture game, he expects the philosophical reader to understand that they (Plato and the reader together) are at that moment engaged in a culture-game of their own—the game called Republic. In this post we’ll come to recognize that Republic features a next-gen graphics-engine and trulyContinue Reading
Drama in the Delta is an immersive role-playing videogame under development at the University of California, San Diego. The historical backdrop to Drama in the Delta could not be more compelling. Funded by the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities, Drama in the Delta takes the player to two Japanese AmericanContinue Reading
A few months ago here at Play the Past, I wrote about the collection mechanic that’s a large part of the grammatical instruction in Operation LAPIS. The rewards for completing categories in that collection mechanic were those wonderful CARDs (digital only) that would then appear in their personal dossiers. FromContinue Reading
When looking at the range of games that are currently available on the topic of archaeology there is an obvious divide in definitions of the discipline. On the one hand there is the antiquated yet appealing portrayal of archaeology as grave robbing, looting and a continuation of 19th century imperialismContinue Reading