While Play the Past is no doubt your favorite and most important source of smart, scholarly explorations of games and cultural heritage, we know we are not the only people writing about the intersection of meaningful play, history, and culture. I wanted to take the time in this post toContinue Reading
Operation ΜΗΝΙΣ is very nearly in the books. Most of the nine students who stuck it out have done extraordinary things. Seven of the nine have some kind of A, and I sincerely believe that they would have those A’s no matter how the course was being assessed, but thatContinue Reading
Archaeology is a fairly common video game theme, and why wouldn’t it be? Distant lands, searching for lost treasures, the threat of competing looters and foreign governments, the possibilities of cursed tombs, with only the lone archaeologist to right the wrongs and triumph. This fantasy is not unique to theContinue Reading
Last week I ran a historical ARG created for a conference called Interacting With Immersive Worlds. The conference was, among other things, a coming out party for the Ontario Augmented Reality Network, which is the new home (and funder) of the history games research I’ve been describing in this highlyContinue Reading
While browsing my friends on Steam the other day, I noticed a game some of them had been playing called “The Cat and the Coup”. As a lover of cats (especially those politically inclined), I couldn’t help but be interested. Termed a documentary game by its creators Peter Brinson andContinue Reading
I stumbled upon this delightful image while browsing the web for some project of mine. It prompted me to start wondering just how much of the game frameworks we spend so much time in have impacted our worldview. Occasionally, I’ve thought of my own needs in terms of The SimsContinue Reading
When I was 8, I was enrolled into a summer camp at Genesee Country Village and Museum. The village was a living museum where costumed interpreters talked about the life of an eighteenth to nineteenth century village. The purpose of the summer camp was to learn about lifeways during this period, asContinue Reading
This post is a reflective update on the course I was feverishly developing all this past year (and which I teased here a couple months back), Operation ΜΗΝΙΣ. As readers of Play the Past know, the brand of game-based learning in cultural heritage (and other) fields on which my UConnContinue Reading
In my previous post on Play the Past, I looked at the way critics and scholars made sense of the videogame JFK: Reloaded (Traffic, 2004). The game lets players reenact the Kennedy assassination, the goal being to match the findings of the Warren Commission Report with as much accuracy asContinue Reading
At last year’s THATcamp at the Center for History and New Media I helped facilitate a mini-game jam. In an hour the 20 or so people that participated came up with 4-5 kinda cool ideas for humanities games. Each of the groups promised to post something about their game concept.Continue Reading