My last post here on Play the Past was an attempt to outline the scope of the connections between Plato’s cave–and by extension Platonic philosophy–and video games. In this post, I want to make the connection between the homeric material I spend most of my time working on and theContinue Reading
In a fit of optimism, I agreed to contribute to a conference on ancient Roman economic history. “Ancient logging? Sure, no problem” said I. Of course, there is a problem: namely, that the archaeology of logging is pretty sparse. There’s been one major work on the topic in oh, theContinue Reading
Traffic’s 2004 JFK Reloaded is a notorious example of a videogame that attempts to engage with real cultural heritage: the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. Unlike pseudo-historical games such as Civilization or Age of Empires, which evoke the signifiers of History without actual history, JFK Reloaded is rootedContinue Reading
Routledge is releasing my new book, Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History in just a few days (May 24th). I’m very excited for its release as, to my knowledge, it is the only book of its kind anywhere: a practical guidebook taking history and social studiesContinue Reading
OR, The Nefarious Pop-ups of Mr. Ting AKA, Chapter 2 of TECUMSEH’S CURSE A TRUE Story of Historical ARG Design Where YOU Are Invited To Comment and Thus EVER SO SLIGHTLY Affect The Ending “I know it’s a game, and you know it’s a game, but the game doesn’t knowContinue Reading
This post takes us from homeric epic to a key moment of its reception in classical Athens, Plato. In it, I cover ground I’ve also covered in print, in a chapter in the collection Ethics and Game Design. Here’s what you need to know starting out: 1) Plato loved Homer—theContinue Reading
The generations of games, from one patch to another, or from an original release to the expansions that follow, exist as a rapidly fading history. Because there is no way to recover the old versions of these games, they only exist in the players’ minds and quickly become the productContinue Reading
As recent events have reminded us, torture for the purposes of interrogation is a part of our cultural heritage in the United States. And, so are games. But what about the combination of the two? Games featuring harsh interrogation techniques are rare, but they’re out there. Lately, though, I’ve beenContinue Reading
I wrote at the end of my last post about the way game designers and game players, in the analogy between narrative games and homeric epic, have certain parts of the role of the bard divided between them: the player gets the most obviously fun part of the bard’s job–combiningContinue Reading
Museums are increasingly turning toward alternate reality games (ARGs) as way to engage visitors and draw broader audiences to their collections. If you’re unfamiliar with the term ARG, Wikipedia’s entry provides an adequate working definition: “An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world asContinue Reading