I hate the words gamification and crowdsourcing. They are demeaning. This is particularly problematic because I actually think the ideas behind these terms are transformative. I don’t like that they frame our activity in terms of commercial exploitation (of the two crowdsourcing is particularly problematic, gamification’s sins are much moreContinue Reading
I argued in my last post on Play the Past that the simulation game Prison Tycoon can only imagine an inwardly-directed, self-contained prison world—a world we know to be at odds with prisons in the real world. In the comments to that post, Peter Christiansen suggested comparing Prison Tycoon withContinue Reading
This post serves as a prelude to some heavy oral formulaic lifting I’m planning to do in a subsequent one, following on from the more general argument I made about immersion in my previous two posts on games and homeric epic. Hopefully, these posts will clarify both the similarities betweenContinue Reading
A new game has hit the MMO scene in the last couple of weeks and is making waves. RIFT has managed to draw a sizeable portion of the community at least temporarily away from their current homes. Many players are excitedly moving house from Azeroth to Telara, saying goodbyes toContinue Reading
Registration opened last week for the online course/game I’ve been working on since last summer. The formal title of the course is Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies 1101 Greek Civilization, but as an Alternate-Reality game I’ve titled it Operation ΜΗΝΙΣ. Μῆνις (menis) means “wrath,” and it’s the word used byContinue Reading
The term “public archaeology” isn’t particularly well know to those outside of the archaeological community. So, what is it exactly? At its core, public archaeology seeks to protect and advocate for archaeological heritage (sites, resources, etc.) through public education, outreach, and engagement. This manifests in lots of different ways. Archaeologists visiting middle schoolContinue Reading
In my previous post on Play the Past I introduced the idea of virtual prisons, noting that prisons appear in videogames as either spaces of confinement or spaces of control. In the first kind of game, the player tries to escape the prison. In the second kind of game, theContinue Reading
So far we have blogged a fair amount about a few genres of games. For example, we’ve talked a good bit about role playing and simulation games. With that said, one of the most engaging historical experiences I have had with a game came involved a plastic guitar. Beatles RockContinue Reading
Gamification is all the rage. Operation Lapis show us what full-blown gamification can look like in the classroom; but if you’re not ready for that, there are other things you can do to introduce playful approaches to your teaching. I find myself teaching ‘The Historian’s Craft’ this term. There areContinue Reading
I think it’s fairly easy to see that the story of an adventure video game comes to be about the person playing the game—especially when we think of the various sorts of games that fall into the RPG (role-playing game) category in one way or another, in which a playerContinue Reading