The following is a guest post from Christopher Sawula an Early American Historian of Class, Society, and Culture. CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alabama. You can find him @CGSaw on twitter. Valiant Hearts is the only war game I would ever teach students as a historical text. FocusingContinue Reading
In a post in August, I opened a discussion of how analyzing the meta-discourse surrounding MOBAs (Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas) may help us describe the relationship between player-performance in these games and bardic performance in ancient epic in a more interesting way. The point of such an analysis is notContinue Reading
Videogames have an amazing potential for modeling societal processes. At the same time, videogames also embody the worldview of their creators on a procedural level. As such, it is a rare thing when a game is able to move beyond popular understandings of the world and approach it from aContinue Reading
The last time I wrote for Play the Past (unfortunately, far too long ago), I examined Valiant Hearts: The Great War as an object of remembrance and commemoration and an excellent way to understand the First World War without glorifying the conflict or understanding the war in a “top-down” view. ItContinue Reading
In a famous study of The Great Cat Massacre, historian Robert Darnton tries to figure out why a group of apprentice printers living and working on Rue Saint-Séverin in Paris “massacred” cats in the late 1730s. Read the following quote from his writing on the subject, but think about #gamergateContinue Reading
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been in the process of relearning C++. Of course, saying that I am “relearning” is perhaps giving me too much credit, as it has been almost fifteen years since my first attempt at mastering the language. While it shares a good deal of syntaxContinue Reading
It’s a fine line between submitting useful information and indulging in shameless self-promotion, I know, but I hope the following will be of interest. I was catching up with PtP-er Rob MacDougall the other day and realized that very few people are aware I published an article in the HistoryContinue Reading
« Those who study history are concerned with the occurrences of passed times; those who conceive time as history are tuned to what will happen in the future. » — George Grant, Time as History When we play at History, are we playing the past, or the future? As players of history-themedContinue Reading
Corey Milne is a freelance writer who graduated from Stirling University with a degree in history, only to follow that up by getting his masters in digital journalism at the University of Strathclyde. Enjoys delving into modern European history with a focus on Ireland’s journey to independence, and the mechanisedContinue Reading
(Spoiler alert: this post contains spoilers for King’s Quest III: To Heir Is Human and the whole series so far. But you really should have played it by now, shouldn’t you?) With the recent announcement of Sierra’s resurrection as a collaboration between Activision and independent developers, and the accompanying announcementContinue Reading