Before I begin, a short preface. I have made it something of a personal mission, both as a researcher and writer on historical simulation games and as a classroom teacher, I love to do research on the best www.easyslots.com games, to crack the Civilization IV code. In other words, toContinue Reading
Videogames are inextricably bound to ideology. In most cases, this is not by design, but simply because game developers tend to create virtual worlds that reflect the particular way in which they see the real world. As Ian Bogost (2006) has noted, these ideological frames are rarely explicit, making itContinue Reading
The Civilization franchise includes some of the games most oft-studied by academics, those here at Play the Past included. One of the most salient features in the representation of history created these games is the “Tech Tree,” the representation of the technological and scientific progress of the player’s civilization overContinue Reading
I had the opportunity to sit down with Jon Shafer of Conifer Games last week. Some of you may know him as the modder turned lead game designer of a little game called Civilization V. Currently, he’s working on a new project called At the Gates, a single-player turn-based strategyContinue Reading
Civ IV was the first, and at the moment, also the last of the Civilization games to include religion as a component in the games model of history. I imagine that the developers have always found themselves in a tricky spot. Clearly Religions have played a critical role in worldContinue Reading
This is the final post in 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 history helps us approachContinue Reading
This is the third 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
Mark Sample recently posted a short talk he gave at the 2011 MLA, called “Criminal Code: The Procedural Logic of Crime in Videogames.” There is a lot in this little talk that’s worth reading. (I applaud Mark’s call for humanists to do close readings of code, something we tried toContinue Reading
Sid Meier’s Civilization is one of the most-loved franchises in gaming, particularly among those with a historical bent, even though it doesn’t provide a realistic narrative of history. The latest iteration in the series came out a few months ago and adjusted many aspects of play for better or worseContinue Reading
For years, researchers have discussed the educational potential of digital games within learning environments (either formal or informal). It’s only relatively recently that those discussions have started to bear fruit in the form of robust serious game development and (more importantly) published research. The problem (at least from the perspectiveContinue Reading