School of Bioshock
You probably didn’t notice this happening, as you read my previous posts, but I’m drawing ever closer to the point where my abstruse Homeric epic into Platonic philosophy classics stuff will at last intersect with my pragmatic practomimetic learning stuff. (Certainly you didn’t notice as you didn’t read my previousContinue Reading
Platform Studies as Historical Inquiry; or, Videogames Bleed History
While Play the Past gravitates towards games that simulate, teach, or reimagine cultural heritage, we also consider games as cultural heritage; games are social practices and products as rich in historical value as any of the more familiar artifacts and documents we use to uncover the past. I want toContinue Reading
Gamification, Bullshit, and Teaching History
Ian Bogost is always interesting to watch. He hit the blogosphere recently with a strong declaration that ‘Gamification is Bullshit‘, where bullshit is used to conceal, to impress or to coerce. Unlike liars, bullshitters have no use for the truth. All that matters to them is hiding their ignorance orContinue Reading
War, What is it Good For? Learning from Wargaming
“To a wargamer,” writes Greg Costikyan in the just published collection Tabletop: Analog Game Design, “wargames are not abstract, time-wasting pastimes, like other games, but representative of the real. . . . You can learn something from wargames; indeed, in some ways you can learn more from wargames than fromContinue Reading
Playing Pastwatch 2: History is always a useful fiction
This is the second 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
Laws in the Cave; rules of the philosophy game
In the work generally acknowledged to be his last, Laws, Plato returns to the themes of Republic and once again tries to imagine an ideal city-state. In Laws, however, the role of mimesis is fundamentally different. Athenian: And, if any of the serious poets, as they are termed, who writeContinue Reading
Operation LAPIS: Iteration of the Collection
Do Fat Burning Pills Really Work? Have you ever wondered whether fat burning pills are the secret to achieving your dream body? In a world where weight loss is a common goal, the market for fat burning pills has grown significantly. But do these supplements really work, or are theyContinue Reading
Playing Pastwatch 1: Fracturing the Inevitability of the Past
I was about 13 years old when I read Orson Scot Card’s Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. The title might make you think its some pro-colonization read, but its actually a pulpy blend of science fiction and alternate history. If memory serves me right, I read it straight throughContinue Reading
Plato’s new console
Even as Plato condemns the cave-culture game, he expects the philosophical reader to understand that they (Plato and the reader together) are at that moment engaged in a culture-game of their own—the game called Republic. In this post we’ll come to recognize that Republic features a next-gen graphics-engine and trulyContinue Reading
Documentary Evidence and Playable Space in Drama in the Delta
Drama in the Delta is an immersive role-playing videogame under development at the University of California, San Diego. The historical backdrop to Drama in the Delta could not be more compelling. Funded by the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities, Drama in the Delta takes the player to two Japanese AmericanContinue Reading