A Revisionist History of JFK: Reloaded (Decoded)
In my previous post on Play the Past, I looked at the way critics and scholars made sense of the videogame JFK: Reloaded (Traffic, 2004). The game lets players reenact the Kennedy assassination, the goal being to match the findings of the Warren Commission Report with as much accuracy asContinue Reading
Play as Hermeneutic: A Forgery Game for History Students
At last year’s THATcamp at the Center for History and New Media I helped facilitate a mini-game jam. In an hour the 20 or so people that participated came up with 4-5 kinda cool ideas for humanities games. Each of the groups promised to post something about their game concept.Continue Reading
Loading the cave-culture game: reframing μίμησις
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
Practical Necromancy*: Build your own history lab
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
Rebooting Counterfactual History with JFK Reloaded
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
Gaming The Past is Coming (But Why?)
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
This Is Not A Game
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
Dangerous immersion
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
A Gaming Generation Gap
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
The Last Night At Chinatown Fair Arcade: An Interview With Kurt Vincent
Here at Play the Past we talk a good bit about history in games and teaching history with games. Today I am excited to put up a post that moves us a bit further in the direction of thinking about history of games and draw some attention to a neatContinue Reading