The Fog of Germantown
The men of the “A” companies of the 2nd Light Infantry had been hearing odd noises for the last half hour. One of the sentries said that he too had heard the noises and all he had seen was a local farmer out early driving some cows. That seemed toContinue Reading
Session Play: Linear Past in a Multi-Linear Medium
One of the beauties of the MMO genre is its ability to create a virtual world that feels inhabitable and real. Players live in this other place, existing at a particular time in its history, perhaps slowly progressing along a storyline. In Lord of the Rings Online, although Tolkien’s narrativeContinue Reading
Of Hockey, Sympathetic Magic, and Digital Dirt
We won tickets to see the Ottawa – Tampa Bay game on Saturday night. 100 level. Row B. This is a big deal for a hockey fan, since those are the kind of tickets that are normally not within your average budget. More to the point of this post, itContinue Reading
Meanification and Crowdscafolding: Forget Badges
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
The Virtual Prisons of Tropico
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
Epic choices, and the lack thereof
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
Deletion as Death Performance
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
Convict Socrates! Save civilization! Learn ancient Greek! Take Operation MENIS, coming this summer!
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
Digital Games as Public Archaeology
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
Managing Virtual Prisons with Prison Tycoon
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