The following is a guest post from Hannah Rice, a digital heritage specialist with an architectural history and computer games background. Hannah’s MSc dissertation was on computer games and architectural history engagement. Hannah is currently working in the archives at the Hull History Centre, in Kingston upon Hull, UK. She’s on Twitter @hannahbeth_r INTRODUCTIONContinue Reading
I’m here in lovely Madison, along with such luminaries as Jeremiah McCall (I was lucky enough to catch up with him over a beer [well, more than one] last night) at Games+Learning+Society 9.0. Before happy hour, yesterday, at the Playful Learning Summit that kicked things off this year, my colleague SteveContinue Reading
It’s summertime, and while that doesn’t automatically mean I have nothing to do but lounge around all the time in workout gear watching Food Network cooking shows and tweeting about it, it usually means I have a bit more time and headspace to mull over new ideas than I doContinue Reading
The prisoners in Plato’s Cave don’t want to get up. The chains are superfluous, as they would be if applied to a player on an BioShock binge, or even on a Duck Hunt one. The interactivity of the contests I talked about in my last post is the real chain,Continue Reading
The cave-culture game that Plato outlines as the most immersive part of what the prisoners do as they sit watching the shadow-puppet play is in fact from one perspective the first recorded game of Duck Hunt. Socrates: I said, “ . . . if they [that is, the prisoners ofContinue Reading
[This is a guest article from Amanda Visconti, a Literature Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland. In addition to her work on the UMD iSchool ARG Team, she serves as Webmaster for the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) and is co-organizing a humanities game unconference, THATCampContinue Reading
In my last few posts, I’ve argued that Plato’s Republic and Irrational Games’ BioShock present a challenge to culture, and, in particular, to the educational systems (read “school”) that transmit that culture. Still more, I’ve tried to show, do they present a challenge to those who are trying to harnessContinue Reading
[This is a guest article from Andrew D. Devenney. Andrew is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of World History at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. A life-long and avid gamer of both video and role-playing games, he is currently spending far too much time playing through the variousContinue Reading
So here’s where I make the connection between BioShock and gamification–or rather, try to show that as ways of doing education, the two are radically different. More, I try to show that they’re different in a way that’s inspired what my team is doing with practomimetic learning. There’s a contextContinue Reading
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