humanities

I’m glad to say that I have real hope of starting to contribute to PlaythePast again. I’m working on a book I’m excited about, though I have no idea whether it will ever actually emerge in any traditional “book” format. In any case, I’m going to start broaching the subjectContinue Reading

Game designer Liam Liwanag Burke describes Dog Eat Dog as a “fun, compelling game about colonialism and assimilation in the Pacific Islands.” That’s right – Burke created a fun roleplaying game about the inequality inherent to colonialism and its consequences. One player acts as the Occupation (all of it – leaders, military, and touristsContinue Reading

So is it still humanities if the player, invited to interrogate the méconnaissance that constitutes the epistemology of what s/he perceives as interactivity, says “Meh”? It seems hard to deny that the vast majority of players of BioShock have never thought about the Death-Disarm sequence as a critique of theirContinue Reading

At the end of November, Brooklyn-based indie game studio Sortasoft launched a Kickstarter to raise funds for Meriwether: An American Epic. Inspired by a trip taken along the Lewis and Clark National Historic trail, Meriwether allows players to command the Corps of Discovery as Meriwether Lewis and voyage across North America. While watchingContinue Reading

What separates someone who’s just playing HALO or BioShock to fill a few hours of his or her time from someone who’s “doing humanities” by performing within a ruleset that goes back to homeric epic or Platonic philosophy? On one extremely important level, nothing. As I’ve demonstrated in previous postsContinue Reading

The proposition with which I closed my last post, that we might get gamers to read Sophocles, seems, to be sure, wildly impractical. So let me backpedal on that a bit, and try to lead up to it along another path. What if we got them to play HALO? Here’sContinue Reading

In my last few posts I’ve outlined a massive undertaking: convince the gamers of today (in the Warkian sense, really, of everybody who practices in modern culture, with the caveat that Plato recognized the same dimension of culture 2500 years ago) to be humanists through a demonstration that their livesContinue Reading

So at the end of the Rules of the Text series, I put forward the claim that “playing the past is an absolutely essential part of living the present.” Testing that claim is the purpose of Epic Life. Thus I mean in Epic Life to take the formulations I madeContinue Reading