plato

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

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

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 post I suggested that the approach to homeric epic developed by Gregory Nagy beginning with The Best of the Achaeans, when considered in relationship to the rulesets of play-practices that digital culture and above all digital games make more apparent every day, provide an opportunity to describeContinue Reading

The operatives of Team Agathoboulos in Operation KTHMA (aka Greek Historical Writings) are tasked with playing an aspiring tragedian. Tragedy, that arguably greatest of dramatic genres, held incredible cultural importance in the Athens of Herodotus and Thucydides; the tragic drama of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides–along with that of the countlessContinue Reading

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