This is a guest post by Alvina Lai. Alvina holds an MS in Library and Information Science from Pratt Institute, and a BFA in Photography and BA in Creative Writing from The New School. Their writing appears in The Mary Sue, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and the NYT’s “Metropolitan Diary”; all of which can be found on...
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(Earlier posts in this series: part 1, part 2.) In the previous post of this series I described the basic function of what I call the scenario deck(s) in the three Living Card Games (LCGs) I’m analyzing: The Lord of the Rings: the Card Game (LOTR), Arkham Horror: The Card Game (AH), and Marvel Champions: the Card Game...
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(Click here for the first post of this series.) I want to try to describe the living card game (LCG) as thickly as I possibly can, almost as an ethnographer might. Not only do the various narratives to be found in the games’ scenarios present crucial links to storyworlds outside the ambit of the rules’ so-called...
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This is a guest post by Franki Webb. Franki holds an MA in Archaeology from University College London, and a BA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University. She currently works as an archaeological consultant and researcher in London. She can be followed on her Twitter. The misrepresentation of indigenous culture in...
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I’m returning, happily, to my roots to write a series of essays on PlaythePast. In 2012 I proposed the outlines of a framework (first here on PtP and then elsewhere in The Journal of Digital Humanities) that I have come to call the “historical problem space framework.” Since then, I have spent a considerable...
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Let’s start with the cards themselves. They work like epic formulae (e.g. the “cunning” in “cunning Odysseus”) but with game-mechanics, and with pictures, some of them lovely and some merely serviceable. In homeric epic, certain formulae — the epithets every student remembers, like podas okus...
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