Commemoration, Video Games, and Remembrance Day
The last time I wrote for Play the Past (unfortunately, far too long ago), I examined Valiant Hearts: The Great War as an object of remembrance and commemoration and an excellent way to understand the First World War without glorifying the conflict or understanding the war in a “top-down” view. ItContinue Reading
#GamerGate, The Great Cat Massacre, and Future Special Collections
In a famous study of The Great Cat Massacre, historian Robert Darnton tries to figure out why a group of apprentice printers living and working on Rue Saint-Séverin in Paris “massacred” cats in the late 1730s. Read the following quote from his writing on the subject, but think about #gamergateContinue Reading
Excavating Code: An Archaeological Record of Software Development
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been in the process of relearning C++. Of course, saying that I am “relearning” is perhaps giving me too much credit, as it has been almost fifteen years since my first attempt at mastering the language. While it shares a good deal of syntaxContinue Reading
The Medium of Historical Simulation Games – Revisited
It’s a fine line between submitting useful information and indulging in shameless self-promotion, I know, but I hope the following will be of interest. I was catching up with PtP-er Rob MacDougall the other day and realized that very few people are aware I published an article in the HistoryContinue Reading
Being Historical: How Strategy Games are Changing Popular History
« Those who study history are concerned with the occurrences of passed times; those who conceive time as history are tuned to what will happen in the future. » — George Grant, Time as History When we play at History, are we playing the past, or the future? As players of history-themedContinue Reading
Preserving History in Gran Turismo
Corey Milne is a freelance writer who graduated from Stirling University with a degree in history, only to follow that up by getting his masters in digital journalism at the University of Strathclyde. Enjoys delving into modern European history with a focus on Ireland’s journey to independence, and the mechanisedContinue Reading
Gwydion to Alexander: Colonialism in King’s Quest III
(Spoiler alert: this post contains spoilers for King’s Quest III: To Heir Is Human and the whole series so far. But you really should have played it by now, shouldn’t you?) With the recent announcement of Sierra’s resurrection as a collaboration between Activision and independent developers, and the accompanying announcementContinue Reading
MOBA meta and the Muses: an invitation
There’s a point I try very hard to get across to students whenever I teach the homeric epics Iliad and Odyssey. I tend to phrase it as a point about the nature of the Muses, but it actually extends much deeper into the fabric of the epics than would appearContinue Reading
Dwarf NORAD: A Glimpse of Counterfactual Computing History
When most people think about the kind of super-high-performance games people build custom PCs for, they probably imagine some first-person shooter with fast action, huge explosions, and millions of polygons being rendered to the screen at real time. Few people would think of Dwarf Fortress, a game that is renderedContinue Reading
Ghosts of Races Past: Son Finds Father’s Ghost in Game
I remember the first time I learned that racing games were haunted. For me, it was one of the Mario Kart games. It is a rather straightforward solution to a technical problem. When you play single player games, it is really hard to get the AI of the game toContinue Reading