Holiday Play, 2013 Edition
It’s that time of year again! The semester is winding down (or already has wound down), final exams have been taken (or given), grades (or assignments) have been turned in, and calendars are booked with various holiday gatherings and parties. And, in keeping with Play the Past tradition, it’s theContinue Reading
The Virtue of Specificity in Pharaoh
It’s easy to criticize games with historical settings based on their inaccuracies, and equally easy to defend them on the basis of gameplay. I have certainly done both before. This time, I want to do neither; in this post, I will examine how specificity strengthens Sierra’s Pharaoh in terms ofContinue Reading
Epic Life: Assassin’s Creed and Ubiculturality
The historical stories told within the animus of Assassin’s Creed are about the clash of cultures. The Assassins and the Templars are represented in the game’s version of history by those same Assassins and Templars (Assassin’s Creed), the forces of enlightenment and repression in Renaissance Italy (Assassin’s Creed II), NativeContinue Reading
L.A. Noire: Recreating Postwar America
NOTE: THIS PAPER CONTAINS SPOILERS The Second World War was possibly the most devastating conflict in human history. For Europe, it would take years before the continent was put back together. As for the United States, it became the most powerful nation in the years immediately after the Second WorldContinue Reading
Capricious Fate: Videogames as Tools for Moral Instruction
We often treat serious games as a relatively recent or unexpected development. Certainly there is still a fair amount of hype about the potential practical uses of videogames, particularly in the realm of education. While such discourses of progress and potential are certainly not unfounded, it is important to rememberContinue Reading
Epic Life: the verbs of the past and Assassin’s Creed
In my last two posts about the shooting mechanic, I tried to demonstrate that an understanding of immersion as the player’s identification with the ruleset that conditions his or her performance can help us find ways that even as entrenched a mechanic as shooting can, together with the shaping ofContinue Reading
Tall Tales of a True Witness: Storytelling Technique in Call of Juarez: Gunslinger
“Once upon a time in the wild, Wild West… “ …a game publisher decides that it needs to save a once-successful game license from certain doom. For a series built on the premise of gunslinging in the Western style, that could only mean one thing: give’m gunfighting action, and lots ofContinue Reading
Plundering the Past: Historical Tech in the Science Fantasy RPG Numenera
The cat’s meow in tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) for the last several months has been Monte Cook’s Numerera. Set one billion years in Earth’s future during a time known as the Ninth World, Numenera is a Kickstarter-funded science fantasy RPG that embraces as its core concern one of the fundamentalContinue Reading
The Mechanics of Power Fantasy: two examples
I’m going to use two examples in this post, Call of Duty and Mario Kart, in order to further my continuing humanistic analysis of the shooting mechanic. In my last post I argued that the concept of “emersion” might be very useful as a way to describe variations of theContinue Reading
Videogames and Scientific Revolutions
As I discussed in a previous post, videogames tend to take a very deterministic view of technological development. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the concept of the “Tech Tree.” While dedicated players and modders are usually quick to point out other flaws or deficiencies in games (often holdingContinue Reading