Family history: source analysis in Gone Home
The following is a guest post from Richard Bell, a graduate student studying history at Stanford University interested in the political culture of early modern Britain and the history of imprisonment. Note: Gone Home is a game of investigation and discovery, and as such is best experienced with as little foreknowledge asContinue Reading
Reading into the Cold War in Video Games
“We will bury you!” – Mistranslated quotation of Nikita Khrushchev, 1956 “We will bury them!” – Rhino Tank, Red Alert 2 Introduction The Cold War defined generations. In the more than 40 years that the Cold War took place, the world witnessed the Korean War, the McCarthy trials,Continue Reading
Stacking Minecraft Up in the History of Construction Play
A few weeks ago my colleague Colin Fanning (who coauthored this post with me) forwarded me a call for papers for an edited scholarly volume on Minecraft, the beloved and near-ubiquitous sandbox game by Mojang. Initiated by Nate Garrelts, Associate Professor of English in the Department of Languages and Literature atContinue Reading
Sierra’s Phantasmagoria: Translating the Gothic
Sierra On-Line’s 1995 Phantasmagoria by Roberta Williams has not aged well. Its dated graphics, preset viewpoints, and one-button point-and-click interface mark it as the pinnacle of a short-lived movement in gaming that was quickly supplanted by more modern polygonal 3D graphics, free-look exploration, and real-time motion controls. Bernard Perron citesContinue Reading
The Joys of Imperialism, or, The Political Economy of Strategy Games
Luke Pullen is a long-time player of strategy and role-playing games with a BA in Classics and German from the University of Tasmania. He is interested in the ways games portray past and present cultures as functioning systems. Luke sternly disapproves of “this Twitter business”, but can be contacted viaContinue Reading
Epic Life: The Mechanics of Power-Fantasy
How then do we understand our relationship, as players, to the games that for better or worse constitute mainstream game-culture? It would be easy enough to sidestep this question, and instead focus on the amazing things that the enormous “rest” of game-culture is doing. For the future of game-culture, indeed,Continue Reading
Technoscience in Virtual Worlds
The Civilization franchise includes some of the games most oft-studied by academics, those here at Play the Past included. One of the most salient features in the representation of history created these games is the “Tech Tree,” the representation of the technological and scientific progress of the player’s civilization overContinue Reading
Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag and Historical Interpretation
This guest post is by Christopher Sawula, who is a graduate student in History at Emory University. He is interested in early American class and culture and is a Mellon Fellow at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. You can find him on twitter at @CGSaw or at his blog,Continue Reading
Let’s Play a Walkthrough
If you’re of a certain age, owned an NES, and were really into RPG’s, chances are you probably owned- or at least knew someone who owned- the Nintendo Power Strategy Guide for Final Fantasy. Full of “play to win strategies straight from the pros”, the guide provided intrepid explorers ofContinue Reading
Posts you could write for Play the Past
Our open call for contributors has brought in a few fresh faces writing about very cool things, like Zelda’s historians, war gaming, and a post colonial take on Age of Empires. I’d stress there are still a bunch of neat pitches that came in that are in the works, soContinue Reading