The Video Game War as a Video Game
The following is a guest post from David R. Hussey, a 4th year History major at the University of Waterloo. He previously wrote about timelines in Zelda. “We spend all day broadcasting on the radio and TV telling people back home what’s happening here. And we learn what’s happening hereContinue Reading
Epic Life: Immersion and Identification in AAA Games–a prelude
My next task, as I see it, is to take my definition of immersion as identification with a practomimetic ruleset and demonstrate its usefulness for understanding the kinds of practomime we encounter most frequently. As I never tire of pointing out, the vast majority of what we call art isContinue Reading
Mr. and Mrs. Beauchamp of Olympus Heights (Bioshock, 2007)
The following is a guest post from Zach Whalen Assistant Professor of English, University of Mary Washington his teaching and research focuses on the critical study and practice of digital media in a variety of genres, including video games, electronic literature, comics, and transmedia. You can find him on twitter @zachwhalen. In theContinue Reading
What’s in a Name?
This is a mostly serious and occasionally tongue-in-cheek open response to Kevin Bacon’s (@fauxtoegrafik) thoughtful and honest blog post “Nameless Gameless.” I’m hoping it will spark some open dialogue between a variety of folks interested in cultural heritage and meaningful play (and of course, those tricky games). Bacon, the Digital Development OfficerContinue Reading
The Past Plays You
The following is a guest post from Nicholas Kratsas, an undergraduate student in Social Studies at Cleveland State University, interested in cultural anthropology and gender studies. You can find him on Twitter @the_kostas Jason Rohrer’s Passage is a game about life. It is a colorfully pixilated experience in which aContinue Reading
Epic Life: Immersion and Identification in Papo & Yo redux
In an intensely personal game like Papo & Yo, I think the connection between immersion and identification becomes more obvious than it is anywhere else. To play Papo & Yo is to identify with the game’s designer, Vander Caballero, because the player-character of the game, Quico, is a metaphor forContinue Reading
The Othering of Time in Age of Empires II
The following is a guest post from Angela Cox, a graduate student in English at the University of Arkansas. You can follow her on twitter at @KQscholar. She previously wrote for Play the Past on Space Quest. The very title of the Age of Empires series invites postcolonial readings. Reading real-time strategy (RTS)Continue Reading
Librarians, Archivists and Curators According to Magic the Gathering
I’ve been thinking a bit about the unit operations (discrete, interlocking units of meaning). In particular the unit operations of cultural heritage organizations. What do libraries, archives and museums do in games, and how do they do it? I have pulled a few examples out from the game Magic theContinue Reading
The Past as Played and Lived Reality
This guest post is by Cornelius Holtorf, Professor of Archaeology at Linnaeus University in Kalmar, Sweden. He is currently investigating the archaeology of time travel and long-term communication strategies regarding final depositories of nuclear waste. Contact: cornelius.holtorf@lnu.se Reliving the past and “time traveling” are widespread pastimes in early twenty-first-century society.Continue Reading
Look in Hole: Gameplay Parody in Sierra’s Space Quest
The following is a guest post from Angela Cox, a graduate student in English at the University of Arkansas. You can follow her on twitter at @KQscholar. Technological development is often conflated with creative possibility in videogames; arguments from players, designers, and scholars have suggested that as, videogames become more technologically capable ofContinue Reading