Epic Life: Immersion and Flow, 3
In a comment on my last post Rebecca demonstrated that the thought-experiment of narrative knitting is not at all ridiculous–there are several knitting practices that create emergent stories as they provide meaningful variations on the known patterns. Rebecca cited the symbolism of many of the traditional patterns, and the wonderfulContinue Reading
Historical Wargaming and Asymmetrical Play
The videogame industry, like other computer and tech industries, tends to have a very buzzword-heavy culture. Certain phrases just seem to resonate with game makers, who latch on to them, often overusing or even misusing them. As some people have already pointed out, the new videogame buzzword seems to beContinue Reading
Zelda’s Historians: Canonizing Fictional Chronologies
The following is a guest post from David Hussey, a 4th year History major at the University of Waterloo. Considering the audience of this website, most of what’s next is likely unnecessary but I’m going to lay it all out anyway. The Legend of Zelda is one of the mostContinue Reading
Open Call for Play the Past Contributors
Updated : Feb. 13, 2018. Over the last eight years, in over 300 posts and articles, Play the Past has come to be a rather fantastic project. It’s a great body of work. I often find myself telling people that they need to read something from the blog on closeContinue Reading
Another detour to the shores of Lake Mendota
I’m here in lovely Madison, along with such luminaries as Jeremiah McCall (I was lucky enough to catch up with him over a beer [well, more than one] last night) at Games+Learning+Society 9.0. Before happy hour, yesterday, at the Playful Learning Summit that kicked things off this year, my colleague SteveContinue Reading
Epic Life: Immersion and Flow, 2
I ended up like this, last time: “the ruleset of knitting is not humanistic because its narrative varies so little.” In this post, I want briefly to explore some of the implications of that statement. Or, really, I want to try it on for size. First of all, the converseContinue Reading
Epic Life: Immersion and Flow, 1
It’s officially summer, on my calendar at least, and so I’m going to change my format to something a little lazier. Shorter posts, more questions, fewer “I argue in this post”s and “as I demonstrated”s. What is the relationship of immersion to flow? By flow, I mean of course CziksentmihalyianContinue Reading
Epic Life: Ritual Immersion in Papo & Yo
Our immersion in rulesets creates metaphors for our selves that have the power to transform us. I’ve been talking in my last few posts about how that works–about how we identify not only with characters like Odysseus (in the Odyssey) and Quico (in Papo & Yo) but also with otherContinue Reading
Colonialism, Privilege, and Meaningful Play in Dog Eat Dog
Game designer Liam Liwanag Burke describes Dog Eat Dog as a “fun, compelling game about colonialism and assimilation in the Pacific Islands.” That’s right – Burke created a fun roleplaying game about the inequality inherent to colonialism and its consequences. One player acts as the Occupation (all of it – leaders, military, and touristsContinue Reading
Epic Life: Immersion and Metaphor in Papo & Yo
In this post I read the ruleset of Papo & Yo as an example of the same kind of creative manipulation of immersion I located in the Odyssey in my last post. My argument for better living through epic springs from a model of immersion that at its simplest levelContinue Reading