Author: Mark Sample

Traffic’s 2004 JFK Reloaded is a notorious example of a videogame that attempts to engage with real cultural heritage: the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. Unlike pseudo-historical games such as Civilization or Age of Empires, which evoke the signifiers of History without actual history, JFK Reloaded is rootedContinue Reading

As recent events have reminded us, torture for the purposes of interrogation is a part of our cultural heritage in the United States. And, so are games. But what about the combination of the two? Games featuring harsh interrogation techniques are rare, but they’re out there. Lately, though, I’ve beenContinue Reading

Museums are increasingly turning toward alternate reality games (ARGs) as way to engage visitors and draw broader audiences to their collections. If you’re unfamiliar with the term ARG, Wikipedia’s entry provides an adequate working definition: “An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world asContinue Reading

I argued in my last post on Play the Past that the simulation game Prison Tycoon can only imagine an inwardly-directed, self-contained prison world—a world we know to be at odds with prisons in the real world. In the comments to that post, Peter Christiansen suggested comparing Prison Tycoon withContinue Reading

I have a longstanding interest in the way videogames imagine a part of our cultural heritage that many of us might enjoy experiencing in a game or on a cinema screen, but which we’d presumably rather not know firsthand, and that is the role of prisons, asylums, and hospitals inContinue Reading