The Rules of the Text
This post serves two purposes: first, to review the posts of the Rules of the Text series and to recapitulate their argument and its relation to the two examples that have dominated the series: A Song of Ice and Fire (aka Game of Thrones) and Mass Effect; second, to prepareContinue Reading
History & Design in 1989: Dawn of Freedom
In October of 1989, the then German Democratic Republic (better known to many as ‘East Germany’) celebrated its 40th Anniversary amidst the growing presence and pressure of popular protests calling for wide-scale reform of the often harsh and repressive regime led by the aged, though still able, General Secretary ErichContinue Reading
Spatial Storytelling
Locations carry a great deal of narrative potential for us, even in everyday life. Locations carry meaning in themselves and communicate temporal significance through their changes. Certain places evoke particular memories of times that were different. When one goes back to their hometown after an extended time away, we immediately mark theContinue Reading
Making the Connection
Registration is now open for the annual Connections interdisciplinary wargaming conference to be held July 23-26 at the Center for Applied Strategic Learning at National Defense University in Washington DC. Connections serves the professional community of practice around wargames, conflict simulation, and serious games. Let me reproduce the official inviteContinue Reading
Detour to the shores of Lake Mendota: GLS 8.0
This week I’m at the Games+Learning+Society conference at the lovely University of Wisconsin Madison, in the charming company of Play the Past colleagues Kevin Ballestrini and Jeremiah McCall. I promise yet another dreary post about the Great Chain of Practomime in two weeks’ time, but for today something brief, andContinue Reading
Irrevocability and meaning in Mass Effect (rules of the text 9)
The very large differences in the ways players of Mass Effect have viewed the way choice works in the trilogy deserve attention from a practomimetic perspective first because they represent critical perspectives worth refining. Second, and more importantly, however, those differences demand attention because of their affective nature, in lightContinue Reading
Playing at Slavery: Modding Colonization for Authenticity
When Trevor and I started writing a series based on the 2008 version of Sid Meier’s Colonization, we knew that the issues we wanted to discuss were already controversial. Trevor’s initial post discussed the fervor with which bloggers reacted to the game’s release, and he argued that games about colonizationContinue Reading
Historical Hit Points 2: Simulating Medieval Economics in Tabletop RPGs
I have spent much of my free time lately poking through the core rulebook for Adventurer Conqueror King (ACKS for short), a new fantasy RPG published by a company called Autarch LLC. ACKS is what I like to think of as a classic Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) retro-clone on steroids.Continue Reading
Choice, multiculturalism, and irrevocability in Mass Effect, part 2 (rules of the text 8)
This post contains spoilers about the endings of the three Mass Effect games. Part 1 is here. In the final moments of Mass Effect 3 the player is confronted with the notorious choice of the three paths (though it is very possible only to have two paths, and even toContinue Reading
Jamestown Adventure: Less is More
There is a lot of interest in making educational games and history games are no exception. This post kicks off an occasional series of co-authored posts by myself and Marjee Chmiel. Marjee has extensive credentials as an educational game designer and educator. She developed an array of educational games forContinue Reading