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
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
In an unusually redemptive reading of the widely disparaged Atari VCS game E.T. (1982), Ian Bogost observes that the game perfectly (though perhaps not intentionally) captured the essence of Spielberg’s hit movie. “It was a film about alienation, not about aliens,” Bogost writes in How to Do Things with Videogames.Continue Reading
What simulation games do best as interpretations is present the past in terms of problem spaces. This is a concept I have co-opted from games and learning theorists (most notably Henry Jenkins and Kurt Squire) for use in thinking about how we teach and learn about the past and useContinue Reading
This is the third post in a four part series exploring how the story of Orson Scot Card’s book Pastwatch gets readers to play with and explore their own models of the past. The first post discussed the way the book’s claim that we are living in an altered historyContinue Reading
This is the second post in a four part series exploring how the story of Orson Scot Card’s book Pastwatch gets readers to play with and explore their own models of the past. The first post discussed the way the book’s claim that we are living in an altered historyContinue Reading
I was about 13 years old when I read Orson Scot Card’s Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. The title might make you think its some pro-colonization read, but its actually a pulpy blend of science fiction and alternate history. If memory serves me right, I read it straight throughContinue Reading
Mark Sample recently posted a short talk he gave at the 2011 MLA, called “Criminal Code: The Procedural Logic of Crime in Videogames.” There is a lot in this little talk that’s worth reading. (I applaud Mark’s call for humanists to do close readings of code, something we tried toContinue Reading
For years, researchers have discussed the educational potential of digital games within learning environments (either formal or informal). It’s only relatively recently that those discussions have started to bear fruit in the form of robust serious game development and (more importantly) published research. The problem (at least from the perspectiveContinue Reading