Playing with Hofstadter
The great U.S. historian Richard Hofstadter on play and the intellectual: [The intellectual] may live for ideas, as I have said, but something must prevent him from living for one idea, from becoming obsessive or grotesque. … Piety, then, needs a counterpoise, something to prevent it from being exercised inContinue Reading
Project Diary: Red Land/Black Land
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
Toy Stories
Why is it that when we set out to talk about history and play, we always end up talking about games? One thing that attracted me to the blog you’re reading right now, besides the terrific set of co-conspirators Ethan has assembled, was its title and the broad set ofContinue Reading
The Presence of the Past in Fallout 3
Fallout 3 offers much to swoon over. In hindsight though, the most memorable moments from my game play are not slow-motion replays of exploding super mutant heads. Most of the in-game moments that have stuck with me involve interactions with, Apple II-ish green-screened in-game terminals. Computers that have apparently beenContinue Reading
Operation LAPIS: An Introduction
Gastric bypass is surgery to help you lose weight if you’re very overweight. It works by making your stomach smaller and bypassing part of your intestines (bowels), so you absorb fewer calories. Let me also tel you that if you do not want to have a surgery like this, thatContinue Reading
My Glorious Failure
[a version of this article first appeared on GameSpy in 2007, but I thought y’all might appreciate it] “Vespasian has converted to Judaism!” The cheery message came as something of a shock. After all, Vespasian and his son Titus together were responsible for the destruction of Jerusalem and the TempleContinue Reading
Halo: Reach as practomime
Halo’s modern warrior code, as expressed over and over in the orders given to you both by characters and by the game itself (orders like “Defend Dr. Halsey”) is to shoot those you have been told to shoot because the world must be saved. Just as the rule-based practice of the Iliad perpetuates the Iliadic warrior-code, the rule-based practice of Reach perpetuates Halo’s. . .Continue Reading
The Image of Rome in Video Games: My Empire (Part 2)
I spoke last time in general about how the image of Rome is manipulated in video games to provide an image of cultural identity in comparison to that of America’s identity through diversity, at least in official rhetoric. Today, I will be discussing in particular My Empire, a game which offersContinue Reading
Conflicting the Past
“Nothing except a battle lost,” wrote Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, “can be half so melancholy as a battle won.” His view was as sober as any to emerge from the killing fields of Waterloo in June of 1815, but the Duke already grasped the extent to which the battleContinue Reading
When on Google Earth?
One of the perks of working at the British School at Rome in the late nineties on the Tiber Valley Project was getting to play with the GIS, especially the digitized photos of the Tiber Valley taken during the war years. We used that GIS and those photos to re-locateContinue Reading