game design

Since its founding in 2010, Play the Past has had the good fortune of hosting many enriching and far-ranging discussions on the intersection of history, cultural heritage, and games. In celebration of our 10th anniversary, we published this last November a brief account of the origins of Play the Past.Continue Reading

We live our lives immersed in numerous complex systems – systems of meaning, economic systems, information networks, large socio-technical systems, and so forth.  One of the things that make videogames interesting is that they allow us to momentarily step into a different set of systems and play with them.  WeContinue Reading

Videogames are inextricably bound to ideology.  In most cases, this is not by design, but simply because game developers tend to create virtual worlds that reflect the particular way in which they see the real world.  As Ian Bogost (2006) has noted, these ideological frames are rarely explicit, making itContinue Reading

Last week I proposed that the design of historical simulation games around problem spaces provides guidelines for how one can meaningfully critique them as historical interpretations. This week moves to the flip side of the coin: how the concepts and functioning of problem spaces illustrated so well in historical simulationContinue Reading