My kids and I have been playing Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim this break. If you aren't familiar, it's a fantasy role-playing style game. In this post, it's an object and opportunity for discussing the operation of reading from an object-oriented perspective. To provide some brief context, I approach speculative realism and object-oriented ontology by departing from […]
Category: humanities gaming
Here is the text of my presentation from Computers and Writing for those who requested it (and those who didn't). Ian Bogost has a piece on Gamasutura taking on one of his favored targets, gamification. It grabbed the attention of the WPA list (mostly because he starts out talking about his experience at 4C's this year) but […]
The 2011 Horizon Report is out today and once again, games are on it. Not for nothing, but here's the history of gaming in the Horizon Report: 2004: Educational Gaming 2-3 year window 2005: Educational Gaming 2-3 year window 2006: Educational Gaming 2-3 year window (tick, tick, tick) 2007: Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming 4-5 year window (hmmmm) 2008: […]
One useful thing at HGI for me is playing some new games (new for me anyway). Yesterday I played Passage and Flower. I've inserted a couple videos about the games below. People like to say you need to play Passage before you read about it (it takes about 5 minutes to play), so if you […]
Some reflection one week into the humanities gaming institute. Our hosts have been welcoming and gracious, and the participants are fun and interesting. Just in general I've had some good conversations. Something I knew but was reinforced. There's not really any reason for me to learn programming. I know that some of my computers and […]
forget gaming #hgi
Extending on the notion of haunting in the prior post, I was thinking about the issues of anamnesis and hypomnesis as they pertain to digital media, but more specifically to gaming. I think these are concepts that are fairly easy to connect to databases and digital preservation/access, but what about games, either digitally or in […]
The Derridean puncept hauntology sounds the same as ontology, at least in French (and maybe with a French accent). And I am drawn to the hauntological by Mark Sample's provocative post on his ideas for a game he calls Haunts. Essentially it's a subversion of existing locative games like foursquare for the production of narratives regarding […]
AKA, don't hate the player; hate the game. In the context of the humanities gaming institute, I suppose it is unavoidable that one would ask questions such as "what is a game?" and "what is play?" I am sure such questions can be productively addressed in the context of serious game development. That is, I […]