Old Is The New New

Wikipedia’s evil twin. Also: Burt Reynolds, Betty White, and Norman Fell!

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Geocaching, and its low-tech granny letterboxing, are a kind of hobby treasure hunt, massively multi-user hide-and-seek games played in the great outdoors. Basically, players hide caches or letterboxes in out of the way places, then other players use clues or maps or GPS coordinates to find them. The caches usually contain a logbook, so you [...]

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At BLDGBLOG, a great guest post by Jim Rossignol on the imaginary architecture of enemy lairs in videogames.

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Ada Lovelace is cool, don’t get me wrong. But there would have been no Ada without Mary.

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An interesting interview with Sid Meier. We may think Civ is about history, but it is really about psychology: a diabolical Skinner box of operant conditioning.

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One of the challenges in designing games or activities for education is the interface between a game’s subject and its mechanics. Picture if you will the classic computer game John Kerry Tax Invaders, released by the GOP during the 2004 election. The gameplay is identical to Space Invaders, but instead of a ship you control [...]

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If you’re getting the idea that what I mean by “playful” historical thinking is better known as “bad” historical thinking, go to the head of the class.

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Vikings vs. Samurai!

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In the world of historical texts, good stories win. What wins in the world of history games and play?

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History is too important to take seriously.

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