Comments on: History Invaders!

By: Tecumseh’s Curse (Chapter 1) | Play The Past

Tecumseh’s Curse (Chapter 1) | Play The Past — Mon, 16 May 2011 15:51:11 +0000

[...] say. “I actually have this beef with simulations, which I will explain in a series of blog posts two or three years from [...]

By: Seeing Like SimCity | Play The Past

Seeing Like SimCity | Play The Past — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 16:02:36 +0000

[...] Here’s how I’ve tried to make this point in the past. The rules of a game trump its framing fiction. The procedures trump its context. The board game Monopoly was once a radical critique of landlords and capitalists, designed by the Quaker Lizzie Magie to illustrate the ideas of Henry George. But the game’s procedures contain no real critique of capitalism, and when the original context is forgotten, it is the procedures that remain. [...]

By: 12. Playing with the Past | History 9808

12. Playing with the Past | History 9808 — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 18:04:45 +0000

[...] the topic include “History at Play,” “Playful Historical Thinking,” “History Invaders,” “Toys Not Games,” and “The Action Figure Curriculum.” I’ve [...]

By: Nick Wedig

Nick Wedig — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:02:59 +0000

I have been arguing the same thing for a while. A successful educational game will make the decisions the player makes actually be decisions about the subject matter. Instead of moving Bush’s head around to shoot at blocks (making decisions about moving and shooting), you could have a game where you decide to vote or not vote for tax increases and then see the results of those choices. That would make the players think about taxes and how they affect things. (And by controlling the rules the GOP or whoever made the game could skew things toward their political ideology, of course; if voting in favor of tax hikes is always bad, then the player may carry that idea into the real world.)

So if you want to teach college kids about being a historian, you make a game about reconstructing what happened based on historical documents, or about finding common themes in history or whatever aspect of a historian’s job you’re trying to illustrate. When trying to teach historians to think playfully, then the decisions you must force on them are different, so they need a different rules set.

By: Jeremiah

Jeremiah — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:59:13 +0000

Good post. I think the issues about designing for education is, at heart, why most of these endeavors fail. This overlaps to why gaming is risk management is usually a futile and annoying affair.

Out of curiousity, where would you place Buckmister Fuller’s World Game concept?

By: The Constructivist

The Constructivist — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:40:32 +0000

Neat post, Rob! I would argue that playing Civ is an example of how ideology works, in an almost-Althusserian sense. If you play enough, you’ll see that trading and technology development are the best ways to maximize your scores. The ritual of Civ-playing inculcates a kind of technocratic neoliberalism, in short, at least if you take the scoring algorithm seriously in a fairly literalistic way.

Another argument for designing our own games!