Categories
Medievalism Technology

The Digital Dark Ages and the Trouble with Tech Trees

Technology trees are everywhere.[1] They’re a really useful game design tool. But they come with a lot of baggage and often don’t align with scholarly or popular views of the past. In particular, this often leads to unusual representations of the ‘Dark Ages’. The medieval world is typically presented as backwards and superstitious[2] (not to mention violent […]

Categories
(Post) Colonialism

Reply to Click to Colonise: Space, Power and History in Strategy Games

The following post by Arturo Iannace is a reply to the HGN blogpost by Dr Adam Chapman for our (Post)Colonialism theme. In turn Adam has considered the points and his response is included here. Arturo Mariano Iannace is a PhD candidate at the IMT School of Advanced Studies, in the curriculum of Cognitive and Cultural […]

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Education

Argument, not Fact: Changing the Rules for Teaching with Historical Games

Adam Chapman is absolutely right to be cautious about prescribing the use of games in education uncritically. We need to be careful about selecting and using games that are effective as learning tools and that can be meshed with course content (McCall, 2016), and – perhaps most importantly – that are sensitive towards serious topics […]

Categories
(Post) Colonialism

Click to Colonise: Space, Power and History in Strategy Games (Part 1)

There is a rumour. A rumour that is whispered only around the academic campfires at select conferences. A legend of a time back in the misty days of yore, when there was only a handful of us poking around, searching for scraps at the base of the mountain of ideas that would one day become […]