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 […]
Shaping a genre Only a select few games come close to Sid Meier’s Civilization‘s fame. As with Doom or Super Mario, the name itself has been firmly committed to cultural memory. And similar to those titles, the name Civilization signifies more than just a specific game: As Doom defined First-Person-Shooters (without technically being the first), […]
Around six hundred years after his death, Gajah Mada, a mahapatih (prime minister) of the Majapahit kingdom, became one of the first precolonial figures that rose to prominence in early postcolonial Indonesia. His popularity continued during the Sukarno and Suharto regime, and was reinvigorated in the early 21st century by the writer Langit Kresna Hariadi through a series […]