The class projects from this year’s crop of students in the Interactive Arts & Science program at Brock University are now online… full details here. The theme is ‘Niagara 1812′, when the Niagara peninsula (location of Brock University, no coincidence) was the flashpoint for hostilities between the young American republic and Great Britain. Lundy’s […]
From Emily Short, a premier writer of Interactive Fiction:
Interactive fiction is increasingly being used in junior high and high school classrooms to encourage reading and teach problem-solving skills; it is also approached critically in college and graduate courses on digital and new media studies, and used as an example project in courses on computer programming […]
A mod for Civilization III - The History Canada Game
“The year is 1534… Play the New World
A strange, pale-faced man named Jacques Cartier arrives on the shores of the Baie de Gaspé accompanied by a crew of 61 men. He raises a cross on the shore emblazoned with the French coat of arms.
To Iroquois chief […]
The decisions we make when we try to simulate an historical period - especially in a video game - are only part of the ‘rhetoric’ that playing the game embodies. If we are making the game from scratch, like our game set during the Montreal Plague of 1885, we can control that rhetoric from the […]
We have posted a ‘white paper’, a discussion piece concerning the Theory & Practice of History Simulation, over on the ‘Theory & Practice‘ page. We’d appreciate any discussion or comments you might have!
A group of senior students (Joe Peric, John Bachynski, Andrew McNiven, and Nicki Darbyson) led by Kevin Kee, are currently working on a simulation/strategy game exploration of the world of 1885 Montreal, and its devastating encounter with smallpox. The event is chronicled in Michael Bliss’s book, Plague -
the story of a horrifying smallpox epidemic […]
Here is a movie of a walkthrough of a project which combines the online world of Second Life with the online learning management system Moodle: Sloodle!
Shawn’s presentation at Brock’s Immersive Worlds conference, held in June 2007, may be listened to here: The Virtual Archaeologist: Of Past Lives and Second Lives
Abstract:
Archaeology is about material culture, about exploring the human condition (not necessarily in the past) through how we create and manipulate objects. In recent years, the power of computers has opened […]
Henry Jenkins, interviewed for the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Henry Jenkins, co-director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was one of the first scholars to study Trekkies and other fans of popular media. For decades, he argues, those fans have been on the cutting edge of the trend of participatory […]