|
|
I’ve been playing Star Wars:The Old Repuiblic lately, to see what the state of the art in MMORPG is, and its ok, but as a long time tabletop RPG gamer, it is not very satisfying. I can get lost in it, occasionally, but I’m a bit fed up picking up 7 credits and a pinch magazine from every Separatist trooper I mow down as I level up on Ord Mantell. Do the old sarge give them all 7 credits in the morning for lunch money? (I feel bad about looting them now!) Do Sith Lords all carry empty magazines so I can collect them off their dead bodies? who knows – but I’d like something more in my MMO experience.
Continue reading Is there a future for artisan MMORPGs?
and we should stop wasting public money training any more of them. It is 2012, the book is dead, and it follows that the library, as the big building housing books is a waste of prime space on campus, and therefore the people wandering around the stacks are relics of a dead age. Like the sailing master on HMS Victory, they are quaint and admirable exhibits, but not much use in a sea fight anymore.
The efforts of many academic libraries to re-invent themselves as information centres, working from within the traditional paradigm of the nineteenth century lending library, are hopeless efforts which often fail and always disappoint the users. A great many librarians are wonderful people, trapped in a dead profession, whose abilities are being wasted.
Continue reading Librarians are useless…
I chanced across an discussion last night on twitter which aligns with a problem I have been considering – how can the digital humanities include social sciences and science, if at all? This relates to the question of creating an undergraduate curriculum of some sort in Digital Humanities which would be truly interdisciplinary, that would work for scientists and social scientists as well as humanists Continue reading A Broader Digital Humanities?
Neil Ferguson‘s mis-adventures in gaming are highlighted on Richard Mehlinger’s blog on HASTAC in a a post which reinforces the dangers of non-gamers getting swept up by the gee-whiz of digital games. I’ve always been wary of digital games for teaching, which is why I’ve always used old fashion non-digital game play and design in my history courses. Continue reading Theory=Model=Game
There has been a great deal of excitement this week about the National Archives publication of images of selected documents on the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921; the full text of most of those documents has been available online for many years as part of the CELT collection at UCC. The online exhibit is good, and will draw attention to the original sources, but personally I find the transcriptions more useful. To my mind, taken together the entire range of documents shows DeValera in a fairly poor light – it highlights that he must have known that he would not get his fanciful dream of “External Association”. Continue reading End of Empire, Enter the Commonwealth?
Teaching contemporary International Relations with in-class simulations is sometimes challenging when the simulation scenario may be radically changed by what is happening in the real world, but that is the challenge my HI3112 International Organisations students are dealing with this week in this terms conference game on the Horn Of Africa/Arab Spring. “Upstairs” literally as well as figuratively, the MA class are dealing with the problems of designing a game which bridges the gap between IR theory and contemporary crises for their assignment. Continue reading Gaming Reality History
For a couple of years now, the question of fixing our creaking Arts degree has been floating round, and there is to be another round of “review” this year. Based on previous experience of reforms and new programmes, I think it is an impossible task, and we are better off starting with a clean sheet and designing a new degree from scratch, and rolling it out in parallel to the old BA degree. I think the old BA will continue to draw students for quite a few years, but I would love the chance to teach in a radically new kind of degree, with an interdisciplinary core, full credit accumulation and no lectures. If I had a blank sheet, here are some of the things I would have in a 21st Century degree:
First week of full term, and I am installed in my new office and dealing with changed and new courses – changes to Hi3112 International Organisations, and a new course Hi0090, Personal Development, which is basically a leadership course which I am looking forward to. Until it gets a Blackboard site, the introduction and materials will be here on my blog under Courses. Continue reading First Week..new courses, changed courses…
August is often a quiet month, as people straggle back from beach to desk and and the new academic year, but this month has produced a fine crop of early autumnal fruit from the blog tree. This months History Canrival is a mixed bag of riots, roadways, building walls and observatories, executions, and playing games. Continue reading Flights, Riots and Anniversaries
Crowds in revolutions are fascinating for the historian as we try to unpick and explain to our students how the “Paris Mob” operated so the tweets from the revolutions of the “Arab Spring” are not only a wonderful document of a struggle for democracy, but also a case study in revolution. Continue reading Twitter, the July Days and the Arab Spring
|
Blog of a middle aged liberal historian and gamer - insert 'occasional' where needed!
|