Operation ΑΡΕΤΗ: my current practomimetic course

It probably makes sense to post a small note about Operation ΑΡΕΤΗ, the game-based course on Greek philosophical writings that I'm currently teaching (or rather, I suppose, demiurging) at UConn. I think it makes sense because I suspect that the small number of people who read this blog probably intersects fairly closely with those who follow me on Twitter or Buzz, or are friends on Facebook. Since I recently introduced a Twitter assignment to the course (based on the wonderful inspiration of an ornithologist colleague at UConn, for whom I suspect Twitter might actually have been invented), you may be seeing a series of mystifying tweets with the hashtag #3207arete, and I thought it would at least be courteous to explain them.

Operation ΑΡΕΤΗ is a practomimetic course in the style of Operation ΚΤΗΜΑ and Operation ΚΛΕΟΣ, with antecedents also in what was originally called FABULA AMORIS, and will probably be called Operation AMOR next time I offer it. It's an RPG in an ARG wrapper, which is listed in the UConn catalogue as Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies 3207 Greek Philosophical Writings. I won't bore you with the details of the mechanics, since they're really only a slight iteration on the ones you can read about in various posts about Operation LAPIS.

The RPG component--that is, as we call it, the TSTT immersion--involves controlling characters in 360 BCE in Athens, who are invited to join the Academy, and who then must decide how to describe and analyze the practice of Plato in the context of that time and of our time. I've also decided to incorporate a great deal of real ancient Greek, in much the same way that an MMORPG like World of Warcraft incorporates a great deal of terminology like "DPS" and "Mana." Operatives of Operation ΑΡΕΤΗ are doing "attunements" that involve collecting various kinds of Greek words in lists for which they receive bonus Philosophy Points, in which their grades are calculated, as well as reading Key-texts that come from the real text of Plato.

The Twitter assignment, which was the trigger for writing this post, has the operatives (students) making Twitter accounts with their codenames (things like "Poplar," "Island," and "Lemon," assigned to them at the start of the course), and tweeting any time they see someone in need of ἔλεγχος--that is, Socratic cross-examination. Every time they make such a tweet, which is judged by "Mission Control" to be of a certain quality, they earn 100 PP (for comparison purposes, an A+ for the semester is equal to 100,000 PP). So feel free to follow up on the #3207arete hashtag and see what they come up with!

I'm also very happy to answer any questions you might have about this course or about my team's practomimetic courses in general, on Google Buzz or via e-mail.

Operation LAPIS: the HUD mechanic

The mechanic of a heads-up display, usually called a "HUD," is well known to players of a wide variety of different kinds of games. Probably the most familiar kind of HUD for most gamers is the one found in games with a shooting component: the overlay of various important pieces information on the picture of the virtual world in which your character is trying to complete his or her objectives. Two of those pieces of information are nearly universal: a targetting reticle (the little shape in the middle of the screen that tells you where your firearm will deliver its projectile) and some kind of health-bar (the indicator of how much more damage your character can take before he or she reaches some kind of failure state—most often analogous to death).

Learning to manipulate the HUD of an FPS or an RPG is perhaps the most basic objective of games that have such a mechanic. After all, if you can't use the information in the HUD effectively, you won't achieve any other game objective. Games have become very good at teaching players—that is, creating the opportunity for players to learn—how to use their HUD's through simple game-opening tutorials, but the reason they've been able to get so good at it is that basic nature of the mechanic, like all game-mechanics, is itself an opportunity to learn. The reason experienced gamers can pick up a huge variety of games and play them almost right away is that through game after game they've learned the HUD mechanic by doing things in games with HUD's. In that sense, the HUD is a kind of microcosm of the potential of game-based learning.

What if learning how to read Latin were like learning to use a HUD? What if the information overlaid on the screen were information about the grammatical and cultural aspects of an ancient situation, to respond to which a student had to interpret and assimilate that information?



LAPIS operatives, as we've discussed in previous posts, will find themselves in ancient situations that demand that they read Latin and respond like Romans and in accordance with the worldview of their characters. To assist them, in the same way that a health-bar assists a gamer playing, say, Halo, they will have a HUD that contains vocabulary, grammar notes, and cultural information—including multimedia and links to places to obtain more information. They will absolutely need to use the information in their HUD's to contribute effectively to the team collaborations where they will be assessed on their progress towards mission objectives. Remember that teams of students control a single Recentius (player-character), and that they will need to collaborate on what action to take in response to the prompts they receive from the TSTT.

From the pictures you can see that we envision the HUD being displayed on mobile devices. To marry the ARG aspect of LAPIS to students' actual lived experience with the technologies of everyday digital culture by sending them information vital to their mission on their handheld devices—well, you can just call it potentially engaging. The same information could also be displayed in a browser tab, though, so students will have multiple ways to access their HUDs.



"Student-centered learning" is a term that gets thrown around a lot. The HUD may be the best mechanic I've ever seen for letting players and students keep the learning centered on them. At the same time, the HUD mechanic shows clearly a fundamental relationship between game mechanics and learning activities: in a game, as in LAPIS, a player manipulates information given by the game to reach objectives. The mode of manipulation is a mechanic; the process of reaching the objective is an activity. Thus, in a traditional course, one could describe using a glossary as a mechanic; in fact, the LAPIS HUD is in a certain sense a glorified glossary. If there's a breakthrough here, it's in the way the mechanic is integrated into the activities and learning objectives of the course: whereas a traditional glossary has no integral relation to what students are doing when reading Latin (that is, to look up a word in the glossary isn't actually a part of reading but rather takes students out of that activity and into the glossary), using the HUD is explicitly a part of the ongoing narrative of Operation LAPIS. When students use the HUD, they will be working towards their real learning objective—not just decoding the words of a passage of Latin, but performing as a reader of Latin.

By integrating the scaffolding of the HUD into the overall practomime of LAPIS, we believe that we've given students a way to engage the material of introductory Latin—grammatical and cultural—on a very deep level. More, the basic activities involved in achieving mastery of this material are made part, as they should always be made part for the scholar as well as the student, of the greater quest for the highest goals of humanistic learning: preserving and improving our civilization. That’s why the Demiurge has recruited them, after all; that’s what they’ll do if they manage to play through all the operation’s missions and at last find and read the LAPIS SAECULORUM.