Prototyping a Latin 1 practomime

On Wednesday, I get to play-test the beginning of a practomime towards which I've been working for nearly a year now: what I have a feeling, if it catches on, may well be called "The Latin Game" (that's what my daughter calls it anyway, and she's been my only real play-tester all these months).

I call it, among other things, "A practomimetic introduction to Roman culture through the Latin language." It's an RPG--a tabletop RPG at the moment, but with dreams of going digital some day. It's about a possibly-mythical, possibly-real object called the Lapis Saeculorum (Stone of Ages), which bears an inscription that the students have been recruited to decipher.

In order to do that they must:

1. Travel back in time through the imaginative energies harnessed by the Demiurge (aka their teacher; aka, on Wednesday, me);
2. Learn Latin, because of course the inscription is in Latin.
3. Learn enough about Roman culture to understand what the inscription means.

Otherwise, you know, the world ends.

Wednesday is the Classical Association of Connecticut's State Latin Day, an amazing occasion when north of a thousand Latin students wear their tunicae (they can't have the fun otherwise) and run around a camp-like setting that has, of course, a piscina. I've been going faithfully for the last few years with my XBox or laptop in tow, trying to spread the word that games are not the devil, especially when viewed through classics.

The students, taking time away from such things as sunning themselves and racing chariots, have always been appreciative (and they have to do a certain number of enriching things over the course of their day, so being able to use video games for that purpose seems appealing, I imagine). But I've always seen a sort of longing in their eyes: "Isn't there a way," their eyes say, "that we could actually play games to learn Latin?"

"Ita vero, Marce, est ludus Latinus."

Six Romans, played by any number of Latin students in a team format, arrive on a road outside Pompeii, where a group of brigands is looking menacingly into a tree.

Six Romans, cousins--but each with a distinct worldview and a distinct set of skills. Three young women and three young men. One admires the Republic, another the Caesars; a third just wants peace. One knows of the power of Rome's legions; another of the power of the ancient cultural heritage that has come to Rome from the Greek world. Each has a different ars linguae ("speech skill") with which to start, and will gain more artes as the students level him or her up.

Six Romans who may have very different ideas about the empire and the old republic, but who must work together through the Demiurge's Texto-Spatio-Temporal Transport System to carry out the mission of OPERATION LAPIS SAECULORUM.

Some of my co-conspirators and I are working on this practomime on Google Wave, along with a similar practomime for Ancient Greek that will embed the first levels of that language in my large lecture courses on Greek Civilization and Classical Mythology. If you'd like to come along and help reimagine classics learning, let me know!

How much fun is virtual edutainment?

This is an entry in a fun and interesting challenge sponsored by The Ancient World in London, presented by the energetic and classically-minded folks at Heritage Key.

I want to say that virtual edutainment is a lot of fun, but only if it's designed not to be fun but to help learners tell a story—that is, if fun isn't the primary consideration. My thinking on the subject has evolved enormously over the past year, as I've been developing a game-like way of delivering my own courses in classics. This past Fall I gave a course on the Greek historians as a role-playing game; this spring I'm teaching Advanced Latin as an adventure with the poet Ovid in 8 CE Rome.

Because I don't have the resources at my university to develop 3D worlds within which my students can go to ancient Athens and ancient Rome, I've been running my practomimes, as I call them, as old-fashioned tabletop RPG's and as online text-adventure with a few illustrations, like the one above of the Forum of Augustus.

I've learned that the virtual worlds that we create in students' imaginations can be learning tools just as powerful as the immersive environment of an MMORPG. Of course, my students do get to do their share of fighting, since fighting was so crucial to the cultures within which classical literature developed—but the most exciting parts for them have been meeting Pericles, Sophocles, and Augustus, and being able to "see" in their imaginations, what the ancient world looked like.

In Operation KTHMA, the course on Herodotus and Thucydides, my students stood trial for breaking and entering the home of Pericles' rival Thucydides son of Melesias. In FABULA AMORIS ROMANI, my students had to sing for Augustus, first emperor of Rome. In these moments, fun is being had—I have video of some of these moments, and there are actual smiles on my students' faces!—but fun isn't the thing that matters most. What matters is engagement in the material, and, if they're to be believed in their comments on the course at the end of the semester, my students were engaged. In (Gaming) Homer, my students are caught up in an ARG where they must become homeric bards by observing and playing The Lord of the Rings Online in relation to the Iliad and the Odyssey.

How much more wonderful would these courses be if the students could also be there in a 3d rendering? Fun, yes—but if the narrative were well-designed, also a course of study that's just as engaging as World of Warcraft. It's not the fun, it's the immersion, whether that immersion is high-tech, low-tech, or somewhere in between.

The table and the screen: a curious resistance

I've seen it frequently enough both in myself and in people I'm talking to—notably my students and my classicist colleagues—that it no longer surprises me. People who haven't spent time studying games seem to have a fundamental resistance to the nearly self-evident idea that video-gaming, or, as I've taken to calling it, digital practomime, is fundamentally the same thing as tabletop-gaming. Or, as Pete Border (whom I don't know except through this one post) put it in a post on the GLS Educators' Ning, "If a game isn't fun with everybody in a room playing it on a table, adding a computer won't help it."

It was a major breakthrough for me, which only occurred over the course of several months, to realize the absolute truth of the notion that ludic practomime (i.e., game-playing) doesn't really change in the essential elements of its construction of meaning as it goes from the Monopoly board, or paper-and-dice RPG's, or Live-Action Role-Playing, or even live-action sports, to those things' digital versions in what we usually call video games.

Just as that other kind of practomime, storytelling, is recognizably the same thing between book and computer screen, and even between oral composition and textual book, and even between book and film, the more obtrusively interactive kind of practomime that we call games is the same thing between table (and dice, and books, and board, and field) and screen. Which is not to say that books and movies themselves are the same--rather that storytelling as an act is consistent between them.

There are obviously things you can play easily on the screen that would be very difficult, if not impossible, to play on the table. If someone were able to drop objects of certain stereotypical shapes from a height down to you, and you were able to rotate those objects as they fell so that they fit together as efficiently as possible, it would be Tetris, and be recognizably the same as Tetris on the computer screen. But of course, as even the famous video of Live Action Tetris makes clear, Tetris is a game that's not possible in the physical world. Nor is it practical to get your friends to wear mushroom- and turtle-suits so that you can try to jump on them, a la Super Mario Bros., although it would—obviously, I think—be fun if it were possible.

And there's no question but that the integration of the verbal with the visual and the manual, and even the visceral, that comes in video games, along with the opening up of possibilities like jumping on Goombas and Koopas, has a role in our seduction into thinking that it is video games that are revolutionizing the way we think about art and education and even culture itself. But I don't think that the sheer impact of that integration, or those possibilities, can fully account for the resistance we find to seeing games (or practomime) as a single art form between table and screen.

So what does account for this difficulty, and why does it matter?

To a classicist trying to develop a field that I'm thinking of these days as "applied classics," the table-to-screen shift looks rather like the oral-to-written shift that leaves legible marks on the remarkable culture of 5^th Century BCE Athens, in the works of the tragedians (Aechylus, Sophocles, Euripides), the historians (Herodotus, Thucydides), and the first philosopher, Plato. I could go straight back to Plato's cave, and then add a soupcon of the Phaedrus, to say that Plato was trying among so many other things to get people to pay attention to the bad things (and the good) about the changeover, but I'm sure you're sick of me on the cave by now.

Instead, let me point to Thucydides' hope that his work, by taking full advantage of the technology of writing, would become a possession forever, a ktema es aei, as opposed to what he saw all around him, contest-pieces for immediate hearing—that is, for oral delivery and auditory reception. Thucydides was clearly including Homer and Herodotus among those whose work would not survive, or at any rate would not be useful for future generations. Similarly, my students seem to think of their gaming as occurring in a world apart from the world of tables and classrooms.

(The ktema es aei passage has a very great deal to tell us about practomime, and I plan to come back to it soon, because the "contest-piece" side of the equation is also the practomime side of the equation, as opposed to cultural material like textbooks and [traditional] courses. Deconstructing that opposition has, I think, a lot of potential for understanding the power of practomime in culture.)

But Thucydides' resistance to seeing the traction that oral composition has over our relation to the past is also closely analogous to our characteristic failure to see that a Dungeons and Dragons module and DragonAge: Origins are fundamentally the same thing. Playing pretend on a tabletop in the "real world" is in crucial ways the same as playing pretend in a digital medium. Thucydides is seduced by the textual as we are seduced by the digital. (Plato, notably, is not seduced this way, and his ability to break through the resistance to seeing the continuity of oral and written—and thus also the actual discontinuities—is perhaps what permits him to formulate the cave.)

It's important to fight against this seduction, I think, for at least two reasons, one of them metaphysical and the other eminently practical.

Metaphysical first: if we fail to grasp that digital practomime (i.e. the video game) is a continuation of tabletop practomime, we lose an opportunity to see the practomimetic construction of "reality"—or, to put it in my usual terms, we fail to learn the lesson of the cave, and instead simply become more deeply implicated in the unnecessary fetters that Plato so vividly put on his prisoners' limbs.

To fail in this way is analogous to failing to see that the Matrix trilogy is about all of culture, not just about digital culture, and to failing to understand that Facebook is an extension of "real-world" social relations, not a new way to relate to other people. As a teacher of the Humanities, I see an urgent need for my students' cultural competency and for my own career-survival, to persuade the world of the truth that the "real" world is as virtual as the online world, and always has been. Such an understanding would make clear for example that terms like "the digital humanities" misunderstand both our opportunities and our challenges.

Practical next: if we fail to see that we can do practomime with nothing more than our imaginations and our voices, and can build the technology up from there, and that e.g. Googlewave is easily a more powerful technology for practomime than any currently functional 3D digital world, we lose an extraordinary opportunity for doing culture, whether we call our practices—that is, the culture we do—art, or education, or even entertainment.

I would really like to see more teachers, yes, playing around with the possibilities both online and off-, both digital and physical, both table and screen, of the huge strides people like Jim Gee and Kurt Squire have made in studying what video games tell us about learning. I would really like to see more developers understanding the implications in this area of the explosion of social games, which seek to obscure the connection between the table and the screen even as they trade on it (how else to characterize the constant updates about Farmville and Bejewelled, that use your friends as marketing materials?). Also, though, I would really like to play more practomimes that take me back and forth from physical to digital. Like Wii Fit. But with gods and monsters.

The end of KTHMA

See this hub for a guide to my posts on Operation KTHMA.

I'm deep in the midst of planning not one but two more practomimetic courses for the semester that begins (gulp) in less than two weeks (I'll be posting some key documents soon from the one that's not top secret and ARG-y), but I do want to finish the KTHMA story in at least a skeletal fashion.

Under cover of darkness, the team landed on the beach at Methone, accompanied by Herodotus, Thucydides, and Alcibiades. They observed that there were two conveniently located beacons: one that would alert the Athenian ships to land and disembark their 1000 hoplites to take the town; another that would alert the Spartans further inland that Methone was under attack.

Team 2 rolled a nine, to their delight, when it was time to get off the fishing boat that had been commandeered to take them in to shore, and thus disembarked in style. The whole mission team successfully gathered the available intelligence, which indicated that the wall of Methone was undefended. One of the pro-Pericles teams lit the beacon that alerted the Athenian ships, and they heard a horn-call as the troop transports headed on-shore.

At that point, things became confused, as the fog of war descended. One of the pro-Spartan teams apparently forgot that there was a conveniently placed beacon to alert the Spartans, and decided instead to tip over the coastal beacon in hope of starting a fire big enough to attract Spartan attention. They were quite successful, and much of Methone went up in flames, attracting the attention of Brasidas, greatest general of the Spartans, who actually does enter Thucydides at this point.

Unfortunately, the fire also allowed the Methonians to surround the team.

I rolled a die. "There are no survivors," I reported.

Laughter.

"But," I continued, "Herodotus, Thucydides, and Alcibiades step from the shadows, evade the flames, and manage to get your bodies back to the beach, where they take ship for Athens and are thus among the dead of the first year of the war. . ."

I have videotape of this moment. There is something on the audio that sounds like a gasp. I'm sure it's not actually a gasp, but a prof can dream.

". . . over whom Pericles delivers the funeral oration."

To call this course the most rewarding experience of my teaching career thus far would be true, but wouldn't capture the feeling of rightness I've had about it since I first started to dream in this direction, and the change of register it's involved in my thoughts about the entire educational enterprise. It didn't all go particularly well, but so much of it was so extraordinary that I can't imagine the experience failing to transform every class I teach from here on.

My thanks to you for reading these precis, with the hope that I'll have more to share in very short order, as this adventure continues.

Operation KTHMA: handing over the reins

See this hub for a guide to my posts on Operation KTHMA.

Here's what I uploaded over the weekend to the KTHMA team. The idea of requiring the students to start telling the story, as engagement and as assessment at the same time, comes partly from the HoneyComb Engine and partly from some comments helpful readers made on earlier posts.

DEMIURGE ONLINE

BEGIN TRANSMISSION
SIGNAL "MISSION 6 TSTT-USE: NEW RESPONSIBILITIES"

The Demiurge advises you that it has become clear to him that the situation is worse than he thought, and the danger to Western Civilization greater. Because of the continuing diminishment of the imaginative exploration of the past in the general population, the TSTT cannot function as intended, and requires more input of psychoporeutic energy than the KTHMA-team has yet been able to generate. (The Demiurge recommends that if the operatives have seen the movie Elf they make the analogy of Christmas Cheer and its role in the flight of Santa's Sleigh to the role of psychoporeutic energy in the function of the TSTT.)

The Demiurge does not plan to take this dire state of affairs lying down. This mission will achieve its objectives if the Demiurge has anything to say about it, and so the Demiurge has resolved to attempt a desperate experiment, and he requests the KTHMA-team's assistance, although he knows it will demands a level of mastery the team has not yet achieved.

Specifically, the team will need to boost its Vitality signifcantly, in order to get the answers we need about the meanings of Herodotus and Thucydides. In practice, this will mean merging each class' Athenians into a single Athenian of that class, a sort of classics superman, and taking a greater degree of control over the TSTT's imaginative function than the team has yet taken.

The Demiurge has already laid the groundwork for this new responsibility in instructing the TSTT to reformulate your secrets. Now, as the mission proceeds, the KTHMA team will take the next step by demonstrating their growing mastery of Greek historical writings in preparing to imagine, and then, in mission-session, actually imagining parts of the action biotized by the TSTT. That is, to put it in clearer real-world terms, you will be responsible for creating chunks of the mission-action, and thus adopting the role of the historical writer. As you create, you may narrate any action of the plausibility of which you can convince at least half the KTHMA team.

This new responsibility will work as follows. The Demiurge will notify you in session and on HuskyCT about what will be happening in Athens in upcoming sessions. When you are doing your pre-session reading, you will also mine both the section you are currently reading and the rest of the texts available to you in Herodotus, Thucydides, and any other works such as Plutarch, tragedy, Aristophanes, and Plato that you wish to bring in, for ideas about what information needs to be obtained in the upcoming encounter in relation to your class-team's goals in the interpretation of history. In your class-team forum, and in brief in-session team-meetings, you will agree upon what you hope to accomplish in the upcoming TSTT session.

The central idea behind what you narrate will be to advance your class' idea of what historical writing is about by accomplishing your class' in-Athens goal, and at the same time defending your secret from the "damaging" textual information supplied by the TSTT as a psychoporeutic stimulant. The Demiurge will discuss how this works with you in your team-forums, and will always assist in the in-session narration when you request assistance.

The rewards for demonstrating your mastery at analyzing Greek historical writing will be twofold: first, the usual experience points that contribute to your class-participation grade in the mission's course-cover; second, as you make your psychoporeutic contributions you will gain in Vitality, which will in turn advance your Stage rating; that advance will earn unique awards of honor in the Demiurge's Hall of κλέος.

The Demiurge advises you that even if you do not manage to prepare for a given mission-session, there are still experience points to be gained from showing up and contributing, though obviously it will be possible to win more experience points by making more deeply prepared contributions.

END SIGNAL
END TRANSMISSION
DEMIURGE OFFLINE

Along with that briefing, I also uploaded new instructions for each class, specifying their worldviews further and suggesting ways in which their view of how history should work, and what it should do, might differ from the other classes. Yesterday I informed them that after they were done in the Athenian assembly (where they'll get to see the debate in which Athens decides on war), they would be going to court, accused of breaking and entering. I gave each class-team a different text to mine for the necessary data, for example Xenophon's Apology, Plato's Apology, and Aristophanes' Wasps, all key texts for our understanding of the Athenian legal system, and thus the development of rhetoric during the end of the 5th Century BCE.

And, in a step that's really only vaguely related to the game but seems to me to have been enabled by it, I've made their research paper optionally collaborative, with all collaboration to happen in the KTHMA discussion forums. I've grown less and less happy about the college-class paper as a form over the years, though my belief in the importance of teaching writing and the critical thought that goes with it has never wavered. Since at least four of these class-teams have formed themselves into functional collabroative units, and the fifth shows enough spark that I don't despair of it, it seemed worth giving a collaborative model for a research paper a shot.

Operation KTHMA: arts, crafts, and card-based combat

See this hub for a guide to my posts on Operation KTHMA.

The boss-fight with the High Priest of Apollo at Delphi delivered the information I was hoping my students would get about how Delphi actually worked, according to what I think is our best evidence. (That is, it was rather like Switzerland, banks included, and with a girl on a tripod substituting for the magical power of Swiss Chocolate.)

But it also crystallized a problem with the logagonistic system that I've been avoiding: as it has stood hitherto, it's not interactive enough. The basic idea is that students discover the information that they need both for the game and for the course above all by deploying skills (a la weapons and spells in traditional RPG's both paper-and-dice and digital). When they deploy a skill, as the Demiurge I tell them what their character is saying and how their "target" (that is, interlocutor) responds.

That is, it ends up being a roundabout way to lecture, in which the top-down nature of lecturing becomes starkly, even absurdly apparent. Not un-engaging, I think, because I always try to make my descriptions and presentations of the information entertainingly goofy and iconoclastic, but definitely not as engaging as I want Operation KTHMA and the other courses I hope to base on it to be.

As I lamented this defect a bit, one of the few students who's truly both an experienced gamer and an experienced classicist nudged me along the path I've been trying to travel—the path of text. You may remember that the basic nature of the gameplay already has a healthy helping of textual analysis in it: each mission-part begins with a session in which the teams use their skills in reverse, analyzing a key section of Herodotus or Thucydides to "power-up" the transport device that sends them back in time. That "power-up" phase is without a doubt the most successful part of the course thus far, in my opinion (though the multimedia team skill-practice exercises are a close second): the power-up is the time when it really does feel like we're making the ancient world come alive.

What if somehow the logagonistic (that is, "combat") system were a real continuation of that textuality? The difficulty I saw was that I wanted the students to practice analyzing the text, but the point of skills in RPG's is that they function as a clever metonymy to cover over a player's lack of real skill in, say, sorcery.

That's when I got out the card-stock and the glue (which I borrowed from my kids' craft box and which, hilariously, turned out to be sparkle glue), and made the skill-cards. One of those cards is pictured above.

Skills, you see, seem to me to tend to teach a player about his or her class, and, by observing other players playing other classes, about those other classes. Their rule-based existence teaches players not how to cast a spell or swing an axe, but how to be a loremaster or a champion—at least insofar as the designers of the game have managed to encode in that rule-based existence some nugget of their idea of what those classes are. To that end, I realized that it's not what the skills do that matters for the teaching aspect of the course, but what they mean.

The reason for the cards is first that I want to see if standardizing the skills brings their basic point across better—the point being that these are discursive techniques that various ancient Greek cultural figures used. Second, the cards will be an easy way to simplify the mechanic of the expense of character-energy—each team has three cards for their basic skill, two cards for their second-tier skill, and one for their third-tier skill; as they play them on a given mission, the cards are put in a discard pile.

Third, though, and probably most importantly, standardizing the skills this way allows me to introduce a new framework for the discovery of the secrets in logagonistics—both the NPC and the PC secrets. From now on, I'm going to formulate each secret as a declaratory statement with discrete elements, and tie each of those elements to a passage that the character-skills can discover.

For example, the secret the operatives discovered from the High Priest of Apollo was "Delphi seeks to remain neutral." If we had been playing under the new system, I would have broken the statement into four parts: "(a) Delphi (b) seeks (c) to remain (d) neutral." For each of those parts I would have assigned a particular sentence in one of the important texts (not just Herodotus and Thucydides, but also homeric epic, tragedy, Aristophanes, and Plato—all instantly available on the internet, to be projected on the screen in the classroom). For example, I might tie "Delphi" to the moment in Sophocles' Oedipus Turannos when Oedipus tells the chorus that he has sent Creon to Delphi. Ideally each "damage-passage" would have some sort of thematic relationship to the secret itself (as the Sophocles passage does), but that's not really necessary: the idea is that the students will have to find the passage first and then identify the key-word that forms part of the secret.

You can probably guess where my high hopes for this new version of the system lie: not only will the students be closer to the text at all times, but opportunities open up for texturing their idea of what Athens was like with a wealth of different material, and for texturing their knowledge of the texts of Athenian culture with a new idea of Athens. I'll keep you posted.

Operation KTHMA: Boss-fight!

Last Wednesday, the operatives' Athenian hosts were led by their new acquaintance Aristides into a section of the city they had never seen. Here, it appeared, lived many metics, the resident foreigners who were an essential part of Athens' economic prosperity. For the first time in their young lives, I told them, they also saw prostitutes.

(Would Aspasia—whose house the students were quickly approaching—have lived in this kind of neighborhood? We'll never know, though I actually think not. On the other hand, I decided to put her there because it introduced the students to several important concepts that may help us understand Pericles and the Athens out of which Herodotus and Thucydides come: the metic population, its relationship to Athens' status as a sea-city, Pericles' relationship to both of those things.)

Outside the courtyard of the house of Aspasia lingered four burly sailors. They asked Aristides where he was taking these kids. He replied "The chief wants to see them." The sailors let them pass.

In the courtyard, they saw an old man talking to a beautiful middle-aged woman. They kissed, and parted. The old man said, "I'll see you later, Aspasia."

(In the classroom, furious typing on at least two lap-tops.)

(Wednesday's class ended there.)

Friday's class-session was entirely devoted to the boss-fight with Pericles. In the interim, to my nearly-shameful joy, I had received the tuchic determination devices I had ordered, and I distributed one d6 and one d10 to each class-team.Pericles opened the encounter by leading them into the andron of Aspasia's house, where they could see the remnants of last night's symposium, not yet cleaned up, and saying, "Aristides tells me you may be trustworthy. I have a job for you, because you've been asking around town about that Ionian storyteller. But I can't tell you what it is, because Pericles cannot have been heard to ask for help of this kind. You must figure it out for yourself."

Again, writing can't convey either the tautness of the educational atmosphere, or its confusion as the operatives and I struggled to come up with a balance between flow and pedagogy. Pericles never hit them, so their secrets didn't come into play, but that was principally because Class 4 had studied their skill-sheet carefully, and deployed their skill "Confusion," which on a miss (which is what happened) at least stuns the opponent so that he can't attack.

One mechanic that I hadn't fully appreciated was in fact the miss, which can lead, I realized, to dynamics that are really much more interesting than simply passing the turn to the next character in line. When the framework is this logagonistic one I'm developing with reference to Corvus Elrod's HoneyComb Engine, a question that Pericles refuses to answer can be interesting and revealing because of the specific way Pericles refuses to answer it.

So as I called on one student from each class-team in turn, he or she would roll the d10 (I meant to have them roll the d6 to hit, then the d10 for damage, but I have to admit I had too much to manage in this first boss-fight, and in the end it was only the d10's that got rolled). One of the brilliant advances of the HoneyComb Engine is the way it allows players (whom Corvus calls storytellers or 'tellers) to improvise the outcome of an action according to a die-roll. I'm hoping I can get my students to do that eventually, but on Friday I took my inspiration from the Engine and used the number each student rolled to do my own improvisation about what happened. For example, Class 5 deployed their skill Divine Melody, to attempt to make Pericles think he was in the presence of a deity. They rolled a 1, and I told them that they had sung a terrible bit of doggerel about the gods, on hearing which Pericles had looked puzzled for a moment and then said, "Yes, well, that's true," and turned away.

From an educational perspective, the most important breakthrough I think we made in this boss-fight was at the several moments during the encounter when as a team discussed what they wanted to do on their turn, I intervened as the Demiurge to lead them through a passage of Herodotus that was related to what was going on in battle of wits with Pericles. Above all, I called their attention to the passages that had to do with the two more-or-less ruling families of Athens, the Alcmaeonidae (of whom Pericles was descended) and the Philaidai (of whom Cimon, and Miltiades, and Thucydides son of Melesias, and almost certainly Thucydides the historian, were all descended).

In the end, it turned out that Pericles wanted the operatives' Athenians to go to the house of Thucydides son of Melesias and find something he could use to discredit the things the Ionian storyteller seemed to be saying about him. Pericles said that he really couldn't figure out what the man from Halicarnassus was up to, but that it seemed very dangerous indeed not to be taking action, when the Spartan ambassadors were on their way, and the moment of decision was at hand.

Operation KTHMA: Closing in on Homer

The unexpected development of Friday was that the more-or-less standard—that is, just students and a teacher talking about stuff—discussion of the transport-passage, where Herodotus tells his audience that the Persians say that the Achaeans who went to Troy must have been idiots, was so good that we barely had time to get to Athens. I despair of a way to get any usable data on this dynamic, because I don't think the students actually realize how much better they're doing at discussing a classical text than they would be in a traditional course. Even if I were to ask them a survey-question like "Was your regular class-dicussion enhanced by the game-format of the course?" I wouldn't trust the answer. On the other hand, I do think that they've noticed that they're talking a lot more than they usually do.

Part of the enhancement of their learning experience comes from the simple mechanical tricks of letting them see me punch numbers into a spreadsheet every time they say something and of putting them into small groups for a few minutes to prepare to comment. I'm convinced at this point, though, that without the play context of the game, those tricks wouldn't work anywhere near as well as they seem to be working. In particular, the idea of giving them a "class," which puts them on a "team," and carries a "worldview," seems to be causing them to think much more imaginatively than I've ever seen a group of undergraduates think in an advanced class.

When we did manage to return to Athens, they made their way down to the Piraeus (the port of Athens) and found their way to the merchant ship of Iophon of Halicarnassus, who was able to tell them that he had grown up with Herodotus and that Herodotus had spent a lot of time asking people questions. He said that there had certainly been Persians in Halicarnassus to talk to, but to Iophon's knowledge none had told versions of Greek myths the way Herodotus tells us they did. (That was my way of indicating that we have no evidence that the Persians retold those stories, but also that if we want to say that Herodotus made it up, that argument can only ever be from silence.)

It's probably worth noting that the RPG game-play almost always recapitulates what we've talked about in the discussion of the transport-text, with the added frisson of actually imagining what it would look like to Athenian eyes. In turn, the continuing notion of "playing the past" will hopefully bear fruit when we get to see Herodotus and Thucydides themselves trying to do that same thing and trying to get their audiences to do it. The frisson, that is, becomes the teachable moment of practicing historical discourse.

On Monday we spent most of the time on their first skill-practice exercises. All the class-teams did what I thought were outstanding jobs; I'll single out the comparison of the figure depicted above, and his meme "truthiness" to Herodotus' way of persuading his audience by making his account sound good. The class-skill involved was Class 5's "lyrical fancy," and they were quite convincing on the subject of Herodotus' appeal to what feels true.

I also told them that I'll be pushing a patch to the combat system tomorrow. This patch is based in large part on Corvus Elrod's staggering write-up of the Kiai-Megill Variant of his HoneyComb Engine. In this discursive variant, standard RPG physical and magical combat is transformed into dialogue. In my version, each character (PC or NPC) in what I'm now calling "the logagonistic situation" has a secret s/he must keep; the secret is divulged in bits as the character suffers "hits," and full disclosure of the secret means defeat (for an NPC or a PC in a sparring match) or adverse game consequences (for PC's in Athens). I'll post more about the new logagonistic system on Thursday, hopefully, after the operatives go head-to-head with their old school-teacher, who's holding out on them about Homer.

Operation KTHMA: Day 4

The dice—one six-sided die for each class-team, borrowed from my kids' copy of Yahtzee—went out yesterday. I'd been going back and forth on whether the downside of distraction was worth the upside of engagement, and finally decided that the upside is potentially enormous (I have indelible memories of how I cherished my D&D dice and added to them over time), and the downside probably minimal. At any rate, with about ten minutes left in the class-session, Team 4 rolled a six, giving them the initiative in a conversation with a man with a heavy accent who had been muttering about how the Ionian storyteller—this man Herodotus, who the man knew had come from Halicarnassus—was telling lies about the Persians. Team 4 decided to ask how the heavy-accent man knew, and the man told them that they should go see a sailor named Iophon in the Piraeus; he knew they wouldn't take his own word for it, since he was a Persian, but Iophon was an Ionian, and had known Herodotus growing up. There the class-session ended.

Earlier in the session, I'd rated three operatives at Stage 1 for posts they'd made in the forums in the interim that were more or less in-character. One of them had won the piece of gear pictured above, for a particularly belligerent post. Then I'd introduced the Ancient/Modern Interweave Skill-Practice Exercise, which is a collaborate weekly multimedia project that each team must complete and post on most of the Mondays of the course. They'll then present their work to the rest of the KTHMA team in our Monday session. The idea is to use their class-skill in the modern world, and connect multimedia bits of modern culture with the ancient text. It's my fond hope that I'll be able to get their permission to post some of these here on Living Epic.

Then we'd turned to the mission-text, which was the second chapter of Book 1 of Herodotus, in which the writer tells of what the Persians say was the origin of the conflict between Persia and Greece. Either I'm fooling myself or even the non-Greeked students are becoming comfortable with having a big chunk of text in a foreign language with a foreign alphabet on the screen in front of them. My strong feeling is that the game-frame is absolutely crucial here; take away the high-stakes grade-related nature of complex classwork and suddenly everything comes naturally. I wish I had some kind of data to back this assertion up, but I've felt for several years that the biggest problem in my teaching was that I haven't had a way to present complex critical analysis without scaring the clear majority of my students into the disengaged torpor of "This is too hard to understand—I hope he'll just tell us what we need to know for the test." My previous solution, which was to say 1) there's no test and 2) OK, here's a list of precisely the stuff for which I'm actually holding you responsible, has always been unsatisfactory. Again, it's unsupported by data (yet!), but I think the game may be the answer.

As soon as I developed in the operatives a certain skepticism about whether Herodotus could be on the level about what the Persian λόγιοι (wordy-guys, story-tellers) say, the TSTT started to glow, the room faded away, and there they were in Athens again. They got a little lost on the way to the Agora, and ended up at the Acropolis, where the guards told them to get lost, but provided directions to where the Ionian storyteller was holding forth. When they arrived, they found that the crowd was already too big to get close, but they were able to listen to the bystanders, including the heavily-accented man.

I'm a bit surprised by how naturally the course/game has fallen into a turn-based system, and how cycling through the whole class to take the next turn simultaneously removes the vast majority of the pressure of being called on cold and preserves the tremendous benefit of that practice. It's been several years since the last time I tried cold-calling on my students in the traditional way, and I've regretted that because there's absolutely nothing like it for maintaining engagement. To make this turn-based class-participation even stronger, the next piece of the game-development is I think to come up with a handy chart of the possible actions for a turn, for example speech, movement, call to the Demiurge, attack, skill-use.

Tomorrow we'll be meeting the ghost of Homer head-on for the first time. Since I don't believe there was any such person, there unfortunately won't be any combat with the undead.

Operation KTHMA: Day 3

Actual in-world gameplay for the first time yesterday!

In the time between Day 2 and Day 3, one of the operatives, to my delighted astonishment, wrote a gorgeous post in character as Agapocles, her ancient Athenian host, using her class-skill to meditate on the text of Herodotus in relation to Athenian culture. I instantly rated her as a "Stage 1 Operative of the TSTT," gave her a ton of XP and a boost to two vital stats, and then posted a Congratulations-message, with the gear-drop pictured just above.

I was then delighted (though a bit less astonished) when another of my diligent students mailed me (very politely) to ask how the heck Agapocles had managed to get rated Stage 1 before anyone else, and, by the way, what the heck was Stage 1. I encouraged that operative to post in the forum and ask for an explanation from Agapocles' operative. Since things are still a bit confusing in the course/game, and my operatives all have many, many other things going on in their lives, I ended up posting as the Demo Student, asking Agapocles' operative to explain how she'd attained the rating, and she gamely explained that she'd "had him consider" the text.

That was as far as that dynamic got before we met yesterday, but it sowed a very valuable seed, and let me talk at the start of the session about the theory behind the role-playing aspect of the course: seeing the ancient world through ancient eyes is what lets us understand the most important parts of ancient texts. By understanding what Herodotus meant in Athens we understand what his writing really can mean today.

We turned back to the text of the first chapter of book 1 of Herodotus. The discussion that ensued was easily the best discussion I've ever had on that passage with undergraduates. I went from team to team, asking for the insights their skills had given them. The most wonderfully bizarre thing was that it appears that by telling them I had granted them those skills I'd actually evoked the skills in them. The most obvious example is the way the team to which I'd granted "Objectivity" detected some very important traces of bias in passages later in the book that most students simply gloss over.

Each group had its say, and the incipient, fundamental disputes over whether Herodotus is doing something new or something old, and how invested he is in being right, started to break out.

Then I intervened and told them that the TSTT, fed by their psychoporeutic energy ("For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings"), had sprung to life. The room was fading, and now they heard the sounds of voices speaking in another language.

"You're standing in the gateway of a little courtyard. . ."

After a lot of agonizing, I had decided that for certain scenes, the thirty of them would be compressed into a single Athenian, and we would operate with the conceit that parallel scenes were taking place all over Athens, in the lives of thirty different young Athenian men.

(Note on sex and gender: I defaulted all the hosts—that is, in-mission characters—to male. When I explained this dynamic to the operatives, I gave them two reasons, and an out. First, and perhaps most importantly, given that realism is a central goal not for its own sake but rather to provide the students with as accurate a picture of life in 431BCE as possible—which is in fact one of the course objectives—a female character in a realistic Athens would have a very hard time leaving the house. Second, "masculinity" in ancient Athens was most certainly not the same as masculinity today, and it will be up to the operatives to decide how to perform their genders. Finally (the out), I said that if anyone wanted to work out a role-playing way to have a female-sexed Athenian character (for example a girl whose parents raised her as a boy, a character choice which of course has its own gendering difficulties), I would be very open to the idea.)

In the scene that ensued, the player-character's father discussed the political situation with them. He brought them into the andron (man-room—the dining-room of an ancient Greek house) and uncovered his hoplite armor. I gave each decision about what to do or say to a different operative, assigning them their operative code-names (e.g. Operative Jessep, Operative Boston, Operative Red) as I did so. Their first important decision was whether or not to try on their father's armor. Operative Mal (named by the student after the character in Firefly) decided not to try the armor on.

Crucially, the father then offered them the chance to flee the city if war broke out. If the course/game goes to plan, that offer will be a very important plot point.

"Alright," said the father, "go see your mother, and get some sleep. I'm sure you've heard that a storyteller from Ionia has come to town, and I expect you and your friends will be up early to get to the agora and see if you can get a listen."

(Gaming) Homer Course-design (3): Units (syllabus, more or less)

This is a post in a series taken from the preliminary version of the course-design document for CAMS 3208. Dig in and see what you think! Please do let me know if you’ve got suggestions for other activities, or if you think anything needs clarification. I really want this course to be something gamers with the slightest interest in the ancient world, and classicists with the slightest interest in gaming, are drooling to take. :D

At some point, probably in January, I'll post the actual syllabus for the course, but the following is pretty close to what it's going to be. If you're feeling really clicky, you can correlate the letters A-E in parentheses with the goals and objectives in the first post in the series, and the readings with the list of activities in the second. Think of it as a game! ;-)

Unit 1. The bardic occasion, then and now (A, B) (3 weeks)

• Activities: (reading) Iliad 2, Odyssey 8-9, Lord, Singer of Tales; (gaming) Play a level or quest three times, preferably in co-op; (discussion) in-game discussion; develop interview questions for developers.
• Sub-objectives: 1) describe the bardic occasion; 2) summarize oral formulaic theory; 3) produce a report of a gaming session as a bardic occasion.

Unit 2. The Aristeia and levelling (A, B, C, D) (2 weeks)

• Activities: (reading) comparison of aristeiai, Nagy, Homeric Questions; (playing) level an RPG hero; (discussion) in-game discussion; conduct and analyze interview; proxy visit to MMO developer studio.
• Sub-objectives: 1) describe the practice of the aristeia, with examples from Homeric epic; 2) produce a report of a videogame aristeia, with reference to ancient material.

Unit 3. Gear (B, C, D, E) (2 weeks)

• Activities: (reading) Iliad 18, Selected passages; (gaming) Equip Master Chief correctly for the situation, gain gear for an RPG character; (discussion) in-game discussion.
• Sub-objectives: 1) describe the function of arms and armor in Homeric epic; 2) produce a report of a videogame despoiling and resulting combat, with reference to ancient material
  sub-obejctive; 3) produce a report of RPG gear aggregation, with reference to ancient material.

Unit 4. Ethical critique (C, D, E) (2 weeks)

• Activities: (reading) Iliad 9, 24; Odyssey 11, 22; Nagy; (gaming) play an RPG scenario light and dark; play Halo “save the marines” moment; (discussion) in-game discussion; develop interview questions, conduct and analyze interview.
• Sub-objectives: 1:) descibe the ethical critiques mounted by the Iliad and the Odyssey; 2) describe a potential affordance of videogames for ethical critique; 3) produce a report on an experience of an ethical videogame situation, with reference to ancient material.

Unit 5. Minigames (C, D, E) (1 week)

• Activities: (reading) Iliad 23, Odyssey 8; Nagy; (gaming) Lego Star Wars; (discussion)in-game discussion.
• Sub-objectives: 1) describe the functioning of embedded harmonizing reprsentations like funeral games in Homeric epic; 2) produce a report on an experience of a harmonizing minigame with reference to ancient material.

Unit 6. Psychology/Sociology of Epic (C, D, E) (1 week)

• Activities: (reading) Iliad 20, Odyssey 23; (gaming) Halo 2 Arbiter level; (culture) forum observation; (discussion) forum discussion.
• Sub-objective: 1) describe the psychological model proposed by the Homeric epics; 2) describe the pscyhological model proposed by an adventure videogame, with reference to ancient material; 3) produce a report on observations of psychology and/or sociology in a gaming community, with reference to ancient material.

Unit 7. Anti-heroism (C, D, E) (1 week)

• Activities: (reading) Odyssey 11, Iliad 22; (gaming) Grand Theft Auto series; (culture) forum observation; (discussion) in-game discussion.
• Sub-objective: 1) describe the figure of the anti-hero in Homeric epic; 2) produce a report on an experience of playing as an anti-hero, with reference to ancient material; 3) produce a report on anti-heroic behavior on a gaming community forum, with reference to ancient material.

Unit 8. Community and Polis (A, C, D, E) (2 weeks)

• Activities: (reading) Odyssey 9; Plato Apology and selections from Republic, selections from Herodotus and Thucydides; Nagy; (culture) forum observation; (discussion) in-game discussion; design, conduct, analyze developer-community-manager interview.
• Sub-objectives: 1) describe the role of Homeric epic in the rise of the Greek polis in the 7th and 6th Centuries BCE; 2) produce a report on findings about the role of community in gaming culture, with reference to ancient material; 3) produce a speculative report on the affordances of adventure videogames for community-building in the modern world, wirh reference to ancient material.

D&D and Plato&Aeschylus

Ray Huling has a fun and thought-provoking piece at The Escapist this week. He's arguing among other things that the RPG is a sort of paradigm-shift in storytelling in world-culture, and he brings in Plato and the Athenian tragedy-guys to explain why.

I'm not a big fan of paradigm-shifts in general, because it seems to me that they're always in the eye of the beholder, and that much, much more often they actually represent swings of the pendulum. In the case of Huling's article, as I commented over at the mag, I think it makes more sense to see RPG's as a swing back towards improvisation from scripting. The nice thing about such a quibble, though, is that it doesn't really vitiate Huling's point at all, and also gives us lots of new ground to explore.