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.

+Humanities? (a reaction to Games+Learning+Society 6.0)

I had the incredible privilege last week to serve as the designated classicist—perhaps even the designated humanist—at the Games+Learning+Society conference in Madison, Wisconsin. (It's an unofficial, self-appointed position.) My presence there, in the strange and wonderful space where the games industry and the burgeoning field of educational technology meet, would never have occurred without the close and immensely fruitful collegial relationship I've had over the past two years with Michael Young, who doesn't (I believe) get enough attention as a pioneer in his field of educational psychology and its relation to educational technology.

Others have reported broadly and emphatically about the sweep of the conference, from Kurt Squire's call to look at games as possibility spaces (my own take would be that we should start speaking of games as one kind of possibility space—or, better, practomime—in which learners gain the power to transform themselves) to David Wiley's call to realize the gains that only true openness of information can bring (my own take would be that, well, yeah—but with narrative, please). (Worth noting that Wiley is yet another teacher who independently started grading in XP; there must be something in the air—and the murmur that went through the room of what I'd call shocked approval at that slide indicates that that air's scent has been wafting over the lakes of Wisconsin.)

So my contribution to the post-conference conversation is to say "More humanities, please!"

I think there's enormous potential both for the new game/ed-tech inter-field (if you will) and for the ancient inter-field of the humanities in broadening their points of contact: ed-tech could gain a connection to the deep roots of culture; the humanities could gain the kind of traction over the modern world for which their practitioners have been longing. The new "field" of digital humanities (scare-quotes because it's widely agreed not to be a field but rather a set of methodologies) is questing towards some way of making the humanities relevant to the digital age; for a couple years now I've had the niggling feeling that there's something off about that quest—simply put, the humanities are relevant to the digital age, whether they're carried out digitally or in analog form. If Facebook is an instantiation of Plato's Cave, the way we describe it thus—that is, whether we prove it by data-mining or verbal argument in Latin on parchment—has no effect on the validity of the point, though of course it may well have an effect on how large an audience the argument reaches and persuades.

I don't mean to suggest that digital methods are not quite possibly the best methods available for humanities research—simply that we shouldn't look to them to assert the relevance of the humanities to those whom we'd like to keep us in business. Rather, I think what I saw at GLS last week can help us make a much stronger claim to relevance—a relevance that goes well beyond our tools, and into the very constitution of human culture—and even the survival and increase of culture's constructive elements (whatever we should declare those elements to be, a point on which reasonable people are always bound to differ despite general agreement that there are such constructive elements, and that they should survive and increase).

Helped by the absence of any formal educational institutions (as we conceive of them) to think past, Plato was able to see that learning and culture—and thus learning and the humanities, though of course the humanities were at that time many, many years from existing in the semi-formal sense in which we know them—are locked in a dance so intricate that it could be expressed metaphorically as the chains that hold the willing audience in their places in the Cave. As I've demonstrated elsewhere, Plato allegorizes cultural learning as something we can recognize under the current use of the word "game"—or, to put it purely functionally, under the prevailing use of that word by the GLS Conference's attendees.

Because we on the other hand do have formal educational institutions to think past, much of the energy at GLS is understandably taken up with figuring out how to think past them. How do we get administrators to let us bring games into the classroom? Above all, what's the evidence for the benefit of games in schools, and how do we use it, and then get more evidence? These questions are urgent ones, but I'd like to suggest another one, based on humanistic inquiry: if culture is itself, as Plato saw, a sort of game (or a practomime, or a possibility space), and thus school is already a game, how can we redesign this game, this cave, so that all the learners in the schools, in the universities, in the cities and towns and villages, gain the culture-skills they need to make the game a better one for all humanity?

That's the kind of thing I think humanists are best equipped to wonder about—and, I like to flatter myself, maybe classically-trained ones best of all. I'm pretty sure I'm going to spend the summer and the fall pondering precisely that question, since I'm putting together two practomimetic courses based on Plato's understanding (and perhaps misunderstanding) of Athenian culture and culture in general, and since I'm also working with my socii to develop a new practomimetic Latin curriculum for both high school and college classes. Expect more in this vein, as well as about Red Dead Redemption and (I fervently hope) Mass Effect 2 and DragonAge!

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.

Operation KTHMA: The end of the mission, the birth of the practomimetic course, part 2—doomed mission to Methone

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

On Friday, in the final class-session of Operation KTHMA, I killed my students. Never have I had less desire to harm a class than I had to harm this one; nevertheless, it's the historical views of Thucydides we've been exploring in the second half of the semester, and no more appropriate ending could be imagined. This post is the first of two in which I talk about how those tragic, realistic deaths came about.

Of course, this utterly realistic ending was accompanied by an utterly fantastic collocation of Thucydides himself (whom they had gotten to know under his "nickname" Olorides), Herodotus himself, and Alcibiades himself, all of whom had volunteered for the same reconnaissance mission of which the students had been in charge. Such a fantasy, I told the operatives of KTHMA, was the kind of thing the texto-spatio-temporal-transport (TSTT) system (aka the teacher's desk at the front of the room, upon which rested my laptop) dreamt up in its AI in order to help the operatives get to the truth of the various ways to interpret Greek historical writing.

At any rate, having those three luminaries there made it possible to recover the bodies of the operatives' Athenian hosts, and get them back to Athens for burial at the public funeral later that year. You know, the one where Pericles delivers the funeral oration. Several weeks ago, I'd sent them back on a special ops mission to that funeral, to talk to Olorides about why he had written the oration up the way he did. The reason for sending them back out of sequence was twofold: 1) President Obama had just given his eulogy at Fort Hood, and the comparison to Pericles' speech was striking; 2) I suspected that I was going to kill the operatives before, chronologically speaking, the winter of 430, when the public funeral took place.

Here they were, though, at a place in Laconia called Methone, as recorded by Thucydides in Book 2 of his history—a place where Athens had its first success delivering hoplites into enemy territory, and where Brasidas of Sparta first enters the history, a general whose extraordinary fate will later be bound up with Thucydides' own, when Thucydides is exiled because of the battle of Amphipolis, where Brasidas triumphs, and dies.

On the flag-trireme, cruising off the Laconian coast, they had been asked by the three Athenian generals to stage a debate, the winner to be in command of the reconnaissance mission. Being in command was of great importance, because the teams' Athenians were now at odds with one another. Two teams had chosen to ally with the aristocratic faction led by Thucydides son of Melesias (not the historian) and three with the demotic faction led by Pericles.

The generals demanded that they imagine that a small island had opposed annexation by Athens. The artistocratic side was to pretend to be the islanders, attempting to persuade the Athenians to let them go free; the demotic side was to pretend to be the Athenians, attempting to persuade the islanders to surrender without a fight. In short, they were to enact the Melian dialogue. It was the TSTT's way (that is, my way) of talking about how the inevitable slide into a Law-of-the-Jungle, realpolitik world was already happening, as Thucydides sees it, at the very start.

In the event, we didn't get to finish that debate (leadership, as I'll detail in the next post, was determined by a die-roll). The operatives, however, made very fine contributions under the new model of action that closely follows the HoneyComb Engine. In this model, the students must declare what they want to do, then roll a die to see how successful they are, then narrate what happens. In a dialogic situation, it can make for very interesting and entertaining results. Above all, it takes a great deal of pressure off the students, who get to take refuge in silliness like "I say 'Athenians, we think that the gods will save us' and then I nearly fall off the boat." The other side can then respond, "Did they save you from falling?" and Thucydides' lesson about realism and idealism advances in their minds an important step. It's that wonderful situation where learning happens unnoticed.

This HCE model, from my perspective, is an extraordinary learning tool. On Wednesday, the second to last class-session, we took the whole class-period to debrief about the course. The bottom-line is that they liked it. More importantly, both their praises and their critiques were really well thought-out, and incredibly useful. I mention it now because a wonderful operative, code name Jessep, had two great things to say that have a bearing on the narration-by-students model: first, he, one of the most participatory and enthusiastic operatives over the course of the semester, recalled something I had forgotten about the first day of the course—that he had raised his hand and said, "Does anyone else just have no idea what's going on?"; second, he said that he had been taken aback by how many little things he now knew about the culture of Herodotus and Thucydides that profoundly affected his understanding of them.

Next post: which beacon are they going to light?

Operation KTHMA: The end of the mission, the birth of the practomimetic course, part 1—the collaborative research paper

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

Yesterday I debriefed the operatives about the final challenge of Mission 6, which they had just completed, having been awarded a week's extension by the Demiurge (that is, me) when I saw that things were not progressing as quickly as I'd hoped but that nevertheless the progress was very promising. This final challenge was the briefing in the form of a collaborative research paper that I mentioned at the end of my last KTHMA post. The topic for the briefing was "What is Thucydides' attitude towards Athens?" (a subject that's much more complex than the non-reader or even the cursory reader of Thucydides might think).

The operatives had a wealth of insight into how to make the assignment work better, but were nearly unanimous in their enthusiasm for the assignment itself. (Or so it seemed to me, though of course some might have been hiding daggers in their bosoms, waiting until I was safely out of grading range [I'm jesting here; I've never been more convinced of or impressed by a class' good will than I am by these operatives'].) Three of the teams have handed in papers that are collaborative (and very good indeed) from top to bottom; the other two shared sources and ideas, and I think (though I haven't waded into the depths of the papers yet) certain passages that were deemed especially felicitous.

The linchpin of this assignment is the class-team forums, where I insisted all collaboration take place. By picking through those forums, I'll be able to tell (indeed, I've been following along and so have a fairly good idea already) who did what, and grade accordingly not on the finished product but on the mastery of course objectives that their collaboration shows.

For me, this means that I can stamp "solved" on a problem I've had with the assessment of college writing since I began to teach it as a graduate student fifteen years ago: I have never had the opportunity to grade anything but a final product that is nothing but a stale exercise in trying to give the instructor what he seems to say he wants. Even with mandatory rewrites, I had no justification that would let me judge anything but what the student handed in, as a paper in fulfillment of a requirement for the course.

For classics majors, this was fine, because that stale exercise was a key part of disciplinary formation, or so I justified it to myself. But what about the students who desperately need to learn to write, but who get so, so little from learning to write a dead-end research paper containing unoriginal ideas about Thucydides?

And that's without even taking into account the absolutely enormous benefit the students derived from seeing each other work. Some of the students in this class are in fact very talented writers of research papers who may well go on to academic careers in which they put that skill to good use in producing new knowledge. The students who don't fall into that category had never, I'm fairly sure, had the opportunity to see that kind of student at work. I don't think I'm reading too much into the posts I saw in the class-team forums when I say that many of them found it truly eye-opening.

Did this assignment or its evident success have anything to do with the practomime of the course's framework?

("Practomime" is a word I'm audtioning to substitute for "game." Fear not: if it passes the audition I'll explain it further, and quite likely will never shut up about it either.)

While I would certainly recommend this kind of collaborative paper in any course, I think its success in this practomimetic course had a great deal to do with two elements that are unique to the practomime:

1. The operatives of the course are used to collaborating because of the "AMISPEs" (Ancient/Modern Interweave Skill Practice Exercises) they've been doing from the beginning of the course. One could argue I suppose that if I'd divided the class into teams with no practomimetic frame I would have gotten similar results both on the AMISPEs and on the paper, but that seems to me more or less to grant my central point that things like "teams" are good; anytime you put teams on the field, you're doing practomime, I think. It was wonderful to hear one of the operatives say, "The paper was just like one big AMISPE."
2. The narrative framework of the practomime has subtly influenced the way the operatives think about Thucydides so that they have a familiar lens through which to see the articles they were reading for the research. For all but the most seasoned students, research papers in past versions of this course have been an arduous exercise in trying to graft classics scholars' complicated arguments into the students' much simpler ones. This time, although as usual I could be thinking wishfully, the final products I've seen indicate a much deeper relationship with the secondary sources. It seems to me that that relationship can only come from the feeling that the operatives know what Athens was like and what Thucydides was doing there.

Over the next week or three I'll be adding to this post mortem series about Operation KTHMA. Next up (I think): the KTHMA team stands trial for hubris.

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 1, as it actually went down

"According to the student administration system, this is CAMS 3212, Greek Historical Writings. Now that the door is closed, however, I can reveal that what will actually happen in this room this semester is. . ."

I pushed the button on the projector control panel. Nothing happened. Groans from the students who'd been following along on Facebook, followed by sympathetic laughter. A few more button presses, and the slides sprang to life.

"Operation KTHMA."

Really the thing went better than I could have hoped. Only a couple students wore looks that suggested they had been trapped in a hot classroom with a dangerous lunatic.

In fact, two game dynamics that hadn't previously crystallized came to full realization as I was leading us through the set-up for the game: 1) discussion-grinding, where students get 11XP for saying anything meaningful, and multiples of 11XP for saying something clever (one of my favorite students is trying to figure out what the minimum meaningful utterance might be; I can't wait to see whether he finds a way to macro it); 2) the beginnings of a PvP system, where the different classes (which I have to be very careful not to spoil here) will act in opposition to one another—the story I've got planned will offer a lot of opportunity for role-playing the worldviews of the classes, which are decidely not in harmony with one another.

As of midnight last night, two thirds of the class had undergone the Psychometric Sortition Tool, and had been placed in their classes. One of the students had actually been proactive and followed an instruction the Demiurge (that is, I) had left on the site but had not mentioned in the session, to start a thread in the "Hall of κλέος." I awarded him his Greek name, Chyrsopolis, with a title, Protocletic (that is, first-glorified), 22XP, and a picture of the "Sword of κλέος," shown above, as a trophy. Subsequent posts will get diminishing rewards.

In my next update, I'll say more about the classes, since by then all the students will have been assigned to one, and about the "courseplay," since in tomorrow's session I'll be training them in one of the fundamental mechanics, the use of the Textospatiotemporal Transportation Device.