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.

Brief classical thoughts on "No Russian"

This blog may have some readers who have managed to miss the controversy surrounding the single-player campaign of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (MW2). To orient you, my VGHVI colleague Erik Hanson brought together some of the most important responses to the controversy on the VGHVI Context Clues blog.

There's really no need to divulge the nature of the atrocity here; if you're interested you can follow-up through the link to Context Clues. What you need to know is that there's a chapter of the game in which the player-character is forced (if he or she chose to be forced, at the start of the game, since the game asks you if you want to play the disturbing sequence or skip it) to aid in the commission of a terrible atrocity. What's important for the purposes of the classical comparison is that 1) it's something that no rational person could view as anything other than an atrocity; and 2) the player (if he or she has chosen to play the sequence) is forced to aid in committing it.

The game critics whom I consider worth reading are near-universally agreed that the chapter does not deliver the profound meaning it seems pretty clearly to be attempting to deliver. There are a host of reasons for this impression that arise in the execution of the chapter, ranging from its context in the larger story of the game to the odd and jarring way its interactivity is managed. With regard to this failure of execution, it's perhaps worth noting from my classical point of view that there are several tragedies of Euripides that are marred (if we wish to put it that way, though scholars disagree) by a similar failure to integrate horrific acts into their plots in a meaningful way. I would hesitate to credit Infinity Ward, the developer of MW2 with this level of depth, but it's just possible that 100 years from now what looks now like the inappropriateness of the sequence will be hailed by scholars hoping to get published as a brilliantly dicomfiting coup de jeu.

There is, however, another point about "No Russian" that appears more strongly from a classical perspective than perhaps any other. It seems to me an undeniable fact that Infinity Ward, who put analogously atrocious action in MW2's predecessor, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, is maintaining a commitment to bringing the players of its games face-to-face with the ethical ambiguity of war. That fact by itself shows a development of game culture that mirrors the development that we can see in the homeric tradition when we look at that tradition diachronically, and pick apart its strata: in the Iliad, for example, the ethical simplicity of tales of glory becomes, over time, the ambiguous story of an Achilles who drags Hector around Troy, in front of his grieving parents, and then kills Trojan youths on Patroclus' funeral pyre. Indeed, this development leads in ancient Athens to tragedy, the ne plus ultra of literary ethical thought, where atrocities are used over and over to expose the fragility of our ethical claims and to strengthen our understanding of why we must make those claims nonetheless.

MW2 reaches in an old, old direction. Its failure to lay hold of the profundity it seems to seek is sad, but the reach itself means much more than I think many have acknowledged.

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.

Noted: Michael Abbott on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 marketing

I'd be quite surprised if there were anyone who reads this little blog who doesn't also (and indeed more frequently) read Michael Abbott's The Brainy Gamer, but just in case, and in tribute to his wonderful post this morning, I'd like to point any such hypothetical reader to a great example of the power of the blog form, which is at the same time the most incisive analysis of the forces controlling AAA gaming I think I've ever read.

Here's what I posted in Michael's comments:

From my hobby horse, blaming Infinity Ward for this callousness is like blaming the homeric bards for the graphic violence and smacktalk of their battles. By doing that kind of blaming, we certainly assert our own superiority (which is not an unimportant thing to do). But we also start from a position of having missed something that's culturally interesting about the game and its marketing. You catch precisely that interesting facet here.

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: the road to Delphi

Yesterday the team made its way from Athens to Delphi by way of a series of short encounters with their new acquaintance Olorides, who turns out to be Cimon's great-nephew and thus himself a member of the Philaidai. Each night of the arduous journey, they could get one "hit" in on Olorides before Aristides, the henchman sent by Pericles to shepherd the mission, came to tell them to shut up so that no brigands (or other unfriendlies) could hear them. Olorides turned out to have a great many thoughts about what Herodotus is trying to tell the Athenians, though he was careful to make clear that these thoughts shouldn't be taken as somehow definitive.

Olorides does seem, though, to have a firm grasp on the cultural scene of Athens, and how Herodotus' innovative ideas about the role of law in human life and in the ordering of the cosmos relate to it. When the team's Athenians reached Delphi at last, and stood with Olorides by the Castalian Spring, with a clear view of the amazing wealth of the Sacred Way rising toward the enormous Temple of Apollo built by the Alcmaeonidae, becoming thus the proximate cause of Athenian democracy and Pericles' rule over it, they had a last chance to detain him and pick his brain about the meaning of Herodotus.

Aristides would take them to the temple and tell them what to do. He, Olorides, was on his way to see some people he knew.

The class-teams furiously deployed their skills, revealing that Olorides, though he disagrees with Herodotus about this, thinks that Herodotus is trying to tell the Athenians to act Greek, rather than Persian.

On the pedagogical side of things, it's becoming clear that this game-method thing is wonderfully flexible as a framework for several different kinds of learning. Judging from my students' reactions, any time I downshift into "ordinary" teaching mode, and either just start telling them things e.g. about Greek history, or tell them about course mechanics liks the upcoming Mission Final Challenge (that is, quiz), it's very much like they're reading a post in, say, a forum about The Lord of the Rings Online or even Halo, telling them how to defeat a particular boss. I'm not sure it would be an exaggeration to say that the frame of the game-space, engaging in and of itself, makes even "ordinary" teaching more engaging. Indeed, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that students become positively grateful for that ordinary teaching that will help them get further in the game-story, in the same way I feel positively grateful, after dying multiple times, to learn the best approach to defeating a Nazgul.