The Rules of the Text series, at Play the Past

This post is an index to my posts in the Rules of the Text series, at Play the Past. I'm starting to think of my post-series as books; I invite you to do the same, if you find it helpful.

1. A modest proposal for viewing literary texts as rulesets, and for making game studies beneficial to the publick
   
2. The rules of song and the rules of myth: playing with dragons and other mythohistorical archetypes
   
3. Transmedia and tabletops
   
4. Performances and operations
   
5. A galactic ruleset under siege: the Mass Effect 3 controversy
   
6. Detour to the Magic Kingdom
   
7. Choice, multiculturalism, and irrevocability in Mass Effect, part 1
   
8. Choice, multiculturalism, and irrevocability in Mass Effect, part 2
   
9. Irrevocability and meaning in Mass Effect
   
10. The Rules of the Text

Time out for (a) "Journey"

I don't feel adequate in the slightest to the task of talking about Journey after only playing an hour of it. But I want to register here that I've started this new practomime, and it makes me think that a relationship between ethics and aesthetics, arising out of inherited mechanics but transcending them, is gathering steam.

Everything you hear about the "multiplayer" (scare-quotes because it's not multiplayer according to most previous understandings of the term) is true, but only scratches the surface. There is much work to do here, both in elaborating the practomime (that is, playing the game) and in reading its effects.

The Cave, unpacked: part 3

Then, in that post, came this bit:

2) Plato hated Homer—the sheer number of times Socrates tells us, especially in Republic, that Homer (whom he thought of as a single person, though at this blog we know better) was pretending to be something he was not, proves that beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Again, this declaration is probably a bit too broad--the word “hate” is of course much too strong. If the statement is true, the negative emotions Plato felt towards the fictional Homer whom he believed to have been a real writer were probably much closer to anger, frustration, and envy than to hate.

If there’s an emotional basis to the famous passage from the last book of Republic where Plato has Socrates speak of the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, that’s what it seems likely to me to be: Plato sees how powerful his own education, centering on homeric epic, has been in determining the way he looks at and acts in the world, and is mad at the figure who perpetrated it. He’s frustrated that it was so hard for Socrates, and is so hard for him to think past that education into the new philosophical world that he wants to create in memory of Socrates. He envies, perhaps most of all, Homer’s seemingly ineluctable control over the ruleset of the cave-culture game within which the Athenians have risen to power, fallen from it, and finally ended up in a cultural position that Plato must have regarded as going nowhere.

This is, I think, the way game-designers hate games like HALO and BioShock, even as they often play them to death, and enjoy “hating on” them in every conceivable corner of the internet. Maybe in that very modern, fanboyish sense of the word “hate,” I was on target in my post--Plato is a Socrates fanboy, and he’s jealous of Socrates’ indie cred. So perhaps a more accurate formulation would have been “Plato was jealous of philosophy’s cultural credibility”--the game that he was designing, a game perhaps on best display in the middle to late dialogues, above all Republic, Timaeus, and Critias, needed to establish itself, just as the books of Herodotus and Thucydides sought to establish themselves, in contradistinction to the hegemonic game of “Homer.”

Remember that “jealousy” and “envy,” when used properly, are different, though related, emotions: we’re envious of what we don’t have (that we may have it), but jealous of what we do (that we may keep it): Plato’s emotion, such as it was, was perhaps the feeling that the grand practomime of philosophy could not but be under siege from the apparently grand practomime of epic.

The Cave, unpacked: part 2

So, since no one seemed to object to my idea of using Living Epic, for the foreseeable future, as a place to riff on my stuff at PlaythePast. . . The next bit of that post is:

Here’s what you need to know starting out: 1) Plato loved Homer—the sheer number of quotations from Homer, made in passing by Socrates and others, almost always provided to give unquestionable support to a commonly understood point, proves that beyond the shadow of a doubt.

I suppose if there’s a difficulty here, it’s in what I mean by the word “loved.” Let’s look at an example--and where better to find it than the story of the cave itself. Socrates, in telling his interlocutors about how strongly the philosopher, who’s been outside the cave, would reject the life of the prisoners, quotes the Odyssey. Not just any passage, either: Socrates quotes the famous words from the mouth of the shade of Achilles in the underworld, about how he’d rather still be alive as the meanest slave in the world than be king of the dead. Ironic, huh? The philosopher would rather be in the upper world--the “real” world--than in the lower one, just like Achilles.

More ironic: if I’m right that the shadow-puppet play of the cave is in large part Plato’s metaphor for the education provided by Athenian culture, comprising above all the epics of the homeric tradition, then Plato is using “Homer” against “himself.” The philosopher wants to be free, specifically of Homer.

But doesn’t it take a critic who loves Homer to create this fantastic, nostalgic web of irony and metaphor?

When I say in that post that Plato “loved” Homer, I’m using “loved” as a short-hand for something like “regarded as indispensable and ineluctable,” but this riff may let me follow on to some sort of greater love, albeit one much more complex. Homer was Plato’s education, as it was Socrates’; how could Plato despise it, when it had led him whither he had arrived, able to imagine a world outside the cave?

When we who are trying to use such insights to reform education yet again think about our own educations, I hope we can treat it much as Plato treated Homer--rejecting gently but firmly, speaking of ancient quarrels, but acknowledging, as Plato does in the story of the cave, our eternal debts.

The Cave, unpacked: part 1

I’ve been searching for a way to use this blog, where I’ve done so much that I’m proud of, as something other than an adjunct to what I’m doing as part of the team at playthepast. The difficulty is that the mission of playthepast is a superset of the mission with which I founded this blog, and there’s not a single thing that I’d post there that wouldn’t be appropriate here, either on the scholarship (how Homer and Plato can help us figure out what’s going on with games in the modern world) or on the pedagogy (how Homer and Plato can help us figure out how games can serve as an engine for educational reform) side.

On the other hand, I don’t feel as constrained here at Living Epic to avoid my tendency to formulate things abstrusely, and so as of today I’m undertaking the experiment of taking my recent string of posts about Plato’s cave (which are in fact mostly rewritings of posts originally made here) and unpacking them further, and more obscurely, here.

The posts at playthepast are written to bring the arc of my scholarly project into close contact with my pedagogical one. They pick up from the scholarly foundation I’ve built over the past seven years of the analogy between the form of practomime called homeric epic and the form called narrative videogame, and move through the scholarly edifice I’ve been building on it since 2008, of the way Plato’s reaction to homeric epic can help us contextualize videogames’ role in modern culture. From there, in recent weeks, the playthepast posts have turned towards applying the blueprints of that edifice to the building of learning practomimes like the ones on which my UConn team and I are at work.

At any rate, I want to start with the post that makes the turn to Plato. It starts like this:

This post takes us from homeric epic to a key moment of its reception in classical Athens, Plato. In it, I cover ground I’ve also covered in print, in a chapter in the collection Ethics and Game Design.

The first thing to say is that although I like my chapter in Ethics and Game Design very much, I’ve managed to move beyond it in the past year: in the chapter I manage to say, pretty much, “Plato tells us that mimesis only teaches when it gets interrupted the way Bioshock interrupts itself”; now, in these posts, I’m capable of saying also two more things, “I know how to interrupt mimesis to make that learning happen” and “I know how to analyze, and learn from, videogame mimesis when it doesn’t get interrupted.”

The former of those things is the basis of the practomimetic curricula we’re working on at UConn; the latter is the basis of my current work on the digital narrative videogame, which to this point comprises my analysis of BioWare’s epic style and will I hope soon also comprise analyses of the Bethesda, Bungie, and Square Enix styles.

So that kind of thing is my idea for Living Epic going forward. If you have a strong feeling about it’s worth or lack thereof, I’m pretty easy to find on social media these days, and I love both thoughtful conversation and bruising intellectual brawls.

Operation ΑΡΕΤΗ: my current practomimetic course

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

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

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

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

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

Operation LAPIS: the HUD mechanic

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

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

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



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

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



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

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

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.

Life in Rome: examples of excellent practomime

To celebrate my students' efforts, and to entice others to try the practomimetic method, I want to start highlighting some of the incredible things students in these courses are doing. The students of FABULA AMORIS ROMANI are now on their way North from Rome towards two neighboring farms in the Sabine Hills: one is the famous farm of Horace, given him by Maecenas; the other is the farm of the Recentii, the gens of my students' Romans.

Along with them go their wicked uncle Gaius, and the future emperor Tiberius, whom I call Drusillus (an unattested but plausible nickname), and a disreputable poet named Naso (that's Ovid's real name, from one perspective, and indeed the name by which he has frequently been known through history; it means "nose," so it also has the benefit of just being kinda funny). They've been sent on this sojourn by none other than Augustus the princeps himself, after having performed for him his favorite song, Horace's Carmen Saeculare, with which a chorus of boys and girls had celebrated Augustus' New Age of peace 25 years before. My students' Romans performed the song as a chorus in the portico of Aeneas in the Forum of Augustus, as Augustus himself took a regal position next to the life-size statue of his "ancestor."

Earlier, when they had first entered the Forum, the student who goes by the Roman name Portia had practomimed thus:

Portia, fearing that all these extravagant plans for creating commotion might fail--i.e. anger the Princeps instead of gain an audience with him--decides to create an Augustus-pacifying back-up plan. 1d10=9 (9)

After the group has re-emerged from the dark alley with the litter and continued on its way on the Via dei toward the Forum pincipis, she slips away for a moment to Julius Caesar's temple of Venus Genetrix. There she pauses to admire the apse and eight splendid columns [from the source, I cannot quite tell whether these were Trajan's creation or whether they existed in Caesar's construction, storing up details its construction and the impression they gave in her memory. If Augustus cannot be distracted by more flamboyant means, she might be able to compliment him on the beauty and inspirational qualities of his father's temple, which could even lead to allusions about the connection between the temple's patroness and the temple's builder. Then stories of any of the three illustrious figures (Venus, Caesar, or Augustus), or at least didactic advice for young Romans, might ensue, if the Princeps should feel loquacious, and his narration would not likely prove short. By the time he has finished, perhaps he will have forgotten to punish the malefactors for bringing commotion into his forum--or at least he might be slightly more willing to mitigate the punishment.

Source about the temple:
Orlindo Grossi, "The Forum of Julius Caesar and the Temple of Venus Genetrix" (JSTOR)

And, that the dramatic element not be excluded, here's what the student cui est Romulus nomen did in hopes of entering the forum:

Romulus is feeling a bit confused about the plan to meet the princeps, but he decides to try a radical plan. He notices a group of slaves standing around a litter that looks particularly fanciful and ornate. Being a country rube, Romulus has never seen such a thing.

"What's that?" he asks the slave.

"It's called a litter," says one of the slave. "Rich people use them to ride around the city so they don't step in all the sewage. It's our job to carry it."

"Who does this belong to?" Romulus asks.

"It belongs to the princeps himself," says the slave, somewhat proudly. "We're bringing it to pick him up at the forum principis. Well, I'd better get going now."

"Wait," says Romulus, putting an arm around the man's shoulders. "Come talk to me in this dark alley for a second." Once they are inside the alley, away from the profanus vulgus, Romulus draws his gladius and charges at the slave with murder in mind. 1d10=9 (9)

Romulus stabs the slave 9 times and the man falls to the ground, quite dead. Romulus strips off the man's livery (or whatever the Roman equivalent was) and quickly puts it on. Then he steps back out on to the street. Along with the other slaves of the princeps, Romulus picks up his side of the litter and begins walking towards the forum principis. Disguised as the princeps's litter bearer, he should have no trouble getting close to him.

For enrichment: http://www.vroma.org/images/mcmanus_images/litter.jpg

It has also become clear that Augustus has plans for Naso that Naso hadn't known about. Ovid, clearly being a poet who prides himself above all on his cleverness, had, it seems, placed much too much faith in the princeps' obtuseness. It now appears that the princeps knows about what Ovid has been up to. I don't want to spoil the story, but if you're reading this post, you probably know how it ends. . . . Obviously the signal benefit of the practomime is that my students and I get to experience it for ourselves in such a way that we may be able to understand the poetry surrounding the event in a deeper way.

That then is the narrative context in which we find one of my favorite exasperating students, whose Roman is named Fabius, formulating the following:

Fabius has not a multitude of things to say about paved roads, but he recalls something very specific about roads and the end of the third servile war...but since he feels like it at the moment, Fabius reasons, he shall first talk a little more about Russell Crowe.....

From his youth to the present, Crowe has had a special love of horses. "They're just like people," he told CraveOnline. But how does this relate back to paved roads? An excellent question, for, well, it doesn't. But Crowe's critically acclaimed film Gladiator is much based on the events of the rebellion led by Spartacus in 73 b.c....a rebellion also known as the last of the servile wars...Fabius recalls that his father's father ('s father, possibly) witnessed the brutality with which the defeated slaves under Spartacus were treated after the war...all six thousand prisoners were crucified along the Appian way from Rome to Capua...Fabius thinks it'd be totally intimidating if one had to walk along a road lined up full of rotting corpses..."But surely the corpses have been taken down by now...well if not they're definitely skeletons"

Will they reach the farms before Naso's fate finds him? Can we find a way to make that fate less, or perhaps more, than tragic?

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.

Updates on my practomimetic pedagogy

I apologize for this blog's darkness as I teach my way through an amazing semester of practomime. In case you're desperate for news, I've posted a few updates about the ARG version of (Gaming) Homer at a great LOTRO blog called LOTRO Reporter.

• Overview
• A bardic pub-crawl
• Ecphrastic muffins

The Advanced Latin practomime in Rome is finally hitting its stride. After a night in a brothel, learning about the machinations of their uncle, Ovid, and the future Tiberius to recover a priceless treasure that includes the reputed necklace of Venus, my students' Romans have been directed to go to the Forum of Augustus and get to see the princeps (Augustus, that is) by making a commotion. One of them decided to murder a litter-bearer and disguise himself in the unfortunate slave's uniform so that he could gain access to Augustus; another has been knocked unconscious at the threshold of the forum. And in the reading-Latin portion of the course, we're now reading Horace's gloriously obscene Satire 1.2, in which much is revealed about the erotic character of Rome in the years leading up to the Lex Julia which outlawed adultery and inspired Ovid's outrageous Art of the Lover, and so also his exile.

Come play KOTOR with VGHVI!

Thursday night I'll be hosting a simultaneous playthrough of the beginning of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR). We'll have conversation on Skype, which I'll record for possible publication as a podcast.

Here's the invitation (join up at VGHVI today if you haven't already).

And here's a brief blog post I wrote to prime the discussion pump.

Pedagogical practomime

This semester, as I mentioned below, I'm going all in on practomimetic education.

In my myth course, I've divided the three hundred students into teams of 15 who are going to compete in a series of mythomachies on such questions as "What's the better example of modern myth, Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings?" for the title "Lords of Myth." I'm also awarding Honor Points for answering trivia questions that I've stuck into the intros of my video lectures, and for doing cool stuff like coming up with innovations that make their fellow students' lives easier.

My (Gaming) Homer course is now a full-on Alternate-Reality Practomime (what most people, if they know what to call it at all, would call an Alternate-Reality Game [ARG]--the kind of game that entered the public consciousness really only with David Fincher's flawed-but-wonderful film The Game). Little bits of information about that will be emerging in various places, including here, as the semester continues, but, although I (Roger Travis) am not supposed to know about this, I (shadowy leader of a clandestine, ancient guild of bards) am now in the process of recruiting the students to fulfill bardic missions in The Lord of the Rings Online.

And, the real subject of this post, my advanced Latin course on Horace and Ovid is a practomimetic narrative in which the students, acting as young Romans in 8 CE, must make the choice between amor romanus (Roman love--that is, getting erotic with Ovid in Augustus' Rome) and amor Romae (love of Rome--that is, getting serious with Horace and getting with Augustus' fascist program). In the first fabula of the course, the students, all cousins one with another, have been sent to Rome to stay with their wicked uncle, Gaius Recentius Malus, and look after an important lawsuit in which the Recentii are attempting to recover a farm that was confiscated by Octavian (you know, Augustus before he really got going) after the Civil Wars and given to a veteran.

Their mothers have made Gaius promise that he will not let them leave the house until they have read and understood the Roman Odes of Horace, those first six poems of Book 3 that pretty much tell a young Roman how to cleanse his Augustan way. The fabula is called Carmina Romani Gravis "Poems of a Serious Roman."

We'll be using Google Wave for a great many of the course activities, including the explicitly practomimetic aspect (there are several other ludic elements, like collection of forms for Latinity Points, which I frame as a way that Gaius is making their study fun for them). For interest's sake, here's the document about practomime in the course that I've posted on the course website:

Practomime:

What it is

Alright, I'll concede it just for the moment: if you wanted to call practomime "playing pretend" or "playing a role-playing game" I wouldn't argue. Think about it: how much do people learn playing pretend, whether that's playing a game, acting in a play, going through a religious ritual, or reading a historical novel? I would contend that it's more than they ever learn in school.

How it works

From a purely technical perspective, the entire course is a big practomime. (In fact, if you think about it, every course you've ever taken [with the exception, to be sure, of my previous courses] is a boring practomime in which you pretend to be a student who's getting to know the stuff he or she needs to know to pass the course.) You are learning to be something like a Roman who could function in some small range of ancient Roman culture.

From a practical perspective, your sessions of reading Latin poetry, however, which would be interludes in the life of the Roman you portray, will in the world of this course dominate his or her practomimetic life. The rest of his or her existence—the times in which he or she gets to "do stuff"—will be squeezed in between the reading. This fact of course means that we get to skip the boring parts of Roman existence (sleeping, walking, eating non-banquet food) and concentrate on the interesting ones.

In between defined units of poetry, we will be doing this practomime. Some of it will occur in class-session, but most of it will happen in Google Wave, once I get you familiar with the system. Once we're up and running, you will be required to take at least one turn in each break between class-sessions (as you'll see in a moment, a "turn" is just an action you take in ancient Rome). You will find that there are many interesting things to be found out from the characters you meet, beginning with your uncle Gaius Recentius Malus, but if you would rather spend your time doing rather than talking, the only limits are your imagination and our fairly scanty knowledge of the period. At the start of the course, you will be confined to the house, but once the first fabula is over, you'll be able to roam the streets of Rome. As you'll see from the syllabus, I've got a broad idea of where I'm going to try to funnel you, and at some points I may have to tie you up to get you where I need you to go, but those moments will be few and far between.

So: aliquid age. Do stuff. That's how it works: decide what you want to do; determine how well it goes; tell the rest of us what you're doing, and you've done it.

(What follows [that is, how action is governed in the practomime] is a version of Corvus Elrod's HoneyComb Engine.)

Any time you set out to narrate yourself doing something, you'll roll a ten-sided die, either with the dice-link on Wave or with a real die in the classroom (zero is zero for this purpose—9 equals critical success; more fun that way [oops, I said the f-word]). The result on that die determines how well you succeed in what you've undertaken to do.

Thus, you'll first tell us what you want to do, then roll a die, then narrate what happens. There are ways to modify the roll which we'll discuss as the course moves along, but I want you to grasp, first of all, the simplicity of the concept.

Here's an example. I'm Gaius Recentius Malus, your uncle. I'm at a banquet and I've just been told that I'm to be prosecuted for adultery. I decide that I'd like to take a sip of wine to buy myself a moment to think. I announce to the class: "I'm going to take a sip of wine" or, better, "Vinum bibam." I roll a die, and get a 1. I narrate, perhaps, "Conor a sip vini bibere, but end up spilling it super togam meam."

Some guidelines

The purpose of practomimetic coursework is always to achieve course objectives. For this course (CAMS 3102 Horace and Ovid) that means that in your practomime your object is to enhance and to demonstrate your growing mastery of the thematic meaning of the poetry we are reading, of the language in which that poetry was composed, and of the cultural background from which that poetry derived its meaning. There are no limitations on what you, in acting the life of an ancient Roman, can attempt to do in the virtual world we are creating together, but in order to demonstrate your work towards course objectives a few guidelines will be helpful.

• Try as hard as you can to use Latin. Broken Latin is absolutely acceptable (e.g. "Pono money meum in arca" [arca means "safe"] would be perfectly acceptable, if you should happen to forget that argentum means "money"), as is incorrect Latin (I would never e.g. tell you that you should have used a Future Less Vivid condition instead of the simple present one you used).
• Try hard, also, to use the Latin we're seeing in the poetry. Echoes of Horace and Ovid in our practomime are exactly what I'm hoping for.
• Try to find out things about the story you're in. The course is going to put you in situations conducive to discovering the information and developing the cultural skills that will satisfy course objectives. How you do that discovery and development is up to you.

So I'm thinking it's going to be an immersive semester!

A note on the word "practomime"

I'd like to express my thanks to Charles Pratt, a wonderful sparring partner ιn such matters, for discussing this subject with me in the Google wave that led to this post; if you'd like access to that Wave, let me know in the comments.

If my work should continue in the direction I think it's going, you're going to see me use the word "practomime" with increasing frequency. Essentially, I mean by it exactly what I meant by "performative play practice" (PPP). Practomime is what games and stories have in common—playing pretend in a context where everyone agrees that playing pretend is what you do. I'm seeking to replace my own reflexive use of the word "game" with "practomime" in any context where I consider it important to bring the performative element of the practice to the fore. I made the word from two authentic Greek roots, πράττω (pratto: do, act—the word that of course gives us πράξις praxis, which is what Aristotle says tragedy enacts) and that all-time fave of mine μίμησις (mimesis: performance-as [often misleadingly translated "imitation"]—this is what Plato and Aristotle say tragedy is), so I think it's sturdy enough for my purposes, at least.

As I try to figure out what the things people call games are doing and what they can do, I increasingly feel the need to make the connection to mimesis (see this post for a bit more detail). For my own purposes, I need a term that captures certain connections that I have proven to my own satisfaction at least to be fundamental. That doesn't mean I think those connections are by any means exhaustive, and I still think it makes sense at the very least to talk about "game elements" in what I'm relabelling, for my own purpose, "practomimes."

But the category of human experience that's being touched on in these practomimes is so far beyond the semantic range of "game," as I see it, that for me a new term is necessary. That new term needs to capture the greater depth of "games'" aesthetic relationship to Hamlet than to Monopoly. Note that I'm not saying that they're not fundamentally related to both those things.

Consider New Super Mario Bros Wii, which I'm finding, with my aged reflexes, fiendishly difficult. "Is this really a practomime?" I have said to myself, as whatever exiguous story there is in the game faded into the far background to reveal the stark horror of failing over and over to make a particular jump. "Yes," I thought to myself, "but just as calling DragonAge a game doesn't get me anywhere interesting and can in fact serve to impede my critical progress, calling NSMBW a practomime doesn't capture what's most interesting about the game."

On the other hand, I do think it's fascinating, from a practomimetic perspective, that NSMBW is, like a re-composition of the oral epic tradition, a virtuosic variation on what's near-exactly the same story in so many earlier games. That's the sort of thing that for me simply can't be discussed with any degree of facility if we call it a game. But the critical language I'd use might be something like "As a practomime, NSMBW possesses several interesting features that tend to be obscured by the understandable tendency of most critics to frame it primarily as a game."