Roger Travis is Associate Professor of Classics in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages of the University of Connecticut. He is also the Director of the Video Games and Human Values Initiative (http://vghvinet.ning.com), based at UConn, an interdisciplinary online nexus for online courses and scholarly activities like fellowships, symposia, and the initiative’s Proceedings, of which Travis is the editor. He received his Bachelor’s degree in classics from Harvard College, and his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley before arriving at UConn in 1997. He has published on Homeric epic, Greek tragedy, Greek historiography, the 19th C. British novel, HALO, and the massively-multiplayer online role-playing game He has been President of the Classical Association of New England and of the Classical Association of Connecticut. He writes the blog Living Epic (http://livingepic.blogspot.com) about his discovery of the fundamental connection between ancient epic and the narrative video game. In the 2009-2010 academic year, Travis offered the first courses ever designed entirely as practomimes (see http://www.academicimpressions.com/news.php?i=59 for detail), a form of serious game.
The very large differences in the ways players of Mass Effect have viewed the way choice works in the trilogy deserve attention from a practomimetic perspective first because they represent critical perspectives worth refining. Second, and more importantly, however, those differences demand attention because of their affective nature, in lightContinue Reading
This post contains spoilers about the endings of the three Mass Effect games. Part 1 is here. In the final moments of Mass Effect 3 the player is confronted with the notorious choice of the three paths (though it is very possible only to have two paths, and even toContinue Reading
This post contains spoilers about the endings of the three Mass Effect games. We still don’t know what, if anything, will change either in superficial or in substantive ways, about the ending of the Mass Effect saga. But Mass Effect as it stands demands analysis. Perhaps the practomime is asContinue Reading
I haven’t had the opportunity to move forward in my thinking about Mass Effect enough to feel that I can write a good post about the central issues I to which referred in my last one, but in the intervening period my attention was grabbed by something very much worthContinue Reading
Two weeks have passed since the CEO of BioWare attempted to quiet the fans of Mass Effect with an announcement that the Mass Effect 3 development team would be working on a modification to the game’s ending. The announcement was gracious, and whether because internet rage tends to die downContinue Reading
As I’ve worked on these posts, I’ve been torn about how much of other scholars’ work to bring in, or, as I was taught to say in grad school, to adduce. It seems to me that the moment most readers of blogs see a reference to a book they haven’tContinue Reading
If a rule, in general, is a constraint placed on an agent by the agent’s cultural situation, then in a cultural zone understood as appropriate for play that general sense of “rule” transfers nicely to a sort of constraint that allows a player to make choices (cf. Sid Meier’s famousContinue Reading
George RR Martin titled A Song of Ice and Fire advisedly, I think, with reference to the bardic traditions of European culture that gave us also the Iliad, the Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Song of Roland among many others. As I’ve demonstrated, those bardic traditions worked like games. That weContinue Reading
In this post, I want to try to open a new direction in my own thinking about play and art. As you may have gathered from previous posts here at Play the Past, I see games and other works of art as part of a continuum of μίμησις–or, in myContinue Reading
The operatives of Team Agathoboulos in Operation KTHMA (aka Greek Historical Writings) are tasked with playing an aspiring tragedian. Tragedy, that arguably greatest of dramatic genres, held incredible cultural importance in the Athens of Herodotus and Thucydides; the tragic drama of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides–along with that of the countlessContinue Reading