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 prisoners in Plato’s Cave don’t want to get up. The chains are superfluous, as they would be if applied to a player on an BioShock binge, or even on a Duck Hunt one. The interactivity of the contests I talked about in my last post is the real chain,Continue Reading
The cave-culture game that Plato outlines as the most immersive part of what the prisoners do as they sit watching the shadow-puppet play is in fact from one perspective the first recorded game of Duck Hunt. Socrates: I said, “ . . . if they [that is, the prisoners ofContinue Reading
Two weeks ago I tried to demonstrate that giving students a perspective from which to see their learning as practomime–that is, as a play practice–constitutes an interruption of the usually-closed mimetic cultural system that Plato identified in his allegory of the cave, and that Irrational Games lets the player ofContinue Reading
In my last few posts, I’ve argued that Plato’s Republic and Irrational Games’ BioShock present a challenge to culture, and, in particular, to the educational systems (read “school”) that transmit that culture. Still more, I’ve tried to show, do they present a challenge to those who are trying to harnessContinue Reading
So here’s where I make the connection between BioShock and gamification–or rather, try to show that as ways of doing education, the two are radically different. More, I try to show that they’re different in a way that’s inspired what my team is doing with practomimetic learning. There’s a contextContinue Reading
You probably didn’t notice this happening, as you read my previous posts, but I’m drawing ever closer to the point where my abstruse Homeric epic into Platonic philosophy classics stuff will at last intersect with my pragmatic practomimetic learning stuff. (Certainly you didn’t notice as you didn’t read my previousContinue Reading
In the work generally acknowledged to be his last, Laws, Plato returns to the themes of Republic and once again tries to imagine an ideal city-state. In Laws, however, the role of mimesis is fundamentally different. Athenian: And, if any of the serious poets, as they are termed, who writeContinue Reading
Even as Plato condemns the cave-culture game, he expects the philosophical reader to understand that they (Plato and the reader together) are at that moment engaged in a culture-game of their own—the game called Republic. In this post we’ll come to recognize that Republic features a next-gen graphics-engine and trulyContinue Reading
Operation ΜΗΝΙΣ is very nearly in the books. Most of the nine students who stuck it out have done extraordinary things. Seven of the nine have some kind of A, and I sincerely believe that they would have those A’s no matter how the course was being assessed, but thatContinue Reading
This post is a reflective update on the course I was feverishly developing all this past year (and which I teased here a couple months back), Operation ΜΗΝΙΣ. As readers of Play the Past know, the brand of game-based learning in cultural heritage (and other) fields on which my UConnContinue Reading