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.
I promised in my last post to discuss here three aspects of the humanism of the moment of potential ethical reflection embodied in what I have called the “Death-Disarm Sequence” of BioShock: 1) how the scholarly ruleset is merely a codification of the reflection enacted in these moments, when theirContinue Reading
What separates someone who’s just playing HALO or BioShock to fill a few hours of his or her time from someone who’s “doing humanities” by performing within a ruleset that goes back to homeric epic or Platonic philosophy? On one extremely important level, nothing. As I’ve demonstrated in previous postsContinue Reading
With the notion of playing HALO as doing humanities broached, it’s time to discuss the precise nature of the humanistic study in which HALO-players engage. Several times already I’ve alluded to the fashioning of Western selves. In this post, I’ll read a single performance moment of HALO: Combat Evolved within aContinue Reading
The proposition with which I closed my last post, that we might get gamers to read Sophocles, seems, to be sure, wildly impractical. So let me backpedal on that a bit, and try to lead up to it along another path. What if we got them to play HALO? Here’sContinue Reading
In my last few posts I’ve outlined a massive undertaking: convince the gamers of today (in the Warkian sense, really, of everybody who practices in modern culture, with the caveat that Plato recognized the same dimension of culture 2500 years ago) to be humanists through a demonstration that their livesContinue Reading
In this post I continue on from the notion I oultined in my last one that a ludic understanding of a much broader range of cultural activity than we generally place under the rubric “play” might let us use Gregory Nagy’s insights into the interaction of rulesets and performances toContinue Reading
In my last post I suggested that the approach to homeric epic developed by Gregory Nagy beginning with The Best of the Achaeans, when considered in relationship to the rulesets of play-practices that digital culture and above all digital games make more apparent every day, provide an opportunity to describeContinue Reading
So at the end of the Rules of the Text series, I put forward the claim that “playing the past is an absolutely essential part of living the present.” Testing that claim is the purpose of Epic Life. Thus I mean in Epic Life to take the formulations I madeContinue Reading
This post serves two purposes: first, to review the posts of the Rules of the Text series and to recapitulate their argument and its relation to the two examples that have dominated the series: A Song of Ice and Fire (aka Game of Thrones) and Mass Effect; second, to prepareContinue Reading
This week I’m at the Games+Learning+Society conference at the lovely University of Wisconsin Madison, in the charming company of Play the Past colleagues Kevin Ballestrini and Jeremiah McCall. I promise yet another dreary post about the Great Chain of Practomime in two weeks’ time, but for today something brief, andContinue Reading