Quibus Lusoribus Bono? A Classicist Shakes Things Up

Recently, in the Escapist, an article entitle ‘Quibus lusoribus bono?‘ appeared, by Roger Travis, a Classicist at the University of Connecticut. On his blog site, he argues that “video games are actually ancient, [...] they reawaken the anicent oral epic tradition represented above all by the epics of the Homeric tradition, the Iliad and the Odyssey.” I am going to have to go carefully through his posts, because this is a great argument to make… anyway - in his Escapist piece, Travis writes:

The problem with game studies - the thing that gives rise to opinions like Wilson’s - is that the effort to create and maintain the discipline is keeping gaming from winning the respect it deserves. Against all appearances, scholars are pursuing game studies to the detriment of gamer culture.

By pretending that game studies stands alone as a unified discipline rather than at the nexus of various other fields, scholars of game studies (and those of departments that call themselves things like “digital media studies”) are institutionalizing exactly what Wilson feels: antipathy to the real culture of gaming. The more entrenched the notion becomes that gamers are abnormal and defective, the longer it will take for real works of art like Sins of a Solar Empire, BioShock and, yes, even Halo to vindicate gaming as a worthwhile pursuit.

Comments, critiques and a bit of old-style flaming are all over the games-related blogosphere; but for an interesting dialogue, see Ian Bogost - whom Travis refers to on a number of occasions in his piece - at “A Response to Roger Travis who misconstrues my work and that of my colleagues“.

For the most part, the discussion is moderate in tone, though clearly Travis has upset the apple cart - one commenter writes:

Whatever is said here, it boils down to this: Roger, do you let people with Marketing degrees tell you how to teach “Topics in Advanced Latin”? I’m guessing you don’t. Why is acceptable for you to tell Ian how to do his? I’ll give you a hint. It isn’t.

It’s one thing to question the legitimacy of a professional. It’s another to question the legitimacy of a profession. I really don’t think you want to open that can of worms. While I can see the worth of the classics and how they are basically the basis of all modern thought, I’m thinking it’s probably hard for payroll to justify paying your obviously bloated salary.

I suppose it’s only a matter of time before somebody invokes the Nazis. But in the meantime, the last word by Travis on Ian Bogost’s blog (and then the conversation switches to the forums at the Escapist):

“1. I see the analogy of a marketing professional telling me how to do classics as very unpersuasive. Ian and I work the same job, more or less, and we both (I’m sure) spend time on committees where we’re doing, intramurally, precisely what we’re doing publicly in this discussion. The suggestion that my salary is bloated would have made me laugh if my salary weren’t such a sad little thing.”

And finally, for completeness, here’s the link to the Escapist forum discussion.

So… what do I make of all of this? I admit, I got a bit lost in the original article, since I haven’t read all of the related pieces (nor indeed, the one to which Travis was originally responding).  In essence, it looked as if Travis was warning of the danger of academics sucking the fun out of games (which may be to simplify).  But that’s something every discipline or subject needs to watch out for, the people who take things too seriously. Archaeology sure has a hard time paying the bills, but at least it’s still fun to do…

MadLat Conference, Winnipeg

Just got back, will post more when I have a moment - keynote speaker was excellent, and his session on ‘Instructional Robotics’ was fantastic, though poorly attended. I expect people were put off by the title… but imagine a remotely operated vehicle, armed with camera, directional microphone, and wee video screen roaming the aisles of a distance-ed classroom, and you get the picture…

My presentation was well attended, which made a nice change from the Classics conferences I’ve gone to and given an online learning or games-related paper. Typically, the classicists are just not interested - there’ll be me, the moderator, the other two presenters, and the guy who thought that this was a session on Attic pottery….

Anyway, one nice comment at the end of my paper was along the lines of, ‘it’s very interesting to see someone actually implementing games or Second Life, and not just talking about the theoretical side of things!’ In truth, I’m not that far removed from the theoretical side, though I have subjected students to some of my experiments.

Right. Presentation is here, designed and implemented courtesy of Flypaper, whom I thanked in my talk. It might not live at that location for too long, in which case I’ll post it somewhere else, if necessary.

Simulating History Research Lab

The Simulating History project folks at Brock University’s Centre for Digital Humanities, with whom I do my games-based research,  have released a nice little video about the Lab:

TypeRacer

…It’s like the Typing of the Dead, but with race cars. My best so far is 71 wpm. Weee… a new way to waste time AND improve my skill-sets. Play here.

Library Research Skills Game from Carnegie Mellon

Carnegie Mellon Libraries are introducing some games to help students “develop research skills through

entertaining and easy-to-repeat activities. At this stage, we are testing each game to work through any technical glitches and prepare the games for a final version.

Please feel free to send us your comments & suggestions on ways that we can further develop the games.”

The Year of the Four Emperors mod for Civ IV

This little video records some of the game play in ‘The Year of the Four Emperors’ mod for Civ IV that I’ve used from time to time in my teaching. Things to watch for - the opening shows how to load the mod and get it running; ‘research’ can’t be turned off in the game, but you can make it impossible to carry out (’gunpowder’ for some reason is on the list- but it’ll take ca 2600 turns to do it, by which time the game has ended); the senate takes a vote on declaring one of the contenders Emperor; towns and military units are more or less in their correct historic positions.

Interactive Fiction, Passively

PMOG:The Passively Multiplayer Online Game

An interesting feature of Pmog ‘missions’ is the way that so many of them are really guided tours of specialty websites (e.g. this one). This is a handy approach if, say, you teach via distance and you want to show your students what constitutes ‘good’ research sites.

Yet, that’s really nothing a powerpoint couldn’t already do. An interesting variant on these missions is the ‘puzzle’ mission, where creators exploit a glitch in the game to create breaks in the flow of the mission. The only way to progress is to solve the riddle to learn what website to go to next - whereupon the mission resumes.  Some of these, like ‘The Mystery Machine‘, require you to read the page to fill in the blanks: each word represents a letter in an ultimate URL. If you’ve got the right letters and you complete the last URL, the resulting webpage represents the ‘Victory!’ screen.  Others are more complex, more devious. My own mission, ‘The Case of the Missing … Something” depends on anagrams of URLs (which is mean, I know). I can’t solve ‘The Lost Gold of Dr. Nes‘, since it depends on a gamer’s knowledge of nintendo, but the principle is good.  ‘Meet Felix Klein‘ takes the player on a tour through various flickr photographs to create a kind of visual story. No puzzle, but it certainly *feels* like an old-style text adventure.

All of these represent a new twist on “interactive fiction”, with the fiction layered on top of the day-to-day internet (perhaps a riff on augment reality, too?).  In a way, they are like the ‘Prisoner Escape from the Tower of London‘ game created by mscape: the fiction intersects with daily life to create the game, with events being triggered by your physical or virtual location in the game space. Unlike regular interactive fiction, the game creator does not control that game space - other people intrude (in Pmog, other players might lay, for reasons unrelated to the mission you happen to be on, mines or portals on pages within a mission, which could -perhaps- prevent you from completing it).

The archaeological angle: simple show and tell of vetted sites is good, for starters. Using Pmog (or other AR) to create layers of information/meaning on top of the information is even better. You could imagine a student creating a pmog mission on curse-tablets. This might begin as simple show and tell. Other students could then play the mission, leaving mines on pages they think are ‘bad’ (poor information, bad research, whatever) or portals to ‘good’ sites… the game records the play, and the meta-analysis afterwards with the prof would spark a deeper discussion. Inserting puzzles into the mission would force a deeper engagement still, and completing a puzzle mission would constitute a formative assessment exercise.  Creating missions could also be exercises in public archaeology for the students,  if built around a decent resource (say the British Museum, or Chaco Canyon).

What I’m arguing for is that we, as educators, need to be using things like Pmog to get our students to engage with online materials in a deeper fashion. They are too often uncritical users of what they find. They need to interact passively.

birthing pmog

For the interested, here’s a long discussion of the genesis and thinking behind Pmog from Terranova.

PMOG mission

I’ve been away from PMOG for a while - they were having some teething problems as they updated bits and pieces of their system. I’d been trying to make a mission built around the Great Canadian Mysteries website, similar to the first one I made, ‘Awwww, Sir, how can I find out anything about THAT?‘. Anyway, I got frazzled, and left it alone for a while (everything kept crashing on me). Took a peek at PMOG today, and things seem to be running well again, a bit nicer layout and so on. So I’ll try again…

Meantime, here’s the opening blurb from the mission, where ‘the Professor’ takes a student by the hand, and sets them off on a quest to find proper research materials…

“”How in the world can I find sources on the motivations of ancient Olympic athletes?? Maybe if you told me what to read, then I could answer the question.” read the email. The prof looked away from his computer, groaning inwardly. And no doubt, just parrot back to me a webpage, he thought. Why do students expect to be spoon-fed everything?

“Follow me. First, let us search ‘ancient olympics’ properly. Where would you go first, O student at the University of Manitoba with its excellent library resources?’ “

(Nb, I’m not that snide with students. Dramatis personae, and all that…)

In setting up the mission, I left ‘mines’ and other booby-traps at places where students typically go that are emphatically NOT good research sources (but students nevertheless find with dismaying regularity). They’ve since all been tripped, so I’ll have to go lay some more. Some feedback from other Pmogeons:

	caggles (02 Apr 2008 16:25:2 I found it ^_^ Awesome quest. I like the idea behind it, the student doing a project. I can totally relate XD
	sarastani (19 Mar 2008 18:31:5 I found it! I found it! I like these missions. Good job Professor!
	chetyre (18 Mar 2008 04:12:14) Sorry, I’m just dense and didn’t figure out the last URL. Carry on…
	chetyre (18 Mar 2008 03:39:39) It broke for me on the Penn Museum page. Don’t know if it’s just me. Also, you might want to look out since “rrdreamer” is leaving mines on your pages
	azeo (17 Mar 2008 15:26:12) Hmm, am I detecting some work-related frustration?
	snocrsh (17 Mar 2008 14:56:4 Scholarly journals are made of academic win. It’s that simple!

(Not sure what that last comment actually means, but anyway…)

The one thing that prevents me from wholeheartedly embracing the concept of PMOG: what do they do with all of that data generated on browsing habits? Clearly, that’s information worth lots of $$$…

All Rules Lead to Players

Aki Järvinen, of the University of Tampere in Finland, has just defended his phd thesis- his opening statements may be read here.

An excerpt:

[...]we arrive at the question concerning games’ nature as, supposedly, ‘mere’ entertainment versus something that has persuasive powers; powers to change and influence our beliefs, and possibly persuade us to take action once the game is over. If we accept a hypothesis according to which games, like any other form of communication, are able to persuade their players, in other words either shape their beliefs, responses, or even behaviour, then we have to accept the postulation that play may lead to many varieties of behaviour, even harmful behaviour.

Without resorting to populist rhetoric, this nevertheless is a thought that, in my experience, too few game developers, in their urgency to create business growth through ‘mere’ entertainment, contemplate upon. In the thesis under examination, I promote the idea of game design through metaphors that create emotional attachment - however, it is metaphors and simulations of death that get proliferated in games - and, deservedly in part, games with vividly designed metaphors of death thus gain public dissent.

His thoughtful musings are well worth considering for anybody interested in the nature of games, and their persuasive power. I haven’t fully explored his blog yet, but there looks to be a substantial amount of material from his thesis there.  Memo to all grad students out there: get yourself a blog, and use it to develop your thoughts and bounce them off others. Aki’s is a model to follow!