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…

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.

A few posts ago I put up the raw data from my xrd analysis of the South Etruria Survey Brick Stamp collection conserved at the British School at Rome, suggesting that it might be, amongst other things, useful in teaching archaeological statistics… happily, it is being used in just that fashion at   the Quantitative Archaeology Wiki.

The wiki seems to be maintained by scholars in Italy, but I’m not sure. One of their projects is to update the exercises in Fletcher and Lock’s “Digging Numbers”. I still have that on my bookshelf - it was the required text in Archae 341 at WLU, back in ‘96… (I note also that one of the banner images from the Laurier archae website is of an old classmate in his long-haired days, who is now a lecturer at the University of Western Ontario…nice one, Marty!)

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:

I love the circularity of the internet sometimes. My post on Flypaper got picked up by an automatic blog aggregator, and was put on “Hey Jude” under a posting on ‘The Problem With Powerpoint’. Somebody clicked on that, and wordpress stats told me about it. So I went to the post, and lo! there was this extremely well done powerpoint on ‘Dodging Bullets in Presentations’ by Rowan Manahan. Whether you use Flypaper, Powerpoint, or something else, the lessons here are extremely good. Maybe all conference presenters should view this one before they do their papers…! I know I’ve been guilty by times…

Am going to sunny Winnipeg next week (think it’s stopped snowing), for the MADLaT 2008 conference, ‘E-Learning Comes Together‘

I’m presenting in Session 7, abstract below; my presentation might actually match the abstract. We’re using Flypaper to do our multimedia - they’ve been really great, crafting a template for us to use, and helping out with all the fiddlybits.

The Use of Moodle, Virtual Reality and Other Emerging Technologies in Online Classics Teaching

Session Description:

Robert Welch University is an entirely online Liberal Arts university in Appleton, Wisconsin which was approved as a degree-granting institution in 2005.

Those of us who start an online university may believe the theory “If we build it, they will come.” Students may come, but will e-learning come together for them? Once we have set up the online courses and basic communication, we must ask ourselves whether meaningful communication and class participation are actually occurring. Our students find emerging technology appealing, particularly VOIP and user-created content. How can we incorporate advances in communication and the participative web in our teaching practices?

This paper recounts how Robert Welch University evolved from simple document delivery with its Moodle learning management system (html pages, PowerPoint, mp3 files) and basic communication (asynchronous forums and real-time chat) to an immersive learning environment featuring wikis, Skype, webcam, game-based learning, YouTube videos and Second Life in order to make students active participants in their own learning.

All educators face the challenge of how to encourage students to engage with the material, but online educators face special challenges such as how to meet the needs of a diverse blend of non-traditional students and how to foster a sense of community between instructors and students.

At RWU we have come to realize that even distance learners need a social setting for their learning and that students may benefit from the kind of immersive environment which a persistent virtual world can provide. Our students will collaborate online in Second Life as they reconstruct the ruins, practice archaeological field skills and perform the Greek tragedy which they are translating.

A few years ago I developed an agent based model prototype for exploring visitor impact on archaeological sites - the idea being to model where visitors would go on a site, and to explore the consequences of alternative routings and so on. I found the presentation I made about ‘VisitorSim’ this morning, as I was looking for something else, and thought that it might be interesting to share it here. I’m interested to know if other archaeologists have ventured down this route, thoughts, ideas, etc for improving the model. I note that Keith Still, the founder of crowddynamics.com has a professional consultancy built around a similar idea, see below.

First, the VisitorSim powerpoint:

And now a page from ‘Crowd Dynamics, about the ‘Myriad II software suite’. The Venn diagram provided neatly encapsulates my own approach to ABM, networks, and archaeology; I wish I’d come across his work during my thesis years! At any rate, Myriad II looks to be an excellent piece of software, to which my VisitorSim is like a tinker-toy…

They’ve also done some analysis on historical problems:

Myriad II - Integrated Crowd Dynamics Modelling Suite

Over the last 15 years we have been using a range of modelling and analysis techniques for places of public assembly. The process of model building typically requires three different mathematical modelling disciplines. The table below shows how these methods overlap for various projects.

AGENT ANALYSIS	SPATIAL ANALYSIS	NETWORK ANALYSIS

…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.

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.”

It’s been a virtual morning. Just participated in the VastPark stress test. VastPark is a nascent virtual worlds platform - according to their material,

VastPark is an end-to-end solution for creating, deploying and distributing virtual experiences on the web. It’s composed of a new breed of applications, designed to make creating these experiences simpler and faster, with a more immersive result. We call this the era of the virtual web.

Powered by open specifications

VastPark is powered by some exciting new specifications that have been developed to fulfill two of the layers in this virtual web; MetaWSS for content distribution and IMML for content presentation

Read more about how VastPark is working to standardise the virtual web.

So I downloaded the alpha browser, and logged in.

The point of view was first person, mouse controls and keyboard controls for moving around. There’s a chat window in the right… felt a bit like one of those VRML type sites. I couldn’t connect using my poor old Toshiba laptop, but my desktop graphics card was up to the task, and connection was achieved in 5 seconds, throwing me in-world. The first world worked fine enough, second one I tried caused it to freeze up (but that may have been because the test ended right about the same time). Now, I realise that this is the alpha build, and that this was a stress test, so one shouldn’t expect too much, yet (I was annoyed the way the browser grabbed my mouse, and wouldn’t let me leave the world pane of the browser. Turns out you have to hit the secret key to get it to release). They’ve already made all of their tools available, even at this early stage, so that’s something to be commended! Check ‘em out, see what you think. Full features list here.