Ancient epic in Middle Earth: a college course starts up in Ered Luin

Mae govannen! I’m Roger Travis, an associate professor of classics and ancient mediterranean studies at the University of Connecticut, sometimes better known as UConn. Over the past few years, I’ve been getting deeper and deeper into the strange interddisciplinary intersection I’ve found between classics and video games. If you’re interested in following my amusing journey, have a look at my blog, Living Epic: Video Games in the Ancient World, and at the initiative I founded with wonderful colleagues at UConn and also elsewhere, including my three main co-conspirators Michael Abbott (sometimes known as the Brainy Gamer), Jeff Howard (author of the marvelous book Quests which is about medieval literature and game design, and is well worth reading for any LOTR fan or LOTRO player), and Mike Young, an amazing scholar in Educational Psychology who works on learning in virtual environments and game-worlds.

Among other things, I’ve claimed that adventure games in general (by which I mean everything from traditional RPG’s to action games like Prince of Persia to first-person shooters to MMORPG’s like LOTRO) are a new sort of reawakening of a very old thing-the real, ancient epic tradition, as brought into being by the bards who created the homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. (Those books are actually fossiles of a once-living improvisatory tradition; there never was a guy named Homer, but rather [probably] a guild [or a kinship, if you like!] called the Homerids.)

Last spring, I taught a course on that material for the first time. It was a cool course, completely online, with funny video lectures and amazing dicussion from my first bunch of students. The only complaint my students had was that they never got to play together, and thus never got really to experience what I was talking about in the lectures. By the end of the course, everyone had more or less accepted my argument that games are very much the same thing as ancient epic, but it was clear they wanted to feel it more deeply-and simply to become more engaged in the subject matter.

Over the summer, I had an epiphany at the Game Education Summit, during a talk by the amazing Ian Schreiber, game designer and game design teacher. It is possible, I realized, to make game design and instructional design the same thing. It is possible to make a course into a game. In the fall, I ran a course which I think is the first college course ever to be taught completely as a game, or as I now call it, a practomime.

Put all of the above together, and you get this, the re-edited introduction to my course (Gaming) Homer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6ODsYS_q8k

Feel free to follow the link, which leads to this “secret” video.

http://kleos.wikispaces.com/HomeridPrime573

Then watch this other “secret” video:

http://kleos.wikispaces.com/HomeridPrime985

The students in this course, that is, are now playing an Alternate-Reality Game, of which a very important part-their bardic missions-takes place inside LOTRO. My kinship on Windfola, the House of Blackrock, is bemused, but tolerant. (It helps that a significant number of them are my students and colleagues.) Last night, the first group of them met their contact in Frerin’s Court, and agents from the ancient guild of bards observed their progress, before sending them on to Skorgrim’s Tomb.

Here’s the thing. It’s not a gimmick. It’s not even an activity to get the students excited. The objective of the game is to become a bard with a full awareness of what it means to be a bard, and the ability to analyze bardic material with an understanding of its cultural heritage. The objective of the course is to gain precisely the same ability.

I believe that this is the future of education, and I’m thrilled that I get to start the revolution in Middle Earth.