[game_edu] Greek historians course as RPG

[Travis, Roger]

Inspired--nay, transformed--by Ian's presentation at the Game Ed Summit in June, I'm in the process of turning my upcoming course on Herodotus and Thucydides into an RPG with a few ARG elements. Students will play as students recruited by the Demiurge to save Western Civilization by travelling back (a la Assassin's Creed) to Athens in 431 BCE and explaining to people like Pericles and Plato what the historians were trying to say. 

I'm going to use a class-based system in which part of the game is discovering what class you are (e.g. Histor, Recorder, Sophist, Tragedian), and at each level your title changes and you gain a skill that will help you complete the next mission. These skills are things like "Fake ethnography," which is a characteristic of Herodotus that I tried to teach through discussion in years past. The "RPC" will happen in class meetings and also through Web course tools, where for example I've changed the website to look like a series of transmissions from the Demiurge recruiting the students for "Operation KTHMA."

Anyway, I'm hoping to get any advice anyone on this list wants to give about the idea in general. I'm also hoping, specifically, to get advice on anything I should be doing at this stage to make it possible to take this game digital at some point.

With thanks and best wishes,
Roger Travis

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Roger Travis
Associate Professor of Classics, Department of Modern and Classical Languages
Director, Video Games and Human Values Initiative, http://vghvinet.ning.com 
University of Connecticut U-1057, 337 Mansfield Rd., Storrs, CT 06269-1057
roger.travis at uconn.edu; Blog: http://livingepic.blogspot.com