With all the hoopla about interactive math and science learning, who’s looking out for the poor humanities?

I found countless static websites to help students make sense of the classics, identify themes, or gain historical insight, but nothing interactive until I stumbled across Dr. Roger Travis. This Associate Professor in the Modern and Classical Languages department at the University of Connecticut uses online gaming as a course requirement when teaching the classics.

Dr. Travis, who first noticed a connection between modern video games and the classics while teaching Virgil’s Aeneid, suggests that the bards’ audiences were interactive with epic poems in much the same way that today’s video gamers interact with a software-generated adventure tale.

He has gone so far as to turn his course, “Classics in Ancient Mediterranian Studies” into an online class he affectionately refers to as, “gaming Homer.” Students are assigned to read Homer as well as secondary sources about Homer’s improvisational tradition. They then play video games to grasp that myth is not just something from 2,500 years ago.

“Like today’s gamers, the bards’ audiences didn’t know what was going to happen next, so they were immersed in the story and were interactive with it in a very real way,” Travis says. “The popular notion that video games are unique in their interactivity overlooks a tradition well over 2,000 years old.” Video games “bring back to life an essential part of the sort of storytelling to be found in the epic tradition of the Homeric bards.”