ludi latini

The image above is of the best dedicated, Latin-language game we can find, a bit of freeware from Hungry Frog Software. It is a step above "Hangman" where students arbitrarily guess at letters until they find a combination that works, revealing a Latin word or phrase. It goes beyond traditional find-a-word puzzles where students circle combinations of letters that form a Latin word matching one in a list of terms to discover. The game pictured above uses animation, graphics, color, and allows the student to zap "birds" out of the sky with a . . . um . . . factory, scoring points for hitting birds that are labeled "is", the English translation for the tiny Latin word in the lower-right corner, "est". Sadly, this game fails as both fun and instructional because the word is divorced from any kind of context; the student is not informed or quizzed on its conjugation; the game only quizzes a handful of words; it's not really fun to play and has little replay value.

As the Director of eLearning for Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, it's my job either to find or create interesting digital aides for Latin and Greek students and teachers. As an avid gamer (and a bad Latin student -- I did get better in graduate school), I have always been interested in how we can use games to teach Classical languages. Learning via gaming is not a new concept, and universities like Carnegie Mellon and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have long-term projects committed to creating games and gaming platforms for education. The problem, best articulated by Professor Henry Jenkins of M.I.T.'s Games to Teach project, is:

"Move beyond the current state of edutainment products which combine the entertainment value of a bad lecture with the educational value of a bad game."

This is indeed the Holy Grail: make a game that is fun to play that teaches you something without it seeming to be, well, teaching you something. So how do we do this for Latin?

1) We use existing games that were never intended as Latin instructional tools. There are plenty of games that use Latin to add a bit of mystery or intelligence to make gameplay more interesting or believable: the Final Fantasy series, the Harry Potter series, games from Blizzard Entertainment like Warcraft, Starcraft, and World of Warcraft.

There are also games set in Rome that do provide some real Latin during gameplay. The best of these is Rome: Total War which can be modified (or "modded") with the application of the freely available Rome: Total Realism patch with Latin audio. Now you can hear the generals order their troops around in Latin. The 2006 game, Glory of the Roman Empire, was produced with a Latin-language option out of the box, although many might laugh at the heavily Italianate pronunciation used in the game.

We can take these games one step further, especially in the case of MMOs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) like World of Warcraft. I run a Latin-language guild, Carpe Praedam, on the U.S. server for Feathermoon where the intent is to run student-teacher diads where the student helps the teacher play and the teacher helps the student with Latin. When used in raids, instances (dungeons), and PvP (player vs. player), this is a great way to practice the use of the active, the imperative, not to mention prepositions and vocabulary specific to armed conflict.

With World of Warcraft and other games, it is also possible to create machinima where students can record Latin dialogues as they happen in-game, handing in the movie files for extra credit or as end-of-term projects. There are dozens of examples of these student-created films on my eClassics site.


2) We can create games from the ground up that focus on teaching/reviewing Latin without foresaking a quality gameplay experience. As I said at the beginning of this post, I was a poor Latin student. I was not wired for learning Latin via grammar charts and repetition (I thrived under a reading approach, however). I have also always been a person who learns best by doing. And I have an addictive personality, which is probably more than the readership wanted to know.

Now, if I can make a game that combines addictive gameplay (i.e. must... get... to... next... level... before... sunrise....) with Latin reading, then great! So, as a work in progress for 2009, I am working with a small team of Latin teachers and programmers to create what is tentatively being called "LatinQuest!". It merges the addictive qualities of completing quests for gold and gear (made popular by World of Warcraft and, to a more funny extent, Kingdom of Loathing), with a graded approach to Latin learning. Easy quests at the beginning of the game feature "easy" Latin (first declension nouns, very basic vocabulary, etc.), while harder quests later in the game feature more "difficult" Latin (periphrastics, anyone?). The player learns as s/he plays. the games supplements what they are learning in class, but gives them a fun way to test what they know. We'll see how development progresses on our first 100 quests. My goal is to allow Latin teachers to submit quests to put into the game once the students demonstrate mastery of the Latin learned in 1st- and 2nd-year. This keeps the Latin content new and fresh, and keeps students (and hopefully some teachers) playing.

My goal with Latin and computer games is not to replace traditional textbooks, but to supplement them with contemporary material for "born-digital" students. Modern languages are already successfully exploiting iPods, iPhones, Nintendo DS, Macs, and PCs for teaching and review in a fun way. I want to do the same for Latin:


Apologies for such a long post! Let me finish by thanking Moa Ekbom for her kind invitation to me to post here regarding the topic of my presentation at the recent Greek and Roman Games in the Computer Age conference. I would be happy to continue a dialogue on the topic of Latin via gaming either here or over on eClassics or via email at areinhard at bolchazy dot com.

Andrew Reinhard
Director of eLearning
Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers
(writing from his home office in Phoenix, Arizona, USA)

Playing Civilized

Having given my best years and braincells to computer games I feel eminently qualified to answer the blogstresses call and write a little about them. My particular poison is strategy games. To begin with I will write a little about what a strategy game is, illustrating with examples from perhaps the greatest game(series) of all times. Don’t worry, there will be classical references.

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Strategy (the word itself of course from the greek, Strategos; a leader of an army), games are about exactly that, i.e. marshaling your limited resources to acheive certain goals, usually in competion with opponents. Before computer versions there were board games, such as chess, Monopoly and far more complex ones (link to the civilization board game wiki). Often the theme is military, conquest or more generally guiding a nation, or even a civilization through war, peace and what lies inbetween. And that, ladies and gentlemen, brings us to the game; Civilization.

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I still remember the first time I played it; I was 11 and at a friends house. I think that experience forever decided the course of my life. That was the first in the series, which now includes 3 direct sequels, one Nietzschean(titelwise) kinda sequel, variants, mods, scenarios, expansions and countless rippoffs. The original designer now has name included in every game he makes, and probably som he doesn’t.

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What is so great about it? What isn’t? It set the standard for the 4x genre; games where you explore, expand, exploit and exterminate(but in a....nice way). It starts out in 4000 BC with the founding of your civilization’s first city. You then gather resources and build military units, discover technologies, build new cities, defend against barbarians, make contact with other civilizations and deal with them in a peaceful or warlike manner. You can trade, make treaties, spy or just hit them with a big club-or later, tank. The game takes you through all history, endning in 2000 ad-ish unless of course, you’ve already won by then.

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And yes, all you caeser-crazed classicists, out there, you can play as the Romans. You get to be Julius Caeser(The picture is from the latest game in the series)! That is, if Julius was immortal, had (more or less) complete power over his realm and no, you don’t get to explore his personal life. In the original game the Egyptians are not even led by Cleopatra(They are in some later versions, though....in the latest there is even a Celtic civilization you can conquor). This is however basically cosmetic, it makes no difference in game terms. Normally you play on a randomly generated, but earthlike, world, but you can play on the old familiar map as well. Kinda takes the joys out of exploring, though.

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At a certain point in the game you might find yourself with a civilization looking like the classical roman soceity; aqueducts, soldiers armed with iron swords, roads linking your cities, temples keeping your population content and calm, corruption affecting your border provinces where barbarians raid, your republic slowly becoming too expensive to maintain, forcing a change to a monarchy.

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The interesting thing is of course the model; the fact that the game tries to simulate how a soceity works, how increased trade leads to technological advances, population growth occurs because of food surpluses, the effect of roads(allows faster troop movements but also increases trade-as the romans knew, roads make an empire), form of goverment(democracy gives the most trade but makes the military cost more and means you cannot go to war when ever you want to). As I stated ealier the whole point is using your limited resources to get what you want. If you want to conquer your neighbour, you need an army with preferably better armament than the enemy, to get this you need to dicover the iron working technology and also create cities with high production so you can build the units. Since one wants to do well, one is forced to learn this model. For the game to work this has to agree with our preconceived ideas of how things hang together but can also educate/indoctrinate us about it. In learning to play the game, we internalize its underlying ideas of how the world works.

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Behind this lurks, of course, a criticizable view of the world. For example, it postulate a pretty linear view of progress that varies little from one civilization to another(it also postulates progress). Furthermore, you win the game by 1. destroying all other civilizations(might does make right) 2.expanding into space(always expand) or 3. getting the most points when the game ends(Points given for happy or content citizens, wonders of the world and more). You don’t have to be a post-modernist to spot some....potentially problematic values there. Nevertheless, I believe that playing this game(and other) has given me a better understanding of history and the processes governing it; better a flawed model, than no model at all.I could argue further that this gives a different, in some ways more immediate understanding than merely reading history or economic or under sciences; in being forced to apply an internalized understanding, manipulate a model, you get a feel for the connections that only doing(in what ever subject, compare it to solving mathematical problems, handling a computer or commanding an army) can give you; no amount of theory can do the same. To answer your question; yes, I believe our political leaders should be required to log at least 100 hours on appropriate games before being allowed to play with reality.

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The civilization series has of course changed over time, added such features as culture, religon, different leader traits which give different bonuses(Caesar is in the latest game for example imperialistic and organized, Augustus industrious and organized), special buildings and units for different civilizations(praetorians and forums for Rome) great people, natural resources(can’t build Iron equipped troops without iron) etc. Also scenarios where different systems or limited areas/times are used(one in Civ 4 called Rise of Rome where you battle as Rome, Carthage, Greece, Gaul, or Egypt for control of the Mediterranean beginning in 300 bc) or one where Civilizations actually come and go, collapse and are replaced something like what happened in the real world but(for playability purposes mainly I imagine; its more fun to just keep going than see your hard won empire degenerate and fall) isn’t modeled in the normal game. And yes, they have added new victory conditions, including one where you can win a “Diplomatic” victory by building the United Nations and then getting everybody to sit in a circle and sing “Kumbaya”(not from the greek).

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But forget about all that; models, greater undersatanding, yadda, yadda. The real reason surely to play a game is to have fun; the civilization series for me always had that “Just one more Turn”-quality, where you never want to stop playing, telling yourself as day turns into night, night back to day, “just one more turn....just ‘til I discover Mathematics, ‘til I defeat the Persians, ‘til I finish building the Colossus, ”. Be warned; the game invites alien abduction, you sit down to play, and suddenly five hours have just disapeared. Lost time, right out of the X-files.

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There are other arguments and resons for playing games, I will return to the subject later. For now though a quote which makes the most fundamental arguemnt better than I ever could.

“In play the “objectivity” of objects and their effects, and the actuality of the objective world with which one is usually forced constantly to deal, thus learning to respect it , are temporarily suspended. For once, one does entirely as one pleases with objects; one places oneself beyond them and becomes “free” from them. This is what is decisive; in this self-positing transendence of objectivity one comes precisely to oneself, in a dimension of freedom denied in labor. In a single move of a unit, the player acheives an infinitely greater triumph of human freedom over objectification than in the most powerful accomplishment of technical labor”*

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Tomorrow; Total War!

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Tegularius

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* Modified slightly from the orginal. If anyone can spot the alteration and identify the writer of the original I will give you a computer game. Maybe Civilization 4, maybe something else if you already have that. Send your answers(one per person) to latinbloggen@yahoo.com.

For those wanting more about the Civ series I recomend Civfanatics.