MEDS 286 - Gaming Antiquity: Interactive Historical Fiction and Classical Athens

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as GRST 286) Have you ever experienced the feeling of being joyfully lost in another world? Maybe you felt this sensation when reading Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings, or perhaps you experienced it while creating your own work of art? In this course you have the opportunity to evoke this sense of immersion by crafting your own interactive historical fiction in the form of a digital role-playing game set in classical Athens. We begin by reading Mary Renault’s classic of historical fiction, The Last of the Wine, and exploring how she so effectively conjures the world of 5^th-century Athens. You then begin working in teams to craft your own historical fiction in the form of a playable ‘quest’ designed within the framework of a tabletop role-playing game. For your culminating project you craft a digital version of your quest by ‘modding’ (modifying) The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. This course aims to develop your creative, technical and analytical capacities all at once by challenging you not just to develop a playable historical fiction set within the ancient world, but also to confront the difficult questions of adaptation posed by the disturbing realities of antiquity, like patriarchy, pederasty and slavery. No experience in Computer Science is necessary to enroll in this course.

Two 75-minute periods.

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