Scholar illuminates classical literature with contemporary video games

To draw parallels between Virgil’s Aeneid and the video game Halo might seem at first blush like heresy, but Roger Travis does it all the time.

He even brings a Microsoft Xbox to class to illustrate his points.

Virgil’s epic poem from 19 BC chronicling the fall of Troy and adventures of its hero Aeneas, as he makes his way toward a new beginning in Italy, has been studied and recited for millennia, but Travis, an associate professor of modern and classical languages, may well be the first scholar to use video games to help bring the tale to life for students.

“My students like hearing that there’s some sort of redeeming social value to video games,” he says. “I try to show that the games do have artistic merit, and share traditions that date back to the ancient storytellers.”

Travis ties video games and the classics together in two ways.

One is to use the games to look at the Aeneid from an unconventional perspective.

The other is to compare the oral improvisatory nature of Homeric epics with the way video games engage players.

The Iliad and the Odyssey are Homeric epics that predate the Aeneid – a written work – by centuries.

They began as oral works, performed before large groups by bards who often improvised as they went along, perhaps to cater to a particular audience.

Travis suggests that the bards’ audiences were interactive with epic poems in much the same way that today’s video gamer interacts with a software-generated adventure tale.

“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.”

Travis transports students back to ancient times and describes how a bard unfolded a story like the Odyssey before a live audience.

Students who view Virgil or Homer through Travis’s prism of adventure video games are apt never again to see the games or the classic poems in quite the same way.

In his classroom, the games are not lighthearted diversions, but useful devices for removing some of the fog from ancient texts.

Travis finds many analogies between a game like Halo and the Aeneid. Halo’s hero is the Master Chief, a semi-robotic super-marine who battles religious fanatic aliens called the Covenant in an outer space ring-world called Halo.

At stake is nothing less than human-kind’s existence, and the galaxy itself.

Aeneas, the Trojan hero of the Aeneid, travels through its 12 books, battling adversaries and enduring all manner of treachery at the hands of both gods and men, before arriving in Italy and paving the way for his ancestor, Romulus, to found Rome many generations later.

“Both Halo and the Aeneid tell a story about a more-than-human hero defeating enemies who would be too much for ordinary people like us – enemies who nevertheless bear an important resemblance to the ones we and the Romans face in our respective presents,” Travis says.