Mae govannen! I’m Roger Travis, an associate professor of classics and ancient mediterranean studies at the University of Connecticut, sometimes better known as UConn. Over the past few years, I’ve been getting deeper and deeper into the strange interddisciplinary intersection I’ve found between classics and video games. If you’re interested in following my amusing journey, have a look at my blog, Living Epic: Video Games in the Ancient World, and at the initiative I founded with wonderful colleagues at UConn and also elsewhere, including my three main co-conspirators Michael Abbott (sometimes known as the Brainy Gamer), Jeff Howard (author of the marvelous book Quests which is about medieval literature and game design, and is well worth reading for any LOTR fan or LOTRO player), and Mike Young, an amazing scholar in Educational Psychology who works on learning in virtual environments and game-worlds.

Among other things, I’ve claimed that adventure games in general (by which I mean everything from traditional RPG’s to action games like Prince of Persia to first-person shooters to MMORPG’s like LOTRO) are a new sort of reawakening of a very old thing-the real, ancient epic tradition, as brought into being by the bards who created the homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. (Those books are actually fossiles of a once-living improvisatory tradition; there never was a guy named Homer, but rather [probably] a guild [or a kinship, if you like!] called the Homerids.)