{"id":1040,"date":"2015-05-05T16:48:00","date_gmt":"2015-05-05T16:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/?p=1040"},"modified":"2023-05-24T17:57:07","modified_gmt":"2023-05-24T17:57:07","slug":"a-gaming-guided-tour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/2015\/05\/05\/a-gaming-guided-tour\/","title":{"rendered":"D\u00e9j\u00e0 Vu Along the Via Appia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard Paige<\/em> — Even on his first trip to Rome, Tom Witkowski \u201915 experienced more than a few d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu moments, courtesy of a video game.<\/p>\n

Witkowski had been a regular player of Assassin\u2019s Creed II, an immersive game of historical fiction, which served as his tour guide to Ancient Rome.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll the things I learned and was familiar with in the game carry an impact when you see it first hand and get the full scope of what going on,\u201d he said. \u201cIt goes both ways from the game to the real world and vice versa. The game allows for an interaction that being a tourist doesn\u2019t always allow.\u201d<\/p>\n

He speaks of Rome with a deep connection that has lasted more than 10 years, dating back to four years of Latin at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati. A trip to Rome followed his high school graduation, which allowed him to walk on the Via Appia both literally and figuratively.<\/p>\n

Witkowski says the games are surprisingly accurate. In addition to short histories and text, the buildings are nearly exactly to scale. He relayed a story of the Pantheon, featuring a fountain in an adjacent plaza that still exists. The only difference was a coffee shop in the plaza that didn\u2019t make it into the game.<\/p>\n

\"Tom<\/a>
Tom Witkowski ’15 walks kids through a game he created at the inaugural Wabash Game Jam on April 27.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cIt was wild, I\u2019d seen it like this,\u201d he said pointing to the video screen as he walked me through the game. \u201cI\u2019d played the game, climbed around, and done all the missions. Then you walk inside for real and it\u2019s exactly the same. It was like walking back into the game. It was exactly what I\u2019d already experienced.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such a revelation doesn\u2019t surprise Professor Michael Abbott, whose class on game design and human values enthralled Witkowski and 19 other Wabash men this spring. Abbott agrees that the video game experience can help in the learning process by establishing deeper connections for some.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is something different in the experiential dimension,\u201d Abbott said. \u201cActually traveling is so fundamentally different than traveling in a game that it\u2019s a both\/and thing; it affects the head and the heart. It was a richer experience for him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rome stood out to Witkowski because of monuments like the Pantheon or Colosseum. He remembers reading of those places in textbooks, learning of the history and the architecture, but it was his gaming experience that brought it to life.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou play a video game with those facts and you can visualize the things that were talked about in the books,\u201d said the philosophy major who plans to teach English in Prague following graduation. \u201cYou fully experience this building in the game, you walk it, climb it. It\u2019s a lot of reoccurring stimuli. You learn about that world because you are placed in it. You feel like you are flowing through history.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brett Douville, Presidential Fellow in Digital Arts and Human Values, who co-taught the class with Abbott, identified how gaming bridged the gap from entertainment to understanding.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose two things informed each other,\u201d he said. \u201cThings that were in the game that maybe hadn\u2019t interested him before now did, like investigating the little bits of included history and text. He returned and was much more interested and he understood how they connected.\u201d<\/p>\n

The connection wasn\u2019t lost on Witkowski. When asked about his impressions of the class, he responded with what could have been an appropriate description of his own experiences, saying, \u201cIt was interesting to look at the progression of games. First, it was entertainment, and now we can teach with them as well.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Richard Paige — Even on his first trip to Rome, Tom Witkowski \u201915 experienced more than a few d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu moments, courtesy of a video game. Witkowski had been a regular player […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":1046,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-works-in-progress"],"w_featured_image_url":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2015\/05\/witkowski_1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1040"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1049,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1040\/revisions\/1049"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}