Gaming the Past

Path of Honors is an experimental interactive history that I am designing in bits and pieces. The plan is to model an aristocratic Roman as he played the game of politics and sought to win election to offices and gain prestige and dignity for himself and his family. PoH is skeletal right now and will likely take years to finish. In the meantime I hope it will provoke conversation and suggest what historians could do with the interactive medium of choice-based texts.

Discussion of the Path of Honors project

• Meaningful Choices: Twine Developer Diary, Part 3 reflects on some ideas about meaningful choices in Twine in the context of my own experience designing Path of Honors.
• Lucas Coyne, a doctoral student in U.S. History at Loyola University in Chicago, sent me a list of terrific questions about Path of Honors . Their depth and breadth encouraged me to write and post the answers as pieces Here and on PlaythePast.
  • Part1, Path of Honors: Thoughts behind the design of an interactive history
  • Part 2, “Meaningful Choices in Twine: History and Counterfactuals”

Current version of the Path of Honors project

Path of Honors 0.0.15 (Posted 1/4/23) – New battle narrative system added; game still ends with winning an aedileship. Updated to Harlowe 3 using dropdown menus to select goals for the ahttps://gamingthepast.github.io/Path%20of%20Honors%200.0.15%20HARLOWE.htmledileship (though the game still ends as soon as the player sets those goals

Epoiesen Essays

“Path of Honors: Towards a Model for Interactive History Texts with Twine”. Epoiesen: A Journal for Creative Engagement in History and Archaeology (2018).

• First Response to Path of Honors, by Angus Mol, Leiden University
• Second Response to Path of Honors, by Marc Saurette, Carleton University.

Next projected update: Hopefully sometime later in Late March 2018