Sarah F. Porter[a]
porters@gonzaga.edu
It’s 50 CE. You’re Chloe, a resident of ancient Corinth. You receive a letter from a panicked messenger, but can you read it? [Roll for literacy.]
So begins an interactive fiction game called Writing to Paul which communicates to students how the richly textured ideological and material context of the Roman Empire gave rise to the theologies and practices of early Christianities.[1] Students must survive stormy sea crossings, leverage their social networks, fundraise, and explore ancient cities to get a letter from Chloe in Corinth to Paul in Antioch. By the end, they have learned through gamified experience about gendered and classed power dynamics, the internal diversity of earliest Christianity, and the contingency of Paul’s letters now in the New Testament.
At my institution, a Jesuit liberal arts university in the Pacific Northwest, students are required to take two Religious Studies courses. One must focus on Christianity and/or the Catholic tradition. My introductory Early Christianity course meets this requirement. My student population includes students who were educated in Roman Catholic institutions, students with no religious education at all, and everywhere in between.[2] While students expect to study the important dates, thinkers, and ideas of a religious tradition, I must convince them that these are inextricable from the ideas, assumptions, and relationships in a socio-political system. An additional challenge: My course is not a New Testament course, yet I cannot assume familiarity with the Bible, the person of Jesus, or basic teachings about Christian life.
To solve this problem, I have gamified the first decades of early Christian history, just after Jesus’s resurrection, using Twine to build a text-based choose-your-own-adventure experience (Figure 1).[3] In the first chapter of the game, students play from the perspective of Chloe, a Christian woman in Corinth (1 Corinthians 1:11) who receives a letter from Paul asking for financial assistance during his illness.[4] In the second chapter of the game, students play from the perspective of Fortunatus, a (semi-fictional) man enslaved by a deacon named Phoebe (Romans 16:1–2) who must ferry a financial gift to Paul in Antioch. Throughout the game, hyperlinked footnotes and resources illustrate and explain what the player is experiencing. In this article I will explain the learning objectives achieved through this game, discuss specific ethical quandaries that arise through writing and playing my game, describe how the class digests the game, and suggest application scenarios for other courses in the teaching area of Religious Studies.
Figure 1: A screenshot of Writing to Paul’s back-end development on Twinery.
Superimposed is the front-end user interface.
Learning Objectives: What Are We Here to Do?
Ostensibly, the object of the game is to receive a letter from Paul and send financial resources back to him in return. But my learning objectives for students range much farther. Scholarship on experiential, game-based, or role-play pedagogy has identified benefits such as promoting intrinsic motivation, historical empathy, and an understanding of historical contingencies.[5] I do seek these outcomes, but additionally, I seek to introduce students to the material realities of a rich historical context, to confront the ethical complexities of that context, and to develop some familiarity with the language, assumptions, and practices of the earliest Christians (including their internal diversity).
I assign “Writing to Paul” on the third day of my Early Christianity class. During the first week of class, I focus on the material and ideological contexts of the Roman Empire to prepare students to study early Christianities as products of their environment. While students sometimes express confusion about “why it takes so long to get to Christianity,” we refer back to the terms from this week over and over again throughout the semester: viri (ideal Roman men), epithumia (passions in need of control), the porous self, patronage, empire, and the religious marketplace.
This game reinforces some of those terms and dynamics, but it also vivifies the environment of the ancient Mediterranean. For example, students are asked in the game to access ORBIS to decide on the route they wish to take to Antioch: the more expensive, shorter one, or the less expensive, longer one.[6] When they board a ship, the game card is supplemented with a YouTube video on the archaeology of ancient ships and a link to the NAVISone database of ancient ship finds.[7] The game then randomises whether the player will survive a particularly nasty storm, highlighting the fragility of ancient travel. Finally, the ship docks at Rhodes, and a fellow sailor invites the player to head to Apollo’s temple to give thanks. The player has two options:
Option 1: Yes.
“Sure, let’s go,” you say. You know Apollos isn’t a real god, and many people in the Corinthian ekklesia socialize at temples. Though some people say otherwise, this jaunt will be harmless, and you’d like to play the tourist for a few hours instead of being the responsible messenger.
Option 2: No.
You can only imagine what would happen to you if Phoebe or Paul found out you’d visited Apollo’s temple. You’d rather keep your eyes and ears clean of any demonic pollution that could come from that place. Even though many members of your Corinthian ekklesia socialize at temples, you feel mightily uncomfortable about it, as though it’s an infraction of fidelity to the One God.
In both options, “socialize at temples” is hyperlinked to a discussion of 1 Corinthians 8:1, 4–9, where Paul advises the Corinthian assembly on whether to eat food offered to idols.
This adventure, therefore, brings to life the danger of sea travel, the material realia and data we have about ancient sea travel, the religious vibrancy of an ancient harbour, and the conversations among Christians about interacting with temple cults. It models how historical knowledge can enliven the reading of scriptural sources. This preparatory work is in service of two scholarly values: historical empathy and critical analysis. Both values are enabled by some knowledge of the textures of Roman life: economy, the difficulties of travel, levels of literacy, and ideologies of personhood and power.
Introducing the Earliest Christians
Because I teach Early Christianity rather than a New Testament class, I need a way for students to quickly encounter of some of the core constituents, concepts, and conflicts in the first decades of Christian assemblies. The game facilitates this, hosting encounters between the student-player and early Christians (some named in the New Testament; others imaginary). Conversations are scattered with references to biblical stories, phrases, and characters, which students can click on to read more about. For example, Fortunatus overhears a merchant greeting someone with the phrase, “Grace and peace,” and is guided to a Christian household. Foundational terms like ekklesia, Gentile, and apostle are also defined.
The game develops the reputations of Jesus and Paul largely through hearsay. In introducing my students to New Testament texts, I teach chronologically: Paul’s letters are taught before the Gospels. How, then, to introduce non-religious students to Jesus and his message? I begin by imagining his reputation in the early Christ communities scattered around the northeastern Mediterranean. After playing the game, a student will glean historical data about Jesus, like his crucifixion in Jerusalem around 30–35 CE and a few titles Christians used for him (Kyrios, Messiah, and Saviour). They will learn that word spread about Jesus through oral teachings before the different Gospels were written. Students also hear explanations of Jesus’s relationship to early Christians. In one exchange, a Rhodian Gentile Christian named Hermas explains that Jesus made a path into the Jewish family for Gentiles. One character reflects at length on what it feels like to be called “enslaved to Christ” when he is also enslaved to another person.
Students also gather breadcrumbs about Paul, who does not appear to the player until the final frame of the game. They learn that he is a Roman citizen and a Diasporic Jew, and that he has had visions of Christ in which he was commissioned as “apostle to the Gentiles.” Over the course of the game, they meet three people who have been patrons or assistants to Paul in the past. But in their wanderings, students find that not everyone likes Paul, and indeed some Christians haven’t heard of him. This surprises some students who discover for the first time that there was a “before” or “behind” the New Testament.
The sparing detail given to Paul and Jesus is contrasted with the greater attention given to the many kinds of Christians who are traditionally eclipsed by the New Testament’s “protagonists.” New Testament figures such as Timothy, Chloe, Phoebe, and Fortunatus, who made Paul’s journeys possible, are named and encountered. Students learn that Paul’s physical and epistolary corpora were sustained by scribes, donors, and hosts who assisted him throughout his life.
Introducing Historiography
I do not explicitly introduce the concept of “historiography” in my class. But I do press students to consider what enables historical change by asking: “Identify a moment when someone needed their network in order to move forward in the game” and “Identify two times in the game where your mission depended on something material: a thing, a place, etc. How did you go about getting it? Could you have figured out another way if you couldn’t find it?” Students repeatedly notice in their journal entries and in class conversation that they never thought about just how precarious the beginnings of this major religious tradition were.
But the historiographical questions opened by this game are not merely about contingency. They are also about what Cavan Concannon calls “viscosity”: “a measurement of the ways in which costs and velocity can index the economic and emotional resistance that piles up the longer and further one travels.”[8] I ask students, “What relationships was earliest Christianity made of, and how much did those relationships cost to maintain? (Both in financial and other factors.)” Exploring this question allows students to see that the survival and strength of Christian communities depended on investment and labour in addition to more ephemeral measures like persuasiveness and conviction.
Finally, students develop an alternative to “Great Men” histories that credit individuals with “founding Christianity.” In the game, students do not meet Paul until the very last frame, after they have had the chance to encounter up to about a dozen characters who can ease the way to Paul—or obstruct it. The characters who assist or hinder the player are from a variety of social classes, genders, and free statuses, but none of them are wealthy male patrons until players meet Paul’s own (fictional) patron in Antioch. These design choices are informed by re-visioned social and feminist histories developed in the last several decades: earlier watershed texts like Wayne Meeks’s The First Urban Christians and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s In Memory of Her (both published in 1983), up to and including Katherine Shaner’s Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity and Laura S. Nasrallah’s Archaeology and the Letters of Paul in the last decade, along with a host of others in this vein.[9] Students come to imagine what Nasrallah calls “the difficult-to-know adelphoi, brothers and sisters, who preceded him, surrounded him, argued against him, sent him money, worshipped alongside him.”[10]
Following from this, students begin to understand that my course is not only about Great Men, Important Dates, and Canonised Texts. It is about the people and materials that enabled early Christianities to congeal, spread, and branch.
Ethics of Game Design and Game Play
Through Writing to Paul, students encounter the Roman world, the foundations of the Christian story, and a small network of early Christians. However, none of these content spheres are by any means simple. Each is mediated by my own ethical discernment and by long histories of interpretation. In what follows, I assess the opportunities for ethical discernment in game design and game play. First, I explore historical empathy as a value in the game. Then I give an example of the tension in both designing and playing through encounters that are labs for historical empathy: the character position of Fortunatus, an enslaved messenger. Finally, I consider situatedness and contingency as historiographical orientations with ethical weight. Building a history from below as described in my learning objectives is not only a historiographical choice but an ethical one. This is a goal I share with other biblical scholars, but also with other educational game designers.
My institutional context encourages the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm (IPP), a cycle of learning that prioritises reflection and action based on an encounter between a student and an experience (Figure 2). The IPP encourages “hospitality” as a teacherly attitude toward the student’s own context. Working a historical encounter into a game-like experience is a hospitable act of translation from my own preferred communication (texts!) to theirs (games!).
Figure 2: The Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm.
In the process, the game works as a lab for experiencing historical analytical empathy, which can then be generalised into present analytical empathy, a skill of citizenship.
Historical empathy is a blended phenomenon that includes the cognitive skill of perspective-taking and an affective connection to that perspective. However, both the cognitive and affective responses must be informed by a knowledge of the past rich enough to maintain the tension of radical difference.[11] Previous research has shown that video games can be useful platforms for such complex skill-building due to their combination of story, context, and player agency.[12] “Writing to Paul” holds the same combination of factors. And like the IPP, which sees action as the goal of learning, historical empathy’s telos is reached when students use their “understanding of the past to inform their thoughts, emotions, and actions in the present … [and] to understand that both past and present ideas are the product of historical context.”[13] Practice in situated empathy in the past reaches maturity in analysis of and praxis in the present.
Crucially, historical empathy is not historical sympathy.[14] Reading a story of a past person may induce historical sympathy, but playing as a past person is more likely to induce historical empathy. When dealing with oppressive concepts, this can create opportunities, but it also raises concerns for the well-being of students. For example, ancient history instructors and New Testament instructors have attempted to create semester-long scenarios in which students “see the course” through the perspective of an ancient person—sometimes assigned, sometimes by choice through an RPG-style “character creation” process.[15] But other scholars have critiqued these assignments when they force students to take on the traumatised perspective of an enslaved person or allow students to create and play an enslaved person carelessly or voyeuristically.[16]
Having followed these debates, my choice to create the enslaved player-character Fortunatus was not made lightly. I opted to include enslavement as a major theme in the game to stress a significant way that the earliest Christians were products of their environment and to highlight the deep impact enslaved people made on Christianity.[17] I decided that the more ethical choice was to play the game as Fortunatus rather than relegating an enslaved person to a side character (or, in RPG parlance, an NPC or non-player character). This would allow exploration of agency and ethical deliberation within Fortunatus rather than reifying the ancient categorisation of “slaves [as] other objects.”[18] It is impossible to play the game without asking the question: Could early Christianity have grown without enslaved people? What does that mean for this tradition?
I scaffolded student experience of/as Fortunatus through the paratext and through the narrative gameplay. Through the paratext, students were introduced to historical data about the brutality of ancient slavery, material culture such as the well-known Zosimus collar, and bibliographies for further reading. Through the gameplay portion of the game, students experienced how Fortunatus might have reasoned about his position as an enslaved Christian. For example, in one scene, Fortunatus questions whether he will be invited to eat at table with the Christians who are hosting him or whether he will be sent to eat with the woman they’ve enslaved, Meda: “It is odd, you think, that sometimes you count as a slave, and sometimes you don’t. You wonder if Meda is their sister in Christ as well as their slave.” In another, Fortunatus mulls Paul’s famously difficult-to-translate words in a letter to the Corinthian assembly: “Were you a slave when called? Don’t fret. But even if you are able to become free, use it indeed. For the slave who was called into the Master is a freedperson of the Master; likewise the free person who was called is a slave of Christ. You were bought with a price, don’t become slaves of humans. But in whatever condition you were called, brothers and sisters, remain with God” (1 Corinthians 7:21–24).[19] The confusion in the Greek is mirrored in Fortunatus’s own exegetical exercises: “It was impossibly ambiguous. You’d wondered: If Jesus is your new master, does Phoebe still own you? Each of Paul’s lines rang differently.”[20] Later, Paul casually refers to Fortunatus as “boy,” and, “You sigh. You’re fifty years old, but… ‘It’s my pleasure to serve, sir.’”
Playing as Fortunatus provokes questions the first week of class about why Christians did not issue moral teaching on enslavement. Playing as Fortunatus also rejects the premise that enslavement was “just a fact of life” or in any way kinder in antiquity than in modernity. But Fortunatus is not the only enslaved person the player encounters. The careful player will notice that Meda, an enslaved woman in Rhodes, is the mother of Rhoda, an enslaved girl in Antioch. This choice is indebted to historians of ancient enslavement, but especially to Womanist scholar Margaret Aymer. In her 2016 article, Aymer focuses on Rhoda, the young girl who is so overcome with emotion that she fails to open the door for Peter, who has been set free from prison in Jerusalem by an angel.[21] Aymer shows that the Rhoda in Acts 12 is probably a young victim of forced migration. The Rhoda in my game, too, is alienated from her mother, and Fortunatus sees a brand on the nape of her neck. The player does not explore Fortunatus’s past through reading trauma in Fortunatus’s internal monologues. Nor does the player encounter extreme physical violence in the game. For me, these choices would have felt like the production of “trauma porn.” But the story of Meda and Rhoda acknowledges the brutality of ancient enslavement and natal alienation.[22] Simultaneously, the autonomy given to Fortunatus to travel as Phoebe’s agent allows students to understand that human enslavement, while always brutal, is historically specific in its implementation.
I wished to introduce my students to another snarl in the study of early Christianity: the varieties of early Christianity.[23] A common assumption across the syllabi of early Christianity is that “heterodoxy” should be studied when “heresies” arise in the second century and beyond, using the Apologists as sources on those sects. But New Testament and early Christian scholars alike have demonstrated that there is a diversity of views already present in our earliest texts. There is no pure origin of Christianity, and this is a key learning objective in my course. To set my students up for their next assignment, Paul’s letter to the Galatians, I include an encounter that has proven productively confusing to them during our debriefs:
“Grace and peace,” you say. “I am Fortunatus. I come from the ekklesia at Corinth.”
His smile grows. “Greetings! I’m Hermas. You’re on a journey, then?”
“Yes—I’m delivering a message to Paul. Do you know if he has come this way recently?”
“Paul…I’ve heard his name, but no. I don’t know him.”
You’re puzzled. “You don’t? Then who planted the Rhodian ekklesia?”
He nods. “We belong to Brother [[Cephas]]. We keep the Torah of God as we are able.”
“The law?” You arch an eyebrow. “But you’re not Jewish. You need only faith. Don’t you believe in Jesus as Lord?”
It’s his turn to have a furrowed brow. “Of course I believe in Jesus as Lord,” he snorts indignantly. “He made a path to Jewishness for all nations to belong in the family of God. He fulfilled the Torah and we follow in his footsteps.”
You remember yourself and set a path for courtesy. You’ll have to ask Paul about this when you get to Antioch.
“Hmm,” you say, changing the subject. “Well, we have Jesus in common, and that’s what matters. I hate to inconvenience you, but I am here for the night on the way to deliver this message to Paul…” You hesitate. You’re keenly aware of your enslaved status, which might be a disadvantage—but you travel in the name of Phoebe, which might be an advantageous connection for the Rhodian ekklesia. Before you can explain, Hermas exclaims:
“Well, of course you must stay with us!”
Even though Fortunatus explicitly says, “But you’re not Jewish,” more than one student has come to class and describe this encounter as “when Fortunatus meets the Jewish guy.” While Hermas is fictional, and I have no evidence of an early assembly in Rhodes planted by Peter, this conversation anticipates our class on Galatians, the conflict described there between Peter and Paul, and two different early views on the relationship of Jesus to the Ioudaioi. It also challenges student assumptions that someone who follows Torah in the earliest days of Christianity is not a Christian but must be otherwise categorised.
If students missed the pedagogical function of Fortunatus’s encounter with Hermas, it is reiterated when he reaches Antioch. There students must choose among three settings to find news of Paul: the marketplace (because Paul moonlights as a tentmaker), the philosophers’ schools (because you heard a story about Paul at the Areopagus in Athens), and the Jewish Quarter (because you know Paul preached at the synagogue). Students ultimately find news of Paul at the synagogue, but opinions on him vary. One unnamed person calls Paul “a joker,” and a Jewish man named Barnabas quotes Paul’s rules for orderly assembly (1 Corinthians 14:40) to a Gentile Christian, Tabitha, who wishes to share a vision when they gather. In a nod to a later class reading, the Gospel of Mary, Tabitha mentions a prophet named Mariamne.[24]
By the end of the game, students have encountered multiple forms of early Christianities that prioritise different practices and authorities. Although the characters and conflicts are imagined, each vignette is “footnoted” with biblical and scholarly sources that verify its plausibility and give suggestions for further reading.
When students interact with a variety of early Christianities, they unravel a historical grand narrative. Instead, they come face-to-face with multiplicity—and that very multiplicity moves them to ask: Why haven’t I heard of that kind of Christianity? Why do Mariamne’s questions sound familiar? Why hasn’t Hermas heard of Paul? These are questions of situatedness and contingency: That Christianity might look different depending on who taught you; that we may not have all of Paul’s letters; that Christianity might have ebbed or flowed differently. These are historical insights, but they also remind students that history is made by social flows and individual choices. Ideally, this awareness prepares students for ethical discernment in the public square: listen closely; remain aware of difference; make a choice to act. History is an ethics lab.
Processing in Class
Students play the game for homework in week 2 of class. They are encouraged to stay aware and engaged during gameplay with a worksheet which asks them to both notice certain things and accomplish certain tasks, e.g., drafting a letter using an ancient formula and identifying ancient objects. This analogue assignment alongside the digital text-based game reflects more traditional computer or video gameplay where players must interact with objects or perform tasks to move forward. It also serves the mundane pedagogical function of ensuring that students stay alert and on-task, which is not guaranteed even with a “fun” assignment.
In class, students answer questions in small groups then share with the class. Each small group is assigned a different theme and questions:
1. Social: Try to make a map of the social network in the game; identify 2 times when someone’s class, gender, or free status affected the game.
2. Material: Identify 2 times in the game where progress depended on something material, like a thing or a place. How did you go about getting it?
3. Varieties: How many different kinds of Christians could you find in the game? How are they different from each other?
4. General Knowledge: What surprised you? What do you know now that you didn’t know before?
Group processing encourages students to compare notes on their experiences, which turn out to have been quite different from each other. The in-class small groups also provide opportunities for students to verbalise their felt reactions to the game, which is the first step to analysis. In the large group, I coach students in connecting their experiences with the game to a short reading from Concannon’s Assembling Early Christianity (outlined above). Layering a text encounter with a gamified encounter allows students to apply the text to an “experience” in real-time. The game is a useful way to apply Concannon’s concept of viscosity, or the labour required to sustain a social movement.
In the process of writing this article, I invited students from a previous semester to come “liveplay” the game with me again, talking through their decisions with me as I watched. My goal was to evaluate the longevity of insights from the game, as well as to test whether nuances in the game stood in higher relief after a semester of context. Three students agreed to liveplay with me observing and asking questions. Student 1, a student raised in a non-denominational Christian environment who has been testing its assumptions about gender, remembered Tabitha, an NPC who sparred with another Christian about whether women could speak in the assembly. Student 2 exemplified perspective-taking.[25] She appreciated thinking through the ambivalence of Paul’s teaching on slavery alongside Fortunatus, and she was particularly moved by Meda and Rhoda, the example of natal alienation even in Christian households. Student 3 attended Catholic churches and schools, and she was an absorbed player. She noticed how the game set forward different sects of Christianity, with a belief in Jesus as the only common denominator. All three players confirmed that upon first playing the game, they internalised the vibrancy and contingency of early Christian movements, and during the liveplay, they mulled over the difficulties and opportunities of living in the first century CE. In the future, I will include a replay of the game and a self-evaluation of gameplay as part of the final evaluation for the course. For this focus group, though, findings were aligned with my objectives: students attained a more textured understanding of the ancient world through “experiencing” it themselves; they engaged in ethical reflection about the characters’ choices, which often moved them to historical empathy; and they understood the precarity and contingency of the early Christian movement.
Use Cases
In a course like mine, the decision to use interactive fiction is based on both efficiency and principle. A game is a useful hack for presenting multi-layered content in a single experience, and Writing to Paul shows that interactive fiction can effectively expose students to disciplinary content, methodology, and values, while provoking students to question the same content, methodology, and values. Social conflict, literary formulae, and material realia can all be encountered through gamification. These aims are, I imagine, largely shared among instructors of history and religious studies.
I am not the first to use interactive fiction to teach in religious studies. G. Brooke Lester uses two Twine games in his Hebrew Bible courses.[26] One allows the player to simply, in Lester’s words, “prattle around the house” to explore a typical early Iron Age domestic context and recognise the “world behind the text” of Judges. The household goddess Asherah proves to be the voice interacting with the player throughout the game. In this case, our games operate at different spatial scales, but they both bring to life the mundane realia of our contexts, painting a picture of ordinary life’s connections to religious desire and affect. In Lester’s second game, the player experiences the 586 BCE conquest of Jerusalem from the perspective of a combat engineer and thus explores questions of historical contingency. The combat engineer is built as genderqueer to dovetail with Lester’s learning objectives around queer biblical interpretation. This choice encourages perspective-taking, and it shows how history is made at the intersection of individual identity and mass movement. Lester does not disclose how or whether “real” biblical characters are introduced in his games and whether more traditional content is communicated through them, but like Writing to Paul, his games accomplish multiple historiographical and hermeneutic goals in one experience.
Other use cases can be broadly categorised as spatial and interpersonal. An interactive fiction game is aptly suited for explorations of real and imagined space.[27] For example, a player could move through Teresa of Avila’s interior castle and explore minutiae by clicking them, or a player could experience both the mundane and transcendent encounters in the Hajj. Story-driven interpersonal encounters can facilitate “crisis points” for reflection in ethics or pastoral care, as is already being done in the training of healthcare professionals.[28]
An option I have not yet utilised is inviting students to design their own Twine by choosing a setting or narrative in the syllabus (e.g., monks, pilgrims, an ecumenical council) as a final project. My own competency as a teacher of digital tools is limited. But this seems like a clear and vibrant use case for the future. Having students walk through the ethical and pragmatic decisions of game design would clearly mark the transition from beginner to advanced competency, both in terms of content and in terms of the student’s development of their own historiographical method. As Lester notes, this sort of assignment costs time in a compressed semester-long syllabus, but the patterns of thinking learned are likely to endure.[29]
Conclusion
And there he is, the man himself. Small, unibrowed, bowlegged, with a cranky face, he clutches a sheaf of papyrus and a writing kit. He sniffles and sneezes.
The road has passed through Corinth, Rhodes, and Antioch. The player has rubbed elbows with sailors and merchants, read passages of Paul’s letters, and explored archaeological remains. Along the way, questions have arisen about gender, authority, freedom, and Christ through the imagined stories of ordinary people. At this final scene, the player meets her goal: here is Paul, and he is an ordinary man … with a cold.
Writing to Paul sets out to deliver a letter. But it also sets out to accomplish an array of learning objectives regarding historical content, biblical interpretation, historiography, and ethics. By exploring a past rich with material culture, religious difference, and ethical conundrums, my students are reminded that ancient Christianities were vibrant and varied. Through the experience of designing the game, I could clarify and hone my own historiographical ethics. Here in the gameworld, teacher and student alike can explore the possibilities and limits of historical empathy while asking bold questions about how religions happen. And back in the real world, we can explore similar frontiers and phenomena anew.
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McCall, Jeremiah. Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History. New York: Routledge, 2022.
Meeks, Wayne. The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul, 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.
Mees, Allard W., Florian Thiery, et al. “NAVISone: Database of Ancient Ship Depictions, Wrecks, Reconstructions and Ship Models.” www2.leiza.de/navis.
Morningstar-Kywi, N. and R.E. Kim. “Using Interactive Fiction to Teach Clinical Decision-Making in a PharmD Curriculum.” Medical Science Educator. 31 (2021): 687–95. doi:10.1007/s40670-021-01245-7.
Nasrallah, Laura S. Archaeology and the Letters of Paul. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
———. “‘You Were Bought with a Price’: Freedpersons and Things in 1 Corinthians.” Pages 54–73 in Corinth in Contrast: Studies in Inequality. Edited by S. Friesen, S. James, and D. Schowalter. Leiden: Brill, 2014.
Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Peppard, Michael. How Catholics Encounter the Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.
Richlin, Amy. “Role-playing in Roman Civilization and Roman Comedy Courses: How to Imagine a Complex Society.” Classical Journal 108.3 (2013): 347–62.
Scheidel, Walter, et al. “ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World.” orbis.stanford.edu.
Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (10th anniversary ed.). New York: Crossroad, 1995.
Shaner, Katherine. Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Stocks, Claire. “Stories from the Frontier: Bridging Past and Present at Hadrian’s Wall.” Trends in Classics 11.1 (2019): 139–60. doi:10.1515/tc-2019-0008.
Wainwright, A. Martin. “Teaching Historical Theory through Video Games.” The History Teacher 47.4 (2014): 591–94. doi:10.1177/1046878116646693.
Wheeler, J. Robinson. “Mapping the Tale: Scene Description in IF.” Pages 299–316 in The IF Theory Reader. Edited by Kevin Jackson-Mead and J. Robinson Wheeler. Boston, MA: Transcript, 2011.
Wire, Antoinette Clark. The Corinthian Women Prophets: A Reconstruction through Paul’s Rhetoric. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1990.
[a] Many thanks to the students who have played this game and helped me become a better teacher, especially Ava Fink, Gabriella McGillen, and Rachel Sheppard.
[1] Interactive fiction (IF) is like a digital version of a Choose Your Own Adventure book. In IF, the player moves forward in the narrative by choosing how to interact with objects, spaces, and characters around them through textual inputs and outputs. IF is simple to produce compared to more graphically sophisticated video games, and an online tool called Twine allows new builders who are willing to learn only simple HTML. Other game-based pedagogies have ample bodies of research supporting their use, but scholarship on IF-based pedagogy is less common. For example, IF is similar to roleplay in that the player works from someone else’s perspective. For the use of roleplay in learning, see, e.g., Mark Carnes, Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). IF also has some commonalities with videogames since mediated through a digital format. For the use of historical videogames in learning, see, e.g., Jeremiah McCall, Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History (New York: Routledge, 2022) and A. M. Wainwright, “Teaching Historical Theory through Video Games,” The History Teacher, 47.4 (2014): 579–612, doi:10.1177/1046878116646693. IF has been used in other pedagogical contexts, such as language learning (Ivan Fernández Peláez, “Interactive Fiction as a Tool in Language Teaching,” Hispania 107.4 [2024]: 419-424) and science (Simon Flynn and Mark Hardman, “The Use of Interactive Fiction to Promote Conceptual Change in Science: A Forceful Adventure,” Science & Education 28.1 [2019]: 127–52, doi:10.1007/s11191-019-00032-6). For examples of IF in ancient and biblical studies, see, e.g., Claire Stocks, “Stories from the Frontier: Bridging Past and Present at Hadrian’s Wall,” Trends in Classics 11.1 (2019): 139–60, doi:10.1515/tc-2019-0008; G. Brooke Lester, “What IF?: Building Interactive Fiction for Teaching and Learning Religious Studies,” Teaching Theology and Religion 21.4 (2018): 260–73, doi:10.1111/teth.12454.
[2] Students from all and no religious contexts need orientation toward the Bible. Biblical literacy looks different for different kinds of Christians. Students with Catholic educations enter my classroom confident in their background knowledge, but their formation situates biblical literacy in a particular way. See, for example, Michael Peppard, How Catholics Encounter the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024) on how Catholics more often encounter, enact, and perform the narratives of the Bible than read them. Given his argument, gamifying the early decades of Christianity fits well within the Catholic tradition.
[3] Twine is a free tool for text-based storytelling. It does not require coding, and the site has ample how-to and reference resources for self-teaching.
[4] For another take on imagining Chloe, see Kate Cooper, “Looking for Chloe,” in Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women (London: Atlantic Books, 2013), 1–20.
[5] A foundational thinker on digital game-based learning is James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and Good Video Games + Good Learning: Collected Essays on Video Games, Learning, and Literacy (New York: Peter Lang, 2007). On intrinsic motivation, see M. J. Habgood and S. E. Ainsworth, “Motivating Children to Learn Effectively: Exploring the value of Intrinsic Integration in Educational Games,” The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 20.2 (2011): 169–206, doi:10.1080/10508406.2010.508029; Julia Gressick and Joel B. Langston, “The Guilded Classroom: using Gamification to Engage and Motivate Undergraduates,” Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 17.3 (2017): 109–23, doi:10.14434/josotl.v17i3.22119. On contingency, see Wainwright, “Teaching Historical Theory,” 591–94. On historical empathy, see section below, “Ethics of Design and Gameplay.”
[6] ORBIS, a sort of Google Maps for the ancient world, calculates time and cost associated with travel around 200 CE. It is hosted by Stanford University, and its principal investigator is Walter Scheidel. “ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World.” https://orbis.stanford.edu/
[7] NAVISone is a database of ancient ships (both iconographic and archaeological) up to 1200 CE. It is hosted by the Leibniz Center for Archaeology. Its principal investigator is Allard W. Mees. “NAVISone: Database of Ancient Ship Depictions, Wrecks, Reconstructions and Ship Models.” https://www2.leiza.de/navis/ I designed these “side quests” intentionally. I do not require students to master, e.g., shipwreck archaeology, but I am sensitive to and delighted by the kinds of neurodivergence which manifest in the students who follow these rabbit holes. Building in these “side quests” gently introduces all students to rhizomatic rather than arboreal knowledge. In more advanced or research-based classes, these could be nudges toward writing topics, which is why I include bibliographical information for suggested reading.
[8] Cavan Concannon, Assembling Early Christianity: Trade, Networks, and the Letters of Dionysios of Corinth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 80.
[9] Wayne Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins, 10th anniversary ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1995); Laura S. Nasrallah, Archaeology and the Letters of Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Katherine Shaner, Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
[10] Laura S. Nasrallah, Archaeology and the Letters of Paul, 16.
[11] Jason Endacott and Sarah Brooks, “An Updated Theoretical and Practical Model for Understanding Historical Empathy” Social Studies Research and Practice 8.1 (2013): 41–58, doi:10.1108/SSRP-01-2013-B0003.
[12] Liz Owens Boltz, “‘Like Hearing from Them in the Past’: The Cognitive-Affective Model of Historical Empathy in Videogame Play,” International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations 9.4 (2017): 1–18, doi:10.4018/IJGCMS.2017100101.
[13] Endacott and Brooks, “Updated Theoretical and Practical Model,” 53.
[14] Endacott and Brooks, “Updated Theoretical and Practical Model,” 46.
[15] Amy Richlin published her experience: “Role-playing in Roman Civilization and Roman Comedy Courses: How to Imagine a Complex Society,” The Classical Journal 108.3 (2013): 347–62.
[16] Robust conversation occurred on Twitter about this strategy in Classics and Bible classrooms several years ago, but I have been unable to find publications emerging from these debates, nor have I been able to locate those discussions. Still, I register my gratitude here. For related critiques in U.S. history classes, see Melanie M. Acosta and André R. Denham, “Simulating Oppression: Digital Gaming, Race, and the Education of African American Children,” The Urban Review 50.3 (2018): 345–62, doi:10.1007/s11256-017-0436-7; Sadhana Bery, “Multiculturalism, Teaching Slavery, and White Supremacy,” Equity and Excellence in Education 47.3 (2014): 334–52, doi:10.1080/10665684.2014.933072.
[17] Shaner, Enslaved Leadership.
[18] Page DuBois, Slaves and Other Objects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
[19] My translation. There are numerous discussions of how to interpret this passage. For an overview, see J. Albert Harrill, “Paul and Slavery: The Problem of I Corinthians 7:21,” Biblical Research 39 (1994): 5–28, and more recently, Harrill, “Revisiting the Problem of I Corinthians 7:21,” Biblical Research 65 (2020): 77–94.
[20] I am not the first to suggest that the Corinthians themselves may not have known how to interpret Paul’s instruction. Nasrallah suggests, “The Corinthians who received this letter – in the absence of further or prior discussions in their own ekklēsia – were likely as baffled as we are about the meaning of these words. We may wonder whether they sought clarification from the carrier of Paul and Sosthenes’s letter, who was likely a freedperson or a slave; such letter carriers were often expected not only to deliver their masters’ correspondence, but also to voice and to interpret its contents” (“‘You Were Bought with a Price’: Freedpersons and Things in 1 Corinthians,” in Corinth in Contrast: Studies in Inequality, ed. S. Friesen, S. James, and D. Schowalter [Leiden: Brill, 2014], 64). Katherine Shaner argues that the very ambiguity of this passage reminds us that it is part of a wider, multivocal conversation in Corinth (43–56).
[21] Margaret Aymer, “Outrageous, Audacious, Courageous, Willful: Reading the Enslaved Girl of Acts 12,” in Womanist Interpretations of the Bible: Expanding the Discourse, ed. Gay L. Byron and Vanessa Lovelace (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2016), 265–90.
[22] Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).
[23] I riff on William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1902). Several others have riffed before me; the phrase has titled syllabi across the U.S. since the 1990s (Andrew Jacobs; Zlatko Pleše; Rebecca Denova); an educational YouTube series by Religion for Breakfast’s Andrew Mark Henry; and two books (Rebecca Denova, Varieties of Early Christianity: The Formation of the Western Christian Tradition [Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2024]; Everett Ferguson, ed., Doctrinal Diversity: Varieties of Early Christianity [New York: Garland Publishing, 1999]).
[24] Also noted in the Game Notes for this interaction is Antoinette Clark Wire, The Corinthian Women Prophets: A Reconstruction through Paul’s Rhetoric(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1990).
[25] Hilliard et al., “Perspective Taking and Decision-Making in Educational Game Play: A Mixed-Methods Study,” Applied Developmental Science 22.1 (2018): 1–13, doi:10.1080/10888691.2016.1204918. This study tested for empathy, collaboration, and perspective taking during and after a game about ethical quandaries.
[26] Lester, “What IF?,” 267–68.
[27] “Intrinsic to interactive fiction at its inception was the simulation of location, of giving the player the ability to move from place to place” (J. Robinson Wheeler, “Mapping the Tale: Scene Description in IF,” in The IF Theory Reader, ed. Kevin Jackson-Mead and J. Robinson Wheeler [Boston: Transcript on Press, 2011], 299).
[28] N. Morningstar-Kywi and R.E. Kim. “Using Interactive Fiction to Teach Clinical Decision-Making in a PharmD Curriculum,” Medical Science Educator 31 (2021): 687–95, doi:10.1007/s40670-021-01245-7.
[29] Lester, What IF?, 269–70. For an example of implementation in medieval studies, see Bolintineanu, Alexandra, et al. “‘A Certain Enemy Robbed Me of My Life’: Medieval Riddles, Digital Transformations, and Pandemic Pedagogy,” Digital Medievalist (2022), doi:10.16995/dm.8177.