Dirty Pretty Romans: Teaching Catullus as Interactive Fiction Using Twine and StoryMaps

This paper, presented by David Fredrick and Rachel Murray of the University of Arkansas, argues that Classics language instruction can be reoriented around the question "what was it like to be them?" rather than being dominated by grammar and translation. The authors describe a spring 2023 course that used Discursive Game Design, in which students co-created interactive fiction based on the poetry of Catullus. Their central claim is that making games about the past, rather than only playing them, can engage students more actively and critically with ancient texts, particularly those that depict the lives of everyday people rather than the Roman elite.

The course's method combined students from Latin, English, and Creative Writing backgrounds in a ten-step process. Catullus's poems were translated and paired with fictional responses from figures he addresses, styled after contemporary spoken word poetry. Students then built a fictional Roman dinner party as a performance frame, mapped interactive narrative threads in Figma, coded the paths in Twine, and developed player choices that incrementally shaped a Roman identity defined by political alignment, ethnicity, class, and gender. Locations and characters were further documented using ArcGIS StoryMaps. The outcome was a playable work titled Dirty Pretty Romans.

The authors support their conclusions with a post-class questionnaire, which they report showed students engaged more actively, holistically, and critically than in a traditional translation-based class. They note that the co-creative design often prompted students to turn the question of Roman experience back toward their own lives. The work is presented as provisional and incomplete, and its evidence is limited to a single course and a student questionnaire, so its findings are best read as an exploratory account of one pedagogical experiment rather than a broadly generalizable study.