Roger Travis (pictured above posing with a virtual isthmus) teaches classics at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. He also plays videogames. If you sign into Xbox Live, you can see from his gamertag that he's seriously into Halo single player, Oblivion, Chromehounds, Mass Effect, and BioShock. And if you visit his blog, you can see that he sometimes considers videogaming from the perspective of a classics professor. Especially BioShock.

It's pretty easy to make fun of him by truncating his point while it still sounds ridiculous and then appending a Duke Nukem joke. Heck, a few years ago, I'd be right there with all the cool kids doing just that. And then I'd use Travis' pilfered lunch money to try to buy cigarettes at 7-11 and hope they didn't card me.

After all, I can't really follow a lot of what Travis is saying because it's not hyperlinked like the Metal Gear Solid 4 databanks. But I'm glad he's saying it. One of the exciting things about this point in time for videogaming is that we've grown up. Those of us whose childhoods were shaped by coin-op arcades, Atari 2600s, and Amigas are now in the real world making multimillion dollar movies, becoming policemen, joining the military, practicing law, writing snarky blogs, or just teaching at the University of Connecticut. And many of us haven't grown out of videogaming. Instead, we've brought it with us to what we do.

So I admire Travis for raising the basic question of whether the games we have now can reach the same depth of expression as classical literature. His answer is yes, they can, but they haven't quite yet. For comic value, it's best to omit the final part of Travis' point. Because otherwise, he's made a perfectly reasonable assertion, even if he brazenly did it in the language of academia, where you'll find this mention of a moment in the Iliad: "so achingly sad as to make us better people for having read it". I want that in gaming. As do most of us groundlings who just mutter about when we're going to get our Godfather or Citizen Kane.

Besides, anyone who ends a discussion with, "so that’s why Book 9 of the Iliad is cool" is okay in my book.