By Ben Burgess
What would you get if you transported Julius Caesar to the 1960s?
A pretty clever video game, if you’re Rebecca Beneroff.
The Morristown High School senior has created a text-based adventure game–still untitled–that puts the gamer in Brutus’ sandals. But she didn’t stop there.
“I basically rewrote World War Two,” Beneroff said with a grin.
She created the game as the capstone of her year in the school’s Classics Academy, a program for students “who wish to explore the…connections of ancient Greece and Rome both to Western intellectual history and…to their own lives,” according to the MHS website.
Beneroff and five classmates will present their projects at 6 o’clock tonight, June 13, 2013, in the school library. (School officials have decided that security measures are sufficient for the event to go forward, after bomb threats this week.)
The roster includes:
- Celeste Jackson on language, and how it has been developed and used over the years.
- Travis Fielding, tracking an asteroid’s progression.
- Johannes Burger, performing a piece of music that he composed.
- Shannon Kikuchi, on how fashion relates to mathematics.
- Zaji Zabalerio, with a short film exploring existential themes.
Conceived as part of a symposium class on creativity, these works represent the culmination of what students learned during their time in the Classics Academy. In addition, the projects must answer the question: How is your present contingent on your own, and humanity’s, past?
“I thought about what the question meant to me,” said Beneroff. She decided to create an experience that would allow people to “recognize, learn, and build from the past.”
And for Rebecca, who aspires to study game design after a “gap year” of work and travel, building a virtual adventure seemed the most natural way to achieve that goal.
Rebecca Beneroff fought to save Classics Academy. Click icon below for captions.
Her game boasts an intriguing premise, plucking the story of Julius Caesar’s downfall from the past and inserting it into the 1960s. The player controls the actions of a modern Brutus, deciding whether to participate in tearing the Caesar-like character from power.
The game boasts a whopping 17 ending scenarios. This gives players the feeling that their actions trigger real consequences, and also urges players to hash out new approaches based on their previous actions.
Indeed, the ingenuity of such projects illustrates why Beneroff, along with a host of current and former Morristown High School students, fought for Classics Academy when the Morris School District board considered shutting it down because of low enrollment.
When asked why she consistently stood up for the program, Beneroff replied:
“It’s not just plain school. It’s so much more.”
Rebecca Beneroff’s video game can be played for free at www.chooseyourstory.com.
Ben Burgess, a 2012 graduate of Morristown High School, plays bass with Timeless Jazz and was a finalist in last year’s MorristownGreen.com Film Festival. He attends Carnegie Mellon University and is interning at MG this summer.
