I’m plagiarizing myself here just a bit, since I actually wrote this for another venue, but it’s not actually on the Web anywhere, so … here goes.

I spent more time over the winter holiday than I probably should have playing Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception on the PS3 (I actually forbade my partner from taking the PS3 with him when he went to visit his family so that I could keep going).  If you’re not a gamer, you might just want to skip this post. Unless you’re a history geek like me.

Kill the bad guys, but stop blowing up the historical treasures!

This third installment in the Uncharted series, an Indiana Jones-style series of adventure games that follows anti-hero Nathan Drake and his companions as they venture off to the far corners of the globe in search of lost treasure, has earned stellar reviews and several awards, including the top spot on several “Best of 2011″ lists.

Drake’s Deception puts players on a trek to find the real lost city of Ubar—believed to be Iraam of the Pillars of antiquity, mentioned in the Qur’an and 1001 Nights–deep in the Empty Quarter (Rub’ al-Khali) in Saudi Arabia.  On the way, the story takes a surprisingly accurate voyage through a few Middle Eastern locations.  And, being the history nerd and Middle Eastern-ist that I am, I thought to myself, “Wow, someone should put together a resource guide to all the stuff in this game.”

And then I realized that I’m probably one of the best qualified nerds for the job.

Making allowances for the fact that this is a video game and that the action has to move forward in a suspenseful manner–not every dark alley in Sana’a leads to a secret chamber of secrets waiting to be discovered–the overall plot outline incorporates an impressive corpus of research on topics near and dear to the Middle East historians’ hearts: Players read through excerpts from T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom and learn about his career for British intelligence in World War I; explore nearly every inch of a crusader castle in Syria (clearly based on the Crac des Chevaliers near Homs); chase bad guys across rooftops in an painstakingly accurate digital re-creation of a Yemeni souq (complete with locals who engage you in Arabic); solve puzzles that incorporate old Sabaean script and pre-Islamic South Arabian civilizations; and finally find themselves on a sun-baked trek across the sands of eastern Arabia before finally landing in what is the least accurate part of the game for the climax: the lost city of Ubar itself (fortunately, this most fantastical part of the plot resolves itself somewhat satisfactorily for the nit-picky among us, but I won’t spoil it).

Below, I’ve compiled some resources to offer up for anyone else whose curiosity about the people and places visited may have been piqued over the course of game play.  Naturally, this effort came entirely out of my dedication to research <he says, looking innocent>.

This isn’t an actual walkthrough — there are plenty of those out there if you just Google it.
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Hey, look, it’s Christmas!

It’s been ages since I posted anything of substance. As I suspected, being in school all of the fall semester seriously put a dent in my desire to spend more time being creative and writing anything, what with all of the non-creative reading that goes along with that.

So, the fall went pretty well. I took six hours worth of courses (that’s two graduate seminars), which impressed the graduate coordinator in the History department; she had been expecting me to do the coursework one at a time. If I can keep this up, I’ll be able to get the courses done in another two years, at which point the real work begins, but we’ll focus on that later.

It was weird being back in school, not least because I feel like a dinosaur among my history cohort; several of them were born the year I entered high school for God’s sake! They’re a pretty affable group, though. Class didn’t really get started each week until someone pronounced the readings “bullshit,” or we had an extended argument about whether it was possible for someone to be racist in the 15th century when the modern concept of racism wasn’t invented until the 19th. (Yes. My answer, and I’m sticking to it, dammit.)

The other class I took was a classical Arabic course, that reduced me to tears a few times at the beginning of the semester when I had to read through some 10th century poetic verses, and not because the poetry was so beautiful. All in all it came out well, but at the end of the day, what I learned in the class was to try to avoid reading poetry when and where possible. I kind of saw this coming, though — I mean, I’m not a huge fan of poetry in English.

And so.

Tomorrow, the parents and I are going to Puerto Rico for a few days – just long enough to get away from the unseasonably cold weather, then zip back here for New Year’s Eve … and back to work. And then the next semester begins.

I may need a few more days off.

Merry Christmas, everyone!