Andrew Ryan, shadow-puppet master

I think it’s now probably time to tackle Bioshock. My chapter on ethical education in the cave and in games, featuring the same reading of Bioshock I’m doing here, looks set to appear in the Fall, in what’s going to be a very exciting IGDA volume on ethics and game design. I think, with that academic version completely under my belt and in my rear-view mirror, I can without my eyes crossing too severely work up a version that’s more fun.

Here’s the claim I’m going to make: the much-discussed ludonarrative dissonance that constitutes Bioshock’s ethical system does not rob the game of ethical meaning, but rather enacts a decisive and meaningful disruption in the player’s performance of the cave-culture-game. That disruption, I claim, has the power to bring about in the player of Bioshock the same sort of ethical reflection enabled by Republic.

There’s a context for this argument that I’m going to spread over several posts; the context has to do with how Bioshock is different from games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) and Oblivion and GTAIV. It seems, though, to make sense to lay out the big claim first, and thus give the elements of the whole argument-cum-context some breathing space and some time for others to comment. Right now, I want to put forward the central pillar of my argument.

Please be advised that this argument is necessarily chock-full of spoilers of the worst sort.

The central pillar: the harvest/rescue dynamic of the game must be understood in association with the interruptions of interactivity that arise in what I call, as shorthand, the death-disarm sequence. Only when we understand them together can we grasp the critique of objectivism (and the various versions of it that undergird important parts of our culture) enacted by Bioshock.

The harvest/rescue dynamic is the usual focus for critique of the ludonarrative dissonance of the game. The central characteristic of the dynamic, as Clint Hocking pointed out, is the equality of effect on gameplay of doing the “bad” thing (“harvesting”—i.e. killing the Little Sisters) and of doing the “good” thing (rescuing them). Hocking argued that this equality of effect renders the ethical system of the game meaningless, and that it creates a dissonance between game and story that he found blameworthy.

The death-disarm sequence has attracted some critical attention as well, most cogently I think from Iroquois Pliskin, but perhaps not as much or as contentious as harvest/rescue. By the shorthand “death-disarm” I mean to refer to the entire sequence of the cutscene in which your character kills Andrew Ryan and the gameplay sequence that follows, in which the game will not progress unless you obey Atlas and disarm Ryan’s auto-destruct sequence.

At that point in the game—the disarm part of death-disarm—from the standpoint of the your world (your culture, really), you certainly have a choice of actions. You can do any number—an infinite number, really—of different things in the narrow space of Andrew Ryan’s office, like running around, jumping, and shooting at targets. You can also cease playing the game at that point, and turn off your PC or console. From the standpoint of the mimesis of Bioshock (see this post for more on mimesis), however, you have only one choice: to disarm the self-destruct sequence, thus verifying and enacting Atlas’ control over you.

In death-disarm, that is, Bioshock enacts a failed disruption of its closed ethical framework, which is exactly analogous to the failed disruption of the released prisoner in the cave.

For the thinking player of Bioshock, the crushing ethical blows of frustration in being unable not to kill Andrew Ryan, and then of being unable not to disarm the self-destruct, serve to expose the ethical system of the game—and thus of all games—as being like Andrew Ryan’s objectivist dystopia: instead of a world where every man can be a king, Ryan created a world where that very notion made every man a slave. As he is accepting death at the player-character’s hands, Ryan repeats over and over “A man chooses; a slave obeys.” He, and Bioshock, however, demonstrate just as Plato’s cave-culture-game demonstrates, that the dangerous illusion of choice presents the true ethical problem.

Here the harvest/rescue “choice” comes into its own. Precisely in that it is not a choice at all, in terms of the actual gameplay of Bioshock, it enacts through its ludonarrative dissonance itself the dangerous futility of choice. Choice, that is, is exactly analogous to the cave-culture-game, and to the ethical system of games like KOTOR. We must somehow find a way to make ethical choices that does not presume that those choices are freely made, that understands how determined by culture our “free” choices are.

How can we do that? The lesson of the cave-culture-game and the lesson of Bioshock are the same, paradoxical, frustrating precept: you can’t do it in the game you’ve got—it would break the game to try; find a new game. Republic has the benefit of containing the cave-culture-game within its over-arching, brilliant performance of Republic. The reader of Republic can take some comfort in knowing that the dialogue he or she is reading is at least Plato’s best attempt at the new game with the better ethics. But Plato’s need to return to the ideal city in Laws, a work written at the end of his life, indicates very strongly that the perpetually dissatisfying lesson that realizing a better ethical framework requires breaking the old one is as much a part of Republic as it is of Bioshock.

Plato's new console: dialogue and mimesis

Even as Plato condemns the cave-culture-game, he expects the philosophical reader to understand that they (Plato and the reader together) are at that moment engaged in a culture-game of their own—the game called Republic. We’ll come to recognize that Republic features a next-gen logic engine and truly emergent gameplay that provides an unparalleled philosophical thrill-ride.

Republic is a game that, like 2K’s Bioshock, brings the player face to face with his or her own cultural constitution through gameplay. The most obvious example of Republic doing that—perhaps the most obvious example of any Platonic game (that is, dialogue) doing it—comes in the return of the ascended man to the cave. Indeed, as we continue, we’ll see that the philosopher’s return demonstrates just how thoroughgoing is Republic’s attempt to make the reader see him or herself as a prisoner of mimetic culture.

For in the light of the philosopher’s return, the figure of that doomed dissident, the figure of Socrates himself, pushes his arguments both forwards and backwards through the entirety of Plato’s majestic ten-book edifice.

Republic begins, after all, with Socrates telling his unknown interlocutors (that is, the interlocutors of the dialogue itself—the unnamed characters to whom Socrates is narrating the story of the cool conversation he had with Plato’s brothers et al. at the house of Cephalus: that is, us, the players of the Republic game) that it all started when he went to the feast of Bendis, a new cult where there was going to be a thrilling new ritual: a night-time torch race on horseback—such diverting games, Plato expects the reader to realize, go to make up the cave-culture game.

Republic ends at last with the massive, enigmatic myth of Er, in which none other than problem epic hero Odysseus is shown gaming the system of reincarnation, and we are expected to learn from his example to game the system of myth and mimesis. People usually don’t read the myth of Er. If you want an idea of how different Plato is from what you thought, go read it—it’s at the end of Republic 10. I’ll wait.

Republic is one big mimesis: one big game. How do we deal with that?

If we decide not to do what most platonic scholarship through the course of history has done—if we refuse simply to ignore the clues that tell us we’re supposed to understand that Republic and all Plato’s dialogues are in fact themselves mimesis--, we could still say that what Plato in fact is trying to tell us with those clues is something different, that his dialogues may look like mimesis, but really aren’t mimesis. We would lose a great deal of the irony that makes Plato wonderful instead of mind-numbing, but we would gain a philosopher who makes the kind of sense we tend to like in a guy upon whom our livelihoods depend.

We would also, however, be ignoring an absolutely crucial piece of evidence.

In the work generally acknowledged to be his last, Laws, Plato returns to the themes of Republic and once again tries to imagine an ideal city-state. In Laws, however, the role of mimesis is fundamentally different.

Athenian: And, if any of the serious poets, as they are termed, who write tragedy, come to us and say-"O strangers, may we go to your city and country or may we not, and shall we bring with us our poetry-what is your will about these matters?"-how shall we answer the divine men? I think that our answer should be as follows:-Best of strangers, we will say to them, we also according to our ability are tragic poets, and our tragedy is the best and noblest; for our whole constitution [politeia] is an identificative performance [mimesis (or what did you think?)] of the best and noblest life, which we affirm to be indeed the truest tragedy. You are poets and we are poets, both makers of the same strains, rivals and antagonists in the noblest of dramas, which true law can alone perfect, as our hope is. Do not then suppose that we shall all in a moment allow you to erect your stage in the agora, or introduce the fair voices of your actors, speaking above our own, and permit you to harangue our women and children, and the common people, about our institutions, in language other than our own, and very often the opposite of our own. For a state would be mad which gave you this licence, until the magistrates had determined whether your poetry might be recited, and was fit for publication or not. Wherefore, O ye sons and scions of the softer Muses, first of all show your songs to the magistrates, and let them compare them with our own, and if they are the same or better we will give you a chorus; but if not, then, my friends, we cannot.

“Constitution,” politeia, is a word frequently translated “republic.” It also happens to be the title of the work of the same name. I don’t think Plato could have said any more clearly that his work, whether you want to call that work “philosophy” or “dialectic” (which really just means “conversation,” for goodness’ sake) or “meta-musical mimetic,” is the same kind of thing the people in the cave are doing. It’s mimetic. It’s ludic.

It’s going to take a few posts to unpack the implications of this passage. Let me wind this one up by telegraphing the connection to games a bit more clearly.

Bioshock.

Alright, fine--even I am willing to admit that Bioshock has received more than enough attention, so although I’m going to be talking in detail about its signal moment, the confrontation with Andrew Ryan, as I continue this series, let me say that despite Bioshock being the only mainstream game thus far that emphatically thematizes the disruption of the cave-culture-game, games are increasingly making use of their closed mimetic constitution to make at least a part of their meaning.

The example of Tale of Tales’ The Path (2009) (see also Kieron Gillen's extremely lucid review of the game), whatever we think about the game’s content (Plato’s lawmakers would, I believe, most certainly not approve) comes in nicely here. The theme of that game is arguably the inevitability of corruption, and the game uses the falsification of its own interactivity to express that theme. There is no way to avoid the wolves and yet play the game (to avoid the wolves is, precisely, not to play): to play the game is to go to meet your characters’ corruption, willingly or unwillingly. The theme itself is tragic, as opposed to philosophical, and thus precisely what Plato would seek to disqualify from enactment in the city of Laws.

The situation in Republic is much more complex and interesting. From the standpoint of Republic, The Path would seem to be disqualified not because of its theme but because of its mimetic nature. But here we come up against it, because Republic itself is mimesis—a mimesis that carries the story of how the philosopher tried to get the prisoners in the cave to turn their heads away from the shadow-puppet play, and failed. While The Path has no such grand and urgent intent, it’s nevertheless a game to be played on Plato’s new console: it makes the player perform as characters under the compulsion of mimesis. It’s an act of mimesis as Republic is an act of mimesis: both games make us sensible that, as The Matrix puts it, the world has been pulled over our eyes.

Loading the cave-culture-game: Plato puts down the controller

The last post was an attempt to outline the scope of this series of posts about Plato’s cave and video games. In this post, I want to make the connection between the homeric material I’ve been discussing through most of the Main Quest and the cultural move that Plato makes in the myth of the cave, the one I started talking about in the last post—a move that’s usually overlooked. Briefly, Plato makes a special and peculiar effort to make the cave’s shadow-puppet play interactive.

Socrates: I said, “ . . . if they [that is, the prisoners of the cave] were in the habit of conferring honours among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that [the man who had seen the real world outside the cave] would care for such honours and glories, or envy the possessors of them? . . .

“And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable) would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.”

What does Plato mean when he has the prisoners of the cave interacting with the shadows they see in that rudimentary game of observation, remark, prediction, and measurement?

It’s important to remember that when Plato introduces the idea of the shadow-puppet play itself (the play, that is, that's all the prisoners know of the entire world), he’s drawing on well-known cultural material. Socrates’ interlocutors know what a shadow-puppet play is, and Plato’s readers know what a shadow-puppet play is.

But when Plato says that the prisoners have competitions in observing, remarking, predicting, and measuring, he’s making stuff up, the way someone in the modern world would be if he said, “Imagine a movie theater, where everybody is tied down and can only see the movie. Now imagine that the people in the theater have contests in figuring out what’s going to happen next in the movies.” Movie theaters we know. Contests for predicting plot twists we don’t know, but can readily conceptualize.

So what does Plato mean? He means culture, obviously: the things that people do every day, in particular of course the things they do in Plato’s Athens, are for Plato like contests about a shadow-puppet play. Our lives, our never-ending quests for success and prosperity for ourselves and our families, are like a game in which we’re trying to get rewards for our interactions with the stuff we find in the world.

Life, Plato is saying, is like a video game.

Ken Wark has recently done some pretty interesting work along precisely these lines. His book Gamer Theory can be read as a meditation on the theme of interaction introduced into the myth of the cave by Plato.

My own mission in this post-series, though, is to use Plato’s insight not to talk about culture in general but to talk about games themselves.

But (you might object) isn’t that reading the myth of the cave incorrectly? Plato didn’t want to say anything specifically about video games (or shadow-puppet-plays, or imaginary contests at shadow-puppet plays), did he?

Actually, he did. Because the shadow-puppet play is very clearly an instance of mimesis, the cultural practice Socrates and his interlocutors have already spent a lot of time talking about, in the context of their discussion of education. Socrates demonstrates to his interlocutors satisfaction, if not to ours, that epic—that is homeric epic—Iliad and Odyssey—and especially tragedy and comedy make use of mimesis. The word is usually translated “imitation,” but in order to grasp what’s really going on in the cave we need to translate it as “performance as somebody else” or “identificative performance.” Mimesis is, more or less, playing pretend.

That discussion, again, was about education, and another overlooked part of the cave is the way Socrates introduces it. When we understand that introduction, however, we understand much more about what’s really going on in the cave, and how it relates to the rest of Republic. I’m going to give it to you in Greek, first, because there’s a word in there that doesn’t have a good single translation:

meta de tauta, eipon, apeikason toioutoi pathei ten hemeteran phusin paideias te peri kai apaideusias.

“After this,” I [Socrates] said, “liken to the following sort of state our nature concerning both education/culture [paideia] and non-education/non-culture [apaideusia].”

The cave is about education, and because Plato’s problem with education is mimesis and the shadow-puppet play is mimesis, the cave-culture-game is in fact not just about culture in general, but also about the mimesis’ that go to make up culture: Homer, tragedy, video games. It’s very much worth noting by the way that I’ve already spent a lot of time on this blog making it clear that homeric epic was essentially interactive, and that tragedy too was highly interactive in the way the city participated in putting on the productions and in judging them, and that there were highly prestigious competitions in both homeric epic and tragedy, for which the city awarded major prizes. The analogy with the cave-culture-game, that is, is quite exact.

That’s enough Plato for one post, I think, but it’s really only half the set-up, because although Plato puts down the controller of epic and tragedy, he picks up the philosophy-controller at the same time.

It’s very interesting, though, to turn at this point and look at a game like Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion, where a an ethical scale of “fame” versus “infamy” partly determines the course of the story. A microcosmic way to look at this side of Oblivion and games like it is to consider the example of the Dark Brotherhood storyline, which only opens to the player-character when he or she has committed a murder—something the player-character is not obliged by the game to do.

On the face of it, such an efficacious choice—that is, the choice to commit murder has a decisive effect on the narrative—seems to make Oblivion different from the cave-culture-game, which consists only of observation, remark, prediction, and measurement of shadows. The choice to commit murder would seem to be a mimesis of a real ethical decision, capable of making the player think about things that matter from an ethical point of view.

Aristotle would almost certainly agree that the choice to commit murder in Oblivion is capable of that. Viewed inside Plato’s cave, however, the choice looks much less efficacious than it might at first seem. Getting to do the Dark Brotherhood storyline is a reward like other rewards in the game—the choice is measured in terms of the reward within the game, and not in terms of whatever real rewards there might be for making real ethical choices.

Plato’s point is not just that Oblivion and homeric epic are only games (or epics) and thus have no effect on the “real world,” but more importantly that games and epics deceive their players into thinking that they and their choices matter in the “real world,” when in fact those things only matter within their closed systems. As film studies recognized in the 1970’s, the cave, like the cinema, is an apparatus along the lines of what Louis Althusser called the ideological state apparatus, among whose functions is to catch people in culture.

Like Oblivion, like homeric epic, the cave-culture-game is a mimesis that immerses its players so deeply that they’re committed to believing it real. As I proceed in this post-series, I’ll seek to show that Plato wasn’t out-to-lunch in seeing a danger there, but that he and Aristotle each give good reason to hope to avoid that danger and create constructive art in the process, and that game-designers and gamers alike, often unwittingly, are realizing those hopes.

Dangerous Immersion

This post takes us from homeric epic to a key moment of its reception in classical Athens, Plato. In it, I begin mini-series about Plato’s cave that’s pretty much a more fun version of a chapter I’m writing for an IGDA volume. Here’s what you need to know starting out:

1) Plato loved Homer—the sheer number of quotations from Homer, made in passing by Socrates and others, almost always provided to give unquestionable support to a commonly understood point, proves that beyond the shadow of a doubt.

2) Plato hated Homer—the sheer number of times Socrates tells us, especially in Republic, that Homer (whom he thought of as a single person, though at this blog we know better) was pretending to be something he was not, proves that beyond a shadow of a doubt.

3) Plato kicks Homer out of the ideal city in Republic on the grounds that his poetry does what Plato calls mimesis. Most people translate mimesis “imitation,” but I would prefer to translate it “identificative performance.” If you want to jaw about that, let’s do it in the comments. In any case, one of the things I’ve been trying to do in the Main Quest is show that that kind of identificative performance is also what we usually call “immersion.”

Plato’s idea, put forward in Republic, is that if you pretend to be somebody, or watch others pretend to be somebodies, you will become like them. For Plato, this power of mimesis presented dangers that, when he wrote Republic, seem to outweigh any possible positive impact. Looking at Plato and video games together, then, can be a way of looking at an essential question in video game criticism: How can, and how should, immersion fit into the rest of culture?

Even a brief look at Plato shows us that that question is both very old and very contentious from its beginning. Looking a little closer will do two things, I think—add complexity to our discussion of what video games are up to in our own culture, and give us some traction over that complexity.

Socrates: I said, “ . . . if they [that is, the prisoners of the cave] were in the habit of conferring honours among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that he would care for such honours and glories, or envy the possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer, “Better to be the poor servant of a poor master, and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after their manner?”

“Yes,” [Glaucon] said, “I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner.”

“Imagine once more,” I said, “such an one coming suddenly out of the sun to be replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have his eyes full of darkness?”

“To be sure,” he said.

“And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable) would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.”

It’s important to remind ourselves (and it will be even more important down the road) that Republic is Socrates’ first person narration of a very long day he spent at a friend’s house. The great dialogue—perhaps the greatest philosophical dialogue ever composed—is thus itself an identificative performance, a mimesis. More, it is a mimesis of a dialogue, which according to Plato’s own scale of harmfulness in Book 10 of Republic should be about as bad as representation can get.

The familiar myth of the cave, that is, is a mimesis in a mimesis in a mimesis. It finishes with the above passage, in which I contend Plato becomes the first video game designer. My point, as this mini-series develops, is going to be that the game of the cave—the competition for honors in commenting on the shadow-puppet play—gives us a framework for evaluating video games’ cultural potential and for shaping their cultural effects.

Even the choices, for example, of a game like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic(KOTOR) (often praised, of course, like other Bioware titles, for its “openness” in allowing the player to choose different ethical paths) appear from the perspective of the cave-game not to matter at all, since, like the honor-contests of the cave, the choices of the game are bounded by the game. We can argue with Plato on this score—as Aristotle argued with him in Poetics—but it’s hard to deny that whichever ending you finish KOTOR with, you’ve come to power and brought order to the galaxy. Light or Dark, you have reinforced a key part of a dominant ethic. While the cave-game doesn’t exhaust, by any means, the expressive power of KOTOR, it gives us a compelling index to its ethical dimension.

On the other hand, the relationship of the cave-game to the main point of the myth of the cave—philosophic education—tells us that there is in fact a way in which game ethics might be made to matter in culture: by making them disruptive. The ascended man is put to death, as Socrates was put to death, but look at the game Socrates is playing now: a game called Republic.

About (the lack of) the author

This post is a contribution to the March in-gathering of Blogs of the Round Table, Corvus Elrod’s wonderful community of video game critics.



It’s my belief that video games have the potential to help us let go, once and for all, of our belief in the author. What I’m going to say here in response to Corvus’ provocation is a lightly revised version of something I posted last summer, when I got into a very productive dispute with a few of my fellow ludamants (oh, why not—“ludophile” is a barbarism, in the technical sense, being a mixture of Greek and Latin).

Film studies is well known for the famous debate usually referred to as the “auteur debate.” Put very briefly, the central question was “Does (or should) a film have an author?”

The reason to ask the question with respect to film is that most of the time, there are a lot of people involved in the making of a single film. The two sides of the auteur debate were the people who thought it was a good thing to spread authorship around (they were the Hollywood types) and the people who thought it was better to have films controlled by a single vision (they were above all the French filmmakers of the 50’s and 60’s) as much as possible.

The old auteur debate has nothing on the problem of authorship (or, if you will, “artistship”) in video games, because instead of just debating whether Ken Levine did (or should) have complete control over, and should get all the credit for, Bioshock, there arises in the case of video games the question of whether the player has a role in the creation of the art.

The foundation of the debate remains the same, though—the notion, espoused by some, that true beauty (or artistry, or profundity, or whatever else you like to find in your aesthetic experiences) can arise only when a single composer (let’s use that word instead of “author” and “artist”) has the opportunity to communicate his ideas to his audience through the medium of a work of creative production (call it “art,” if you want). If the audience is somehow able to change the composition of the work, according to this model, the composer’s ideas may not be communicated as they should be, and true beauty may not arise.

I find that notion to be an interesting fiction—a fiction that can be very helpful both for a composer and for an audience from time to time. I don’t think there can be any doubt that great works of art have emerged from it.

But I would maintain very strongly that it is a fiction for all that. Composers have decisive effects on the interpretation of their works, but audience members have even more decisive effects, because they’re the ones who get to say what it meant to them and to their communities. (There are theoretical ways to talk about this topic, above all the century-old idea of the “intentional fallacy,” but there’s no need to bring them in to understand the matter.)

And when we contemplate much more complex, and much livelier, models of composition like ancient epic and video game, I think we see that trying to make the composer a controller of ultimate meaning, and to base one’s standard of beauty and profundity around that control, is unlikely to produce art that takes advantages of those models’ unique affordances. It seems to me, that is, that trying to argue that the best aesthetic experiences to be had in games come about through a conventional idea of authorship makes games into (weak?) imitations of written forms like novel.

Here’s another place where I strongly believe a comparison with ancient forms like epic and tragedy can be really helpful. Particpatory art can probably be forced to produce the same kind of deep meaning to be found in non-particpatory art, but I’m of the opinion that it realizes its potential more greatly, and does more for us and our civilization, when composers embrace the opportunity to allow players to participate in the creation of the art.

I think, actually, that that’s what Ken Levine did in Bioshock, because the moment of having to kill Andrew Ryan makes sense only in contrast to the interactivity the player has been allowed to enjoy elsewhere in the game, which in turn creates (in my opinion) a deep meaning that exists between the individual player’s individual choices and the composer’s control.

To make an analogy back to ancient epic one more time, Ken Levine's contribution is mostly like the pre-existing, immutable (though in actual fact slowly-changing-over-time) mythic story, while the player is mostly like the bard (and also like the audience, but we’ll talk about that some time down the road). The analogy is not exact, and that's one of the reasons I find it so exciting, because it means there's a lot of work still to be done. Game developers clearly get to do a lot of the work of the bard as well, in creating the game world and in defining certain crucial apsects of the interaction. But it’s in the interaction itself that I think some of the most profund (and the less profound) meanings of ancient epic arose, like the (non) Choice of Achilles, and will arise also in video games.

Is this the only way for epic, or games, to achieve true beauty? Of course not. It’s a pretty cool way, in my opinion, though. All of which leads to an answer I would propose to Corvus’s question to what extent a video game designer should exert control over his or her game—to whatever extent the designer wants, recognizing that the ultimate meaning of the designer’s work is always already out of his or her hands.

Phaeacian immersion

This is a post in the "Living Epic: the Main Quest" The earlier posts can be found through the "Main Quest" hub.

This post is about how adventure video games, which seem to be about various out-there characters like space marines, elven warriors, and canine divinities, come to be about you, and about how the story of Odysseus’ adventures comes to be about the people to whom he’s telling the story. If I do my job right, this post will build one important bridge across the gap between what happens inside games like Halo, World of Warcraft, and Fallout 3, and what happens outside them, between the people who play them and the people who make them.

A while back, I argued that Odysseus’ adventures have the important purpose of turning his audience into fanboys of Odysseus, just as the bards tried to turn their audiences into fans of the bards, just as many games are set-up to turn gamers into fans of the game-franchise.

Now I’m going to argue that the way Odysseus does that is to shape his performance so that his adventures aren’t just about him, but also about his audience, the Phaeacians.

When you start to think about the “adventures” of Odysseus this way, there’s evidence all over the place, from the Lotus-eaters to the Island of the Cattle of the Sun, but there’s one passage that seems to me to crystallize the thought. It’s the middle of the night, and the middle of Odysseus’ story about how he went to the land of the dead (we’re talking about the middle of Book 11). He’s just spent the last ten minutes or so talking about a series of royal women he met there, with little epitomes of their stories included. For one very important example, he runs into the mother/wife of Oedipus, whose name in the Odyssey is Epikaste (see what I mean about how chageable all this was?).

And then he says that it’s time for bed. His hosts first promise him presents, then beg him to keep telling the story. Alcinous, king of the Phaeacians, first says that he thinks Odysseus’ words have the ring of undeniable truth:

“Odysseus, we as we look at you do not imagine
that you are a deceptive or thievish man, the sort that the black earth
breeds in great numbers, people who wander widely, making up
lying stories, from which no one could learn anything. You have
a grace upon your words, and there is sound sense within them,
and expertly, as a singer would do, you have told the story. . .”

Then he asks,

“But come now, tell me this and give me an accurate answer:
Did you see any of your godlike companions, who once with you
went to Ilion and there met their destiny?”

Odysseus thanks his hosts, and then says that Yes, as a matter of fact, he did see both Agamemnon and Achilles there. He goes on to narrate the most memorable part of the entire adventures, his encounter with those who died at Troy.

There’s an interactivity here, as Alcinous plays Odysseus like a console—an interactivity that is clearly to a certain extent contrived by the bard to present a sort of ideal version of what the job of a bard is really like. Don’t forget that Odysseus only a short time before had asked Demodocus for a specific story; now Alcinous is doing the same. There is, however, a crucial difference: when Odysseus makes his request to Demodocus, he’s asking for a song such as might be sung by a bard. When Alcinous asks Odysseus if he saw any of the other Achaeans in the underworld, he’s very explicitly asking for what he considers the truth, but in a way that’s obviously intended to make the bard’s audience realize that Odysseus is making it all up, and in a way that makes it clear that Odysseus’ metier and his greatest talent is to make up exactly the story that will get him what he needs, by plunging his audience in the story so deep that they can’t tell truth from fiction. Now that’s immersion.

But it’s also immersion accomplished through a very specific mechanism that I think may prove to be the key to all immersion in the end: intersubjective self-performance. By that term I just mean telling a story about yourself (“self-performance”) to someone else (“intersubjective”). The reason Alcinous and the rest of the Phaeacians are so struck by Odysseus’ story is that he’s there in front of them, talking to them from the perspective of the man who was there, who did the things he’s telling about. Again, it’s paradoxical but true that this self-performance makes the story about its audience, people who can be counted on not to have been there, or they wouldn’t have the proper relationship with the story.

The reason for the immersion, the strange psychological audience-involvement, is that the storyteller himself makes the connection: I, Odysseus, the one telling you the tale am I, Odysseus, the one who saw these places and did these things. The masterstroke of the apologue (the adventure-tale of Odysseus that stretches from Book 9 to Book 12) is that the preposterous nature of the tales makes them both extraordinarily entertaining and strikingly thematic—that is, the immediately graspable “truth” that Odysseus is telling fish-stories makes his achievement in self-performance truly great: only he could sell these stories, and that makes his a sort of ideal model of the bardic occasion’s capacity for immersion.

How could that work in a situation where the storyteller is not Odysseus, the best storyteller imaginable, a man who can make you believe he was there? How could that work for a bard? I think we can look to adventure video games for the answer. What is it that makes us, like Alcinous, travel the circuit from immersion to interaction and back? The idea that it’s happening to us. What is it that makes us keep on through Halo or Bioshock or even Fallout 3? The idea that we have to do it, if it’s going to get done. We’re simultaneously Odysseus and Alcinous, and we look to the designers of our games as Odysseus looks to Demodocus, as the author of the occasion—not of the story, but of the occasion—for us to tell our tale so well that it feels undeniably true. Corvus Elrod has recently and compellingly explicated semiotics' concept of fabula in a very similar direction.

What’s more, the fictionality of Alcinous—that is, the fact that he’s a character from the fantasy-land of the Phaeacians where they have ships that travel instantaneously from port to port—tells us something else very important about the inherent intersubjectivity of this self-performance: it can be fictively constructed. When we play a single-player RPG, for example, even though there’s no one else in the room, we’re still doing intersubjective self-performance, strangely enough, for the NPC’s of the game. The occasionally-ludicrous citizens of Albion in the Fable games are only the most obvious example of the crucial connection between immersion and (fictive) intersubjectivity.

Odysseus’ tale-telling to the Phaeacians tells us that adventure video games’ interactivity and their immersiveness are fundamentally bound together (we knew that, of course, but perhaps we tend not to express it often in relation to other art forms), but also more importantly that the circuit formed by interactivity and immersion is fundamentally rooted in the performance of the self to others, whether real (think fellow-players in an MMO, or the official game forums and how invested gamers are in them) or imaginary (think, for example, of Sergeant Johnson or Andrew Ryan).

Where does that get us? It's been pointed out many times that, really, all art-forms are interactive, or, in Ian Bogost's term, procedural. In talking about how video games differ nevertheless from other (always) interactive art-forms, critics emphasize a huge range of different characteristics of games' storytelling and play mechanics. In relation to Odysseus' immersion of the Phaeacians through interactivity I think we see a model that might open a new part of that discussion: how narrative games provide a modern occasion for an ancient, fulfilling kind of self-performance--one that other art-forms don't provide because the interactivity-immersion circuit in them is almost invisible, whereas, in living epic, it's right there before your eyes.

Serious games, human values, and classics

This post is an index to the discussion we've just kicked off at VGHVI about what VGHVI should say and/or not say about the Serious Games Movement. My contribution has classics content (Plato!), as you might expect. It's also here on the wiki, where I'd love your suggestions on how to refine it.

Senior fellow Stephen Schafer of English at Digipen University has contributed "The Pscyhecology Game," a fascinating analysis of the Story-Based Game within a Jungian frame that I, as a myth-guy, find incredibly interesting despite not really being a Jung-fan.

My colleague in educational psychology at UConn, senior fellow Mike Young, will make his contribution soon.

Since this is my own blog, I hope I may be excused for saying, well, "Squee." This conversation already is a dream come true for me--interdisciplinarity takes patience, but when it happens it's pretty awesome--at least for a fanboy of reasoned discourse like me.

The forum thread for carrying on the debate engendered by the reasoned discourse is here. I hope you'll stop by and at least write a line or two about your own view of serious games and their movement.