Makin' kleos, makin' fanboys

This is a post in a series expressing the essence of my argument about how video games are actually ancient, how they reawaken the anicent oral epic tradition represented above all by the epics of the Homeric tradition, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The earlier posts can be found in the “Living Epic: The Main Quest” post, linked on the right. Note that this blog is aimed at an audience that includes non-gamers; I apologize for boring the gamers in my audience by going over such things as the basics of game genres, but I hope they might want to see that as an opportunity to print my posts out and give them to their non-gaming parents, teachers, and spouses.



In this post I’m going to begin to show that the practice of immersive play, whether in the shape of an epic or in the shape of a game, creates communities, paradoxically, by simultaneously making the story about you and making you a member of a group of people that the story is about.

One of the funny things about the comparison I’m making in this blog is that the bards of the Odyssey clearly would have been extremely enthusiastic gamers if video games had been available to them. I venture to say that whereas the bards who gravitated towards the Iliadic stories might well have stuck with their oral epic, thank you very much, the Odyssey bards would have dropped their lyres and picked up their controllers without a second thought.

The reason I venture to say that is that when Odysseus tells the Phaeacians the story of his adventures, he anticipates the “emergent gameplay” of games like Oblivion by about 2500 years.

I need to lay it out on the line that I’m convinced that the Odyssean bards (or perhaps just the more clever among them) wanted to make their audiences suspect very strongly that Odysseus is not being truthful in his account of his adventures. I could spend a long, long time producing all the evidence that I think points to that conclusion, but I’m hoping that I can at least sow a fatal seed of doubt in your mind by calling attention to the simple fact that if the adventures are true, the story would be at once the only true story Odysseus tells in the entire epic and the only story he tells that isn’t plausible on its surface.

At some point, we’ll probably come to talk about the other lies Odysseus tells in the epic in detail, but suffice it to say for now that in order to get home in the style he wants, he needs to tell some whoppers. These whoppers don’t involve man-eating giants, nor even singing ladies who’ll lead you to your death on the rocks. They’re eminently plausible stories of what might happen to a guy trying to make a success of himself in archaic Greece.

The adventures aren’t like that. They’ve got the man-eating giants, and the singing ladies, and a king whose fifty daughters and fifty sons are married to each other and who controls the winds, and a bona fide daughter of the sun, and a trip to the land of the dead. But even if you won’t go with me to the place where we say, “Odysseus is lying,” maybe you’ll at least let me say that Odysseus has a kind of bardic control over his story. He does, after all say

But your spirit was inclined to ask me about my mournful
sufferings, so that I must mourn and grieve even more.
What then first, what last should I recite to you?

That is, he gets to decide in what order to play the story, just as a bard had the very same power in recomposing the stories of the epic tradition, just as a gamer in a great many games (Grand Theft Auto, Oblivion and Mass Effect spring to mind) can decide which part of the game to play next.

But that should be old hat by now. The first thing the adventures add to the mix is that they’re focussed on the guy who’s telling them. Right after the bit about “what then first,” he says this:

Now first I will tell you my name, so that all of you
may know me, and I hereafter, escaping the day without pity,
be your friend and guest, though the home where I live is far away from you.
I am Odysseus, son of Laertes, known before all men
for the study of crafty designs, and my fame goes up to the heavens.

Not exactly modest, is he?

Now the word Richmond Lattimore translates “fame” is a very important word indeed. The Greek is kleos, and it can also be translated “reputation,” or (and this is how most people do it) “glory.” It’s a word that comes from a verb that means “to listen,” and, therefore, has everything to do with who hears about you in the tales that singers sing about you.

At this moment, Odysseus therefore has an opportunity no other epic hero ever has—to control his own kleos directly, as a gamer controls his own performance and his own prowess in the narrative of the game. The story of a game is about you, or about me—it’s about the player. Strangely, though, the game equivalent of kleos isn’t really becoming famous as a marvelously skillful gamer (a la the great Halo players like the Ogres and the other stalwart warrior of Major League Gaming), though there are comparisons to be made there, I believe. No, the real game equivalent of kleos is connecting with the audience, with the community.

After all, Odysseus has just had Demodocus give him standard epic fame and glory by singing the tale about the Trojan horse. That wasn’t just so that people a long way away would talk about him in some distant future. It was so someone would finally ask him who he is. Now, the purpose of telling the Phaeacians his name isn’t so they’ll say “Man, that Odysseus—he’s so cool!” The purpose is in order that they be friends, guests and hosts in the sacred traditions of xenia, guest-friendship.

That is, the activity of making kleos, as a bard or as a player, is about forming an affinity group—people who think the game is a cool game, who want to talk about it, who would go to the mat for it. It’s about making fanboys. Odysseus is going to turn the Phaeacians into Odysseus fanboys, just as the bard of Odyssey 9 is going to turn his audience into fanboys of the Odyssey, just as he the bard is already such a fanboy.

Or do you really think that Halo fans and World of Warcraft fans wouldn’t defend the fame and glory of their game to the death? If the Master Chief came to dinner, wouldn’t a Halo fan give him a ride home to UNSC HQ?

Why? Because the game is actually about the gamer, just as Odysseus’ story is actually about the Phaeacians. First I’ll tell you my name, so that I can be your friend. As we’ll see, Odysseus’ story and friendship change them profoundly as a community, just as games build, and then change their communities.

Next time: Phaeacian immersion.

A reflection on the importance of shooting games, in the light of ancient epic

Bloggers whom I respect greatly, Michael Abbott in particular, have over the last few months been registering discontent with the continuing dominance of the shooter—loosely defined as any game in which the primary gameplay mechanic involves shooting a firearm—in the games industry. I share the sentiment, to the extent that I hope that games will keep expanding the range of stories they can tell and facets of the human condition on which they can shed light.

I’m very tired of shooters, myself, having played a great many of them over the last few years—some of them extraordinarily good as vehicles of immersion in tales of death and glory. I want to play more games like Pixeljunk Eden, the wonderful art-game released this week for the Playstation 3. But I worry that we might let our desire for richer games stop us from understanding how important, and how meaningul, shooters are as a sort of baseline for game-narrative.

I say that because of my appreciation of the books of the Iliad that are usually called the “battle books.” In these books, epic heroes kill one another with great abandon and in spectacular ways. Here’s a sample, from Book 4, in Richmond Lattimore’s translation:

Antilochos was first to kill a chief man of the Trojans,
valiant among the champions, Thalysias’ son, Echepolos.
Throwing first, he struck the horn of the horse-haired helmet,
and the bronze spearpoint fixed in his forehead and drove inward
through the bone; and a mist of darkness clouded both eyes
and he fell as a tower falls in the strong encounter.
As he dropped, Elphenor the powerful caught him by the feet,
Chalkodon’s son, and lord of the great-hearted Abantes,
and dragged him away from under the missiles, striving in all speed
to strip the armor from him, yet his outrush went short-lived.

It goes on like that, and on, and on, and on. (One analogy with the battle books that I find very compelling is MMO grinding, the game mechanic in games like World of Warcraft in which players must slay enormous numbers of the same enemy, but that’s for some posts down the road.)

The battle books clearly represent a very early layer of Homeric epic—the kind of thing warriors and warrior wanna-be’s would have loved to listen to at a feast. The analogy with shooters like Halo and Half-life seems pretty clear to me. What we might call the expressive range (that’s Iroquois Pliskin, following up on Michael) of this material, whether Iliadic or game-ish, is not great: it consists of various interesting ways in which people might kill other people in battle. What I want to point out, however, is that the meaning of the profound bits of the Iliad (like the ones I’ve talked about before) could not have come into being without the battle books, because it is in the battle books that prowess is defined, and the themes of epic (both the Iliad and the Odyssey) revolve around how we are to understand prowess.

To take it a sort of fundamental step back, playing war is something boys do. Oh, man, did I do it myself. I did it to such an extent that I was convinced, at around the age of 10, that I was going to go to Annapolis and become an admiral. I played with my cap gun, and my ship models; my ancient Greek herdsman must have done it with stick-swords and ships made out of wood instead of plastic; my five year old son does it with his squirt gun, despite the fact that my wife and I have assiduously kept the slightest mention of armed conflict from his ears.

Unless you know what glory is, the idea that glory is hollow makes precisely no sense. The battle books and the dominance of shooters tell me that glory is fundamentally the feeling one gets from annihilating one’s opponents with the coolest possible technology in a culturally-approved situation, and that other versions of it are metaphorical and transferred. Thank God we don’t actually have to kill anybody to become thoroughly acquainted with the feeling, and the notion. Thank God, that is, for the battle books, and for shooters.

Should we have peaceful games like Pixeljunk Eden, in addition to our shooters? Of course. Am I tired of shooters? Of course. But I really believe that the peaceful games would never seem quite so peaceful had I not played so many hours of Halo and Call of Duty.

Communal immersion, ancient and modern

This is a post in a series expressing the essence of my argument about how video games are actually ancient, how they reawaken the anicent oral epic tradition represented above all by the epics of the Homeric tradition, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The earlier posts can be found in the “Living Epic: The Main Quest” post, linked on the right. Note that this blog is aimed at an audience that includes non-gamers; I apologize for boring the gamers in my audience by going over such things as the basics of game genres, but I hope they might want to see that as an opportunity to print my posts out and give them to their non-gaming parents, teachers, and spouses.



After Odysseus gets what he wants from Demodocus at the end of Book 8 of the Homeric Odyssey, and Alcinous has stopped Demodocus from singing so that he can ask why the hell Odysseus is crying into a curtain, Odysseus does, to a certain extent, fulfill his part of the bargain he made with the bard to sing the bard’s praises if the bard sang his. In the process, he gives us what I would hold up as a candidate for the first depiction of immersion in the Western literary tradition:

Surely indeed it is a beautiful thing to listen to a singer
such as this one here, like the gods in his singing;
for I, at least, think there is no practice that is more pleasurable
than when happiness arises among all the people,
and the feasters throughout the palace listen to a singer,
sitting in order. . .
But your spirit was inclined to ask me about my mournful
sufferings, so that I must mourn and grieve even more.
What then first, what last should I recite to you?

It’s the “sitting in order” listening to the singer and its connection to the pleasure of the occasion (a superlative pleasure at that, since Odysseus says there’s no other practice that has more pleasure), that I think makes it immersion. We know this image well from our own culture as well—it’s the same thing that happens at a really good movie, when a hundred people are sitting in their seats not noticing that there are other people next to them, not even aware that they themselves are breathing, so transported are they by the story.

There are plenty of other moments in the Odyssey that I could point to as filling out this picture, above all the moment when Odysseus pauses in his own story and the Phaeacians “stay, stricken to silence,” but the picture of a community immersed is the one I want to focus on, because it seems at first so different from what goes on in our game-rooms or at our computers, when we’re playing a game like Oblivion or Halo.

There may be something to be mourned, there, if we stop getting together to sit in order throughout the palace, but I doubt we will stop (especially since sports are going to go on, seeing that we have bodies, WALL*E notwithstanding, and people aren’t going to stop liking to act out plays).

Much more important, however, is the assured survival of the fundamentally imaginative, creative, and positive construction of community through immersion. What Odysseus is talking about is a cultural practice that had a crucial role in making the just-starting-out ancient Greek city-state (the famous idea of the polis) what it was, and what it became. The word I translate “pleasure,” is kharis which also, and more radically, means “reciprocal benefit.” In the early city-state, kharis made the community go round—people bearing kharis towards one another made up the fabric of the growing society.

That kharis is there in gaming culture. I would suggest that it’s more there in gaming culture than it is in film culture (though cineasts form some strong communities too!). The connection between the imaginative activity of gaming and the bonds we gamers form with one another is almost mystical. Those bonds are expressed the more strongly in the strong things we will occasionally say to one another, and hopefully be sorry afterward. Those bonds also enliven us to an extent so great that we will sometimes find our commitment to our gaming communities coming into conflict with our commitment to the communities of our families. Is it not so?

“Almost mystical,” I wrote, but not completely mystical, I would say. I believe that that connection is susceptible of analysis, and I intend to analyze it. Good thing for me Odysseus is intent, as the story of his adventures begins, on making it clear why he thinks he can out-bard the bard, and tell a story that produces an immersion even deeper than Demodocus’ produces, and that will form precisely the community that will worship the ground Odysseus walks on, and bring him home.

Next time: it’s not all about you, Odysseus! (Or is it?)