tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-41518569695786315232024-02-07T01:56:27.840-08:00Living Epic: Video Games in the Ancient WorldRoger Travis, Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Connecticut, explains how games and gamer culture are much older and better things than most people think.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.comBlogger130125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4151856969578631523.post-39248236034549348842012-07-11T06:54:00.000-07:002012-07-18T11:47:29.943-07:00The Rules of the Text series, at Play the PastThis post is an index to my posts in the <i>Rules of the Text</i> series, at <i><a href="http://playthepast.org/">Play the Past</a></i>. I'm starting to think of my post-series as books; I invite you to do the same, if you find it helpful.<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li><a href="http://www.playthepast.org/?p=2417">A modest proposal for viewing literary texts as rulesets, and for making game studies beneficial to the publick</a><br />
</li>
<li><a href="http://www.playthepast.org/?p=2522">The rules of song and the rules of myth: playing with dragons and other mythohistorical archetypes</a><br />
</li>
<li><a href="http://www.playthepast.org/?p=2574">Transmedia and tabletops</a><br />
</li>
<li><a href="http://www.playthepast.org/?p=2647">Performances and operations</a><br />
</li>
<li><a href="http://www.playthepast.org/?p=2681">A galactic ruleset under siege: the <i>Mass Effect 3</i> controversy</a><br />
</li>
<li><a href="http://www.playthepast.org/?p=2728">Detour to the Magic Kingdom</a><br />
</li>
<li><a href="http://www.playthepast.org/?p=2778">Choice, multiculturalism, and irrevocability in <i>Mass Effect</i>, part 1</a><br />
</li>
<li><a href="http://www.playthepast.org/?p=2836">Choice, multiculturalism, and irrevocability in <i>Mass Effect</i>, part 2</a><br />
</li>
<li><a href="http://www.playthepast.org/?p=2926">Irrevocability and meaning in <i>Mass Effect</i></a><br />
</li>
<li><a href="http://www.playthepast.org/?p=3006" target="_blank">The Rules of the Text</a></li>
</ol>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4151856969578631523.post-6407569685498548172012-04-07T11:23:00.002-07:002012-04-07T11:25:13.678-07:00First thoughts on “EMS” (“Effective Military Strength”) in Mass Effect 3<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Here begin the spoilerish posts. If you haven’t finished yet, I sincerely hope you’ll come back once you have. I’m hopeful that we have in </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mass Effect </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">material for many years of analysis, that in its scale and the way that scale exposes important features of its ruleset (in which, as is my <a href="http://www.playthepast.org/?p=2681" target="_blank">wont</a>, I include what’s generally called its “content”) these games will stand as a landmark if not as a classic. The only negative outcome of the incredible ferment of discussion about the ending of the trilogy over the past few weeks would be if the dispute were a nine days’ wonder.</span></p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The thing that struck me most forcefully as I watched the credits roll had nothing at all, on the surface of it, to do with the strange and apparently inconsistent events of the ending, with their echoes of so many well-known sci-fi (non-)resolutions (</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Matrix</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is the one that I felt the strongest resonance with, but I could name many, many more). What struck me was that I knew instantly that in some way I had not had the range of choices at the end that I could have had, and that this constraint (this </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">rule</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, or rather this </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">mechanic</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) was operative because I had not played enough multiplayer recently enough.</span><br />
</p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Such tedium to describe the bizarre system of Galactic Readiness. It comes down to BioWare breaking the apparent boundaries of the gamespace (also known as Huizinga’s Magic Circle and as the possibility space), papering that rupture over with the veneer of a galactic war, and laughing all the way to the bank as players purchase gear for their multiplayer characters on the plan of Wizards of the Coast’s brilliant </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Magic: The Gathering</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> model, where the player (or rather, consumer, or perhaps player-consumer, in this case) gets the wonderful little frisson so well known to anyone who’s entered a casino, of pulling the slot-machine lever to see if this time s/he’s got a piece of gear worth having.</span><br />
</p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you play enough multiplayer, in your single-player story you do not suffer a crippling weakening of your Effective Military Strength, and narrative possibilities are. . . different. I say “different” where most players would undoubtedly say “worse”: people (characters) die, when you don’t play multiplayer. More, your BIG CHOICES are fewer. I had two of the three possible, and when I had made my choice the final cinematic indicated pretty clearly that my failure to play multiplayer had cost Liara, my consort, her life.</span><br />
</p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You can point to other examples of important choices in other games, but I defy you to produce anything that truly compares, above all when it occurs at the end of 120 hours of practomime.</span><br />
</p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s also in my view consonant with the thematics of the narrative ruleset of </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mass Effect </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">in an absolutely extraordinary way. I’ll explore this further as time goes by and my thoughts unfold, but it’s difficult to escape the impression that BioWare is here in the role of the Reapers, especially if we subscribe to </span><a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2012/03/21/mass-effect-3-ending-the-indoctrination-theory-is-the-easy-way-out/"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Indoctrination Theory</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: we can’t tell whether our choices mean anything, we consumer husks.</span></P>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4151856969578631523.post-12971375525658452452012-04-07T05:16:00.002-07:002012-04-07T05:26:51.648-07:00consummātum, et nōn consummātum, est (Mass Effect)<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 21px;">I finished it (<i>Mass Effect 3</i>). The <a href="http://www.playthepast.org/?p=2681" target="_blank">controversy</a> over the ending forced it upon me, since I was feeling less and less qualified to discuss the game as more and more people were having discussions </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 21px;">about it </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 21px;">in which I couldn't participate. I vow to return to my variegated playthroughs, but for the information of anyone who was following those posts, I finished on Perfect Paragon, but had to cut corners to reach the end, which is in itself a very interesting opportunity for future analysis.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 21px;">The ending is in my opinion of mixed quality, and my guess is that it's the quality problems that have driven much of the player-protest. The true difficulty is in my opinion that so much of <i>Mass Effect</i> is so good, so far beyond anything we've played before, that the bits that are run-of-the-mill RPG fare and run-of-the-mill sci-fi fare really hurt.</span>
<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 21px;">Ending this thing in a way that lives up to the heights to which <i>Mass Effect </i>has soared, especially on the very first try and in the development situation in which the <i>Mass Effect 3 </i>team must have found themselves, was almost certainly an impossible task. Thank goodness they're getting another shot. There are things they won't be able to fix, of course, like the sheer number of times you're told that "This is it," which eventually made me feel like some terrible Reaper-writer was shooting a red ray of exposition into my skull. But I can certainly see how some new cinematics would make a big difference. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">The quality issue is obscuring, however, more interesting problems of choice and irrevocability. To those I shall return.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4151856969578631523.post-29079766768055006962012-03-15T06:58:00.001-07:002012-03-15T06:58:14.845-07:00Fresh Renegade for VGHVI, 15 March: planTo enliven the conversation tonight in our <a href="http://vghvi.org/2012/03/11/gaming-session-mass-effect-12/" target="_blank">VGHVI playversation</a> about <i>Mass Effect 1 </i>and <i>2, </i>I'm going to start a new renegade, as a kind of prequel to <a href="http://livingepic.blogspot.com/2012/03/triumphs-and-sorrows-of-hasty-renegade.html" target="_blank">Hasty's career</a>, which actually began only in <i>ME2</i>. But I'm going to use the <a href="http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Mass_Effect:_Genesis" target="_blank">Genesis DLC</a>, at least as an opening gambit, because I've been fascinated by the idea of that sort of performance materials since I heard about.<br />
<br />
So: the plan is to create a Fresh Renegade, who might be a plausible antecedent for Hasty, and see if the performance process reveals to me anything about the transhistorical nature of the epic hero, always recreated at the same time afresh and as a variation on his ancient self.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4151856969578631523.post-16488513582859186422012-03-14T19:36:00.001-07:002012-03-14T19:39:29.633-07:00Time out for (a) "Journey"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0kWUXoNdVEhibM5OpBUrXnZTpL2djO8xkpMx-WQiJwFg2d9rQQ6ShkM30v45mMWJT2VzhlJwNTWCjK95QUO4V0xbW5Tvf6XnBcQjTdaW-1tzxzAB5P5PMWTVTNei3wSFODiwsV1_imAfE/s1600/6a00e398244402883301348819e495970c-500wi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0kWUXoNdVEhibM5OpBUrXnZTpL2djO8xkpMx-WQiJwFg2d9rQQ6ShkM30v45mMWJT2VzhlJwNTWCjK95QUO4V0xbW5Tvf6XnBcQjTdaW-1tzxzAB5P5PMWTVTNei3wSFODiwsV1_imAfE/s320/6a00e398244402883301348819e495970c-500wi.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
I don't feel adequate in the slightest to the task of talking about <i><a href="http://thatgamecompany.com/games/journey/">Journey</a></i> after only playing an hour of it. But I want to register here that I've started this new practomime, and it makes me think that a relationship between ethics and aesthetics, arising out of inherited mechanics but transcending them, is gathering steam.<br />
<br />
Everything you hear about the "multiplayer" (scare-quotes because it's not multiplayer according to most previous understandings of the term) is true, but only scratches the surface. There is much work to do here, both in elaborating the practomime (that is, playing the game) and in reading its effects.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4151856969578631523.post-86425020041592619172012-03-14T08:57:00.001-07:002012-03-14T14:44:38.187-07:00Pragmatic Paragon, 14 March: ABOR<span style="font-family: inherit;">"ABOR" stands for After-Bardic-Occasion Report. It's an assignment I use in my (Gaming) Homer course; it seems to get modern bards like my students to the heart of the performative side of digital practomime pretty directly. Here's mine for today's session.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><br />
<b id="internal-source-marker_0.021216032560914755"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pragmatic Paragon really does feel like he’s my real character, because especially of his face, which I had to reconstruct due to the face importing <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57395476-1/mass-effect-3-face-bug-ruins-gamers-weekend/" target="_blank">glitch</a>; Perfect Paragon is based on the same character, ultimately, from ME1, as this pragmatist, but I went with the default face at the start of ME3 when hit with the import glitch on Perfect's creation. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Spent some time with the new search and recover mechanic, and actually like it--the “real first” playthrough thing has merit; just as being lost on Hasty Renegade destroyed my appreciation of the landscape, having to figure out the changes in the exploration system on Hasty destroyed my engagement, and thus any pleasure in my performance, of those initial fumblings through the galaxy-map. Now on Pragmatic, though, it feels, well, pragmatic to recover some salvage.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ME3's search and recover mechanic is more straightforward than mining in ME2, which I grew to love but which was very time-consuming. The changes have an upside and a downside, I think (I miss the way my controller shook when I hit a rich vein), but the basic mechanic is the same, and something well worth thinking about especially in relation to my character-performances.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I took this note: cannot figure out the loadout screen for the life of me; then I put in some time and figured it out. Either it's horrendously-designed, or I'm getting old, but I even eventually was able to master the weight mechanic, which gave me a small "aha" moment at the very least about the fact that I had gone from a spammer of Singularity to a waiter-for-Singularity-to-recharge.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A final verdict for now on "real first" performances--that is, second performances in which you get things right for the first time: all in all, there is some value in encountering performance materials for the actually first time, just as there is some value in sight-reading music--or sight-reading homeric Greek, for that matter. </span></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The virtuosic peformances that nourish our souls, though, always come later.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And then there's Garrus being dead, through my obtuseness, in this career. “Where would Garrus have been?” asks Liara. “Right in the thick of it,” Pragmatic responds. Irrevocability. Does this moment exist this way if there are no performance materials where Garrus is alive? Not a chance.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Topics for analysis suggested by this session's peformance:</span></span></b><br />
<ul style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<li style="font-weight: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Narrative combat difficulty: most importantly, I think the friendly critics of this approach don't understand how bad I am at combat. Perhaps a very good example of the absolute essentiality of peformance in making rulesets legible--or, to put it another way, how it's the instanced performance of the player that we can and should read, rather than the ruleset itself.</span></span></li>
<li style="font-weight: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Absence of dead characters: having Garrus just not be there, in a place where he "should" have been there, is really very jarring. I need to unpack that "should."</span></span></li>
<li style="font-weight: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Different faces on my paragons: in what way does it matter what my character looks like, when that appearance mechanic is so completely isolated from the rest of the mechanics of the practomime? Is there a sense in which I myself, the player, constitute a link in the game's ruleset between the appearance mechanic and the rest of the ruleset?</span></span></li>
</ul>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4151856969578631523.post-37294792019568333022012-03-14T07:21:00.001-07:002012-03-14T08:39:59.906-07:00Pragmatic Paragon, 14 March: planningMy plan for today's session: take the Pragmatic Paragon in where the Hasty Renegade went yesterday; don't get lost this time; see whether not getting lost makes me feel more heroic.<br />
<br />
Pre-session question: what is the importance of the second playthrough? Is there a sense in which a second playthrough is actually somehow a "real" first playthrough? Focus for that question: the issue of getting lost. Because I spent so much time being lost in my Hasty Renegade session last night, it feels like today's Pragmatic Paragon session will be my "real" introduction to the performance materials.<br />
<br />
Is there then a "rehearsal" dynamic at work in practomime that I haven't noticed yet?Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4151856969578631523.post-51156324186183778042012-03-13T19:29:00.001-07:002012-03-13T19:29:53.885-07:00The triumphs and sorrows of Hasty RenegadeI always forget that whatever career I play first, the dominant feeling of much of that career will be frustration, as I run around trying to figure out where the next objective is. Thus, as I moved towards the completion of an important diplomatic cum military mission to rescue a Turian VIP, I spent ten minutes running in circles shouting "Why don't I have a map? Why don't I have a map?"<br />
<br />
I did, thankfully, arrive in the nick of time.<br />
<br />
One thing I notice looking at the "War Situation" through my Renegade's eyes; I feel real despair based on the amount of time it will take to build the resources, and the learning curve involved in figuring out how to do so. Along with that feeling comes the idea that it's well to encounter these odds with this character: she's tough enough to take it, and tough enough even to lose. I have the feeling that I wouldn't want to let my Paragons try to find their ways through this maze of mechanics.<br />
<br />
It's this interference of player concerns and performative concerns, of course, that I'm trying to analyze. I take my inspiration from the way the bards of <i>Iliad </i>and <i>Odyssey </i>(particularly the latter) let their own concerns as bards shape their tellings of the stories of their heroes. Immersion is nice, but if we want to understand how it works, we have to see it in the context of performances by players who live outside the world into which their performances immerse them; pretending that there's some, I don't know, "Magic Circle" that prevents my frustrating at not having a map from mattering within the gamespace would be silly.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4151856969578631523.post-14376416793288105512012-03-13T04:51:00.003-07:002012-03-13T04:51:51.867-07:00The sieve of reflectionAs this new way to blog about living epic emerges, one thing that seems to make sense is to intersperse occasional reflective posts that will function as a sort of intellectual sieve, and help figure out what if anything from from the past day or so of play is worth keeping around for analysis.<br />
<br />
Some candidates:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Hasty Renegade has always had a very interesting relationship with Garrus, and so seeing him alive last night (I was truly convinced that he was one of the four I'd lost in this career) was a really narratively significant moment, but in a way that took me out of the diegetic situation, since Hasty Renegade herself obviously couldn't have forgotten that Garrus was alive. In an ideal medium, perhaps, it would be possible for me to play in such a way that my surprise at seeing Garrus somehow did get communicated into my performance, but that wouldn't change the bifurcation of performance and player--the reason this moment was interesting and potentially enlightening for my understanding of my performance and of who I am becoming as a result of it was that my extra-performative surprise resonated with the feeling I've always attributed to Hasty Renegade of professional admiration of Garrus from a distance, tempered with a healthy dose of rivalry. Since they're both snipers, they very rarely go on missions together, and when Hasty Renegade explored Garrus' dialogue tree in <i>Mass Effect 2 </i>I was conscious of reacting with a mixture of sympathy and renegade-ish disdain for his letting his emotions get the better of him no matter how much he pretended not to be. This dynamic is potentially interesting in the way it provides a perspective on interaction between inside the story and outside the story through player-performance.</li>
<li>"Nonrepresentative" keeps bubbling to the top of my mind. My question is "Nonrepresentative of what?" My preliminary answer "the tradition." For me at least this seems to be the first direct evidence of communication of a tradition that in the days of the bards was associated above all with two things: professionalism, and the Muses. To tell me that my <i>Mass Effect 3 </i>performance is nonrepresentative is to tell me that I lack a relation to some font of game-performance inspiration. Many blog-posts in that vein, I think, to come.</li>
</ul>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4151856969578631523.post-75116318745532984432012-03-12T20:05:00.000-07:002012-03-12T20:05:00.801-07:00The siren song of the RenegadeAfter some multiplayer with AcademyofDrX that came out of the blue, I've decided to take my Renegade in to rescue the Turian Primarch. There's something about her that makes me think she wants to be the first into the galactic battle, and that she wouldn't let the Paragons get in ahead of her.<br />
<br />
The difficulty is that the amount of time I have to spend running around looking for things suits my feckless Paragons much better than it does her. . .<br />
<br />
And hello, Garrus! Thought I'd lost him in this career.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4151856969578631523.post-85812632228865708662012-03-12T18:35:00.001-07:002012-03-12T18:35:29.487-07:00Planning my performancesCareer 3 ("Perfect Paragon") is going to be my cautious/highly-elaborated career. I'll take every assignment, search every bit of space that seems to have a reasonable likelihood of yielding materiel to help the cause.<br />
<br />
Career 1 ("Hasty Renegade") is going to be my "How much can I salvage?" career. I'll go straight for the jugular and continue her tradition of cutting corners in the interest of getting results.<br />
<br />
Career 2 ("Pragmatic Paragon") is going to be the career I try to play for verisimilitude. I'll attempt to react quickly, in accordance with my ideas of what I myself would do, in the interest of trying to find my "real" relationship to the character, outside of the kind of analysis I want to try to do on 1 and 3, and more importantly among the careers.<br />
<br />
That said, it probably makes sense to play out career 2 before I do the more involved 3 and 1. Right now, I'm in Perfect Paragon, cautiously exploring the galaxy map and considering the Cerberus outpost Admiral Hackett has advised my PC to deal with. I'll probably see if I can take care of that, then switch to Pragmatic Paragon.<br />
<br />
I'm still on Narrative combat.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4151856969578631523.post-91292973878074778152012-03-11T05:46:00.003-07:002012-03-11T06:58:56.793-07:00"A nonrepresentative Mass Effect experience"Those are the words with which <i>Mass Effect 3</i>'s description of "Narrative" difficulty closes, in the game's options-menu.<br />
<br />
When one of my students, already tens of hours into the game on Thursday (when I was perhaps an hour in on <a href="http://livingepic.blogspot.com/2012/03/living-epic-making-it-really-live.html" target="_blank">career paths 1 and 2</a>), told me about the two "Narrative" settings--which I hadn't seen, and hadn't read about since I have such a hard time distinguishing hype from actual news that I no longer read about games ahead of time unless (see <i><a href="http://livingepic.blogspot.com/2010/09/halo-reach-as-practomime.html" target="_blank">HALO</a></i>) I'm critically invested in the hype itself--I wanted to cancel class and drive home instantly to set my game on these settings and see how it made me feel.<br />
<br />
I still haven't used the "No Decisions" dialogue option, located under a section of Options labelled "Narrative," which, if I understand correctly, turns conversations into cutscenes, but I played for an hour yesterday with the "Narrative" combat option.<br />
<br />
I loved it. When a homeric bard sang a battle-lay, the spears went straight through the warriors' hearts, unless the battle were a very distinctive one--you know, a boss-fight. The bards knew that their practomimes made their audiences feel more heroic that way, just as makers of westerns and war-movies know that enemies always die quickly.<br />
<br />
I suspect, by the same token, that I'll hate "No Decisions" dialogue, which, at least according to my initial reaction to the idea of the mechanic, would have the opposite effect on my feeling about the performance-materials of the game. I plan to save one of my careers, turn that option on today for half an hour or so, then load the save and say goodbye to "No Decisions" dialogue forever. I can't imagine that BioWare isn't tracking how many people are using which options, so I'll be very curious as to whether we either hear anything about the statistics or, maybe more importantly, "No Decisions" dialogue returns in future games.<br />
<br />
"Narrative" combat is not new; both BioWare and Bethesda games have always had ways to make things easier on older players' aging reflexes. What <b>is</b> new is calling the lowest setting "Narrative," and characterizing that setting as "nonrepresentative." I can't wait to unpack this mechanic further, but one wonders whether the first bard to sing about Achilles' withdrawal from battle, and the first bard to sing about Odysseus lying, cheating, and stealing his way home, were similarly characterized as "nonrepresentative."<br />
<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4151856969578631523.post-19380389427161631152012-03-10T13:56:00.000-08:002012-03-10T16:32:11.532-08:00Why I want to trace these Mass Effect careersHere's what I'm most interested in. To what extent does one career actually make my performance either 1) substantively different (by "substantively" I mean different in what gets coded into a save file) or 2) emotionally different--that is, in the way it feels to me--in another career, and why, and how? I can already see that an irrevocable decision made in one career makes it feel very different to make a different choice in another career, even with something as simple as the Normandy's surgeon.<br />
<br />
I suppose that in the back of my mind there's a looming question of a nearly odious nature: with <i>Mass Effect 3,</i> has BioWare created a work unlike any previous work of art in the combination of the plasticity of its performance materials and the irrevocability of the most important choices it affords?Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4151856969578631523.post-43403817991176479042012-03-10T13:25:00.002-08:002012-03-10T13:42:26.996-08:00Mass Effect career 3 choicesI don't know if this will be valuable even to me, but why not?<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>"Acquired war asset" Diana Allers (journalist)</li>
<li>Went to hospital before council to see Ashley (couldn't even bear not to do this on my Renegade; on that career it's Kaiden, not Ashley, who's alive, and I'm considering romancing him)</li>
<li>Saw Dr. Chakwas alive (dead on my other careers, I think) in the hospital. Took her as Normandy's surgeon. Can't deny that that felt awesome. In particular, it felt awesome precisely because Chakwas is dead in my other careers, and that I didn't take a surgeon at all in career 2.</li>
<li>Thinking I may start a fourth career to see what the default for the non-player of the first two games is like.</li>
<li>Went into Bailey's office before council and saw my old journalist nemesis. Saul Tigh as Bailey is something I'd love to spend some time thinking about.</li>
<li>Discovered, and made extensive use of, the X button to get through long cutscenes.</li>
<li>Did not use Renegade power on journalist nemesis; was typing and failed to use Paragon power and so had to re-load and go through hospital and council again.</li>
<li>Bought all volumes of poetry at hospital Sirta terminal.</li>
<li>Took the Paragon power, and am overjoyed. Asked journalist-nemesis, to whom I'd been nice in ME and whom I'd punched in ME2 to "keep asking the hard questions."</li>
</ul>
<div>
Am using the voice commands as much as possible in this career. I still need time, I think, but being able to perform a version of the lines is really interesting, and may be a literal game-changer for me.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4151856969578631523.post-84013012282327111292012-03-10T12:48:00.000-08:002012-03-11T15:22:42.397-07:00Living Epic--making it really live?Yet another idea for re-purposing this blog in the wake of my activity on <a href="http://playthepast.org/?author=7"><i>Play the Past</i></a>: keeping track of my actual living of epic, beginning with <i>Mass Effect 3</i>.
My ME3 careers:<br />
<ul>
<li>Female renegade, soldier, sniper with fully-developed adrenalin rush. She cut corners in ME2 and ended up losing four of her companions. Romanced no one.</li>
<li>Male paragon, adept, spammer of Singularity. Messed up at the end of ME2 and similarly lost four companions. Romanced Liara in ME and no one in ME2.</li>
<li>Male paragon, adept, spammer of Warp. Got the 100% ending of ME2. Romanced Liara in ME and Jack in ME2.</li>
</ul>
<div>
Here's why I think this will be worth doing: I don't know of any other accounts of multiple parallel performances specifically directed at analyzing the performance materials and their relation to the actual performances.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The first thing I'm interested in talking about is the "Narrative" combat difficulty, which, I'm told by the game itself, gives "a nonrepresentative Mass Effect experience." It may be nonrepresentative, but when you're playing 3 careers, it's really great.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4151856969578631523.post-62807302584303906172012-01-08T13:32:00.001-08:002012-01-08T13:33:49.990-08:00What Roger's up to, January 2012<ul>
<li>In talks with awesome people like <a href="http://malvasiabianca.org/">David Carlton</a> and <a href="http://xgalatea.blogspot.com/">Mattie Brice</a> about making two <a href="http://vghvi.org/">VGHVI</a> Thursdays a month into podcasts, one of them being the first Thursday symposium, the other being a single-player night (starting with <i>Skyrim, </i>huzzah) probably on third Thursdays. Stay tuned.</li>
<li>Finishing up my submission to GLS8.0, a worked example about mapping learning objectives to play objectives in <i>Operation ΜΗΝΙΣ.</i></li>
<li>Getting unexpectedly excited about <a href="http://thatcampgames.org/">THATCamp Games</a> in less than two weeks. The <a href="http://thatcampgames.org/bootcamps/">bootcamp</a> the practomime team is going to run may be a model for the future.</li>
<li>Looking forward to <i>Operation ΚΛΕΟΣ </i>3.0 in the spring semester, which starts a week from tomorrow. I think I may finally have nailed the balance among Homer, video games, and the course ARG.</li>
<li>Looking forward to using <i>Operation ΚΛΕΟΣ </i>to bootstrap myself into the Bethesda article that will complement what I think is the very cool BioWare chapter coming out in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dungeons-Dragons-Digital-Denizens-Approaches/dp/1441195181">this book</a>.</li>
</ul>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4151856969578631523.post-6309557221941557942011-10-07T04:09:00.000-07:002011-10-07T04:10:49.980-07:00The Cave, unpacked: part 3Then, in that post, came this bit:<br />
<blockquote>
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.</blockquote>
Again, this declaration is probably a bit too broad--the word “hate” is of course much too strong. If the statement is true, the negative emotions Plato felt towards the fictional Homer whom he believed to have been a real writer were probably much closer to anger, frustration, and envy than to hate.<br />
<br />
If there’s an emotional basis to the famous passage from the last book of <i>Republic</i> where Plato has Socrates speak of the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, that’s what it seems likely to me to be: Plato sees how powerful his own education, centering on homeric epic, has been in determining the way he looks at and acts in the world, and is mad at the figure who perpetrated it. He’s frustrated that it was so hard for Socrates, and is so hard for him to think past that education into the new philosophical world that he wants to create in memory of Socrates. He envies, perhaps most of all, Homer’s seemingly ineluctable control over the ruleset of the cave-culture game within which the Athenians have risen to power, fallen from it, and finally ended up in a cultural position that Plato must have regarded as going nowhere.<br />
<br />
This is, I think, the way game-designers hate games like <i>HALO</i> and <i>BioShock</i>, even as they often play them to death, and enjoy “hating on” them in every conceivable corner of the internet. Maybe in that very modern, fanboyish sense of the word “hate,” I was on target in my post--Plato is a Socrates fanboy, and he’s jealous of Socrates’ indie cred.
So perhaps a more accurate formulation would have been “Plato was jealous of philosophy’s cultural credibility”--the game that he was designing, a game perhaps on best display in the middle to late dialogues, above all <i>Republic</i>, <i>Timaeus</i>, and <i>Critias</i>, needed to establish itself, just as the books of Herodotus and Thucydides sought to establish themselves, in contradistinction to the hegemonic game of “Homer.”<br />
<br />
Remember that “jealousy” and “envy,” when used properly, are different, though related, emotions: we’re envious of what we don’t have (that we may have it), but jealous of what we do (that we may keep it): Plato’s emotion, such as it was, was perhaps the feeling that the grand practomime of philosophy could not but be under siege from the <b>apparently</b> grand practomime of epic.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4151856969578631523.post-25381500174885648712011-09-09T06:55:00.000-07:002011-10-07T04:09:52.353-07:00The Cave, unpacked: part 2So, since no one seemed to object to my idea of using <i>Living Epic</i>, for the foreseeable future, as a place to riff on my stuff at <i>PlaythePast</i>. . . The next bit of that <a href="http://www.blogger.com/%E2%80%9Dhttp://www.playthepast.org/?p=1403%E2%80%9D">post</a> is:
<br />
<blockquote>
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.</blockquote>
I suppose if there’s a difficulty here, it’s in what I mean by the word “loved.”
Let’s look at an example--and where better to find it than the story of the cave itself. Socrates, in telling his interlocutors about how strongly the philosopher, who’s been outside the cave, would reject the life of the prisoners, quotes the <i>Odyssey</i>. Not just any passage, either: Socrates quotes the famous words from the mouth of the shade of Achilles in the underworld, about how he’d rather still be alive as the meanest slave in the world than be king of the dead.
Ironic, huh? The philosopher would rather be in the upper world--the “real” world--than in the lower one, just like Achilles.<br />
<br />
More ironic: if I’m right that the shadow-puppet play of the cave is in large part Plato’s metaphor for the education provided by Athenian culture, comprising above all the epics of the homeric tradition, then Plato is using “Homer” against “himself.” The philosopher wants to be free, specifically of Homer.<br />
<br />
But doesn’t it take a critic who loves Homer to create this fantastic, nostalgic web of irony and metaphor?<br />
<br />
When I say in that post that Plato “loved” Homer, I’m using “loved” as a short-hand for something like “regarded as indispensable and ineluctable,” but this riff may let me follow on to some sort of greater love, albeit one much more complex. Homer was Plato’s education, as it was Socrates’; how could Plato despise it, when it had led him whither he had arrived, able to imagine a world outside the cave?<br />
<br />
When we who are trying to use such insights to reform education yet again think about our own educations, I hope we can treat it much as Plato treated Homer--rejecting gently but firmly, speaking of ancient quarrels, but acknowledging, as Plato does in the story of the cave, our eternal debts.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4151856969578631523.post-71395845932284098282011-08-26T08:16:00.000-07:002011-10-07T04:10:06.555-07:00The Cave, unpacked: part 1I’ve been searching for a way to use this blog, where I’ve done so much that I’m proud of, as something other than an adjunct to what I’m doing as part of the team at <a href="http://www.blogger.com/%E2%80%9Dhttp://playthepast.org%E2%80%9D"><i>playthepast</i></a>. The difficulty is that the mission of <i>playthepast</i> is a superset of the mission with which I founded this blog, and there’s not a single thing that I’d post there that wouldn’t be appropriate here, either on the scholarship (how Homer and Plato can help us figure out what’s going on with games in the modern world) or on the pedagogy (how Homer and Plato can help us figure out how games can serve as an engine for educational reform) side.
<br />
<br />
On the other hand, I don’t feel as constrained here at <i>Living Epic</i> to avoid my tendency to formulate things abstrusely, and so as of today I’m undertaking the experiment of taking my recent string of posts about Plato’s cave (which are in fact mostly rewritings of posts originally made here) and unpacking them further, and more obscurely, here.
<br />
<br />
The posts at <i>playthepast</i> are written to bring the arc of my scholarly project into close contact with my pedagogical one. They pick up from the scholarly foundation I’ve built over the past seven years of the analogy between the form of practomime called homeric epic and the form called narrative videogame, and move through the scholarly edifice I’ve been building on it since 2008, of the way Plato’s reaction to homeric epic can help us contextualize videogames’ role in modern culture. From there, in recent weeks, the <i>playthepast</i> posts have turned towards applying the blueprints of that edifice to the building of learning practomimes like the ones on which my UConn team and I are at work.
<br />
<br />
At any rate, I want to start with the post that makes the turn to Plato. It starts like this:
<br />
<blockquote>
This post takes us from homeric epic to a key moment of its reception in classical Athens, Plato. In it, I cover ground I’ve also covered in print, in a chapter in the collection <i><a href="http://www.igi-global.com/bookstore/titledetails.aspx?TitleId=37269&DetailsType=description%E2%80%9D">Ethics and Game Design</a></i>.</blockquote>
The first thing to say is that although I like my chapter in <i>Ethics and Game Design</i> very much, I’ve managed to move beyond it in the past year: in the chapter I manage to say, pretty much, “Plato tells us that <i>mimesis</i> only teaches when it gets interrupted the way <i>Bioshock</i> interrupts itself”; now, in these posts, I’m capable of saying also two more things, “I know how to interrupt <i>mimesis</i> to make that learning happen” and “I know how to analyze, and learn from, videogame <i>mimesis</i> when it <b>doesn’t</b> get interrupted.”
<br />
<br />
The former of those things is the basis of the practomimetic curricula we’re working on at UConn; the latter is the basis of my current work on the digital narrative videogame, which to this point comprises my analysis of BioWare’s epic style and will I hope soon also comprise analyses of the Bethesda, Bungie, and Square Enix styles.
<br />
<br />
So that kind of thing is my idea for <i>Living Epic</i> going forward. If you have a strong feeling about it’s worth or lack thereof, I’m pretty easy to find on social media these days, and I love both thoughtful conversation and bruising intellectual brawls.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4151856969578631523.post-83716178407335544092011-07-28T04:44:00.000-07:002011-08-17T04:51:35.799-07:00Operation ΜΗΝΙΣ: after-action report<div><a title="Operation MENIS: a soldier, a rhapsode, and a tragedian walk into the agora" href="http://www.playthepast.org/?p=1547">Operation ΜΗΝΙΣ</a> is in the books. Most of the nine students who stuck it out have done extraordinary things. Seven of the nine made some kind of A, and I sincerely believe that they would have those A’s no matter how the course was being assessed, but that at least four of them wouldn't have had A's if the course had been delivered in a traditional way. What I see in these students' work is what I can only describe as a “situated” attitude about ancient Athens that far exceeds anything I’ve ever seen in even the best students in this course previous to it being turned into Operation ΜΗΝΙΣ.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>The easiest way to characterize that attitude is by describing their ability to make connections between texts. In the traditional version of the course, year after year I’ve lectured until I’m blue in the face about how Thucydides and Sophocles are talking about the same problems in pre-Peloponnesian-War Athens, but the exam essays answering the question "How are Thucydides' and Sophocles' views of Athens similar?" always came back in the form of a laundry list. I never managed to get students to think about it like a classicist until I had Aeschylus, grandson of <strong>that</strong> Aeschylus, introduce my students’ avatars to the grand-daughters of Pericles.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>And the way I see this difference is in a trivial little mechanic I used for the very first time: team annotation. The texts for the course are all on Google Docs (all public domain), and the operation team earned Hellenism Points every time they commented on the text. Casually, at the end of the course, they drew connections between Plato and Homer, Aristophanes and Thucydides in those little comments that were hardly bigger than tweets, and then they shared those insights with their individual character-teams as they deliberated on what action to take in 399 BCE without even realizing that they had absorbed an understanding of ancient Greek culture far more nuanced than that of the A-students of past years.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>I think that’s because they knew they needed to use the intel in these texts to figure out how to meet the challenges their characters face in ancient Athens. At the end of the operation, they were trapped inside Plato’s head as he tried to figure out how to deal with the death of Socrates. The ΜΗΝΙΣ operatives had to figure out how to help him, by explaining to him why he wrote what he wrote. They couldn't have done that unless they understood how he agrees with Thucydides and Euripides about the reasons for Athens doing things like killing Socrates.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>Their final exam--their final boss fight--was of course to justify, on the basis of everything they’ve read and “seen,” their characters’ votes to convict or acquit that same Socrates. And when they did that justification, to my great joy, they voted as Athenians. That is, they achieved the learning objectives of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies 1101.</div><div>
<br /></div><div><i>This post originally appeared at <a href="http://playthepast.org/">playthepast.org</a>.</i></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4151856969578631523.post-11847364525211981692011-04-18T04:22:00.000-07:002011-04-27T03:39:38.329-07:00Epic choices, and the lack thereof<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDLPtEZrBmP9On5TOulCLGRmhJoTtRD5uIEcizN9lbNuHonj0RM3bZppTdgq0L4BYIocMfubVpMP7Ds-02tNWoLh9OSr6dyR_5sO12ZCMByXBo-04xpCJUpFr9-UMHKD6t-05gWQLLY9Cr/s1600/a_ryan.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 181px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDLPtEZrBmP9On5TOulCLGRmhJoTtRD5uIEcizN9lbNuHonj0RM3bZppTdgq0L4BYIocMfubVpMP7Ds-02tNWoLh9OSr6dyR_5sO12ZCMByXBo-04xpCJUpFr9-UMHKD6t-05gWQLLY9Cr/s320/a_ryan.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5596883608548264114" /></a><i>This is a republication of a post from </i>playthepast.org, <i>which in turn was a drastically re-written version of a post that appeared on this blog in its early days.</i><div><i><br /></i>This post serves as a prelude to some heavy oral formulaic lifting I’m planning to do in a subsequent one, following on from the more general argument I made about immersion in my previous<a title="Epic immersion, part 1: in medias res, not in mediis rebus" href="http://www.playthepast.org/?p=761"> two</a> <a title="Epic immersion, part 2: the interactivity of the homerids" href="http://www.playthepast.org/?p=877">posts</a> on games and homeric epic. Hopefully, these posts will clarify both the similarities between the interactivity and immersion to be found in oral epic and that to be found in games, and their important differences. My central contention is as usual that the practice of homeric epic was fundamentally ludic, and that an understanding of the rules of that practice, and how they worked themselves out in the narrative of the epics as we have them, can help us understand our own ludic (that is, to use a term that <a href="http://www.bitmob.com/articles/what-it-means-to-be-a-gamer">continues to be contentious</a>, gamer) culture better. So even though the play I’m analyzing in this post is mostly far in the past (with a sizable nod towards <em>Bioshock </em>in the end), I’m convinced it has a significant impact on the present and future of playing the past, too.</div><div><br />The first thing you need to know to take this epic journey with me (sorry--the <em>jeux de mots</em> that go with “epic” are really hard to resist) is a little about the ninth book of the <em>Iliad</em>, one of the most famous and influential texts of all Western literature. Let’s start with the inoffensive-seeming word “book” itself: both the <em>Iliad </em>and the <em>Odyssey</em> as we have them are divided into twenty-four separate books. These units of the stories didn’t become formalized into “books” until the epics were written down, probably some time in the 700’s BCE, but there’s reasonably good evidence to suggest that a bard might have sung for an evening’s entertainment just about the same amount of stuff as is in a single book of the epics as we have them. So we can think of <em>Iliad </em>9 as a self-contained piece of epic performance.<br /><br />By Book 9 of the <em>Iliad</em>, things have become pretty bad for the Achaeans (the guys usually called “the Greeks”—the ones who have come to Troy to get Helen, the wife of one of their number, back): their greatest warrior, Achilles, the son of a goddess, has refused to fight for several days now, and the Achaeans are losing ground very quickly. Agamemnon, the overlord of the Achaeans and the guy at whom Achilles is pissed off, finally gives in, and authorizes an “embassy”—a delegation, basically—to go to Achilles and offer him fabulous wealth if he returns to battle. In the book as we have it, Agamemnon sends three ambassadors, Ajax, Odysseus, and Phoenix. Achilles, who is (not coincidentally) singing epic to his friend Patroclus when they arrive, responds (long story short) with these immortal lines:<div><blockquote>My life is more to me than all the wealth of Troy while it was yet at peace<br />before the Achaeans went there, or than all the treasure that lies on<br />the stone floor of Apollo's temple beneath the cliffs of Pytho.<br />Cattle and sheep are there for the thieving,<br />and a man can get both tripods and horses if he wants them,<br />but when his life has once left him it can neither be gotten nor thieved back again.<br />For my mother Thetis tells me that there are two ways for me to meet my end.<br />If I stay here and fight, I shall not return alive but I shall have imperishable glory:<br />but if I go home my glory will die, but it will be long before death shall take me.<br />To the rest of you, then, I say, 'Go home, for you will not take Troy.'</blockquote></div>So that’s why Book 9 of the <em>Iliad </em>is cool. Now let’s imagine that we’re in a bard’s audience something like twenty-eight hundred years ago. When a homeric bard went to sing what he might well have called “The Embassy to Achilles” (because obviously there was nothing called the <em>Iliad </em>then—there were just a bunch of different stories you could tell about a place called Ilium [what we call Troy]), he was not singing it exactly as he had sung it before. Instead, he was re-composing it for the immediate performance occasion. He knew the way the story was supposed to go (maybe he had been the one to come up with the particular story he was going to sing), but he always sang it differently from the way he had sung it before.<br /><br />The simplest reason for this recomposition is that in the absence of writing a bard couldn’t sing a tale the same way he had before--indeed, the system of oral poetics in which he had trained was a way of dealing with the difficulty of accurate memorization in an oral culture. Just as importantly, though, audiences, as we <a title="Epic immersion, part 2: the interactivity of the homerids" href="http://www.playthepast.org/?p=877">saw</a> in the first book of the <em>Odyssey</em>, always like something new. Bards, as we saw in that passage, made a virtue of necessity, and instead of trying and failing to re-produce a song that had won acclaim, elaborated it differently the next time.<br /><br />Now a bard who was singing a part of the big story called “The Wrath of Achilles” (what we know as the <em>Iliad</em>) couldn’t change the fact that Achilles comes back to battle, eventually to die. But he could most certainly change the way that coming back went down. At some point, one bard did, and came up with the immortal lines I quoted above about what’s been known forever after as the Choice of Achilles.<br /><br />But there’s an amazing tension here to which critics rarely call attention, perhaps because it seems to undermine the meaning of the <em>Iliad</em>. The absolute necessity that Achilles will return to battle--the shared knowledge of bard and audience that it must happen--means that the Choice of Achilles actually isn’t a choice at all. And the bard of <em>Iliad </em>9 uses that necessity with stunning virtuosity. It doesn’t seem to me to be an exaggeration to call this moment in the <em>Iliad </em>the Birth of the Tragic: the choice that is no-choice, in the face of which we must say οἴμοι, τὶ δράσω; (<em>oimoi, ti draso</em> “Alas, what shall I do?”) and know that that question has no meaning.<br /><br />And strangely enough this is also where we get back to games at last, because games are beginning to use such necessities to similar effects. Achilles, that is, can’t leave Troy any more than the main character of <em>Bioshock </em>can, at the crucial moment of that game, fail to do what the game requires of him, or the player to participate--willingly or unwillingly--in that fictional action.<br /><br /><strong>[<em>Bioshock </em>SPOILERS AHEAD]</strong><br /><br />At that crucial moment, evil objectivist genius Andrew Ryan tells the player-character to kill him. The murder then takes place in a cutscene in which Ryan says, over and over, “A man chooses; a slave obeys.” The player has no choice, as the Achilles of the <em>Iliad </em>has no choice: both are, according to Ryan’s formula, slaves.<br /><br />But both the bard of <em>Iliad</em> 9 and the creators of <em>Bioshock </em>call attention to this lack of choice in a way that gives rise to a much richer and more complicated meaning: a kind of meaning that only a ludic narrative practice could yield. The player-character of <em>Bioshock</em> and the Achilles of the <em>Iliad </em>are slaves to the same extent that Andrew Ryan, Agamemnon, the bard, the creators of <em>Bioshock</em>, and we ourselves are all slaves. To understand the non-choice of Achilles and the non-choice of Andrew Ryan is to understand how complex and perhaps illusory is free will itself.<br /><br />Only an overtly ludic, interactive, immersive performance practice can interrupt interactivity in the service of creating this kind of meaning. The implications, as I hope to show in future posts, are fascinating for our understanding both of <em>Iliad </em>9 and of <em>Bioshock</em>; in fact, those implications reach even deeper into our intellectual history in the way <em>Iliad </em>9 underlies both tragedy and a crucial part of the thought of Plato. After all, the guy released from his seat in Plato’s cave has to be dragged kicking and screaming into the light, his interaction with the marvelous shadow-puppet play interrupted for good, in a pale echo of the terrible fate suffered by a gamer who has to take out the trash.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4151856969578631523.post-55154647723360891172011-02-23T15:05:00.000-08:002011-02-23T15:13:53.828-08:00The BioWare style: index<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi95rDSGHUSBzGltB0tAy12U0rYOZesIiFMISiyS3Q6gttKpnmnMVK2lUBfHEn7vW0DSSJZVeiNrjgK2lUXVeG8eoKGt5C6P3b6b2JX0IBQLdnOWa60OteOdFz13TLuAV1OUe_2cp94NjDE/s1600/Lord+Singer.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 205px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi95rDSGHUSBzGltB0tAy12U0rYOZesIiFMISiyS3Q6gttKpnmnMVK2lUBfHEn7vW0DSSJZVeiNrjgK2lUXVeG8eoKGt5C6P3b6b2JX0IBQLdnOWa60OteOdFz13TLuAV1OUe_2cp94NjDE/s320/Lord+Singer.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5577027079116416354" /></a><br />This is an index to my "BioWare's epic style" posts. The chapter is in revision now, and looks likely to make it into the final volume, yay. It turned out quite different in some ways from what I envisioned. I'll post links when the volume is published, in case anyone wants to put his/her cash on the barrelhead.<div><ul><li><a href="http://livingepic.blogspot.com/2010/11/bioware-style-sketch-1.html">Sketch 1: Introductory</a></li><li><a href="http://livingepic.blogspot.com/2010/11/bioware-style-kotor-light-and-dark.html">Sketch 2: KOTOR, light and dark</a></li><li><a href="http://livingepic.blogspot.com/2010/11/bioware-style-theme-and-modularity.html">Sketch 3: Theme and modularity</a></li><li><a href="http://livingepic.blogspot.com/2010/12/bioware-style-meaning-effects-in.html">Sketch 4: Meaning-effects in performative systems</a></li><li><a href="http://livingepic.blogspot.com/2010/12/bioware-style-sliders-and-meaning.html">Sketch 5: Sliders and meaning</a></li><li><a href="http://livingepic.blogspot.com/2011/01/bioware-style-manifest-identification.html">Sketch 6: Manifest identification</a></li></ul></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4151856969578631523.post-45168615610982559872011-02-12T11:07:00.001-08:002011-02-12T11:31:05.871-08:00Operation ΑΡΕΤΗ: my current practomimetic course<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-FJMNZOtd5gca4HrmGI8Ul3t-Oo7nG3jSTmoy8a5EHk0CG4mZmYarRUZNTTNmY0EXP2sn2BEu7kbTdMZUwq6uXHgiIRf7LWAUPA-W6R2jZ-ht49Z43ZR8OWaIYG1S9GwEiASg5mOVpzi1/s1600/socrates.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 218px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-FJMNZOtd5gca4HrmGI8Ul3t-Oo7nG3jSTmoy8a5EHk0CG4mZmYarRUZNTTNmY0EXP2sn2BEu7kbTdMZUwq6uXHgiIRf7LWAUPA-W6R2jZ-ht49Z43ZR8OWaIYG1S9GwEiASg5mOVpzi1/s320/socrates.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5572886412892555410" /></a><br />It probably makes sense to post a small note about Operation ΑΡΕΤΗ, the game-based course on Greek philosophical writings that I'm currently teaching (or rather, I suppose, demiurging) at UConn. I think it makes sense because I suspect that the small number of people who read this blog probably intersects fairly closely with those who follow me on Twitter or Buzz, or are friends on Facebook. Since I recently introduced a Twitter assignment to the course (based on the wonderful inspiration of an ornithologist colleague at UConn, for whom I suspect Twitter might actually have been invented), you may be seeing a series of mystifying tweets with the hashtag<a href="http://twitter.com/#!/search/3207arete"> #3207arete</a>, and I thought it would at least be courteous to explain them.<div><br /></div><div>Operation ΑΡΕΤΗ is a practomimetic course in the style of <a href="http://livingepic.blogspot.com/2009/09/operation-kthma-post-hub.html">Operation ΚΤΗΜΑ</a> and <a href="http://lotroreporter.com/2010/04/15/a-daring-epic-rescue-in-the-scrag-dells/">Operation ΚΛΕΟΣ</a>, with antecedents also in what was originally called <a href="http://livingepic.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-rome-examples-of-excellent.html">FABULA AMORIS</a>, and will probably be called Operation AMOR next time I offer it. It's an RPG in an ARG wrapper, which is listed in the UConn catalogue as Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies 3207 Greek Philosophical Writings. I won't bore you with the details of the mechanics, since they're really only a slight iteration on the ones you can read about in various posts about <a href="http://www.playthepast.org/?p=358">Operation LAPIS</a>.</div><div><br /></div><div>The RPG component--that is, as we call it, the TSTT immersion--involves controlling characters in 360 BCE in Athens, who are invited to join the Academy, and who then must decide how to describe and analyze the practice of Plato in the context of that time and of our time. I've also decided to incorporate a great deal of real ancient Greek, in much the same way that an MMORPG like <i>World of Warcraft</i> incorporates a great deal of terminology like "DPS" and "Mana." Operatives of Operation ΑΡΕΤΗ are doing "attunements" that involve collecting various kinds of Greek words in lists for which they receive bonus Philosophy Points, in which their grades are calculated, as well as reading Key-texts that come from the real text of Plato.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Twitter assignment, which was the trigger for writing this post, has the operatives (students) making Twitter accounts with their codenames (things like "Poplar," "Island," and "Lemon," assigned to them at the start of the course), and tweeting any time they see someone in need of ἔλεγχος--that is, Socratic cross-examination. Every time they make such a tweet, which is judged by "Mission Control" to be of a certain quality, they earn 100 PP (for comparison purposes, an A+ for the semester is equal to 100,000 PP). So feel free to follow up on the #3207arete hashtag and see what they come up with!</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm also very happy to answer any questions you might have about this course or about my team's practomimetic courses in general, on Google Buzz or via e-mail.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4151856969578631523.post-33741183593376283892011-01-13T11:23:00.000-08:002011-01-13T12:02:45.669-08:00The BioWare style: manifest identification (sketch 6)<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyRqGWW8aIxrDacmiXc7bwQdd4yUZXwl1LOGTrXzGvj5AKnJvZAyGQp9OcSDW7xV0yPDRWEjYNJKFX6uL-smfwzthlKqzXd_gd3iLsdN1yLYUTLOu28FfLFr-EZ6jLDthlmHPaZUpiA7zX/s1600/masseffectleveling.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyRqGWW8aIxrDacmiXc7bwQdd4yUZXwl1LOGTrXzGvj5AKnJvZAyGQp9OcSDW7xV0yPDRWEjYNJKFX6uL-smfwzthlKqzXd_gd3iLsdN1yLYUTLOu28FfLFr-EZ6jLDthlmHPaZUpiA7zX/s320/masseffectleveling.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5561756701728357794" /></a><br /><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; background-color: transparent; "><span class="Apple-style-span"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.31208026106469333" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">This post introduces my argument about the relationship of the BioWare performance-slider to the BioWare RPG’s modularity of theme. My thinking when I stated to write this sketch was that this section of the chapter could prove a nice way to package my conclusions, as I also put the argument itself together. The creation of the meaning-effect of the games through the relationships of their sliders to their modular themes seems to me to be the absolute essence of the BioWare style. While I do that final synthesis, I was hoping, I would be able to accomplish two other goals: first, to triangulate the differences of the three games the chapter is supposed to be about; second, to bring in other styles for comparison, to demonstrate that the BioWare style is distinctive and that it can be usefully described as I have described it, in terms of the analytic methodology of composition by theme pioneered by Lord for traditional oral epic. That last bit will prove tricky whenever and however I manage finally to do it at length, but it may well be the most enjoyable: I’m convinced there’s a major contribution to be made both to the study of these individual games and to the study of the RPG in general by demonstrating that a thick description of the way an RPG handles composition by theme provides a critically revealing index of the role that the digital RPG has played and can play in culture. </span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; background-color: transparent; "></span></span><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">But although I still want to close the chapter I’ve been sketching towards with some version of that argument, it’s become clear as I’ve proceeded to exceed the word limit for the chapter, with no end in sight, really, of what I’d like to say not just about BioWare RPG’s but also about Bethesda, Square Enix, Lionhead, and Atlus RPG’s, just to name a few, that there’s a project here that my training would ordinarily make me think of as a book: specifically the type of book called a monograph, which is basically a scholarly article that got too long for its own good. The problem is that nobody publishes monographs any more, because, generally, monographs just aren’t profitable, because they’re useful only to other researchers on the topic, and then only for perhaps a single footnote, if that. Add to that the problem that nobody publishes </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">me</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "> (well, not nobody, but the market for this stuff would only be described as “limited” by a very generous observer) and you’ve got an occasion for me to kick over the traces and say “Here (yes, here, on my blog) is where I stand.”</span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; background-color: transparent; "></span></span><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">That is, I think I’m going to try to write the book here, by drafting the kinds of sketches I’ve been drafting, then refining them gradually into a more organized and articulated structure. The experiment of drafting a chapter intended for publication here on the blog has encouraged me to think that other bits of this new sort of blogograph might find their way through the peer-review process and become “real” scholarship. That’s not to say that I think the chapter I’m sketching here will get accepted; rather, it’s to say that I feel reasonably confident that the process of blogging these sketches has led me to a chapter that I feel comfortable submitting to a traditional peer-review. Readers of </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Living Epic </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">won’t see the back-end scholarly stuff unless the chapter gets accepted and published, but it’s very easy to do that back-end stuff by pounding on the blog posts in a series of Google Docs for a few days, with an added dash of Zotero goodness.</span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; background-color: transparent; "></span></span><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Enough front-matter. My focus in this post shifts from </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">KOTOR </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">to a broader comparative view of </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">KOTOR, Dragon Age: Origins </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">(<i>DAO</i>)</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">, </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">and </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Mass Effect</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">, as a way of beginning to discuss both the essential shared elements of re-composition in the three games and the differences that reveal the way the style has manifested itself not as a single set of ludics but across several different ludic systems. I begin with a consideration of the difference between </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Mass Effect’s </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">version of the slider and </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">KOTOR’s</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">, then use that discussion to open a three-way comparison of analogous moments in the three games.</span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; background-color: transparent; "></span></span><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">I’ll be arguing that modularity plus sliders equals a particular kind of meaningful identification. I plan to demonstrate that the re-compositional thematic ludics of the BioWare style allow players of BioWare RPG’s to form a specific kind of identification with their player-characters: an identification that enacts a subjectivity </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">manifestly </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">negotiated between the game’s thematic system and the choices the player makes within that system. The player of a BioWare RPG relates to his or her PC through the enactment of modular themes and the manipulation of sliders, with the result that his or her performance enacts a visibly unique claim to selfhood. </span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; background-color: transparent; "></span></span><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Through the manifestation of that negotiation, the player gains the special impression of individuality and of fullness that distinguishes the BioWare style. Whereas the homeric bards and their analogues in Yugoslavia performed their thematic recompositions in relation to a public occasion and a public role, the player of the BioWare RPG performs him or herself to him or herself, gaining a self-identity that we may describe theoretically in the terms I use above, of a subjectivity of manifest negotiation. I’ll try to show that manipulating the modular themes of the game in relation to the game’ sliders peforms the player’s subjectivity as not only capable of saving a world worth saving, but also as capable of making that salvation meaningful outside the game.</span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; background-color: transparent; "></span></span><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">The Renegade/Paragon slider in </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Mass Effect </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">can serve, in comparison to the light/dark slider in </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">KOTOR </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">and the party-character sliders in </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">DAO</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">, as the emblem of this meaningful identification: the negotiation of dialogue choices involved in performing a particular version of that slider produces a manifestation in the “Squad” screen of what kind of human the player’s Shepard is. Because the cultural topic of the game is the status of the human race vis-a-vis the other races of the galaxy, what the player sees on the squad screen is a visual index of a numerically determined relationship between his or her performance and the meaning of that performance with respect to the cultural topic. That is, the player’s identification with Shepard--the way he or she is performing Shepard as an extension of him or herself--is visible as a negotiation on that squad screen, a screen the player must visit every level if he or she is to continue playing the game. </span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; background-color: transparent; "></span></span><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">KOTOR </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">and </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">DAO </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">share the essence of this ludic performance of manifest identification. When we compare this effect to the light/dark slider in </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">KOTOR, </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">we see the essential similarity of the two systems; although the </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "><i>DAO </i></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">system differs in that the sliders are not centrally located, it is similarly essential to continuing the game that the player visit the party-characters’ individual screens with great frequency (at least those of party-characters the player has chosen to adventure with), and each party-character’s approval/disapproval slider is displayed prominently on that screen. Just as in </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Mass Effect</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">, the player sees a visual representation of a quantitative index of the relationship of his or her performance as the player-character to the in-progress cultural meaning of that performance of the game.</span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; background-color: transparent; "></span></span><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">My plan for the next sketch of what I’m now thinking of as a never-to-be-published book not to be titled </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">The Epic Styles of Major Developers of the Digital RPG: Realizing the Ancient Potential of Traditional Oral Epic in a New Age of Performative Technology</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "> is to push further in my argument about this special, manifest kind of identification in the three BioWare games under discussion with reference on the one hand to traditional oral epic performance and on the other to the “modularity plus sliders” system of the games.</span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; background-color: transparent; "></span></span><br /><span style="color: rgb(18, 18, 18); background-color: transparent; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Concerning comments</span><span style="color: rgb(18, 18, 18); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">: I'd be incredibly grateful for any corrections and/or refinements you'd care to suggest about this chapter-in-the-making--Google Buzz is my preferred discussion-place now, so comments are turned off here. You’re most welcome to follow me on Buzz, </span><a href="https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#buzz/113909420526338638338"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">here</span></a><span style="color: rgb(18, 18, 18); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">; you’ll find this post there, too, with any luck, and I hope to discuss it with you there!</span></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4151856969578631523.post-69547652809041293342010-12-20T05:18:00.000-08:002010-12-20T05:24:40.360-08:00The BioWare style: sliders and meaning (sketch 5)<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNmsM-PBTjQ38YBmoiEvj-Ss7MgqUMtuzp2HOkyDZ_MaB5JJU6igTOz2Uj4Astohn0WungGJL6s4PNoAEa0SWYLoAspn-2WhydY92XyWqvnWApOi_-wB8TuFYTfV-76tbI3yUfJwSevh6i/s1600/morrigan.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 180px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNmsM-PBTjQ38YBmoiEvj-Ss7MgqUMtuzp2HOkyDZ_MaB5JJU6igTOz2Uj4Astohn0WungGJL6s4PNoAEa0SWYLoAspn-2WhydY92XyWqvnWApOi_-wB8TuFYTfV-76tbI3yUfJwSevh6i/s320/morrigan.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5552754683801065986" /></a><br /><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; "><span id="internal-source-marker_0.5112536291126162" style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Spoiler warning: this post contains a plethora of spoilers for </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">KOTOR</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">), Mass Effect, </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">and </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">DragonAge: Origins</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">. If you haven’t played any of these games and you plan to do so, and you would like to do so without knowing what’s to come, reading this post will have a deleterious effect on the realization of that plan. </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(18, 18, 18); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Concerning comments: I'd be incredibly grateful for any corrections and/or refinements you'd care to suggest about this chapter-in-the-making--Google Buzz is my preferred discussion-place now, so comments are turned off here. You’re most welcome to follow me on Buzz, </span><a href="https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#buzz/113909420526338638338"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 153); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">here</span></a><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(18, 18, 18); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">; you’ll find this post there, too, with any luck, and I hope to discuss it with you there!</span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "></span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">The essence of the BioWare Style, I’m arguing in these posts, lies in the way the re-compositional choices I discussed in my </span><a href="http://livingepic.blogspot.com/2010/12/bioware-style-meaning-effects-in.html"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 153); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">last post</span></a><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "> relate to one another </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">through the system of theme </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">in the three games I’m discussing. In these games, a player builds his or her performance not simply by recombining the themes provided by the game’s ludics (the modular pieces of narrative discussed in the last sketch), but also by casting that performance in relation to the central concerns of the game at hand (the sliders). Players of BioWare games, that is, build meaningful performances of a particular kind, through a particular system.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "></span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Performances in these three games seem to me to resemble bardic composition by theme in oral epic more closely than performances in other styles of RPG do, but that’s not a point I need to insist on--the contribution of this chapter will, I hope, lie, in pointing out the different </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">way</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "> composition by theme occurs in BioWare games because of the combination of sliders and modularity. To put that another way, one that will carry discussion further, many RPG’s have sliders that describe for example a player-character’s “karma,” but it seems to me that only in BioWare RPG’s do those sliders have what I see as two peculiar (in the true sense of “peculiar”) characteristics:</span><ul><li style="list-style-type: disc; font-size: 10pt; font-family: 'Courier New'; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; "><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">a fundamental tie to the overall cultural topic of the game; and</span></li><li style="list-style-type: disc; font-size: 10pt; font-family: 'Courier New'; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; "><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">a meaning finally determined by a manifestly modular system of narrative.</span></li></ul><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">In this post I’ll outline the first of these characteristics. In the next post I’ll outline the second, and start to explore them in depth in the practomime of </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">KOTOR, Mass Effect, </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">and </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">DragonAge: Origins.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "></span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "></span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">By “a fundamental tie to the overall cultural topic of the game” I mean what we see most clearly in </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">KOTOR</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">: in that game, the Light/Dark slider doesn’t just index what the player, and any observer, are supposed to think about the player-character within the overall sphere of culture (that is, is the PC a “good” or a “bad” “person” when measured by the standards of the community of which the player and observers are members). Much more importantly, the Light/Dark slider indexes how the player-character stands according to the fictively-created governing rules of the fictional universe in which the player and observers imagine the narrative action of the game taking place. In </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">KOTOR</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">, the Force, the “energy field” that “gives a Jedi his power,” “is created by all living things,” and “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together,” itself indexes the player-performance in the world of the narrative. </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">KOTOR, </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">like all </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Star Wars</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "> narratives, takes the Force as what I’m calling its “cultural topic,” and the Light/Dark slider makes the re-composition-by-theme of the player-performance about it, too.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "></span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">So by “cultural topic” I mean what we can also talk about in terms of “meaning effect” or “aboutness”: the Force, like the Council in </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Mass Effect</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "> and the Ferelden/Blight conflict in </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">DragonAge, </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">is what </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">KOTOR </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">is most generally about. Also like </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Mass Effect’s </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">council and </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">DragonAge’s </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Ferelden/Blight conflict, the Force renders an ideological negotiation from the “real world” in fictive terms. The Force is a fictive reification of important ethical questions of modern culture--in particular of the claims of the state on the individual; the Council is a fictive reification of questions about nationalism and American exceptionalism in the modern world; the Ferelden/Blight conflict is a fictive reification of questions about loss of freedom to the state in times of crisis. (I’ll spend more time arguing these points in the final version!)</span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "></span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">KOTOR’</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">s slider is the most obvious example, but </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Mass Effect’</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">s paragon/renegade slider is equally tied to the cultural topic of the game. </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Mass Effect </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">revolves around the efforts of an interstellar United Nations to save the galaxy: the renegade/paragon slider indexes a player’s choice of how to behave with respect to that organized government. </span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "></span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">DragonAge</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "> as usual presents more complexity, but the multiple sliders for individual party-members, though they complicate the game’s performance possibilities in myriad ways, nevertheless have the same connection to the cultural topic of the game: </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">DragonAge </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">is about the nature of Ferelden and of the threat to its safety (the Blight), and the question of what the cost of saving that, or any land so constituted, must be. The NPCs of the PC’s party in </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">DragonAge</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">--above all, Alistair and Morrigan--constitute a system for shaping a performance that declares something particular, and unique to that performance, about that question. </span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "></span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Each NPC has an individual relation to Ferelden. Alistair is the reluctant heir who has been mistreated by the power-structure; Morrigan is a witch from the wilds whose motives are unclear for most of the game, but in the end have everything to do with the Blight, and in particular </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">nothing </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">to do with saving Ferelden. (I’m not trying to avoid spoilers--it would just take a wall of text to explain.) Leliana, Wynne, Oghren, Zevran, and Sten each have a very particular relationship to Ferelden; none has as decisive an effect on the player-performance as Alistair and Morrigan do, but each adds thematic possibilities that change what the performance means in relation to the cultural topic Ferelden/Blight.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "></span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">The NPC sliders of approval/disapproval differentiate player-performances with respect not only to any idea the player might have about liking, disliking, loving, or hating this or that NPC, but also with respect to the much more embracing question of what the PC should do as a Greywarden to save Ferelden, and how he or she, and with him, the player and any observer, should feel about it. What affects the </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">DragonAge </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">sliders are decisions made about how to deal with the Ferelden/Blight conflict. A player-performance that employs choices that please Alistair is a composition whose re-combinations of themes are very different from one using choices that please Morrigan; the differences in thematic re-combination, moreover, represent fundamental reshapings of the meaning-effect of that performance as a version of the Ferelden/Blight conflict.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "></span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">That relationship to the cultural topic makes the BioWare slider different from the Bethesda one. The Bethesda karma or reputation slider indexes player-performance not to the cultural topic of the game but to an apparently transparent game-representation of a “real-world” ideological evaluation. Karma in </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Fallout 3</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "> and reputation in for example </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "> both differentiate player-peformance in a way analogous to that of the Light/Dark slider, but </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Fallout 3</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "> isn’t </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">about </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">karma, nor is </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Oblivion </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">about </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">reputation, in the way that </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">KOTOR </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">is about the two sides of the Force, </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Mass Effect </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">is about how you deal with the Council, and </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">DragonAge</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "> is about the people of Ferelden.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "></span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">This point, I think, is likely to be the most contentious, and most critiqued, in this chapter, so I’d love to hear any counter-arguments that spring to the mind of any reader who’s gotten this far!</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685450956270144818noreply@blogger.com