Living Epic: Video Games in the Ancient World

What Roger's up to, January 2012

2012-01-08T13:32:00.001-08:00

In talks with awesome people like David Carlton and Mattie Brice about making two VGHVI Thursdays a month into podcasts, one of them being the first Thursday symposium, the other being a single-player night (starting with Skyrim, huzzah) probably on third Thursdays. Stay tuned.
Finishing up my submission to GLS8.0, a worked example about mapping learning objectives to play objectives in Operation ΜΗΝΙΣ.
Getting unexpectedly excited about THATCamp Games in less than two weeks. The bootcamp the practomime team is going to run may be a model for the future.
Looking forward to Operation ΚΛΕΟΣ 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.
Looking forward to using Operation ΚΛΕΟΣ to bootstrap myself into the Bethesda article that will complement what I think is the very cool BioWare chapter coming out in this book.

The Cave, unpacked: part 3

2011-10-07T04:09:00.000-07:00

Then, in that post, came this bit:

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.

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.

If there’s an emotional basis to the famous passage from the last book of Republic 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.

This is, I think, the way game-designers hate games like HALO and BioShock, 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 Republic, Timaeus, and Critias, needed to establish itself, just as the books of Herodotus and Thucydides sought to establish themselves, in contradistinction to the hegemonic game of “Homer.”

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 apparently grand practomime of epic.

The Cave, unpacked: part 2

2011-09-09T06:55:00.000-07:00

So, since no one seemed to object to my idea of using Living Epic, for the foreseeable future, as a place to riff on my stuff at PlaythePast. . . The next bit of that post is:

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.

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 Odyssey. 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.

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.

But doesn’t it take a critic who loves Homer to create this fantastic, nostalgic web of irony and metaphor?

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?

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.

The Cave, unpacked: part 1

2011-08-26T08:16:00.000-07:00

I’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 playthepast. The difficulty is that the mission of playthepast 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.

On the other hand, I don’t feel as constrained here at Living Epic 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.

The posts at playthepast 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 playthepast 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.

At any rate, I want to start with the post that makes the turn to Plato. It starts like this:

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 Ethics and Game Design.

The first thing to say is that although I like my chapter in Ethics and Game Design 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 mimesis only teaches when it gets interrupted the way Bioshock interrupts itself”; now, in these posts, I’m capable of saying also two more things, “I know how to interrupt mimesis to make that learning happen” and “I know how to analyze, and learn from, videogame mimesis when it doesn’t get interrupted.”

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.

So that kind of thing is my idea for Living Epic 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.

Operation ΜΗΝΙΣ: after-action report

2011-07-28T04:44:00.000-07:00

Operation ΜΗΝΙΣ 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.

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 that Aeschylus, introduce my students’ avatars to the grand-daughters of Pericles.

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.

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.

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.

This post originally appeared at playthepast.org.

Epic choices, and the lack thereof

2011-04-18T04:22:00.000-07:00

This is a republication of a post from playthepast.org, which in turn was a drastically re-written version of a post that appeared on this blog in its early days.

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 two posts 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 continues to be contentious, 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 Bioshock in the end), I’m convinced it has a significant impact on the present and future of playing the past, too.

The first thing you need to know to take this epic journey with me (sorry--the jeux de mots that go with “epic” are really hard to resist) is a little about the ninth book of the Iliad, one of the most famous and influential texts of all Western literature. Let’s start with the inoffensive-seeming word “book” itself: both the Iliad and the Odyssey 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 Iliad 9 as a self-contained piece of epic performance.

By Book 9 of the Iliad, 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:

My life is more to me than all the wealth of Troy while it was yet at peace
before the Achaeans went there, or than all the treasure that lies on
the stone floor of Apollo's temple beneath the cliffs of Pytho.
Cattle and sheep are there for the thieving,
and a man can get both tripods and horses if he wants them,
but when his life has once left him it can neither be gotten nor thieved back again.
For my mother Thetis tells me that there are two ways for me to meet my end.
If I stay here and fight, I shall not return alive but I shall have imperishable glory:
but if I go home my glory will die, but it will be long before death shall take me.
To the rest of you, then, I say, 'Go home, for you will not take Troy.'

So that’s why Book 9 of the Iliad 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 Iliad 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.

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 saw in the first book of the Odyssey, 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.

Now a bard who was singing a part of the big story called “The Wrath of Achilles” (what we know as the Iliad) 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.

But there’s an amazing tension here to which critics rarely call attention, perhaps because it seems to undermine the meaning of the Iliad. 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 Iliad 9 uses that necessity with stunning virtuosity. It doesn’t seem to me to be an exaggeration to call this moment in the Iliad the Birth of the Tragic: the choice that is no-choice, in the face of which we must say οἴμοι, τὶ δράσω; (oimoi, ti draso “Alas, what shall I do?”) and know that that question has no meaning.

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 Bioshock 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.

[Bioshock SPOILERS AHEAD]

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 Iliad has no choice: both are, according to Ryan’s formula, slaves.

But both the bard of Iliad 9 and the creators of Bioshock 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 Bioshock and the Achilles of the Iliad are slaves to the same extent that Andrew Ryan, Agamemnon, the bard, the creators of Bioshock, 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.

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 Iliad 9 and of Bioshock; in fact, those implications reach even deeper into our intellectual history in the way Iliad 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.

The BioWare style: index

2011-02-23T15:05:00.000-08:00

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.

Operation ΑΡΕΤΗ: my current practomimetic course

2011-02-12T11:07:00.001-08:00

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 #3207arete, and I thought it would at least be courteous to explain them.

Operation ΑΡΕΤΗ is a practomimetic course in the style of Operation ΚΤΗΜΑ and Operation ΚΛΕΟΣ, with antecedents also in what was originally called FABULA AMORIS, 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 Operation LAPIS.

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 World of Warcraft 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.

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!

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.

The BioWare style: manifest identification (sketch 6)

2011-01-13T11:23:00.000-08:00

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.

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 me (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.”

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 Living Epic 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.

Enough front-matter. My focus in this post shifts from KOTOR to a broader comparative view of KOTOR, Dragon Age: Origins (DAO), and Mass Effect, 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 Mass Effect’s version of the slider and KOTOR’s, then use that discussion to open a three-way comparison of analogous moments in the three games.

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 manifestly 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.

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.

The Renegade/Paragon slider in Mass Effect can serve, in comparison to the light/dark slider in KOTOR and the party-character sliders in DAO, 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.

KOTOR and DAO share the essence of this ludic performance of manifest identification. When we compare this effect to the light/dark slider in KOTOR, we see the essential similarity of the two systems; although the DAO 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 Mass Effect, 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.

My plan for the next sketch of what I’m now thinking of as a never-to-be-published book not to be titled 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 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.

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, here; you’ll find this post there, too, with any luck, and I hope to discuss it with you there!

The BioWare style: sliders and meaning (sketch 5)

2010-12-20T05:18:00.000-08:00

a fundamental tie to the overall cultural topic of the game; and
a meaning finally determined by a manifestly modular system of narrative.

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 KOTOR, Mass Effect, and DragonAge: Origins.

By “a fundamental tie to the overall cultural topic of the game” I mean what we see most clearly in KOTOR: 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 KOTOR, 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. KOTOR, like all Star Wars 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.

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 Mass Effect and the Ferelden/Blight conflict in DragonAge, is what KOTOR is most generally about. Also like Mass Effect’s council and DragonAge’s 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!)

KOTOR’s slider is the most obvious example, but Mass Effect’s paragon/renegade slider is equally tied to the cultural topic of the game. Mass Effect 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.

DragonAge 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: DragonAge 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 DragonAge--above all, Alistair and Morrigan--constitute a system for shaping a performance that declares something particular, and unique to that performance, about that question.

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 nothing 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.

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 DragonAge 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.

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 Fallout 3 and reputation in for example The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion both differentiate player-peformance in a way analogous to that of the Light/Dark slider, but Fallout 3 isn’t about karma, nor is Oblivion about reputation, in the way that KOTOR is about the two sides of the Force, Mass Effect is about how you deal with the Council, and DragonAge is about the people of Ferelden.

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!

The Bioware style: meaning-effects in performative systems (sketch 4)

2010-12-13T05:29:00.000-08:00

Spoiler warning: this post contains a plethora of spoilers for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR), Mass Effect, and DragonAge: Origins. 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. 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, here; you’ll find this post there, too, with any luck, and I hope to discuss it with you there!

As promised, in this post I’m going to try to pull together the modularity of theme I talked about in my last post with the role of the sliders I discussed in the post previous to that one. In putting those things together, I’m also hoping to deliver on a commitment I made in the first post in this series, to describe the performative nature of the crucial moment of KOTOR in terms of this complex system of recomposition. I committed at the same time also to describe the way the essential peformativity both of that moment and of the ludic system that creates it renders its effect on its audience (both player and observer) in an inescapable relation to the ludic choices of the performance.

That performative moment, I want to suggest both makes a vital part of the game’s system of recomposition and emblematizes that system more strikingly than any other moment. From there, I hope to continue in the next post in the series to the task of isolating key moments in the three games under discussion and describing them in the same terms. While I do that, I want at the same time to point out the uniqueness of these terms to the Bioware style, and hopefully even point the way towards analogous descriptions of the Bethesda, Square Enix, Atlus, and Lionhead styles.

The final meaning effect of a player performance in the three Bioware RPGs I’m discussing--that is, what the player, or an observer of the player’s performance, takes away as a description of what that performance “was about”--is comparable to the final meaning effect of a tale as recomposed by a bard. From performance to performance, though the materials remain the same, the meaning will differ, within a range that is simultaneously bounded--because of the determinate nature of the game’s ludics on the one hand and the poetic system’s constraints on the other--and infinite, because of the unending potential for variation within those constraints.

When a player of KOTOR finds his or her player-character (PC) in the climactic scene in which the PC’s past as the leader of the Sith is revealed, what the choice he or she will make at that point will mean is determined by the entire range of other choices he or she has made within the ludic system to that point; that meaning will be modified also by choices made subsequently. The player creates the meaning of a particular performance of KOTOR, that is, in the relationship among all the choices made in the course of that performance: the big choice between Light side and Dark side has no determinate meaning in and of itself; rather, it exists only as a choice that the player, and whatever audience receives the player’s performance, must integrate into the rest of that performance.

So much is true, mutatis mutandis, of every practomime, whether a game or a story: the way the player rotates and strafes a single, crucial block in Tetris has a meaning only in relation to all the other rotations he or she has made, and will make; the disappearance of Captain Ahab into the whirlpool with Moby Dick has a meaning only in relation to “Call me Ishmael.”

Composition by theme, though--the element that binds together the digital RPG and oral epic--determines that this integration of choices presents peculiar performance affordances in practomimes that allow that kind of composition. That is, the digital RPG and the oral epic have a special analogy, among the whole range of games and stories, because they allow composition by theme, and because they allow composition by theme, saying that a crucial choice in an RPG or an epic performance has meaning in relation to another choice has a special interpretative value.

A player’s choice in KOTOR of whether to side finally with the Jedi or the Sith is in this way like a bard’s choice to have Achilles refuse an embassy from Agamemnon. Because the themes exist in the ludic system, in relation to other themes in the system, performance-possibilities arise that could only arise in such a system. A bard’s performance of a book of the Iliad or the Odyssey, or even of the entirety of one of those epics (like, for example, the versions we have in the text that has come down to us), takes its meaning from the way the bard recomposed the materials available to him in the thematic system of poetics in which he was skilled. A player’s performance in KOTOR takes its meaning from the way the player recomposes the materials available to him--the modular content and the Light/Dark slider--in the thematic system of ludics in which he or she has become skilled.

The prominence of that system is the element that makes composition by theme possible both in homeric epic and in the digital RPG:

Achilles’ refusal of the embassy in the ninth book of the Iliad famously gains its meaning as a refusal to return to battle, and to the themes of traditional Iliadic oral epic. The choice of the bard, that is, is the choice of Achilles, and vice versa. Refinements to the theme of the embassy--the addition of Odysseus, for example--reshape the meaning in the same way, by establishing a new relationship between choices.

The player’s choice of Jedi or Sith in KOTOR creates a meaning-effect in relation to a huge number of other choices in the game, most of them registered on the Light/Dark slider, but perhaps above all in relation to choices made with respect to the player’s party-members. What kind of being is the player’s PC? What kind of story is the player telling about that PC, or about the player him or herself? These questions cannot, after a long series of choices and their effect on the performance--indeed, an effect rendered visually on the slider--be answered in a performative vacuum. “Cannot,” indeed, in a sense of strict impossibility: even if the player should decide to make the choice in relation to nothing but, say, the flip of a coin, that choice--beyond any effect on the virtuosity or interest of the performance--would still affect what happens next in the performance. The choice can be made only within the entire system of the game, which, as I’ll discuss in the next post, is in the end a microcosm of the performative system of the Star Wars saga itself.

The Bioware style: theme and modularity (sketch 3)

2010-11-30T07:43:00.000-08:00

Spoiler warning: this post contains a plethora of spoilers for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR), Mass Effect, and DragonAge: Origins. 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. 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, here; you’ll find this post there, too, with any luck, and I hope to discuss it with you there!

The last post was about the light/dark slider in KOTOR, and before I proceed to talk (kind of) about cutscenes, as promised, I want to note that in the final version of this chapter I’ll pay much more attention to the Mass Effect and DragonAge sliders, which present very welcome complications to KOTOR’s slider. I’ll be sketching that part of the chapter in a few weeks, once I’ve had a chance to refresh my memory of those games.

My plan for this post had been to talk about the cutscenes in KOTOR, and to relate them to the cutscenes in Mass Effect and DragonAge, since unlike the sliders the composition of the cutscenes is quite similar among the three titles, and also quite distinct from other RPG-styles’ compositional dynamics.

As I moved along in my two research-playthroughs of KOTOR though, in which I’m playing both a light-side PC and a dark-side one, trying to keep them in parallel while still exploring as many of the different performance possibilities as I can, I realized that while it’s certainly possible to slice off the cutscenes and talk about them as an example of the way the Bioware style represents an occasion for a particular kind of composition by theme, the thematic nature of the cutscenes in these games is actually tied into the more embracing modularity of the games as wholes. When a set of dialogue choices in KOTOR leads to a cutscene in which an NPC does something that’s partly immutable and partly a result of the choices made by the player, the cutscene is functioning as an integral part of the much broader modular design of the game. For example when the PC chooses a dark-side option like telling an alien that he’s inferior to a group of mean human boys who are taunting him, and the party-member Carth Onasi, a decidedly light-side figure, demurs in a vignette of cutscene dialogue, the player has invoked that cutscene as an aspect of a system of modularity that along with the integral nature of the sliders discussed in my last post could be said to be the most fundamental thematic tools of the Bioware style.

On the other hand, modular cutscenes that run at specific times--the simplest example may be the dreams the PC of KOTOR has after pre-set events like saving Bastila after the swoop race--are simply formulaic, and take their place in the overall composition without need of comment except to point out their formulaic nature.

We’re now getting into topics that can prove out, at a technical level, the theoretical value of the comparison between player-performance in the digital RPG and bard-performance in traditional oral poetry. It’s worth quoting Albert Lord in his famous and foundational article “Composition by Theme in Homer and Southslavic Epos” to demonstrate just how precise this comparison can be:

The theme can be defined as a recurrent element of narration or description in traditional oral poetry. It is not restricted, as is the formula, by metrical considerations; hence, it should not be limited to exact word-for-word repetition. . . . Regular use, or repetition, is as much a part of the definition of the theme as it is of the definition of the formula, but the repetition need not be exact. Strictly speaking, we cannot call an action or situation or description in the poetry a theme unless we can find it used at least twice.

Substitute “the digital RPG” for “traditional oral poetry,” and the comparison begins to come into focus; think of the formula as the ludics of the game--unchangeable things like the act of choosing party members and the dialogue choices that are identical between performances--and “metrical considerations” as the coding of the game, and the precision and power of the comparison start to show themselves.

When you realize that the nature of the digital RPG means that its themes are repeated a potentially infinite number of times, the power of the contrast that corresponds to the comparison and actually gives the comparison its bite also starts to reveal itself: while Parry and Lord and those who have come after them have worked on fossilized texts, the digital RPG (along with other, related kinds of games) presents an opportunity for living study of this kind of creative practice--an opportunity that Parry and Lord had only through talking to the Southslavic bards, an opportunity we can have only in faint echo in those precious passages of Homer in which the bards sing about what it means to be a bard. The digital RPG reifies what in traditional oral poetry can’t be reified--the training of the bards in the formulas out of which themes, and epics, were built.

I plan to argue that the Bioware version of the system of formulaic recomposition affords the player of KOTOR, Mass Effect, or DragonAge a particular kind of range of possibilities for thematic composition. A key element of that particularity lies in the role of the sliders discussed in my last sketch; an equally important element lies in the modularity of recurrent elements like dialogue cutscenes, battles, forced entrances into installations and caverns, and even visits to planets or towns--both generally (the party comes to a new town and has to go to the tavern/cantina to hear the rumors) and particularly (the party goes to the planet Manaan in KOTOR).

The themes of homeric epic are elements like assemblies of lords, sacrifices, and single-combats. As Lord details exhaustively in The Singer of Tales, young singers learned the formulas first, and then the themes, just as new players of Bioware RPG’s learn, say, the user-interface and then the basic elements of a quest like DragonAge’s Orzammar section, before learning to shape their performances according to their creative inclinations.

In both cases, the virtuosity and pleasure of the performance, for player and audience alike, come from the application of personal creativity to the thematic materials provided by the performance-system. So much is true of a wide variety of digital RPG’s, and of games of certain other genres as well. But the Bioware games under consideration are distinctive in deploying a high degree of modularity in at least three easily-definable areas: imaginary-spatially-differentiated plot incident, party-character choice, and dialogue-choice. All three of these games, that is, feature well-defined choices between places to visit, party members to take on such visits, and what to say to the NPCs met there. Any player of these games knows what I mean by “well-defined”: above all, each of these games features a decision-defining map screen of one kind or another, in which the player chooses the next destination; each features a party-selection screen, and each features a kind of dialogue in which each utterance-selection screen functions as a separate cutscene.

To put it comprehensively if simply, the player of these Bioware RPGs enacts his or her performance by fitting together, in the ludics of the game, places, characters, and dialogue according to the heroic identification figured by the game’s sliders. The player does this composition with reference to their often unconscious knowledge of and growing virtuosity in the systems of ludics that define the games. In choosing with whom to adventure, where to adventure, and what to say, the player of a Bioware RPG re-composes not just the narrative but also the part of him or herself embodied in the player-character, until in the end, at such moments as the choice between the legacy of Revan and the freedom of a new self (KOTOR), whether to protect the council (Mass Effect), and whether to put Alistair on the throne (DragonAge), the player is able to demonstrate his or her mastery not just of the ludic system of the game, but of an entire imaginary galaxy--or magic realm.

Despite the superficial similarity to games like Bethesda’s Oblivion (just to choose a single example among a great many), in which saving the world and rising to the top of the world order figure just as prominently as they do in these three Bioware games, the Bioware games, because of their sliders and their modularity, put the emphasis on the player’s knowledge of the system, and the player’s clearly-defined ludic choices. The successful player of Oblivion has done (albeit vicariously) the deeds that lead to saving Cyrodiil, has found the items his or her character needed to find, has fought the necessary battles, but he or she has not had a hand in manifestly manipulating the themes and putting them together, as has the successful player of the three Bioware games under discussion. Bethesda games, to choose the most obvious examples, don’t feature decision-defining maps or party-selection screens.

There’s more to be said, obviously, about the relationship between heroic sliders, modular performance, and the overarching narratives of the games (which are in fact describable themselves as themes, since the “reach the final battle and save the galaxy/kingdom from the mindless forces of evil” theme structures all three games). In the next sketch, I plan to try to put them all together; after that, I imagine that I’ll be able to use subsequent sketches to gather evidence to support and to tweak my argument.

The Bioware style: KOTOR, light and dark (sketch 2)

2010-11-17T06:10:00.000-08:00

Spoiler warning: this post is one long spoiler from start to finish. If you haven’t played Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and you plan to do so, and you would like to do so without knowing about the legendary plot-twist, reading this post will have a deleterious effect on the realization of that plan. 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, here; you’ll find this post there, too, with any luck, and I hope to discuss it with you there!

KOTOR organizes every player performance around the player’s apparently climactic decision as to how to integrate the knowledge that the player-character (PC) was, before the game began, Darth Revan, the leader of the Sith (advocates and users of the dark side of the Force), into his or her subsequent performance. At that point, when (I estimate) 90% of the game has been completed, with only hints that the PC has a secret in his or her past, the PC learns that he or she was saved, before the game began, by the non-player-character (NPC) Bastila and, when it was found that the PC had no memory of his or her past, was allowed by the Jedi Council to go free in hope that he or she might return to the light side.

I want to take this moment as a kind of locus classicus of the Bioware style, not because other styles of RPG don’t feature similar moments, but because the way KOTOR handles this moment seems to me to share certain key characteristics with the way other Bioware games enable differentiated player-performances. This moment in KOTOR also doesn’t, I’ll try to argue, share those key charactistics with other styles.

Moreover, in the chapter I’m sketching here I want to argue that some at least of those key characteristics are describable in terms of oral formulaic theory. I want to suggest, too, that that description might integrate the Bioware RPG into--here I’ll just be simplistically, though not in my opinion inaccurately, broad--intellectual history more satisfactorily than it has yet been integrated.

To close the loop in a way I won’t be able to in the actual chapter, integrating a theoretically-informed thick description of the Bioware RPG into intellectual history has value in my eyes because it helps me understand my culture better, which in turn helps me shape my practices and performances more effectively to serve the good of all. For example, once I’ve described KOTOR to my satisfaction, I’ll be able to help my students integrate their reading in homeric epic with their performances in KOTOR in a way that advances their ability to analyze culture.

(I don’t know if that’s the kind of thing you wonder about--what the hell an academic thinks he’s doing when he’s writing this stuff that apparently has no value other than filling out his CV--but I always wonder about it. That’s why I think blogging has it all over what’s more usually called “scholarly discourse.”)

Anyway, the key characteristics of the way KOTOR handles this moment that seem to me 1) particular to the Bioware style and 2) describable in terms of oral formulaic theory are the relations of the moment to:

the light/dark slider;
the game’s cutscenes;
the PC’s exploration of relationships with party-member NPC’s, especially Carth and Bastila;
the final apparent meaning of the player’s performance.

To finish out this sketch, I’ll begin to unpack the first of these in terms of oral formulaic theory; my plan for the next few weeks is to take on each of them in a separate sketch.

The light/dark slider may be described in several ways. The most usual way to describe it is as a morality scale, by which the player’s choices are given what observers describe, broadly, as moral consequences in relation to the ongoing events of his or her performance. Briefly, a certain (large) number of dialogue choices in the game--for example whether, at this key moment of revelation, to have the PC declare s/he accepts the mantle of dark-side leadership or to have the PC declare that s/he rejects that mantle and will side with the light--, confer light-side points or dark-side points, the totals of which are tracked, in relation to one another, on a sliding scale that is visible to the player at any time.

The light/dark slider may also be described, though, as a ludic system by which KOTOR differentiates player-performances. As the player accumulates a balance on the slider, choices of character configuration--that is, the cost to the PC of certain powerful skills--are shaped by where the PC stands on the slider. For a player on the light side of the slider, skills like “Cure” are less costly, and skills like “Drain Life” are more costly. The player’s dialogue choices are thereby registered at the level of the gameplay so as to differentiate his or her performance from other possible performances at that level, in a way parallel to the differentiation at the level of dialogue, where the player must choose to say certain things and not to say others--choices that trigger the game’s awards of light-side or dark-side points.

At the same time, in a broader context, the light/dark slider differentiates the player’s performance in relation to the range of possible performances as a Jedi in the Star Wars universe, whose dualistic light/dark ethical system is essential to the game, as it is to every part of the discourse of Star Wars. This climactic decision in KOTOR, for example, adds either an enormous number of light-side points or an enormous number of dark-side points to the PC’s total, and thus places him or her decisively in relation to the ongoing performances of the Star Wars universe, whether in games, on film, or in text.

I’ll discuss the way this particular system of differentiation distinguishes the Bioware style from other styles later in this post-series, but my argument will be that in non-Bioware RPG’s that have an analogous scale differentiating player-performances--for example the reputation scale in Bethesda games like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion--that scale is tied into the events of the player’s performance (or, if you like, the performance’s narrative) quite differently. As we proceed, I’ll be trying to argue that the very different scales to be found in Mass Effect and DragonAge share important elements with the light/dark slider in KOTOR that none of them shares with the reputation scale in Oblivion. To oversimplify just for the moment, Oblivion’s reputation scale isn’t an essential part of the unfolding events of the main quest (partly because the very notion of a main quest is different in the Bethesda style), while the light/dark slider in KOTOR, the renegade/paragon slider in Mass Effect, and the individual approval sliders of party members in DragonAge have a determinative relation to the player’s performance of the central ludic materials of the game.

It’s here, I believe, that the concept of composition-by-theme begins to show its worth. To talk about why, I’ll pick two examples from the countless available thematic moments in homeric epic to compare with the climactic “I’m Revan” moment in KOTOR.

When a bard first chose to have Odysseus lie to his father in what we know as Book 24 of the Odyssey, and when a bard first chose to have Patroclus call Hector his third slayer in Book 16 of the Iliad, those choices differentiated those performances from every performance that had gone before, but they did so in relation to the existing epic materials. Those new themes, that is, were already based on old ones (“lying” and “battle-taunting”). In the recompositional process, bards made their choices in developing their themes (remember that in oral formulaic theory a “theme” is a part of a story, like an arming scene or even a whole battle) based on their knowledge of and skill in using the themes that had gone before.

Indeed, when subsequent bards followed them and used those themes (“lying to father,” “victor as third slayer”) in their own performances, they enacted similarly unique performances, in relation to the existing themes, despite the fact that they were using a pre-existing theme. To describe the difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey in a way that goes beyond the obvious and takes into account their geneses in bardic tradition requires that we describe the differing relationships between performance and theme in the two epics. This is the kind of analysis Laura Slatkin does in the essay I mentioned in my last post. That analysis tells us that the bards of the Odyssey re-composed their performances so as to take advantage of their hero’s own relationship to performances like theirs, and demonstrate their virtuosity at such composition.

That sort of argument is well-known to scholars of homeric epic; it has to my knowledge not been attempted on the digital RPG. I want to argue, though, that it should be attempted, because at the moment of decision between Jedi and Sith, the player of KOTOR re-composes his or her performance, even the first time, out of the elements given by the game, and above all in relation to his or her PC’s position on the light/dark slider. This is, I believe, the basic nature of re-composition in the Bioware style: the player at every moment shapes his or her performance with reference to a ludic system that renders the performance meaningful in relation to the entire system of the game, which is at the same time an overdetermined version of the player’s world that productively mystifies him or her about the meaning of his or her choices both in the game and in “real” culture.

From this perpective the homeric equivalent of the Bioware style would perhaps be a sub-genre in which bards sung their heroes’ words and actions according to a very stylized set of requirements (there are certainly examples of poetic genres with not dissimilar stylzations) that rather than the Iliadic focus on glory or the Odyssean focus on wits enforced a focus on a “scale” of diction that related words to themes. Odysseus would for example lie to his father if the bard had earlier called him “Odysseus the crafty,” or not lie to his father if the bard had called him “Odysseus the wise”; Patroclus would be third-killed by Hector if Hector had previously boasted that he was “great in glory.”

I’m beginning to suggest that what makes the Bioware style special is the way it ties the player’s performance explicitly to a fundamental ludic system that itself both represents and determines the register of the game’s range of performances. In KOTOR, that range has to do with the light/dark duality of the Star Wars universe; because of the light/dark slider, performances of KOTOR are always characterized in terms of where they fall on its spectrum--light, dark, or neutral. And because that light/dark duality was from its beginning in the original film Star Wars (now known as Star Wars: A New Hope) a mystifying allegory of real-world ethics, the KOTOR-player’s performance functions to express and perhaps even to shape his or her practices outside the game.

(To be sure, I’ve previously described pessimistic views, on the part of Plato and the designers of Bioshock, about the possibilities for games like KOTOR--that is, games with closed ethical systems--to shape player’s ethical practices. As a believer in the ethical power of homeric epic and the modern RPG, however, I hasten to say that I’m Aristotelian in this regard, though in few others, and I think that such mimesis does effect ethical education.)

In the next sketch I hope to talk about the cutscenes of KOTOR, and in particular the ones that result from the “I’m Revan” moment. The modularity of these cutscenes, and their integrated relation to the player’s re-composition of his or her performance, seem to me highly analogous to a bard’s use of stylized themes like feasts and battles.

The Bioware style (sketch 1)

2010-11-08T06:41:00.000-08:00

I’m tuning up to write a chapter for a forthcoming volume on digital RPG’s, to be entitled Dungeons, Dragons, and Digital Denizens: Digital Role-playing Games and to be published by Continuum Books. Whether or not my contribution is finally accepted for the book, I think it should be a worthy--even ground-breaking--volume, given its editors’ emphasis on theoretical approaches to the subject in their call for chapter-proposals.

What you’ll see here, if you decide to read this post, and whatever others I manage to produce, is a series of probes in the direction of a methodology of game-criticism based on a fuller appreciation of games’ analogy to oral formulaic epic, and to homeric epic in particular, than I think game-critics have yet deployed. Here’s the abstract I submitted, for starters; I need to state clearly that the final version of the chapter--the one I’m working towards with these sketches--hasn’t been accepted for publication yet, though based on the abstract the book’s editors requested a final version.

Bioware’s epic style: oral formulaic theory and the recompositional process in three Bioware RPGs

Several writers, beginning with Janet Murray in Hamlet on the Holodeck, have observed the analogy between certain forms of digital game--most notably the RPG--and the oral improvisatory process that gave the world the Iliad, the Odyssey, and countless other works of the Western literary tradition. Briefly, the player of an RPG engages in practices that are highly and interestingly analogous to the practices of the homeric bards, as studied through the comparative materials collected from South Slavic bards and analyzed originally by Milman Parry and Albert Lord. The RPG-player uses the elements given him or her by the game, just as the bards utilized the tradition in which they had been trained; the RPG-player recombines and innovates upon these elements to produce a performance that is irreducibly unique in the occasion as the bard did the same to produce his epic performance. Indeed, as the homeric bard’s performances were later codified eventually to become the fossils we know as the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the singers of tales of other traditions’ into works like Beowulf and The Song of Roland, RPG-players’ performances are these days sometimes codified in video form and shared around games’ communities.

This chapter seeks to contribute to our understanding of the operation and cultural significance of the digital RPG by analyzing key moments in three RPGs by Bioware, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and DragonAge: Origins as instances of the same thematic recompositional process delineated by Lord and deployed as a methodology of “composition by theme” by scholars like Laura Slatkin. I demonstrate that a developed “Bioware epic style” may be identified in the way Bioware RPGs use a complex imbrication of dialogue trees, highly modular cutscenes, and party selection choices to allow players the opportunity to compose by theme themselves, creating performances that necessarily stand in relationship to other performances of the same game both by themselves and by others, just as thematic composition in the homeric epics--and in the Odyssey in particular--derives its most important effects from the interactions--indeed the interactivity--of the current performance with the possibility of other, different performances.

I demonstrate that in these three Bioware RPGs players’ choices of character origin, of dialogue, and of party selection, as well as of conduct towards party members, we see the mechanics of the Bioware RPG develop in each game as a way of shaping interactivity with the cultural materials given in the game. I also consider as contrast two other studio RPG styles, the Bethesda style and the Square Enix style, to illuminate the particular operation of the Bioware style. The chapter’s greatest contribution is thus likely to be in the comparisons and contrasts of three different games with one another and with other styles of RPG as outgrowths of a new practice of the oral epic tradition.

So my first notion of what my argument in the chapter will be is very much along the lines of a wonderful--though, I think interestingly flawed--paper by the brilliant classical scholar Laura Slatkin, called “Composition by theme and the metis of the Odyssey” (partly available here on Google books). I’ve taught Slatkin’s essay many times now in various courses on homeric epic, and it never fails to generate productive discussion about the exact extent to which we can say that an oral epic is about something or means something.

Strangely (note my irony), it’s a discussion that’s very highly analogous to discussions I have almost every day on Twitter, Facebook, and Buzz about the possibilities for meaning or “aboutness” in narrative video games. I’ve long ago dispensed, for my own purposes, with the notion that we can talk about games having “authors” in any meaningful sense. But the question of what effect that absence of authorship has on what I prefer to call “meaning-effect” is one with which even homeric scholarship, whose modern incarnation is of course older than video games themselves, and whose roots go back much, much further, continues to have great difficulty in dealing. Game scholarship has made advances in this direction--Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck holds its value very well in this regard--but there is much more to be done, and I’m hoping that my Bioware chapter will help do it.

At any rate, I think formulating this argument will take my own project in a direction it should definitely now go--the nuts-and-bolts critical discussion of what the fundamental comparison on which this blog is founded can actually tell us both about homeric epic and about games, and in particular about story-based video games. Slatkin’s argument is more or less that whoever put the Odyssey together did so 1) with a full understanding of the implications of the multiformity of the oral formulaic themes out of which he was making the thing we now know as the Odyssey, and 2) overtly to place himself (or, if you’d rather, the Odyssey’s narrator) in sympathy, and in friendly rivalry, with his hero Odysseus, in the aspect of metis (cunning). To make a corresponding argument about a game or a set of games would involve actually considering what the narrative materials of RPG’s are, and how they fit together--something that the critic of a novel or a film doesn’t do, something unique to oral epic and games.

My plan is to argue that in three crucial moments of the Bioware RPG’s I mention in the abstract, the player’s performances achieve their meaning-effects in a way describable in the same terms Slatkin uses of the composer of the Odyssey, a way particular to the Bioware style. I want to say that even on the first playthrough--and with increasing complexity as firsthand playthroughs and secondhand knowledge of others’ playthroughs accumulate--the player of a Bioware RPG must make meaning out of his or her performance not only through the performative choices s/he does make but also through those s/he doesn’t, not in the general sense true of all RPG’s but in the specific sense of a confrontation with the games’ potential performances, forced upon the player by the way these specific games deploy their thematic material.

I haven’t decided on the three key moments yet--and of I’ll course support my conclusions about them with many references to other moments in the games--but one of them is likely to be the moment in KOTOR at which the player chooses the way his or her performance will end. (I’m going to put it that way in this sketch because I want to keep it spoiler-free).

Just to end this first sketch with something concrete, I plan to argue that KOTOR configures the player’s performance in such a way that the choice between Light and Dark is a confrontation with the meaningful implications of the player’s performance to that point in the game, and so also with the potential meanings of the performative choices with which the game now confronts the player in the form of specific dialogue-options. As the player’s performance continues from that point, his or her composition by theme--that is, the theme s/he chose to elaborate at that crucial moment--works out its meaning-effects in great part through that performance’s relation to the player’s confrontation with his or her previous choices, above all through the specific valence of the Light/Dark scale that lies at the backbone of the game’s ludics.

Structuring, resolving, and elaborating this kind of choice is exactly what Slatkin’s Odyssey-composer does, with relation to the thematic materials of the Odyssean tradition. The performative choices he made, which echoed centuries of performative choices made by other bards, had the same relation to choices he’d made earlier in the recompositional occasion of his version of the epic: he was forced into the same kind of confrontation. The difference--and the reason I think we can talk about a “Bioware style” as opposed to an “Odyssey style” or a “Bethesda style”--is that the Odyssey-composer’s confrontation was in the register of metis, and involved things like similes, whereas the KOTOR-players’ confrontation is in the register of Light/Dark, and involves things like romantic cutscenes.

If I’m not mistaken about where I’ll go next (though admittedly lately I seem to have less than 50% accuracy on that score), I’ll be getitng more specfic, and more spoiler-y, about that moment in KOTOR. I’m excited about this chapter, and I’d love to discuss it with anyone who’s interested as it develops, in the interest of ensuring that it makes a real contribution to its fields.

I’m going to use the occasion of this post on which I’m eagerly seeking comments to experiment with turning comments off on the blog and requesting that if you're interested in commenting you do so on Google Buzz. If you haven’t experienced how interesting, prolonged, and downright valuable Buzz discussion can be, I recommend giving it a try! You’re most welcome to follow me on Buzz, here; you’ll find this post there, too, with any luck, and I hope to discuss it with you there!

Halo: Reach as practomime

2010-09-23T06:33:00.000-07:00

The scarcity of ammunition dominates the campaign of Halo: Reach, at least for a non-elite player. This domination is entirely ludic: as the player depresses the triggers of his or her controller, the amount of available ammo goes down very quickly in relation to the toughness of the enemies around Noble 6, the player-character.

Noble 6 is always, always, running out of ammo. No powerful weapon, like a rocket-launcher or en energy sword, ever lasts for long; semi-powerful weapons like the Designated Marksman Rifle (DMR) and even the Magnum are in constant danger of becoming useless; even the lowly Assault Rifle often has to be exchanged for a Needler or the even lowlier Plasma Pistol. Not infrequently, the current checkpoint has to be abandoned simply because there's no more ammo on the map—not something that's ever happened to me in a game before. Indeed, and more importantly, I don't think I've ever experienced a ludic situation more in tune with the themes of its game: this is desperation conveyed subtly and pervasively, through every facet of the practomime. (It is very much worth noting that the Plasma Pistol, in the hands of an expert, is not lowly at all; such an expert will not experience this game-dynamic as I describe it here, though perhaps the ludic design of the AI and of the firefight scenarios may work for him or her as I describe them in this post.)

The nature of game-design dictates that wide variation in the hegemony of ammo-scarcity is possible in individual performances by individual players. Much of what I write here is in fact simply inapplicable to very good players of Halo, especially as regards the availability of adequate weapons and ammo. A superb player, even playing the game on Legendary difficulty, for example, will possibly never run out of ammo. A very large range of performances of the practomime of the campaign, though, by players of average ability, will I believe be fundamentally and thematically shaped by the scarcity of ammunition.

The constant running out of ammo goes hand-in-hand with two other ludic features of the game: the toughness and evasive abilities of the AI enemies and the frequent use of the firefight scenario with its waves of enemies. I want to suggest that these features together create a practomimetic meaning effect between ludics and narrative, by forcing players to perform the epic deeds I wrote about in my last post not only as power-fantasies (of which, of course, every form of epic, from Gilgamesh on, is full) but as complex enactments both of power and of its frustration.

As I wrote in my last post, the narrative shape of Reach traces the same kind of outline that's traced by many of the fossils left behind by oral formulaic traditions—including the homeric one. By itself, though, that outline does not make Reach—or any game—"epic" in a sense that's helpful from an analytic perspective. Only the living performance of the game by the player can do that—and that living performance is governed by mechanics like scarcity of ammo.

By that definition, to be sure, it might seem that no epic set down in textual form qualifies, since textual epic seems not to allow for live, improvisatory performance. But in fact the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid are like video captures of superb performances of a game like Reach. In being records of actual performances according to the rules of the epic tradition—even if those performances were never delivered orally, since written composition also constitutes performance—those texts present enactments of their respective practomimes.

Those epic texts have lost the living element of the tradition whose performance they record. Nevetheless, the players of the traditions (the anonymous bards who composed the final forms of the homeric epics; Virgil, consummate player of the classical epic) rendered them living in the performances there recorded. So too does, for example, any novelist or film cast-and-crew render their practomime living when they write and shoot it, though (and this is crucial) in novels and films the final audience has access only to the fossil. That audience may then bring novels and films alive through re-performance (cf. the kids who did a shot-for-shot re-make of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies [with the undead presenting a piquant irony, by the way]), but the nature of those forms locates audience performance after authorial performance and not inside and in place of it it, as in epic and games.

Reach, on the other hand, without its player, is an epic waiting to happen, a set of ludics waiting to be given enactment. More than any other comparison I could make, I think this one points out the value of thinking about games like Reach in the light of epics like the Iliad: these two kinds of practomime share the enormously important characteristic of living through re-performance, of gaining their meaning through iteration according to the rules laid down by the practomime.

The Iliadic warrior code, as expressed in the twelfth book of the Iliad--to kill or be killed, to gain the κλέος or to yield it to others—is explicitly related to the practice, and the ludics, of epic. The rules that govern the relationship between the bard's re-composition of the tradition in performance and the effect of that peformance, either on some lost epic occasion or on the text-Iliad we have include above all the rule that a warrior becomes a hero by gaining κλέος, and that he gains κλέος by killing opponents and taking their armor. κλέος, in turn, is as close to a win-state as the Iliad has: not only is the bard giving it to the heroes of epic, but, as the Odyssey makes plain in its depiction of bards, he is trying to win it for himself, in reciprocity with his heroic characters.

So when Achilles personalizes the warrior code into the horns of his ethical dilemma (life or κλέος, in a world where honor is meaningless), the themes of the Iliad itself—honor, death, glory, suffering—have everything to do with the practice that has given rise to it, and the ludics of that practice.

Halo's modern warrior code, as expressed over and over in the orders given to you both by characters and by the game itself (orders like "Defend Dr. Halsey") is to shoot those you have been told to shoot because the world must be saved. Just as the rule-based practice of the Iliad perpetuates the Iliadic warrior-code, the rule-based practice of Reach perpetuates Halo's: the code is explicitly related to the basic rules of its practomime, which in this case are the common dynamics of the shooter—quite simply, the next thing in the game won't happen until you have shot all the enemies you need to shoot in order to reach the necessary game-state. In cases where the ludic situation turns on activating a switch or reaching a certain point in the game's landscape, the player must of course shoot the enemies that stand in the way of his or her player-character.

The necessity of shooting enemies to reach the end of a scenario has no thematic, let alone narrative, meaning in itself. Halo's warrior code gives it that meaning by attaching specific orders to the rules. (I happen to think that such thematic and narrative communications as these orders expressing the code of Halo could also be characterized as a set of rules, but it's not of great importance that we look at it that way, so long as the integration of the thematic/narrative and the ludic is recognized.)

This is where the AI and especially the firefight scenario come in, because firefight expresses Halo's warrior code with an additional bundle of rules that dictates that waves of enemies attack the position being defended by the player-character, each wave more difficult to destroy than the last. At the same time, the incredible AI of elites and brutes ratchets the intensity of these waves higher and higher. I mean "incredible" with some precision; the effect produced upon the player is of disbelief that his or her game-mechanic-controlled enemy has eluded and defeated him or her.

These too are at base standard FPS dynamics (in fact, they're video game dynamics as old as Space Invaders); in the campaign of Reach, though, the sheer frequency of firefights, their integration into the unfolding of the narrative, and their thematic resonance with the campaign's narrative of last-ditch, doomed resistance makes for a ludonarrative consonance that casts the player as the forced savior of humanity.

There's an obvious comparison to be made with Hector of Troy, whose very name means "Holder" (Bungie obviously doesn't have a lock on overdetermined names like Noble 6). Hector's expressions of the warrior code, which were once upon a time recompositions of the Iliadic tradition, stand in contrast to Achilles', creating the conflict of identification that gives the Iliad a great deal of its power. Hector is holding out against the Greeks who out-number him; his death, and his funeral at the end of the Iliad, like the death of Noble 6, is a mechanic of the tradition, as he himself acknowledges over and over. This Hector comparison will I hope someday lead me to a comparison of Reach to Halo 1-3, and of Noble 6 to the Master Chief, since it seems that 6 perhaps plays Hector to the Chief's Achilles, but I'm afraid this post is already a monster of Odyssean proportions.

Scarcity of ammo, enemies who seem to outwit the player, and firefight together make the player's performance of Halo: Reach a practomimetic enactment of the same doomed, glorious heroism I described in my last post. These ludics, as I've said, are not innovative, but as in previous games in the series traditional game-design features are deployed in such a way as to create a practomime that is shaped by, and in turn itself re-shapes, ancient themes that seem unlikely to leave world culture any time soon. We can deplore their presence; we can eschew their performance; but it's worth noting that while Plato threw Homer out of the Republic he would probably have let Halo in: armed conflict was a fact of life for him, as it is a fact of life today, and Homer's practomime is only tossed out because his heroes aren't, well, noble.

Halo: Reach as epic

2010-09-10T00:01:00.000-07:00

One of the things that fascinates me most about the epic traditions of the world is the way bards naturally sing their tales within cycles. The Greek word κύκλος just means "circle," and the cycle with which I'm most familiar—the ancient Greek one—is usually just called the ἐπικὸς κύκλος "epic circle." Every other oral epic tradition that I know of, whether the Japanese monogatari or the French chanson de geste naturally forms its tales into a circle of stories, each one having its beginning in medias res and its ending de mediis rebus (out of the midst of things) in order that another tale may be told, once again in medias res. Around the tales, just over the horizon, lies the whole story, never to be told completely, always to be glimpsed, night after night, as long as you have a bard around to give you those magic glimpses. Even the Iliad and the Odyssey, freakishly long as they are in comparison to what could actually have been sung in a night, only give us pieces of the puzzle, with their references to other tales, to be sung by other bards, like the stories of Heracles and the stories of the War at Thebes.

Epic cycles thereby create a particular species of a well-known literary trope: ring-composition, which is probably best defined as a story ending where it began, although there are also more technical definitions that involve higher degrees of narrative. The idea that the stories of epic return whence they came is an essential element of the hold they have over us, one we can also see in contexts like Lucas' "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. . ." and now in Halo: Reach, which ends both where it (Halo: Reach) began and where it (Halo, in the form of Halo: Combat Evolved began).

I won't spoil how exactly this happens right now—though I plan to revisit it once the game has been out for a few months--, but in what I found a striking series of epic moments I got to play not just the end of the game I was in, but also the beginning of the game I was in and, even more, the beginning of the game I had played years ago. When the 24th book of the Iliad foreshadows Achilles' death in the lost epic the Aethiopis, the feeling of eternity, and of continuity with the lived experience of the audience, is no stronger than it is when we catch site of the Halo ring at the end of Halo: Reach.

The symbolism of the circle itself adds a great deal, despite its imprecision: unlike a ring, no story can really end where it began, because something has happened. Between the feeling that things stay the same and the feeling that things change, a conflict played out on an enormous scale, lies epic, whether ancient or modern. Eternally, we feel, will live the heroes' glory in the bards' traditions—even, or perhaps rather especially, when those bards are we ourselves and our participation in the tradition of that glory will live on after we are gone. Changing and evanescent as is our own particular contribution—the stuff that happens, and happens differently, every time—it plays its part in the eternal circle.

(Plus, ringworlds are just really cool. Larry Niven knew it, and so does Bungie.)

In this next section, I'm going to be engaging in what I consider some mild spoiling—mild because I think anyone who knows the Halo cycle would have no trouble guessing basically what happens in Reach, and to those who don't know the Halo cycle these details are essentially meaningless. Nevertheless, if you like to come to your games entirely fresh. . . well, why are you even reading this?

Cortana, the artificial intelligence who guides the player through Halo 1-3, takes on a role of extraordinary importance in Reach, despite only speaking at the end of the game. From one perspective, Halo: Reach is actually, in its entirety, about Cortana. Cortana's role takes the player of Reach from thematic concerns of the eternal circle and the return to the beginning to the more immediate epic concerns of getting the job done, both in the sense of fulfilling the duties imposed upon a Spartan and in the sense of playing the game in a fashion competent enough to get Noble 6 from point to point within it. The figure of Cortana both binds the game-narrative together as an integrated whole and serves as the narrative metaphor for the onward-pressing mechanics of a shooter: she is the reason to keep going, to keep shooting Covenant and pressing on.

It's almost as if (meaning, I want to argue but don't have the critical courage to go all in and say that) Cortana is the Helen of Halo. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the figure of Helen of Sparta (aka Helen of Troy) has a strange and potent relation to the bardic tradition. When we see her on the walls of Troy, she introduces us to the Achaean kings. When we see her in her bed-chamber, she is weaving a tapestry that depicts all the deeds of the Achaeans and the Trojans. When Hector berates her, she says that she knows she's terrible, but that everything has happened in order that they all become aoidimoi "song-worthy." When we see her in the Odyssey, strangest of all, she claims to be the only true match for Odysseus' intelligence, setting up a comparison she is sure to lose to Penelope but which makes Penelope a new, better Helen (remember that like Helen Penelope is faced with a ton of suitors; Penelope's job is to make sure she gets out of it better than Helen did).

Cortana is a person and yet not a person, a character and yet not a character—and always your way into the heart of the Halo story. "Now would be a very good time to leave!" rings in the imaginations of every player of Halo: CE, and her words at the end of Reach, over-the-top as they may seem, are just what Helen might have said about the heroes of homeric epic: "We will remember your courage."

Cortana's role as the Helen of Halo is all the stronger because like the Iliad Reach is about dying nobly. The broad meaning of the Iliadic tradition turns on the idea of the beautiful death—beautiful specifically because it is a death undergone in order to win the kleos that comes from dying for honor and duty without reference to one's own interest (as Achilles fights because he is duty-bound to his comrades to fight, despite acknowledging that Helen isn't worth fighting for). In Reach, your player-character's identity as Noble 6, part of Noble Team, is only the tip of this self-sacrificial iceberg.

We should not turn away from a fundamental problem here: I'm a guy on a sofa, not a Spartan giving his life to save humanity. Indeed, the very interactive nature of the practice of playing Halo tends to emphasize, rather than cover over, the enormous gap between pretending to be Noble 6 sacrificing himself and actually dying nobly: when the game ends, we're still on the sofa.

Being there on the sofa, like sitting in a bard's audience, though, finally connects Halo and games like it to the epic traditions they have reawakened: through them we become integrally involved in deeds we could not possibly realize in our own lives, but which we must acknowledge our longing, and perhaps our duty, to attempt. From this dynamic comes those frequent epic moments when a hero performs a deed no one alive "now" could do: we are not epic heroes—it is for us merely to try to be like them. The Halo cycle calls us to great deeds by making us part of a story of which, in the end, we feel ourselves only to be weak echoes.

Teaser: coming posts about Halo: Reach

2010-08-27T07:31:00.000-07:00

The epic tale of my relationship with the game Halo has arrived at a new and, for me, frankly, magical place. I had the privilege to play through Halo: Reach on Tuesday at an event held by Microsoft and Bungie to allow reviewers to get a thorough look at the game. I can't deny the the thrill I felt to be told by Joe Tung, the producer of the game, that I was the first person outside Bungie to finish the single-player campaign.

I've made no secret over the last four years of my admiration for Halo and for its creators. I've variously described it as epic, profound, and educational; I've even written a chapter for the forthcoming book Halo and Philosophy that says that Plato would have let the guardians of the Republic play Halo.

I'm not going to try to review the game (especially not in this post, since I'm not allowed to publish anything that might be construed as a review until 10 September). I am, though, planning a series of three posts from my particular perspective as the guy who sees in Halo much of the promise of narrative games' reawakening the epic tradition: "Halo: Reach as epic," "Halo: Reach and the idea of narrative canon," and "Halo: Reach as practomime."

Operation LAPIS: the HUD mechanic

2010-08-26T08:08:00.000-07:00

The mechanic of a heads-up display, usually called a "HUD," is well known to players of a wide variety of different kinds of games. Probably the most familiar kind of HUD for most gamers is the one found in games with a shooting component: the overlay of various important pieces information on the picture of the virtual world in which your character is trying to complete his or her objectives. Two of those pieces of information are nearly universal: a targetting reticle (the little shape in the middle of the screen that tells you where your firearm will deliver its projectile) and some kind of health-bar (the indicator of how much more damage your character can take before he or she reaches some kind of failure state—most often analogous to death).

Learning to manipulate the HUD of an FPS or an RPG is perhaps the most basic objective of games that have such a mechanic. After all, if you can't use the information in the HUD effectively, you won't achieve any other game objective. Games have become very good at teaching players—that is, creating the opportunity for players to learn—how to use their HUD's through simple game-opening tutorials, but the reason they've been able to get so good at it is that basic nature of the mechanic, like all game-mechanics, is itself an opportunity to learn. The reason experienced gamers can pick up a huge variety of games and play them almost right away is that through game after game they've learned the HUD mechanic by doing things in games with HUD's. In that sense, the HUD is a kind of microcosm of the potential of game-based learning.

What if learning how to read Latin were like learning to use a HUD? What if the information overlaid on the screen were information about the grammatical and cultural aspects of an ancient situation, to respond to which a student had to interpret and assimilate that information?

LAPIS operatives, as we've discussed in previous posts, will find themselves in ancient situations that demand that they read Latin and respond like Romans and in accordance with the worldview of their characters. To assist them, in the same way that a health-bar assists a gamer playing, say, Halo, they will have a HUD that contains vocabulary, grammar notes, and cultural information—including multimedia and links to places to obtain more information. They will absolutely need to use the information in their HUD's to contribute effectively to the team collaborations where they will be assessed on their progress towards mission objectives. Remember that teams of students control a single Recentius (player-character), and that they will need to collaborate on what action to take in response to the prompts they receive from the TSTT.

From the pictures you can see that we envision the HUD being displayed on mobile devices. To marry the ARG aspect of LAPIS to students' actual lived experience with the technologies of everyday digital culture by sending them information vital to their mission on their handheld devices—well, you can just call it potentially engaging. The same information could also be displayed in a browser tab, though, so students will have multiple ways to access their HUDs.

"Student-centered learning" is a term that gets thrown around a lot. The HUD may be the best mechanic I've ever seen for letting players and students keep the learning centered on them. At the same time, the HUD mechanic shows clearly a fundamental relationship between game mechanics and learning activities: in a game, as in LAPIS, a player manipulates information given by the game to reach objectives. The mode of manipulation is a mechanic; the process of reaching the objective is an activity. Thus, in a traditional course, one could describe using a glossary as a mechanic; in fact, the LAPIS HUD is in a certain sense a glorified glossary. If there's a breakthrough here, it's in the way the mechanic is integrated into the activities and learning objectives of the course: whereas a traditional glossary has no integral relation to what students are doing when reading Latin (that is, to look up a word in the glossary isn't actually a part of reading but rather takes students out of that activity and into the glossary), using the HUD is explicitly a part of the ongoing narrative of Operation LAPIS. When students use the HUD, they will be working towards their real learning objective—not just decoding the words of a passage of Latin, but performing as a reader of Latin.

By integrating the scaffolding of the HUD into the overall practomime of LAPIS, we believe that we've given students a way to engage the material of introductory Latin—grammatical and cultural—on a very deep level. More, the basic activities involved in achieving mastery of this material are made part, as they should always be made part for the scholar as well as the student, of the greater quest for the highest goals of humanistic learning: preserving and improving our civilization. That’s why the Demiurge has recruited them, after all; that’s what they’ll do if they manage to play through all the operation’s missions and at last find and read the LAPIS SAECULORUM.

Operation LAPIS is ĪTE!

2010-08-15T07:28:00.000-07:00

I'm incredibly excited to let my readers know that the first-ever fully practomimetic introductory language course, Operation LAPIS, is about to launch. (ĪTE means “Go,” by the way.) Operation LAPIS will be running this school year both here at UConn and at Norwich Free Academy, under the able command of Karen Zook (UConn) and Kevin Ballestrini (NFA) as Demiurges. We've been working all summer on designing the practomime and getting the materials together, including most recently a wonderful set of CARDs (Classical-Attunement Reward Devices) like this one, which will be awarded to students for collecting examples of pronouns (for more information about the CARDs in particular, see this post by Kevin.)

I'll let the Demiurge himself introduce the premise:

DEMIURGE ONLINE
BEGIN TRANSMISSION
SIGNAL “First Contact” START

Congratulations, recruit. The Demiurge has selected you as an operative in Operation LAPIS. The Demiurge wishes to express his hope that you will prove an asset to the operation, and to Project ARKHAIA as a whole. He also wishes to explain your mission.

Project ARKHAIA is a secret initiatve of the Demiurge to preserve and build up civilization by identifying and interpreting the key cultural practices and works of the ancient world. The project is divided into several different missions, including Operation LAPIS.

The essential mechanic of all the operations of Project ARKHAIA is to recruit students as operatives of a system called the Texto-Spatio-Temporal Transmitter (TSTT). You may think of the TSTT as a supercomputer running advanced artificially-intelligent simulation software, or you may think of it as a time-machine. Either way, the TSTT has been programmed by the Demiurge to take mission operatives back to the ancient world. There, they collaborate with other operatives to control ancient Greeks and Romans tasked with discovering the secrets that can save our own world. Inside the TSTT, operatives learn to act as Greeks and Romans, and in particular to understand their languages, ancient Greek and Latin.

These secrets are encoded in the TSTT in the form of texts which operatives must read and understand. Of course, in order to read and understand them, operatives must learn the languages and cultures of the ancient world. Without that leaning, the secret texts would be meaningless. The secret text of Operation LAPIS is the LAPIS SAECULORUM (“Stone of Ages”). Your mission, recruit--operative, now--is to discover what the LAPIS is, and where you can find it.

As you progress in your attunement to the TSTT and the classical world, you will receive Latinity Points, which will eventually be disguised as your grade in order to maintain operational secrecy. You and your team will control a Recentius--one member of an ancient family--alongside the Recentii of other teams. You will gain levels of attunement, and gain the ability to decide your Roman’s destiny even as you learn more about that Roman’s story. You will collect the essential elements of the Latin language and the Roman culture, and receive special Classical-Attunement Reward Devices (CARDs) to indicate your progress. Above all, you will discover the secrets of the men and women of ancient Rome who shaped the destiny of the entire world: tradesmen, bankers, matrons, senators, courtesans, emperors.

The Demiurge has recruited you to achieve no less a task than to save civilization, but the path you and your team will take will be your own.

END TRANSMISSION

The course, that is, is framed as an RPG inside an ARG. The operatives (students), divided into five teams, each of which controls a young Roman, must go to ancient Pompeii and answer prompts like this one:

>Outskirts of Pompeii, Italy, 79CE<

Your Recentius is standing, on a bright Italian summer day, on a road near the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. Refer to the TSTT navigation device for geographic orientation.

There is a field nearby, with an olive tree in it.

Persona tua est in viā.
Malus est in viā.
Malus inquit, "Quid nomen est tibi?"

Prompt: Answer the ruffian; you are not required to tell him your actual nomen.

Click here for your HUD.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be blogging much more about the mechanics of LAPIS, and about the way we're trying to assess its affordances for engaged learning. We have an amazing, and growing, team working on the operation, and we can't wait to see what paths Karen’s and Kevin’s students choose.

That Bioshock is tragedy

2010-07-26T06:34:00.000-07:00

The distinction between epic and tragedy seems very clear to us. Even if we lay aside the definitions those words carry in everyday English ("epic"="awesome"; "tragedy"="really sad story"), and get technical and literary, we do pretty well with the old-fashioned, "real" definitions: an epic is a long story (properly, a long poem) about a great event (like the Iliad); a tragedy is a performed enactment of a serious action (like Romeo and Juliet). Those at least are serviceable definitions that cut through the myriad of transferred senses and connotations that have befallen these words over the many years through which they've journeyed from Ancient Greek into English. They're also the definitions I'm going to be using in this post; if you're interested in figuring out where I got the reasoning that led to them, you might have a look at a reference work or two. (Wikipedia's articles aren't terrible, either.)

The question I want to consider in this post is whether it's helpful to think about these ancient genres together in connection with our ongoing attempt to figure out what video games are good for. I'm going to suggest that by describing Bioshock as a tragedy (in a technical sense, at least) we gain the ability to relate the game to artistic tradition, and to compare and contrast its themes and cultural effects with those of other works of the tragic tradition in particular. With that ability, we may also be able 1) to assess Bioshock's cultural achievement more accurately and more effectively, and 2) to describe its artistic elements—mechanics, dynamics, aesthetics, thematics—more thickly and with more satisfying effect.

I've spent a great deal of time talking on this blog about how some of the most popular video games—in particular the standard-issue FPS and the standard-issue RPG—deserve consideration as epics in the epic tradition that goes back to the dawn of Western storytelling, and how in particular they reawaken the oral improvisatory tradition that gave us the homeric epics. But I'm going to say now that although Bioshock partakes of the same characteristics that make other FPS's epic, it uses those characteristics in a way that places it in the tradition of tragedy as well.

That is, the line between epic and tragedy is not as bright as it seems, when—as now and in the 5th Century BCE—artists like Aeschylus and Ken Levine are exploring the limits of artistic storytelling.

I feel like I can make this argument above all because the distinction between epic and tragedy was unclear to no less a crtic than Plato, who groups Homer in as a tragedian at a very important moment in a very important work, Book 10 of Republic:

Therefore, Glaucon, I said, whenever you meet with any of the eulogists
of Homer declaring that he has been the educator of Hellas, and that
he is profitable for education and for the ordering of human things,
and that you should take him up again and again and get to know him
and regulate your whole life according to him, we may love and honour
those who say these things --they are excellent people, as far as
their lights extend; and we are ready to acknowledge that Homer is
the greatest of poets and first of tragedy writers; but we must remain
firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous
men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State.
For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either
in epic or lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind, which by
common consent have ever been deemed best, but pleasure and pain will
be the rulers in our State.

Plato makes it very clear elsewhere that he can tell the difference between epic and tragedy. In other passages he doesn't lump them together the same way, but his insights into mimesis lead him, as we should also be led, to recognize that the essential nature of tragedy somehow transcends the customary form of "performed enactment of a serious action"—that is, in Shakespeare's words, "Two-hours traffic of our stage." In this moment in Plato I find the birth of what I sometimes call "capital-T Tragedy," or "Universal Tragedy" or simply "the tragic."

Aristotle will later try to formalize this notion into the pity – fear – catharsis meme, but I find his strictures to be ambiguous and overly-prescriptive. I would rather say that what we're dealing with is the evocation and manipulation of sympathetic identification. When we see Priam suffer, when we see Oedipus suffer, we feel for them.

If we're willing to follow Plato's reasoning, we end up with a much more flexible way of talking about the things art does to us and with us—and in particular about the things games do to us and with us. For example, we can use the idea of tragedy to talk about Bioshock.

"A man chooses; a slave obeys." This memorable line, delivered at a memorable moment, constitutes the core of Bioshock's thematics of necessity. I have argued elsewhere that Bioshock is a philosophical meditation on the relationship of culture to interactivity; my argument here runs in parallel—that this meditation expresses itself in great part in the register of necessity, and that this expression makes Bioshock tragedy.

To put that in a less complicated way, tragedy is about having no choice. The earliest of the great tragedies of Western literature, Aeschylus' Oresteia, illustrates this idea pretty well: Clytemnestra has no choice but to kill Agamemnon because Agamemnon had no choice but to kill Iphigenia; Orestes has no choice but to kill Clytemnestra because she killed Agamemnon.

It's equally important to note that tragedy's situations of "no choice" are also about the way the freedom of choice is taken away: the reason the Agamemnon, the first tragedy of the Oresteia, is effective is that from the audience's, and the tragic chorus', perspective as ordinary humans, it seems like choice is possible. Clytemnestra could refrain from killing Agamemnon. From the perspective of the characters, though—despite the fact that they claim over and over that they are acting freely—they do what they must. Clytemnestra is the spirit of revenge, the Fury of the House of Atreus: the revenge she takes is, from the divine perspective (whether you believe in some pantheon of gods or you simply see Necessity as a fundamental principle of the human condition), absolutely inevitable.

All of the other typical elements of tragedy—the pity-fear-catharsis, the suffering, the sympathy, even the perspective of the tragic chorus and the unity of time and place—, can be traced to that basic "no choice" mechanic. All of them involve the relationship of the audience to the problem of necessity. What happens when we realize that we're not in control of our own lives?

Similarly, when we realize as players of Bioshock that we really have no choice—that we can't not commit an atrocity, that we can't not disarm the self-destruct, that our "choices" about saving and harvesting little sisters are ethically meaningless—we're forced to consider what it means that from the perspective of Divine Necessity we are powerless, as Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes, and Oedipus, Antigone, and Creon are powerless.

Looked at in this light, narrative games may turn out to be the most perfect medium for tragedy ever conceived. Games in general arise in the restriction of choice just as tragedy does, after all; that's what rules and mechanics are. To this point, though, most designers have sought to construct rules and mechanics so as to preserve and to maximize the illusion that game choices are unrestricted. Bioshock is one of the few games to go in the opposite direction (Shadow of the Colossus is, in its own way, another). There are hopeful signs that more may be to come: DragonAge: Origins works the same play of necessity at several important moments.

There's much more here, and I hope to continue exploring even such relatively minor tragic elements as the unity of time and place in Bioshock, because the setting of Rapture is so fascinating. One important corollary, though, which I started trying to write into this post but which quickly revealed itself as another post in the making, is the nature of sympathy in relation to the tragic chorus and what I consider its analogue, the player-character. Could it be that having an avatar whose choices are taken away meaningfully is the same as watching a bunch of singer-dancers in masks tell you the cryptic backstory of a bloody myth?

Shooting games of armed conflict: a question of narrative technology

2010-07-09T04:53:00.000-07:00

Two discursive moments have converged to make me want to write again about the place of warlike shooting games in our culture: first, Leigh Alexander last week posed a central question in a fresh way; and, second, I'm working on a chapter about the ethics of HALO. More on the latter as work proceeds; I'll tease it a bit by saying that I'm going to argue that Plato wouldn't necessarily have kicked Bungie out of the Republic. In this post, though, I'm going to suggest that when it comes to figuring out what to do about the superabundance of shooters of armed conflict, we are the ones we've been waiting for.

As regular readers of this blog know, I have a very long view of the question "Should we be worried that so many video games are about armed conflict?" In fact, that long view makes me like to ask the question somewhat differently: Why is traditional epic always about warriors? Why are so many of the most popular video games about soldiers, super-soldiers, and super-duper-soldiers?

The easiest answer is of course the old "boys like that stuff" answer. But that answer pays attention to the video game/digital practomime form only to the extent that we can talk about form as relating to opportunity—that is, because boys spend a lot of time with technology, and seem naturally drawn to it, and because boys also seem naturally drawn to war, the two constitute a sort of marketing compact, and feed off one another to their mutual profit. Boys like video screens, boys like war: behold, Call of Duty. On the ancient side, boys went to feasts; bards played at feasts; boys liked war; voila, the Iliad.

But it would be well to try to answer the question in a way that looks more intently at form as an essential part of the reason for the apparent prevalence of war shooters. In fact, I think it's possible to argue for a more satisfying answer that has to do with the way practomime (games and stories) gets performed through the narrative technologies present in culture, both ancient and modern.

The most important narrative technology of the practomime of the homeric bards was the formula—above all, the "ba-da-dum-ba-da-dum-bum" that comes at the end of a line of dactylic hexameter and fits phrases like πόδας ὦκυς Ἀχίλλευς (podas okus Akhilleus—"swift-footed Achilles") and πολύμητις Ὀδύσσευς (polumetis Odysseus—"cunning Odysseus"). Given the cultural context of the kind of feast depicted at the start of Book 9 of the Odyssey, the wonderful jingliness of those line-end formulas conduced marvelously to the development of the thematics of κλέος kleos—"glory/fame," the value of values of homeric epic. Kleos means having people remember your name. Composing homeric epic meant, for the bard, using the line-end formula to make names memorable.

Similarly, the narrative technology of hit-detection—and this is something that Leigh picks up on nicely in talking about the developers' view of the question of the warlike game—intersects with the cultural context of a society contemplating the brittleness of its military might and produces the thematics of modern military glory, in the various forms in which we find it in games like HALO, Brothers in Arms, and Call of Duty. Duck Hunt's core mechanic has been with us for a long time: it seems natural (which is to say, in fact, cultural) that game-designers use it to let us play the practomimes we need to play now.

The stereotypical design of these games—both of mechanics and of story—mirrors exactly the stereotypical plots of homeric epic. And as the golden age of Athens rolled on, and tragedy, history, and philosophy began to question the value of sheer kleos (even as both the Iliad and the Odyssey, No-Russian-like, had begun themselves to question it), homeric recitation remained the AAA title of its day. At Athens' premier festival, the Panathenaea, there was no tragedy, just Homer.

And so the final part of Leigh's first piece hit home for me rather sharply, though I imagine in a way unique to me:

What continues to concern me is that we don't think about it and we don't discuss it. We're able to witness grenade-flung bodies, we're able to crush enemies under the treads of our vehicles, we're ourselves able to die in trenches. And get up again, and keep doing it. How far can we push things before video games like these stop being a way to interact with and process the human experience, and instead cross a line to where they're trivializing it?

It would be easy, and ineffective, for me to say that I think about it and I discuss it, and so do my colleagues and my students. It stings a bit to think that our efforts are met with no acknowledgment from prominent journalists like Leigh and prominent channels like Kotaku. But I think it's more important to point out first that even the gamers who simply refuse to be interested in thinking about it and discussing it are going to be exposed to efforts like "No Russian," and, second, that as the narrative technologies of digital practomime (games) evolve along other directions than games of armed conflict, new thematics will evolve, too. The enormous and growing market share of other kinds of games (various MMO's and social games especially) is probably the best indication.

The Panathenaea happened only every four years; the Great Dionysia, the festival of tragedy, happened every year. By the end of the 5^th Century it was clear (from Plato and Aristotle, especially) that tragedy was now the more important genre, a genre that parted with homeric epic's apparent trivialization of warlike violence in favor of a deep contemplation of what violence means.

AAA titles take years to develop; their technologies are thematics are correspondingly fossilized, just as homeric epic, recited the same way every year at the Panathenaea, became fossilized. Tragedy, on the other hand, while looking like it posed no threat to epic (indeed, looking like it reinforced epic's dominance, since it used epic's stories), nevertheless overtook it, just as the war shooter is, in fact, being overtaken now.

Social games and casual games may not look like profound art in the mold of tragedy, but their tendency to reinforce community, when placed together with the evolution of MMORPG communities and of communities organized around single-player titles like DragonAge may show a way forward past the dominance of the shooting game of armed conflict.

To put this response another way, war-games already trivialize the human experience of war. They always have, just as the Iliad trivialized war into something ancient feasters could listen to while they ate. (This is what the 22^nd book of the Odyssey is about, actually, where the suitors expect to listen to a song about war and instead get slaughtered by the bard-like Odysseus.)

That seems like a problem when it looks—as it looked at E3 this year—like there's nothing else going on, and like the community receiving the practomime has hit a dead-end. But just as new communities formed around tragedy, new communities are now forming around other kinds of games, and the associated markets of those games are bigger, and growing faster.

To put it one final way, it's obviously no coincidence that when Leigh says "We don't think about it and we don't discuss it" she's starting a thoughtful conversation.

+Humanities? (a reaction to Games+Learning+Society 6.0)

2010-06-14T07:54:00.000-07:00

I had the incredible privilege last week to serve as the designated classicist—perhaps even the designated humanist—at the Games+Learning+Society conference in Madison, Wisconsin. (It's an unofficial, self-appointed position.) My presence there, in the strange and wonderful space where the games industry and the burgeoning field of educational technology meet, would never have occurred without the close and immensely fruitful collegial relationship I've had over the past two years with Michael Young, who doesn't (I believe) get enough attention as a pioneer in his field of educational psychology and its relation to educational technology.

Others have reported broadly and emphatically about the sweep of the conference, from Kurt Squire's call to look at games as possibility spaces (my own take would be that we should start speaking of games as one kind of possibility space—or, better, practomime—in which learners gain the power to transform themselves) to David Wiley's call to realize the gains that only true openness of information can bring (my own take would be that, well, yeah—but with narrative, please). (Worth noting that Wiley is yet another teacher who independently started grading in XP; there must be something in the air—and the murmur that went through the room of what I'd call shocked approval at that slide indicates that that air's scent has been wafting over the lakes of Wisconsin.)

So my contribution to the post-conference conversation is to say "More humanities, please!"

I think there's enormous potential both for the new game/ed-tech inter-field (if you will) and for the ancient inter-field of the humanities in broadening their points of contact: ed-tech could gain a connection to the deep roots of culture; the humanities could gain the kind of traction over the modern world for which their practitioners have been longing. The new "field" of digital humanities (scare-quotes because it's widely agreed not to be a field but rather a set of methodologies) is questing towards some way of making the humanities relevant to the digital age; for a couple years now I've had the niggling feeling that there's something off about that quest—simply put, the humanities are relevant to the digital age, whether they're carried out digitally or in analog form. If Facebook is an instantiation of Plato's Cave, the way we describe it thus—that is, whether we prove it by data-mining or verbal argument in Latin on parchment—has no effect on the validity of the point, though of course it may well have an effect on how large an audience the argument reaches and persuades.

I don't mean to suggest that digital methods are not quite possibly the best methods available for humanities research—simply that we shouldn't look to them to assert the relevance of the humanities to those whom we'd like to keep us in business. Rather, I think what I saw at GLS last week can help us make a much stronger claim to relevance—a relevance that goes well beyond our tools, and into the very constitution of human culture—and even the survival and increase of culture's constructive elements (whatever we should declare those elements to be, a point on which reasonable people are always bound to differ despite general agreement that there are such constructive elements, and that they should survive and increase).

Helped by the absence of any formal educational institutions (as we conceive of them) to think past, Plato was able to see that learning and culture—and thus learning and the humanities, though of course the humanities were at that time many, many years from existing in the semi-formal sense in which we know them—are locked in a dance so intricate that it could be expressed metaphorically as the chains that hold the willing audience in their places in the Cave. As I've demonstrated elsewhere, Plato allegorizes cultural learning as something we can recognize under the current use of the word "game"—or, to put it purely functionally, under the prevailing use of that word by the GLS Conference's attendees.

Because we on the other hand do have formal educational institutions to think past, much of the energy at GLS is understandably taken up with figuring out how to think past them. How do we get administrators to let us bring games into the classroom? Above all, what's the evidence for the benefit of games in schools, and how do we use it, and then get more evidence? These questions are urgent ones, but I'd like to suggest another one, based on humanistic inquiry: if culture is itself, as Plato saw, a sort of game (or a practomime, or a possibility space), and thus school is already a game, how can we redesign this game, this cave, so that all the learners in the schools, in the universities, in the cities and towns and villages, gain the culture-skills they need to make the game a better one for all humanity?

That's the kind of thing I think humanists are best equipped to wonder about—and, I like to flatter myself, maybe classically-trained ones best of all. I'm pretty sure I'm going to spend the summer and the fall pondering precisely that question, since I'm putting together two practomimetic courses based on Plato's understanding (and perhaps misunderstanding) of Athenian culture and culture in general, and since I'm also working with my socii to develop a new practomimetic Latin curriculum for both high school and college classes. Expect more in this vein, as well as about Red Dead Redemption and (I fervently hope) Mass Effect 2 and DragonAge!

Starting design of Operation ΜΗΝΙΣ: a potentially cool idea

2010-05-28T07:18:00.000-07:00

Over the next year, I'm going to have the pleasure of developing an online version of the course I've always considered my favorite to teach: CAMS 1101 Greek Civilization, in which I get to tell my students the amazing story of how Western Civilization discovered the questions that still obsess us--above all, the question of ἀρετή arete ("excellence"). Simply put, that question is more or less just "What does it mean to be a good person?"

Now, though, I get to design it as a practomime from the ground up, and I think I've just had a wonderful idea for the framing:

The Demiurge recruits the students as operatives in Project ΑΡΧΑΙΑ in the usual way (cryptic e-mails on the course's web-site saying that their services have been commandeered to save Western Civilization yada yada yada). In order to reach the mission objectives of knowledge and skill necessary to brief the world about Greek cvilization (including sub-objectives of reading ancient Greek), the Demiurge has coded the following practomimetic simulation into the TSTT:

It's the lead-up to the trial of Socrates, and operatives are inserted into Athenians who could be called on to be jurors. In order to make the best possible decision about his guilt and his penalty, they must learn everything they can about how Socrates ended up on trial (which is, when told correctly, a story that goes back to the Bronze Age), and what the consequences of the trial have been for Western Civilization.

Operatives travel via the TSTT to the agora of Athens in the spring of 399BCE. They must find the answers to the questions put to them by the Demiurge and brief him on those answers, questions like, "What does Achilles mean to Athens?"

In order to complete this task (here's where the "activities" and "assessments" come in): they must gain certification on the TSTT through Challenges in the form of multiple-choice quizzes; they must heighten their particular skills through Ancient/Modern-Interweave Skill-Practice Exercises (AMISPE's); they must power-up the TSTT through Imaginative Text Analysis (ITA), including reference to features of the ancient Greek that demands developing skill in reading that language; they must carry-out Practomime once in the Demiurge's TSTT-simulation, and provide him with Briefings (in disguise as exam essays).

Oh, and did I mention they're going to have to learn the beginning level of ancient Greek to do that?

Thinking about the coming design process energizes me in a way that I have to say nothing else in my professional life ever has: the lessons learned from ΚΤΗΜΑ, FABULA AMORIS, and ΚΛΕΟΣ are going to let me have a real go at convincing the world that game-based learning is a fantastic way to teach anything. And as a special bonus, my students and I are going to engage this world-beating material more deeply and immersively than we ever have before.

Red Dead Redemption diary, day 2: in which character and practomime seem to have a cage-match, or, yawn cutscenes again

2010-05-26T08:06:00.000-07:00

A long time ago, I was going to write a book about character in Athenian tragedy. I think it would have been a good book, but I stopped writing it because nobody was really excited about it except for me, and then video games came along. The reason I couldn't get people excited was mostly that I couldn't convince anyone but myself that I'd finally found the true definition of character, and month after month I was writing draft after draft, none of which seemed to improve the thing's persuasive qualities even in my eyes.

But when I started working on games, I quickly realized that their relation to mimesis—the relation, more-or-less, that I now call "practomime"—meant that I would be able eventually to say about epic, tragedy, and Plato in relation to games precisely what I'd always wanted to say about them in relation to psychoanalytic theory. Moreover, if I said it in relation to games people might actually read and even enjoy it.

Briefly, what I wanted to say then about e.g. Oedipus the King, and what I want to say now about Red Dead Redemption, is that characters are actually produced by the audience of a performance, and not by the text of a drama, or a game, or even by the enactment of that drama or game. Like I say above, I could spin you a lot of theory on this subject. Just to assuage my scholarly super-ego, I suppose I'll drop some names in telegraphic fashion: Lacan, Fineman, Benveniste, Calame, Loraux, Silverman. Ah. I feel better now.

A character, that is, is the impression of subjectivity that arises from discourse organized around a peformance as a subject. To put it another way, when a tragedy or a video game shows us and tells us that a bunch of signifiers of various kinds (including images and inarticulate sounds) is supposed to be like a person, we get the impression that it's a person. That's a character—not the signfiers, but the impression: it's what we do with the signifiers that makes the character.

That's what was in my subconscious, I think, last night as I tried to work out my relationship with John Marston. The character-impressions of a practomime (or game, if you like) are obviously going to differ in certain very important ways from those of an epic or a tragedy or a film-Western. The problem, though—and by "problem" here, I mean not to criticize but to critique—, is that John Marston frequently becomes a character who's much more recognizable as a film-Western character than as a practomime character.

Practomime characters, just for the sake of argument, though I think there's probably a book waiting for me out there about this topic, if not about the equivalent one in Athenian tragedy, are characters like the player-character in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) and Bioshock. To oversimplify vastly, they don't talk in cutscenes, and they don't talk during missions. Famously, in Bioware games like KOTOR and most recently DragonAge: Origins, they listen while other characters talk during missions and especially cutscenes.

John Marston, however, like other characters in recent Rockstar games (Niko Bellic is the other notable example), won't shut up. His cutscenes are full of pithy observations about the state of the West. When he's riding to town with his new patroness Bonnie he's full of long-winded though evasive answers, and even asks a few questions about her upbringing. During these moments, even when I'm controlling the wagon or the horse, I tend to wonder if I would have phrased things the same way John would—or, to put it another, less charitable way, the character-impression tends to disappear.

My critical instincts are screaming at me to gesture towards a reading of Red Dead Redemption's practomimetics of character as thematizing alienation, and to throw in some kind of filip about such a reading perhaps being helpful in understanding Grand Theft Auto IV's Niko better than we have so far. I'm not sure that kind of reading would be wrong, either: Marston seems like a pretty alienated guy, and the cutscenes definitely distance me from him, causing me to develop a sort of snap filmic character-impression of him, as if Red Dead Redemption were a practomime in which my character, Mejohn Marston, every so often gets to take a load off his feet, sit down on my couch, and watch a movie about a guy not entirely unlike him living a life not entirely unlike his, just more alienated.

But I think there's something more immediate going on here—something that involves genre, and makes me think of a discussion I had with Michael Abbott on the Critical-Distance podcast back when we were all just speculating about what Red Dead Redemption would be like. I theorized then that the Western hero, as fundamentally a cipher a la Shane or various John Wayne roles like the Ringo Kid of Stagecoach, could well be a perfect player-character for a practomime. A cipher—that is, a performative organization of discourse as metaphoric person—allows for really robust character-impressions, as players bring the character to life, and the ethical ambiguity of the Old West is a perfect backdrop against which to make practomimetic choices that let players explore their own inner landscapes.

I could be critical in two ways on this subject, I think, evaluative or descriptive: I could say that Rockstar failed to realize that generic potential and that we still await a truly profound Western practomime, or I could say that their refusal to make John Marston as much of a cipher as he could be forces the player to pay closer attention to the character-impressions he or she is forming. Like the alienation reading, that one may also be true, whether or not the dev team was thinking along those lines at all.I also like this latter one better, since it makes me feel better about the $60 I spent.

In the end, I believe the quasi-Western honesty of that critical transaction gives me more satisfaction than I could ever have expected from trying to find theory-imbued excuses for why Aeschylus' characters are flat, in an attempt to convince a university press' anonymous readers that I deserve another credit on my CV, for a book I'd be lucky to get even my graduate students to read.

Westward ho!

Red Dead Redemption diary, day 1: In medias res, again

2010-05-19T06:13:00.000-07:00

It's not often that I get to play a game in synch with the rest of the gaming world—that is, when the game releases—and most of the time I consider that a good thing, because it means that like a good little scholar I get to absorb the critical context along with the work. I also get to take my time when I play a game late, and avoid the unpleasant realization of just how "bad" I am at games. (Oh, how little consolation it is that I'm "good" at, say, the Iliad.)

But with the start of summer coinciding with the release of Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption, and with my longstanding interest in the relation of the Western to the epic tradition (I teach the Iliad in my myth course with The Searchers as my opening gambit), I thought it might be fun to blog on a semi-regular basis in a sort of diary-commentary form. Here goes.

I got to play from 9 to 11 last night, after I got my kids into bed. I entered the practomime as a character whom I later learned is named John Marston. He got off a paddle-boat between two semi-official looking men, who were clearly making sure he went where he was supposed to go. In medias res—or, as my friend Nels puts it, in medium ludum, though I personally think the older phrase is better, because it operates at the level of the res (the matters, the subject) of the practomime.

How did I know I was the man with the scars? Three things spring to mind: 1) he was clearly the man on the cover of the game; 2) he was in the middle of the shot, and in the middle of the semi-official men (I still have no idea who they are [in medias res again]); 3) it's a Rockstar game, and if there's a single disreputable character on screen, it must be you.

I think I'll save my frustration with the horseback-riding and with the narrative itself for another post and explore this practomimetic framing for a moment.

A bard or a member of his audience, when striking up his lyre or listening to a lyre being struck, would have had a subtext already running: this bard sings this kind of song, and thus is likely to be about to sing this kind of song again. Not to mention: when bards sing, this is the range of possible subjects, whether or not this bard decides to sing within his usual domain of styles and subjects.

When the bard began for example μῆνιν ἄειδε. . . (the beginning of the Iliad as we have it), it was like seeing the Rockstar logo. When the bard continued and sang that the tale that night would begin with the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles, it was like seeing a scarred dude get off a paddle boat in the middle of the screen.

In medias res isn't just about the story—it's about the context of the story, and its relation to the tradition. Red Dead Redemption isn't just about John Marston: it's about the player's relation to John Marston, as broadly conceived as that relation can be—inside his or her gaming life, inside gaming culture, inside all of culture.

And that, of course, is where Plato comes in. What will Red Dead Redemption allow its players to learn about the West, and more importantly about themselves? What will those players be, after they have been John Marston? Despite the frustrations I'll bring up as we go, I think even I will emerge transformed by the beautiful and profound aspects of this practomime.

Prototyping a Latin 1 practomime

2010-04-26T06:16:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday, I get to play-test the beginning of a practomime towards which I've been working for nearly a year now: what I have a feeling, if it catches on, may well be called "The Latin Game" (that's what my daughter calls it anyway, and she's been my only real play-tester all these months).

I call it, among other things, "A practomimetic introduction to Roman culture through the Latin language." It's an RPG--a tabletop RPG at the moment, but with dreams of going digital some day. It's about a possibly-mythical, possibly-real object called the Lapis Saeculorum (Stone of Ages), which bears an inscription that the students have been recruited to decipher.

In order to do that they must:

Travel back in time through the imaginative energies harnessed by the Demiurge (aka their teacher; aka, on Wednesday, me);
Learn Latin, because of course the inscription is in Latin.
Learn enough about Roman culture to understand what the inscription means.

Otherwise, you know, the world ends.

Wednesday is the Classical Association of Connecticut's State Latin Day, an amazing occasion when north of a thousand Latin students wear their tunicae (they can't have the fun otherwise) and run around a camp-like setting that has, of course, a piscina. I've been going faithfully for the last few years with my XBox or laptop in tow, trying to spread the word that games are not the devil, especially when viewed through classics.

The students, taking time away from such things as sunning themselves and racing chariots, have always been appreciative (and they have to do a certain number of enriching things over the course of their day, so being able to use video games for that purpose seems appealing, I imagine). But I've always seen a sort of longing in their eyes: "Isn't there a way," their eyes say, "that we could actually play games to learn Latin?"

"Ita vero, Marce, est ludus Latinus."

Six Romans, played by any number of Latin students in a team format, arrive on a road outside Pompeii, where a group of brigands is looking menacingly into a tree.

Six Romans, cousins--but each with a distinct worldview and a distinct set of skills. Three young women and three young men. One admires the Republic, another the Caesars; a third just wants peace. One knows of the power of Rome's legions; another of the power of the ancient cultural heritage that has come to Rome from the Greek world. Each has a different ars linguae ("speech skill") with which to start, and will gain more artes as the students level him or her up.

Six Romans who may have very different ideas about the empire and the old republic, but who must work together through the Demiurge's Texto-Spatio-Temporal Transport System to carry out the mission of OPERATION LAPIS SAECULORUM.

Some of my co-conspirators and I are working on this practomime on Google Wave, along with a similar practomime for Ancient Greek that will embed the first levels of that language in my large lecture courses on Greek Civilization and Classical Mythology. If you'd like to come along and help reimagine classics learning, let me know!

Further practomimetic adventures: a daring rescue

2010-04-15T06:59:00.000-07:00

This is just a pointer to my latest update on LOTROreporter, in which I chronicle my students' rescue of their bardic leader from a (fictional) camp of 1337 (that is, leet; that is, "elite") gamers.

The learning objective: analyze an anti-heroic bardic narrative.
The activity: take part in a bardic occasion that tells the story of the rescue of the leaders of the bardic order.
The result: madcap epic engagement (that is [shhh!], fun).

How much fun is virtual edutainment?

2010-04-06T06:02:00.000-07:00

This is an entry in a fun and interesting challenge sponsored by The Ancient World in London, presented by the energetic and classically-minded folks at Heritage Key.

I want to say that virtual edutainment is a lot of fun, but only if it's designed not to be fun but to help learners tell a story—that is, if fun isn't the primary consideration. My thinking on the subject has evolved enormously over the past year, as I've been developing a game-like way of delivering my own courses in classics. This past Fall I gave a course on the Greek historians as a role-playing game; this spring I'm teaching Advanced Latin as an adventure with the poet Ovid in 8 CE Rome.

Because I don't have the resources at my university to develop 3D worlds within which my students can go to ancient Athens and ancient Rome, I've been running my practomimes, as I call them, as old-fashioned tabletop RPG's and as online text-adventure with a few illustrations, like the one above of the Forum of Augustus.

I've learned that the virtual worlds that we create in students' imaginations can be learning tools just as powerful as the immersive environment of an MMORPG. Of course, my students do get to do their share of fighting, since fighting was so crucial to the cultures within which classical literature developed—but the most exciting parts for them have been meeting Pericles, Sophocles, and Augustus, and being able to "see" in their imaginations, what the ancient world looked like.

In Operation KTHMA, the course on Herodotus and Thucydides, my students stood trial for breaking and entering the home of Pericles' rival Thucydides son of Melesias. In FABULA AMORIS ROMANI, my students had to sing for Augustus, first emperor of Rome. In these moments, fun is being had—I have video of some of these moments, and there are actual smiles on my students' faces!—but fun isn't the thing that matters most. What matters is engagement in the material, and, if they're to be believed in their comments on the course at the end of the semester, my students were engaged. In (Gaming) Homer, my students are caught up in an ARG where they must become homeric bards by observing and playing The Lord of the Rings Online in relation to the Iliad and the Odyssey.

How much more wonderful would these courses be if the students could also be there in a 3d rendering? Fun, yes—but if the narrative were well-designed, also a course of study that's just as engaging as World of Warcraft. It's not the fun, it's the immersion, whether that immersion is high-tech, low-tech, or somewhere in between.

Life in Rome: examples of excellent practomime

2010-03-30T06:39:00.000-07:00

To celebrate my students' efforts, and to entice others to try the practomimetic method, I want to start highlighting some of the incredible things students in these courses are doing. The students of FABULA AMORIS ROMANI are now on their way North from Rome towards two neighboring farms in the Sabine Hills: one is the famous farm of Horace, given him by Maecenas; the other is the farm of the Recentii, the gens of my students' Romans.

Along with them go their wicked uncle Gaius, and the future emperor Tiberius, whom I call Drusillus (an unattested but plausible nickname), and a disreputable poet named Naso (that's Ovid's real name, from one perspective, and indeed the name by which he has frequently been known through history; it means "nose," so it also has the benefit of just being kinda funny). They've been sent on this sojourn by none other than Augustus the princeps himself, after having performed for him his favorite song, Horace's Carmen Saeculare, with which a chorus of boys and girls had celebrated Augustus' New Age of peace 25 years before. My students' Romans performed the song as a chorus in the portico of Aeneas in the Forum of Augustus, as Augustus himself took a regal position next to the life-size statue of his "ancestor."

Earlier, when they had first entered the Forum, the student who goes by the Roman name Portia had practomimed thus:

Portia, fearing that all these extravagant plans for creating commotion might fail--i.e. anger the Princeps instead of gain an audience with him--decides to create an Augustus-pacifying back-up plan. 1d10=9 (9)

After the group has re-emerged from the dark alley with the litter and continued on its way on the Via dei toward the Forum pincipis, she slips away for a moment to Julius Caesar's temple of Venus Genetrix. There she pauses to admire the apse and eight splendid columns [from the source, I cannot quite tell whether these were Trajan's creation or whether they existed in Caesar's construction, storing up details its construction and the impression they gave in her memory. If Augustus cannot be distracted by more flamboyant means, she might be able to compliment him on the beauty and inspirational qualities of his father's temple, which could even lead to allusions about the connection between the temple's patroness and the temple's builder. Then stories of any of the three illustrious figures (Venus, Caesar, or Augustus), or at least didactic advice for young Romans, might ensue, if the Princeps should feel loquacious, and his narration would not likely prove short. By the time he has finished, perhaps he will have forgotten to punish the malefactors for bringing commotion into his forum--or at least he might be slightly more willing to mitigate the punishment.

Source about the temple:
Orlindo Grossi, "The Forum of Julius Caesar and the Temple of Venus Genetrix" (JSTOR)

And, that the dramatic element not be excluded, here's what the student cui est Romulus nomen did in hopes of entering the forum:

Romulus is feeling a bit confused about the plan to meet the princeps, but he decides to try a radical plan. He notices a group of slaves standing around a litter that looks particularly fanciful and ornate. Being a country rube, Romulus has never seen such a thing.

"What's that?" he asks the slave.

"It's called a litter," says one of the slave. "Rich people use them to ride around the city so they don't step in all the sewage. It's our job to carry it."

"Who does this belong to?" Romulus asks.

"It belongs to the princeps himself," says the slave, somewhat proudly. "We're bringing it to pick him up at the forum principis. Well, I'd better get going now."

"Wait," says Romulus, putting an arm around the man's shoulders. "Come talk to me in this dark alley for a second." Once they are inside the alley, away from the profanus vulgus, Romulus draws his gladius and charges at the slave with murder in mind. 1d10=9 (9)

Romulus stabs the slave 9 times and the man falls to the ground, quite dead. Romulus strips off the man's livery (or whatever the Roman equivalent was) and quickly puts it on. Then he steps back out on to the street. Along with the other slaves of the princeps, Romulus picks up his side of the litter and begins walking towards the forum principis. Disguised as the princeps's litter bearer, he should have no trouble getting close to him.

For enrichment: http://www.vroma.org/images/mcmanus_images/litter.jpg

It has also become clear that Augustus has plans for Naso that Naso hadn't known about. Ovid, clearly being a poet who prides himself above all on his cleverness, had, it seems, placed much too much faith in the princeps' obtuseness. It now appears that the princeps knows about what Ovid has been up to. I don't want to spoil the story, but if you're reading this post, you probably know how it ends. . . . Obviously the signal benefit of the practomime is that my students and I get to experience it for ourselves in such a way that we may be able to understand the poetry surrounding the event in a deeper way.

That then is the narrative context in which we find one of my favorite exasperating students, whose Roman is named Fabius, formulating the following:

Fabius has not a multitude of things to say about paved roads, but he recalls something very specific about roads and the end of the third servile war...but since he feels like it at the moment, Fabius reasons, he shall first talk a little more about Russell Crowe.....

From his youth to the present, Crowe has had a special love of horses. "They're just like people," he told CraveOnline. But how does this relate back to paved roads? An excellent question, for, well, it doesn't. But Crowe's critically acclaimed film Gladiator is much based on the events of the rebellion led by Spartacus in 73 b.c....a rebellion also known as the last of the servile wars...Fabius recalls that his father's father ('s father, possibly) witnessed the brutality with which the defeated slaves under Spartacus were treated after the war...all six thousand prisoners were crucified along the Appian way from Rome to Capua...Fabius thinks it'd be totally intimidating if one had to walk along a road lined up full of rotting corpses..."But surely the corpses have been taken down by now...well if not they're definitely skeletons"

Will they reach the farms before Naso's fate finds him? Can we find a way to make that fate less, or perhaps more, than tragic?

The table and the screen: a curious resistance

2010-03-10T07:35:00.000-08:00

I've seen it frequently enough both in myself and in people I'm talking to—notably my students and my classicist colleagues—that it no longer surprises me. People who haven't spent time studying games seem to have a fundamental resistance to the nearly self-evident idea that video-gaming, or, as I've taken to calling it, digital practomime, is fundamentally the same thing as tabletop-gaming. Or, as Pete Border (whom I don't know except through this one post) put it in a post on the GLS Educators' Ning, "If a game isn't fun with everybody in a room playing it on a table, adding a computer won't help it."

It was a major breakthrough for me, which only occurred over the course of several months, to realize the absolute truth of the notion that ludic practomime (i.e., game-playing) doesn't really change in the essential elements of its construction of meaning as it goes from the Monopoly board, or paper-and-dice RPG's, or Live-Action Role-Playing, or even live-action sports, to those things' digital versions in what we usually call video games.

Just as that other kind of practomime, storytelling, is recognizably the same thing between book and computer screen, and even between oral composition and textual book, and even between book and film, the more obtrusively interactive kind of practomime that we call games is the same thing between table (and dice, and books, and board, and field) and screen. Which is not to say that books and movies themselves are the same--rather that storytelling as an act is consistent between them.

There are obviously things you can play easily on the screen that would be very difficult, if not impossible, to play on the table. If someone were able to drop objects of certain stereotypical shapes from a height down to you, and you were able to rotate those objects as they fell so that they fit together as efficiently as possible, it would be Tetris, and be recognizably the same as Tetris on the computer screen. But of course, as even the famous video of Live Action Tetris makes clear, Tetris is a game that's not possible in the physical world. Nor is it practical to get your friends to wear mushroom- and turtle-suits so that you can try to jump on them, a la Super Mario Bros., although it would—obviously, I think—be fun if it were possible.

And there's no question but that the integration of the verbal with the visual and the manual, and even the visceral, that comes in video games, along with the opening up of possibilities like jumping on Goombas and Koopas, has a role in our seduction into thinking that it is video games that are revolutionizing the way we think about art and education and even culture itself. But I don't think that the sheer impact of that integration, or those possibilities, can fully account for the resistance we find to seeing games (or practomime) as a single art form between table and screen.

So what does account for this difficulty, and why does it matter?

To a classicist trying to develop a field that I'm thinking of these days as "applied classics," the table-to-screen shift looks rather like the oral-to-written shift that leaves legible marks on the remarkable culture of 5^th Century BCE Athens, in the works of the tragedians (Aechylus, Sophocles, Euripides), the historians (Herodotus, Thucydides), and the first philosopher, Plato. I could go straight back to Plato's cave, and then add a soupcon of the Phaedrus, to say that Plato was trying among so many other things to get people to pay attention to the bad things (and the good) about the changeover, but I'm sure you're sick of me on the cave by now.

Instead, let me point to Thucydides' hope that his work, by taking full advantage of the technology of writing, would become a possession forever, a ktema es aei, as opposed to what he saw all around him, contest-pieces for immediate hearing—that is, for oral delivery and auditory reception. Thucydides was clearly including Homer and Herodotus among those whose work would not survive, or at any rate would not be useful for future generations. Similarly, my students seem to think of their gaming as occurring in a world apart from the world of tables and classrooms.

(The ktema es aei passage has a very great deal to tell us about practomime, and I plan to come back to it soon, because the "contest-piece" side of the equation is also the practomime side of the equation, as opposed to cultural material like textbooks and [traditional] courses. Deconstructing that opposition has, I think, a lot of potential for understanding the power of practomime in culture.)

But Thucydides' resistance to seeing the traction that oral composition has over our relation to the past is also closely analogous to our characteristic failure to see that a Dungeons and Dragons module and DragonAge: Origins are fundamentally the same thing. Playing pretend on a tabletop in the "real world" is in crucial ways the same as playing pretend in a digital medium. Thucydides is seduced by the textual as we are seduced by the digital. (Plato, notably, is not seduced this way, and his ability to break through the resistance to seeing the continuity of oral and written—and thus also the actual discontinuities—is perhaps what permits him to formulate the cave.)

It's important to fight against this seduction, I think, for at least two reasons, one of them metaphysical and the other eminently practical.

Metaphysical first: if we fail to grasp that digital practomime (i.e. the video game) is a continuation of tabletop practomime, we lose an opportunity to see the practomimetic construction of "reality"—or, to put it in my usual terms, we fail to learn the lesson of the cave, and instead simply become more deeply implicated in the unnecessary fetters that Plato so vividly put on his prisoners' limbs.

To fail in this way is analogous to failing to see that the Matrix trilogy is about all of culture, not just about digital culture, and to failing to understand that Facebook is an extension of "real-world" social relations, not a new way to relate to other people. As a teacher of the Humanities, I see an urgent need for my students' cultural competency and for my own career-survival, to persuade the world of the truth that the "real" world is as virtual as the online world, and always has been. Such an understanding would make clear for example that terms like "the digital humanities" misunderstand both our opportunities and our challenges.

Practical next: if we fail to see that we can do practomime with nothing more than our imaginations and our voices, and can build the technology up from there, and that e.g. Googlewave is easily a more powerful technology for practomime than any currently functional 3D digital world, we lose an extraordinary opportunity for doing culture, whether we call our practices—that is, the culture we do—art, or education, or even entertainment.

I would really like to see more teachers, yes, playing around with the possibilities both online and off-, both digital and physical, both table and screen, of the huge strides people like Jim Gee and Kurt Squire have made in studying what video games tell us about learning. I would really like to see more developers understanding the implications in this area of the explosion of social games, which seek to obscure the connection between the table and the screen even as they trade on it (how else to characterize the constant updates about Farmville and Bejewelled, that use your friends as marketing materials?). Also, though, I would really like to play more practomimes that take me back and forth from physical to digital. Like Wii Fit. But with gods and monsters.

Updates on my practomimetic pedagogy

2010-03-03T16:19:00.000-08:00

I apologize for this blog's darkness as I teach my way through an amazing semester of practomime. In case you're desperate for news, I've posted a few updates about the ARG version of (Gaming) Homer at a great LOTRO blog called LOTRO Reporter.

The Advanced Latin practomime in Rome is finally hitting its stride. After a night in a brothel, learning about the machinations of their uncle, Ovid, and the future Tiberius to recover a priceless treasure that includes the reputed necklace of Venus, my students' Romans have been directed to go to the Forum of Augustus and get to see the princeps (Augustus, that is) by making a commotion. One of them decided to murder a litter-bearer and disguise himself in the unfortunate slave's uniform so that he could gain access to Augustus; another has been knocked unconscious at the threshold of the forum. And in the reading-Latin portion of the course, we're now reading Horace's gloriously obscene Satire 1.2, in which much is revealed about the erotic character of Rome in the years leading up to the Lex Julia which outlawed adultery and inspired Ovid's outrageous Art of the Lover, and so also his exile.

Come play KOTOR with VGHVI!

2010-02-08T06:47:00.000-08:00

Thursday night I'll be hosting a simultaneous playthrough of the beginning of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR). We'll have conversation on Skype, which I'll record for possible publication as a podcast.

Here's the invitation (join up at VGHVI today if you haven't already).

And here's a brief blog post I wrote to prime the discussion pump.

Pedagogical practomime

2010-01-21T07:06:00.000-08:00

This semester, as I mentioned below, I'm going all in on practomimetic education.

In my myth course, I've divided the three hundred students into teams of 15 who are going to compete in a series of mythomachies on such questions as "What's the better example of modern myth, Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings?" for the title "Lords of Myth." I'm also awarding Honor Points for answering trivia questions that I've stuck into the intros of my video lectures, and for doing cool stuff like coming up with innovations that make their fellow students' lives easier.

My (Gaming) Homer course is now a full-on Alternate-Reality Practomime (what most people, if they know what to call it at all, would call an Alternate-Reality Game [ARG]--the kind of game that entered the public consciousness really only with David Fincher's flawed-but-wonderful film The Game). Little bits of information about that will be emerging in various places, including here, as the semester continues, but, although I (Roger Travis) am not supposed to know about this, I (shadowy leader of a clandestine, ancient guild of bards) am now in the process of recruiting the students to fulfill bardic missions in The Lord of the Rings Online.

And, the real subject of this post, my advanced Latin course on Horace and Ovid is a practomimetic narrative in which the students, acting as young Romans in 8 CE, must make the choice between amor romanus (Roman love--that is, getting erotic with Ovid in Augustus' Rome) and amor Romae (love of Rome--that is, getting serious with Horace and getting with Augustus' fascist program). In the first fabula of the course, the students, all cousins one with another, have been sent to Rome to stay with their wicked uncle, Gaius Recentius Malus, and look after an important lawsuit in which the Recentii are attempting to recover a farm that was confiscated by Octavian (you know, Augustus before he really got going) after the Civil Wars and given to a veteran.

Their mothers have made Gaius promise that he will not let them leave the house until they have read and understood the Roman Odes of Horace, those first six poems of Book 3 that pretty much tell a young Roman how to cleanse his Augustan way. The fabula is called Carmina Romani Gravis "Poems of a Serious Roman."

We'll be using Google Wave for a great many of the course activities, including the explicitly practomimetic aspect (there are several other ludic elements, like collection of forms for Latinity Points, which I frame as a way that Gaius is making their study fun for them). For interest's sake, here's the document about practomime in the course that I've posted on the course website:

Practomime:

What it is
Alright, I'll concede it just for the moment: if you wanted to call practomime "playing pretend" or "playing a role-playing game" I wouldn't argue. Think about it: how much do people learn playing pretend, whether that's playing a game, acting in a play, going through a religious ritual, or reading a historical novel? I would contend that it's more than they ever learn in school.

How it works

From a purely technical perspective, the entire course is a big practomime. (In fact, if you think about it, every course you've ever taken [with the exception, to be sure, of my previous courses] is a boring practomime in which you pretend to be a student who's getting to know the stuff he or she needs to know to pass the course.) You are learning to be something like a Roman who could function in some small range of ancient Roman culture.

From a practical perspective, your sessions of reading Latin poetry, however, which would be interludes in the life of the Roman you portray, will in the world of this course dominate his or her practomimetic life. The rest of his or her existence—the times in which he or she gets to "do stuff"—will be squeezed in between the reading. This fact of course means that we get to skip the boring parts of Roman existence (sleeping, walking, eating non-banquet food) and concentrate on the interesting ones.

In between defined units of poetry, we will be doing this practomime. Some of it will occur in class-session, but most of it will happen in Google Wave, once I get you familiar with the system. Once we're up and running, you will be required to take at least one turn in each break between class-sessions (as you'll see in a moment, a "turn" is just an action you take in ancient Rome). You will find that there are many interesting things to be found out from the characters you meet, beginning with your uncle Gaius Recentius Malus, but if you would rather spend your time doing rather than talking, the only limits are your imagination and our fairly scanty knowledge of the period. At the start of the course, you will be confined to the house, but once the first fabula is over, you'll be able to roam the streets of Rome. As you'll see from the syllabus, I've got a broad idea of where I'm going to try to funnel you, and at some points I may have to tie you up to get you where I need you to go, but those moments will be few and far between.

So: aliquid age. Do stuff. That's how it works: decide what you want to do; determine how well it goes; tell the rest of us what you're doing, and you've done it.

(What follows [that is, how action is governed in the practomime] is a version of Corvus Elrod's HoneyComb Engine.)

Any time you set out to narrate yourself doing something, you'll roll a ten-sided die, either with the dice-link on Wave or with a real die in the classroom (zero is zero for this purpose—9 equals critical success; more fun that way [oops, I said the f-word]). The result on that die determines how well you succeed in what you've undertaken to do.

Thus, you'll first tell us what you want to do, then roll a die, then narrate what happens. There are ways to modify the roll which we'll discuss as the course moves along, but I want you to grasp, first of all, the simplicity of the concept.

Here's an example. I'm Gaius Recentius Malus, your uncle. I'm at a banquet and I've just been told that I'm to be prosecuted for adultery. I decide that I'd like to take a sip of wine to buy myself a moment to think. I announce to the class: "I'm going to take a sip of wine" or, better, "Vinum bibam." I roll a die, and get a 1. I narrate, perhaps, "Conor a sip vini bibere, but end up spilling it super togam meam."

Some guidelines

The purpose of practomimetic coursework is always to achieve course objectives. For this course (CAMS 3102 Horace and Ovid) that means that in your practomime your object is to enhance and to demonstrate your growing mastery of the thematic meaning of the poetry we are reading, of the language in which that poetry was composed, and of the cultural background from which that poetry derived its meaning. There are no limitations on what you, in acting the life of an ancient Roman, can attempt to do in the virtual world we are creating together, but in order to demonstrate your work towards course objectives a few guidelines will be helpful.

Try as hard as you can to use Latin. Broken Latin is absolutely acceptable (e.g. "Pono money meum in arca" [arca means "safe"] would be perfectly acceptable, if you should happen to forget that argentum means "money"), as is incorrect Latin (I would never e.g. tell you that you should have used a Future Less Vivid condition instead of the simple present one you used).
Try hard, also, to use the Latin we're seeing in the poetry. Echoes of Horace and Ovid in our practomime are exactly what I'm hoping for.
Try to find out things about the story you're in. The course is going to put you in situations conducive to discovering the information and developing the cultural skills that will satisfy course objectives. How you do that discovery and development is up to you.

So I'm thinking it's going to be an immersive semester!

A note on the word "practomime"

2010-01-14T06:17:00.000-08:00

I'd like to express my thanks to Charles Pratt, a wonderful sparring partner ιn such matters, for discussing this subject with me in the Google wave that led to this post; if you'd like access to that Wave, let me know in the comments.

If my work should continue in the direction I think it's going, you're going to see me use the word "practomime" with increasing frequency. Essentially, I mean by it exactly what I meant by "performative play practice" (PPP). Practomime is what games and stories have in common—playing pretend in a context where everyone agrees that playing pretend is what you do. I'm seeking to replace my own reflexive use of the word "game" with "practomime" in any context where I consider it important to bring the performative element of the practice to the fore. I made the word from two authentic Greek roots, πράττω (pratto: do, act—the word that of course gives us πράξις praxis, which is what Aristotle says tragedy enacts) and that all-time fave of mine μίμησις (mimesis: performance-as [often misleadingly translated "imitation"]—this is what Plato and Aristotle say tragedy is), so I think it's sturdy enough for my purposes, at least.

As I try to figure out what the things people call games are doing and what they can do, I increasingly feel the need to make the connection to mimesis (see this post for a bit more detail). For my own purposes, I need a term that captures certain connections that I have proven to my own satisfaction at least to be fundamental. That doesn't mean I think those connections are by any means exhaustive, and I still think it makes sense at the very least to talk about "game elements" in what I'm relabelling, for my own purpose, "practomimes."

But the category of human experience that's being touched on in these practomimes is so far beyond the semantic range of "game," as I see it, that for me a new term is necessary. That new term needs to capture the greater depth of "games'" aesthetic relationship to Hamlet than to Monopoly. Note that I'm not saying that they're not fundamentally related to both those things.

Consider New Super Mario Bros Wii, which I'm finding, with my aged reflexes, fiendishly difficult. "Is this really a practomime?" I have said to myself, as whatever exiguous story there is in the game faded into the far background to reveal the stark horror of failing over and over to make a particular jump. "Yes," I thought to myself, "but just as calling DragonAge a game doesn't get me anywhere interesting and can in fact serve to impede my critical progress, calling NSMBW a practomime doesn't capture what's most interesting about the game."

On the other hand, I do think it's fascinating, from a practomimetic perspective, that NSMBW is, like a re-composition of the oral epic tradition, a virtuosic variation on what's near-exactly the same story in so many earlier games. That's the sort of thing that for me simply can't be discussed with any degree of facility if we call it a game. But the critical language I'd use might be something like "As a practomime, NSMBW possesses several interesting features that tend to be obscured by the understandable tendency of most critics to frame it primarily as a game."

Let's all go to Rapture!

2010-01-11T06:31:00.000-08:00

The Video Games and Human Values Initiative (VGHVI) has weekly multiplayer nights, usually on Thursdays. This week, I'm hosting a simultanteous playthrough of the opening two hours or so of Bioshock, with live conversation on Skype. I've posted a provocation for our conversation on my blog at VGHVI. The event is also an experiment in coordination with the Vintage Game Club, who are talking about Bioshock this month in preparation for the release of Bioshock 2.

I hope to visit Rapture with you!

The end of KTHMA

2010-01-06T05:12:00.000-08:00

See this hub for a guide to my posts on Operation KTHMA.

I'm deep in the midst of planning not one but two more practomimetic courses for the semester that begins (gulp) in less than two weeks (I'll be posting some key documents soon from the one that's not top secret and ARG-y), but I do want to finish the KTHMA story in at least a skeletal fashion.

Under cover of darkness, the team landed on the beach at Methone, accompanied by Herodotus, Thucydides, and Alcibiades. They observed that there were two conveniently located beacons: one that would alert the Athenian ships to land and disembark their 1000 hoplites to take the town; another that would alert the Spartans further inland that Methone was under attack.

Team 2 rolled a nine, to their delight, when it was time to get off the fishing boat that had been commandeered to take them in to shore, and thus disembarked in style. The whole mission team successfully gathered the available intelligence, which indicated that the wall of Methone was undefended. One of the pro-Pericles teams lit the beacon that alerted the Athenian ships, and they heard a horn-call as the troop transports headed on-shore.

At that point, things became confused, as the fog of war descended. One of the pro-Spartan teams apparently forgot that there was a conveniently placed beacon to alert the Spartans, and decided instead to tip over the coastal beacon in hope of starting a fire big enough to attract Spartan attention. They were quite successful, and much of Methone went up in flames, attracting the attention of Brasidas, greatest general of the Spartans, who actually does enter Thucydides at this point.

Unfortunately, the fire also allowed the Methonians to surround the team.

I rolled a die. "There are no survivors," I reported.

Laughter.

"But," I continued, "Herodotus, Thucydides, and Alcibiades step from the shadows, evade the flames, and manage to get your bodies back to the beach, where they take ship for Athens and are thus among the dead of the first year of the war. . ."

I have videotape of this moment. There is something on the audio that sounds like a gasp. I'm sure it's not actually a gasp, but a prof can dream.

". . . over whom Pericles delivers the funeral oration."

To call this course the most rewarding experience of my teaching career thus far would be true, but wouldn't capture the feeling of rightness I've had about it since I first started to dream in this direction, and the change of register it's involved in my thoughts about the entire educational enterprise. It didn't all go particularly well, but so much of it was so extraordinary that I can't imagine the experience failing to transform every class I teach from here on.

My thanks to you for reading these precis, with the hope that I'll have more to share in very short order, as this adventure continues.

Operation KTHMA: The end of the mission, the birth of the practomimetic course, part 2—doomed mission to Methone

2009-12-15T06:15:00.000-08:00

See this hub for a guide to my posts on Operation KTHMA.

On Friday, in the final class-session of Operation KTHMA, I killed my students. Never have I had less desire to harm a class than I had to harm this one; nevertheless, it's the historical views of Thucydides we've been exploring in the second half of the semester, and no more appropriate ending could be imagined. This post is the first of two in which I talk about how those tragic, realistic deaths came about.

Of course, this utterly realistic ending was accompanied by an utterly fantastic collocation of Thucydides himself (whom they had gotten to know under his "nickname" Olorides), Herodotus himself, and Alcibiades himself, all of whom had volunteered for the same reconnaissance mission of which the students had been in charge. Such a fantasy, I told the operatives of KTHMA, was the kind of thing the texto-spatio-temporal-transport (TSTT) system (aka the teacher's desk at the front of the room, upon which rested my laptop) dreamt up in its AI in order to help the operatives get to the truth of the various ways to interpret Greek historical writing.

At any rate, having those three luminaries there made it possible to recover the bodies of the operatives' Athenian hosts, and get them back to Athens for burial at the public funeral later that year. You know, the one where Pericles delivers the funeral oration. Several weeks ago, I'd sent them back on a special ops mission to that funeral, to talk to Olorides about why he had written the oration up the way he did. The reason for sending them back out of sequence was twofold: 1) President Obama had just given his eulogy at Fort Hood, and the comparison to Pericles' speech was striking; 2) I suspected that I was going to kill the operatives before, chronologically speaking, the winter of 430, when the public funeral took place.

Here they were, though, at a place in Laconia called Methone, as recorded by Thucydides in Book 2 of his history—a place where Athens had its first success delivering hoplites into enemy territory, and where Brasidas of Sparta first enters the history, a general whose extraordinary fate will later be bound up with Thucydides' own, when Thucydides is exiled because of the battle of Amphipolis, where Brasidas triumphs, and dies.

On the flag-trireme, cruising off the Laconian coast, they had been asked by the three Athenian generals to stage a debate, the winner to be in command of the reconnaissance mission. Being in command was of great importance, because the teams' Athenians were now at odds with one another. Two teams had chosen to ally with the aristocratic faction led by Thucydides son of Melesias (not the historian) and three with the demotic faction led by Pericles.

The generals demanded that they imagine that a small island had opposed annexation by Athens. The artistocratic side was to pretend to be the islanders, attempting to persuade the Athenians to let them go free; the demotic side was to pretend to be the Athenians, attempting to persuade the islanders to surrender without a fight. In short, they were to enact the Melian dialogue. It was the TSTT's way (that is, my way) of talking about how the inevitable slide into a Law-of-the-Jungle, realpolitik world was already happening, as Thucydides sees it, at the very start.

In the event, we didn't get to finish that debate (leadership, as I'll detail in the next post, was determined by a die-roll). The operatives, however, made very fine contributions under the new model of action that closely follows the HoneyComb Engine. In this model, the students must declare what they want to do, then roll a die to see how successful they are, then narrate what happens. In a dialogic situation, it can make for very interesting and entertaining results. Above all, it takes a great deal of pressure off the students, who get to take refuge in silliness like "I say 'Athenians, we think that the gods will save us' and then I nearly fall off the boat." The other side can then respond, "Did they save you from falling?" and Thucydides' lesson about realism and idealism advances in their minds an important step. It's that wonderful situation where learning happens unnoticed.

This HCE model, from my perspective, is an extraordinary learning tool. On Wednesday, the second to last class-session, we took the whole class-period to debrief about the course. The bottom-line is that they liked it. More importantly, both their praises and their critiques were really well thought-out, and incredibly useful. I mention it now because a wonderful operative, code name Jessep, had two great things to say that have a bearing on the narration-by-students model: first, he, one of the most participatory and enthusiastic operatives over the course of the semester, recalled something I had forgotten about the first day of the course—that he had raised his hand and said, "Does anyone else just have no idea what's going on?"; second, he said that he had been taken aback by how many little things he now knew about the culture of Herodotus and Thucydides that profoundly affected his understanding of them.

Next post: which beacon are they going to light?

Operation KTHMA: The end of the mission, the birth of the practomimetic course, part 1—the collaborative research paper

2009-12-01T09:25:00.001-08:00

See this hub for a guide to my posts on Operation KTHMA.

Yesterday I debriefed the operatives about the final challenge of Mission 6, which they had just completed, having been awarded a week's extension by the Demiurge (that is, me) when I saw that things were not progressing as quickly as I'd hoped but that nevertheless the progress was very promising. This final challenge was the briefing in the form of a collaborative research paper that I mentioned at the end of my last KTHMA post. The topic for the briefing was "What is Thucydides' attitude towards Athens?" (a subject that's much more complex than the non-reader or even the cursory reader of Thucydides might think).

The operatives had a wealth of insight into how to make the assignment work better, but were nearly unanimous in their enthusiasm for the assignment itself. (Or so it seemed to me, though of course some might have been hiding daggers in their bosoms, waiting until I was safely out of grading range [I'm jesting here; I've never been more convinced of or impressed by a class' good will than I am by these operatives'].) Three of the teams have handed in papers that are collaborative (and very good indeed) from top to bottom; the other two shared sources and ideas, and I think (though I haven't waded into the depths of the papers yet) certain passages that were deemed especially felicitous.

The linchpin of this assignment is the class-team forums, where I insisted all collaboration take place. By picking through those forums, I'll be able to tell (indeed, I've been following along and so have a fairly good idea already) who did what, and grade accordingly not on the finished product but on the mastery of course objectives that their collaboration shows.

For me, this means that I can stamp "solved" on a problem I've had with the assessment of college writing since I began to teach it as a graduate student fifteen years ago: I have never had the opportunity to grade anything but a final product that is nothing but a stale exercise in trying to give the instructor what he seems to say he wants. Even with mandatory rewrites, I had no justification that would let me judge anything but what the student handed in, as a paper in fulfillment of a requirement for the course.

For classics majors, this was fine, because that stale exercise was a key part of disciplinary formation, or so I justified it to myself. But what about the students who desperately need to learn to write, but who get so, so little from learning to write a dead-end research paper containing unoriginal ideas about Thucydides?

And that's without even taking into account the absolutely enormous benefit the students derived from seeing each other work. Some of the students in this class are in fact very talented writers of research papers who may well go on to academic careers in which they put that skill to good use in producing new knowledge. The students who don't fall into that category had never, I'm fairly sure, had the opportunity to see that kind of student at work. I don't think I'm reading too much into the posts I saw in the class-team forums when I say that many of them found it truly eye-opening.

Did this assignment or its evident success have anything to do with the practomime of the course's framework?

("Practomime" is a word I'm audtioning to substitute for "game." Fear not: if it passes the audition I'll explain it further, and quite likely will never shut up about it either.)

While I would certainly recommend this kind of collaborative paper in any course, I think its success in this practomimetic course had a great deal to do with two elements that are unique to the practomime:

The operatives of the course are used to collaborating because of the "AMISPEs" (Ancient/Modern Interweave Skill Practice Exercises) they've been doing from the beginning of the course. One could argue I suppose that if I'd divided the class into teams with no practomimetic frame I would have gotten similar results both on the AMISPEs and on the paper, but that seems to me more or less to grant my central point that things like "teams" are good; anytime you put teams on the field, you're doing practomime, I think. It was wonderful to hear one of the operatives say, "The paper was just like one big AMISPE."
The narrative framework of the practomime has subtly influenced the way the operatives think about Thucydides so that they have a familiar lens through which to see the articles they were reading for the research. For all but the most seasoned students, research papers in past versions of this course have been an arduous exercise in trying to graft classics scholars' complicated arguments into the students' much simpler ones. This time, although as usual I could be thinking wishfully, the final products I've seen indicate a much deeper relationship with the secondary sources. It seems to me that that relationship can only come from the feeling that the operatives know what Athens was like and what Thucydides was doing there.

Over the next week or three I'll be adding to this post mortem series about Operation KTHMA. Next up (I think): the KTHMA team stands trial for hubris.

Brief classical thoughts on "No Russian"

2009-11-19T06:36:00.001-08:00

This blog may have some readers who have managed to miss the controversy surrounding the single-player campaign of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (MW2). To orient you, my VGHVI colleague Erik Hanson brought together some of the most important responses to the controversy on the VGHVI Context Clues blog.

There's really no need to divulge the nature of the atrocity here; if you're interested you can follow-up through the link to Context Clues. What you need to know is that there's a chapter of the game in which the player-character is forced (if he or she chose to be forced, at the start of the game, since the game asks you if you want to play the disturbing sequence or skip it) to aid in the commission of a terrible atrocity. What's important for the purposes of the classical comparison is that 1) it's something that no rational person could view as anything other than an atrocity; and 2) the player (if he or she has chosen to play the sequence) is forced to aid in committing it.

The game critics whom I consider worth reading are near-universally agreed that the chapter does not deliver the profound meaning it seems pretty clearly to be attempting to deliver. There are a host of reasons for this impression that arise in the execution of the chapter, ranging from its context in the larger story of the game to the odd and jarring way its interactivity is managed. With regard to this failure of execution, it's perhaps worth noting from my classical point of view that there are several tragedies of Euripides that are marred (if we wish to put it that way, though scholars disagree) by a similar failure to integrate horrific acts into their plots in a meaningful way. I would hesitate to credit Infinity Ward, the developer of MW2 with this level of depth, but it's just possible that 100 years from now what looks now like the inappropriateness of the sequence will be hailed by scholars hoping to get published as a brilliantly dicomfiting coup de jeu.

There is, however, another point about "No Russian" that appears more strongly from a classical perspective than perhaps any other. It seems to me an undeniable fact that Infinity Ward, who put analogously atrocious action in MW2's predecessor, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, is maintaining a commitment to bringing the players of its games face-to-face with the ethical ambiguity of war. That fact by itself shows a development of game culture that mirrors the development that we can see in the homeric tradition when we look at that tradition diachronically, and pick apart its strata: in the Iliad, for example, the ethical simplicity of tales of glory becomes, over time, the ambiguous story of an Achilles who drags Hector around Troy, in front of his grieving parents, and then kills Trojan youths on Patroclus' funeral pyre. Indeed, this development leads in ancient Athens to tragedy, the ne plus ultra of literary ethical thought, where atrocities are used over and over to expose the fragility of our ethical claims and to strengthen our understanding of why we must make those claims nonetheless.

MW2 reaches in an old, old direction. Its failure to lay hold of the profundity it seems to seek is sad, but the reach itself means much more than I think many have acknowledged.

Operation KTHMA: handing over the reins

2009-11-10T06:32:00.000-08:00

See this hub for a guide to my posts on Operation KTHMA.

Here's what I uploaded over the weekend to the KTHMA team. The idea of requiring the students to start telling the story, as engagement and as assessment at the same time, comes partly from the HoneyComb Engine and partly from some comments helpful readers made on earlier posts.

DEMIURGE ONLINE

BEGIN TRANSMISSION
SIGNAL "MISSION 6 TSTT-USE: NEW RESPONSIBILITIES"

The Demiurge advises you that it has become clear to him that the situation is worse than he thought, and the danger to Western Civilization greater. Because of the continuing diminishment of the imaginative exploration of the past in the general population, the TSTT cannot function as intended, and requires more input of psychoporeutic energy than the KTHMA-team has yet been able to generate. (The Demiurge recommends that if the operatives have seen the movie Elf they make the analogy of Christmas Cheer and its role in the flight of Santa's Sleigh to the role of psychoporeutic energy in the function of the TSTT.)

The Demiurge does not plan to take this dire state of affairs lying down. This mission will achieve its objectives if the Demiurge has anything to say about it, and so the Demiurge has resolved to attempt a desperate experiment, and he requests the KTHMA-team's assistance, although he knows it will demands a level of mastery the team has not yet achieved.

Specifically, the team will need to boost its Vitality signifcantly, in order to get the answers we need about the meanings of Herodotus and Thucydides. In practice, this will mean merging each class' Athenians into a single Athenian of that class, a sort of classics superman, and taking a greater degree of control over the TSTT's imaginative function than the team has yet taken.

The Demiurge has already laid the groundwork for this new responsibility in instructing the TSTT to reformulate your secrets. Now, as the mission proceeds, the KTHMA team will take the next step by demonstrating their growing mastery of Greek historical writings in preparing to imagine, and then, in mission-session, actually imagining parts of the action biotized by the TSTT. That is, to put it in clearer real-world terms, you will be responsible for creating chunks of the mission-action, and thus adopting the role of the historical writer. As you create, you may narrate any action of the plausibility of which you can convince at least half the KTHMA team.

This new responsibility will work as follows. The Demiurge will notify you in session and on HuskyCT about what will be happening in Athens in upcoming sessions. When you are doing your pre-session reading, you will also mine both the section you are currently reading and the rest of the texts available to you in Herodotus, Thucydides, and any other works such as Plutarch, tragedy, Aristophanes, and Plato that you wish to bring in, for ideas about what information needs to be obtained in the upcoming encounter in relation to your class-team's goals in the interpretation of history. In your class-team forum, and in brief in-session team-meetings, you will agree upon what you hope to accomplish in the upcoming TSTT session.

The central idea behind what you narrate will be to advance your class' idea of what historical writing is about by accomplishing your class' in-Athens goal, and at the same time defending your secret from the "damaging" textual information supplied by the TSTT as a psychoporeutic stimulant. The Demiurge will discuss how this works with you in your team-forums, and will always assist in the in-session narration when you request assistance.

The rewards for demonstrating your mastery at analyzing Greek historical writing will be twofold: first, the usual experience points that contribute to your class-participation grade in the mission's course-cover; second, as you make your psychoporeutic contributions you will gain in Vitality, which will in turn advance your Stage rating; that advance will earn unique awards of honor in the Demiurge's Hall of κλέος.

The Demiurge advises you that even if you do not manage to prepare for a given mission-session, there are still experience points to be gained from showing up and contributing, though obviously it will be possible to win more experience points by making more deeply prepared contributions.

END SIGNAL
END TRANSMISSION
DEMIURGE OFFLINE

Along with that briefing, I also uploaded new instructions for each class, specifying their worldviews further and suggesting ways in which their view of how history should work, and what it should do, might differ from the other classes. Yesterday I informed them that after they were done in the Athenian assembly (where they'll get to see the debate in which Athens decides on war), they would be going to court, accused of breaking and entering. I gave each class-team a different text to mine for the necessary data, for example Xenophon's Apology, Plato's Apology, and Aristophanes' Wasps, all key texts for our understanding of the Athenian legal system, and thus the development of rhetoric during the end of the 5th Century BCE.

And, in a step that's really only vaguely related to the game but seems to me to have been enabled by it, I've made their research paper optionally collaborative, with all collaboration to happen in the KTHMA discussion forums. I've grown less and less happy about the college-class paper as a form over the years, though my belief in the importance of teaching writing and the critical thought that goes with it has never wavered. Since at least four of these class-teams have formed themselves into functional collabroative units, and the fifth shows enough spark that I don't despair of it, it seemed worth giving a collaborative model for a research paper a shot.

Noted: Michael Abbott on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 marketing

2009-10-31T06:23:00.000-07:00

I'd be quite surprised if there were anyone who reads this little blog who doesn't also (and indeed more frequently) read Michael Abbott's The Brainy Gamer, but just in case, and in tribute to his wonderful post this morning, I'd like to point any such hypothetical reader to a great example of the power of the blog form, which is at the same time the most incisive analysis of the forces controlling AAA gaming I think I've ever read.

Here's what I posted in Michael's comments:

From my hobby horse, blaming Infinity Ward for this callousness is like blaming the homeric bards for the graphic violence and smacktalk of their battles. By doing that kind of blaming, we certainly assert our own superiority (which is not an unimportant thing to do). But we also start from a position of having missed something that's culturally interesting about the game and its marketing. You catch precisely that interesting facet here.

Operation KTHMA: arts, crafts, and card-based combat

2009-10-27T07:18:00.000-07:00

See this hub for a guide to my posts on Operation KTHMA.

The boss-fight with the High Priest of Apollo at Delphi delivered the information I was hoping my students would get about how Delphi actually worked, according to what I think is our best evidence. (That is, it was rather like Switzerland, banks included, and with a girl on a tripod substituting for the magical power of Swiss Chocolate.)

But it also crystallized a problem with the logagonistic system that I've been avoiding: as it has stood hitherto, it's not interactive enough. The basic idea is that students discover the information that they need both for the game and for the course above all by deploying skills (a la weapons and spells in traditional RPG's both paper-and-dice and digital). When they deploy a skill, as the Demiurge I tell them what their character is saying and how their "target" (that is, interlocutor) responds.

That is, it ends up being a roundabout way to lecture, in which the top-down nature of lecturing becomes starkly, even absurdly apparent. Not un-engaging, I think, because I always try to make my descriptions and presentations of the information entertainingly goofy and iconoclastic, but definitely not as engaging as I want Operation KTHMA and the other courses I hope to base on it to be.

As I lamented this defect a bit, one of the few students who's truly both an experienced gamer and an experienced classicist nudged me along the path I've been trying to travel—the path of text. You may remember that the basic nature of the gameplay already has a healthy helping of textual analysis in it: each mission-part begins with a session in which the teams use their skills in reverse, analyzing a key section of Herodotus or Thucydides to "power-up" the transport device that sends them back in time. That "power-up" phase is without a doubt the most successful part of the course thus far, in my opinion (though the multimedia team skill-practice exercises are a close second): the power-up is the time when it really does feel like we're making the ancient world come alive.

What if somehow the logagonistic (that is, "combat") system were a real continuation of that textuality? The difficulty I saw was that I wanted the students to practice analyzing the text, but the point of skills in RPG's is that they function as a clever metonymy to cover over a player's lack of real skill in, say, sorcery.

That's when I got out the card-stock and the glue (which I borrowed from my kids' craft box and which, hilariously, turned out to be sparkle glue), and made the skill-cards. One of those cards is pictured above.

Skills, you see, seem to me to tend to teach a player about his or her class, and, by observing other players playing other classes, about those other classes. Their rule-based existence teaches players not how to cast a spell or swing an axe, but how to be a loremaster or a champion—at least insofar as the designers of the game have managed to encode in that rule-based existence some nugget of their idea of what those classes are. To that end, I realized that it's not what the skills do that matters for the teaching aspect of the course, but what they mean.

The reason for the cards is first that I want to see if standardizing the skills brings their basic point across better—the point being that these are discursive techniques that various ancient Greek cultural figures used. Second, the cards will be an easy way to simplify the mechanic of the expense of character-energy—each team has three cards for their basic skill, two cards for their second-tier skill, and one for their third-tier skill; as they play them on a given mission, the cards are put in a discard pile.

Third, though, and probably most importantly, standardizing the skills this way allows me to introduce a new framework for the discovery of the secrets in logagonistics—both the NPC and the PC secrets. From now on, I'm going to formulate each secret as a declaratory statement with discrete elements, and tie each of those elements to a passage that the character-skills can discover.

For example, the secret the operatives discovered from the High Priest of Apollo was "Delphi seeks to remain neutral." If we had been playing under the new system, I would have broken the statement into four parts: "(a) Delphi (b) seeks (c) to remain (d) neutral." For each of those parts I would have assigned a particular sentence in one of the important texts (not just Herodotus and Thucydides, but also homeric epic, tragedy, Aristophanes, and Plato—all instantly available on the internet, to be projected on the screen in the classroom). For example, I might tie "Delphi" to the moment in Sophocles' Oedipus Turannos when Oedipus tells the chorus that he has sent Creon to Delphi. Ideally each "damage-passage" would have some sort of thematic relationship to the secret itself (as the Sophocles passage does), but that's not really necessary: the idea is that the students will have to find the passage first and then identify the key-word that forms part of the secret.

You can probably guess where my high hopes for this new version of the system lie: not only will the students be closer to the text at all times, but opportunities open up for texturing their idea of what Athens was like with a wealth of different material, and for texturing their knowledge of the texts of Athenian culture with a new idea of Athens. I'll keep you posted.

Living Epic: Video Games in the Ancient World

What Roger's up to, January 2012

The Cave, unpacked: part 3

The Cave, unpacked: part 2

The Cave, unpacked: part 1

Operation ΜΗΝΙΣ: after-action report

Epic choices, and the lack thereof

The BioWare style: index

Operation ΑΡΕΤΗ: my current practomimetic course

The BioWare style: manifest identification (sketch 6)

The BioWare style: sliders and meaning (sketch 5)

The Bioware style: meaning-effects in performative systems (sketch 4)

The Bioware style: theme and modularity (sketch 3)

The Bioware style: KOTOR, light and dark (sketch 2)

The Bioware style (sketch 1)

Halo: Reach as practomime

Halo: Reach as epic

Teaser: coming posts about Halo: Reach

Operation LAPIS: the HUD mechanic

Operation LAPIS is ĪTE!

That Bioshock is tragedy

Shooting games of armed conflict: a question of narrative technology

+Humanities? (a reaction to Games+Learning+Society 6.0)

Starting design of Operation ΜΗΝΙΣ: a potentially cool idea

Red Dead Redemption diary, day 2: in which character and practomime seem to have a cage-match, or, *yawn* cutscenes again

Red Dead Redemption diary, day 1: In medias res, again

Prototyping a Latin 1 practomime

Further practomimetic adventures: a daring rescue

How much fun is virtual edutainment?

Life in Rome: examples of excellent practomime

The table and the screen: a curious resistance

Updates on my practomimetic pedagogy

Come play KOTOR with VGHVI!

Pedagogical practomime

A note on the word "practomime"

Let's all go to Rapture!

The end of KTHMA

Operation KTHMA: The end of the mission, the birth of the practomimetic course, part 2—doomed mission to Methone

Operation KTHMA: The end of the mission, the birth of the practomimetic course, part 1—the collaborative research paper

Brief classical thoughts on "No Russian"

Operation KTHMA: handing over the reins

Noted: Michael Abbott on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 marketing

Operation KTHMA: arts, crafts, and card-based combat

Red Dead Redemption diary, day 2: in which character and practomime seem to have a cage-match, or, yawn cutscenes again