Epic choices, and the lack thereof

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.

Halo: Reach as practomime

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.

Brief classical thoughts on "No Russian"

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.

Notes from the Spice Mines of Kessel

Apologies for the darkness of Living Epic over the past few weeks. As you’ll gather from the notes below, I’ve been busy not just with my ordinary teaching duties (this semester that’s Greek Civilization, Intermediate Latin, Plato-as-practice, and Plato’s Phaedrus with my advanced Greek students [even more glorious, and even more sexy, in the original]), but also more importantly with the center.

Now that our first grant proposal is in, and I have a better feel for how the whole “You know, you really should give me all your money” game, I’ll be trying to get back on the blog, though I suspect for a while it’s going to be an echo-chamber sort of thing: I’ve got an incredible back-log now of amazingly smart things people like Michael Abbott, Iroquois Pliskin, Corvus Elrod, Steve Gaynor, and Duncan Fyfe have said that I want to comment on, however briefly. Since I’ll be starting to develop the materials for the courses now, also, I’ll be able to post about that, too.

Anyway, the first grant proposal, for a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-Up grant, was uploaded yesterday. I’ve posted the narrative on the wiki, here. Comments on it are beyond welcome--I would upload my firstborn if I thought it could get a conversation started that would improve the center's self-formulations.

Next up is the Macarthur foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Competition, due in a week. The money would go to making our own persistent world with Sun’s Project Wonderland resources, and to giving out our first fellowships. In turn, that would mean we could do our first real symposium, and publish the proceedings. It’s all happening, maybe!

I’m giving a lecture, in the fun UConn Honors Last Lecture series, next week called “Bioshock in Plato’s Cave: How Video Games Can Lead Us into the Light.” Two weeks later I’m doing a scholarly luncheon talk at the UConn Humanities Institute called “End-Game Gear and the Multiplayer Epic from the Iliad to World of Warcraft,” which is pretty much an academic version of “Achilles’ Phat Lewtz,” which in turn is the prelude to what I hope will be my first peer-reviewable classics ‘n’ gaming article.

Finally, we’re getting very close to registration for the courses in January and the spring semester. I’ll post again with the relevant links soon!

Achilles' phat lewtz

A fun version of some of the stuff I've been talking about in the Living Epic Main Quest came out today in the Escapist.

While I'm posting, I should apologize for not posting over the past few weeks--between teaching and the exciting-but-oh-so-time-consuming labor of synthesizing the Center for Video Games and Human Values from hydrogen, I haven't been able to formulate a post that I'd want anyone to read.

But things are certainly proceeding nicely both towards the courses in Winter and Spring and towards the rising of the center from the fertile imaginations of so many amazing people with their different approaches to games-and-culture. As always, more to come!

The mysterious dual: the smoking gun of epic interactivity

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



When we last left Achilles, he was sitting in his tent refusing to fight, because Agamemnon took his girlfriend away. Meanwhile, Achaean warriors (that’s Achilles’ team; the word “Greek” isn’t really an accurate way to describe them) have been dying in large numbers. That’s the situation when Book 9 starts.

In Book 9 as we have it, bad old Agamemnon sends to the tent of Achilles three “ambassadors” in what’s been called forever after the “Embassy to Achilles”: Ajax (strongest of the Achaeans), Odysseus (smartest of the Acheans), and Phoenix (old friend of Achilles). When they get to Achilles’ tent, each of those ambassadors gives a speech about why Achilles should accept Agamemnon’s offer and come back to the fighting. It makes sense, and it builds to a very nice crescendo in the speech of Phoenix, after which, from an ethical point of view, the audience is in a lot of suspense about what Achilles should do, despite being in no suspense at all over what he will do.

But there’s this one facet of the episode (which, just to remind you of what I said a couple weeks ago, probably would have made a perfect tale to sing in an evening’s epic entertainment 2800 years ago) that doesn’t really make much sense at all: there are these famous dual forms, which seem, in Iliad 9, to refer to two ambassadors rather than the three we actually have.

What the heck is a dual form? Well, some languages have a special ability that English has almost entirely lost, to talk about two, and only two, things at a time. (English does have a vestige of it in our usage of “both,” which can refer only to two things at a time.) The dual is mostly useful for talking about eyes and hands and such, but occasionally it gets a workout in other circumstances, and Book 9 is one of those. Several times, despite our having three ambassadors, the version of Book 9 that we have, in the original Greek at least, speaks, for example, of how “the ambassadors both went along the shore.”

Those forms suggest very strongly that going so far as to add an ambassador and his speech was within the scope of possible improvisatory change by the bards of the Iliad. To spell out what seems very likely to have happened these thousands of years ago: one bard came up with a story about how Agamemnon sent Ajax and Phoenix, and used the dual number, because he was singing a tale about two ambassadors. Then, another bard, having heard the story as sung by the first bard, or perhaps having been a student of the first bard, decided to sing a different version of the same story. Whether as a tribute to the first bard, or because certain phrases had become basically unchangeable, or perhaps simply because it was allowable, and didn’t matter very much, this second bard retained the dual forms despite his innovation of the third ambassador, Odysseus. (The reasons for thinking that Odysseus is the addition rather than Phoenix or Ajax are complicated and not relevant here in the blog right now, though I think they will be soon; feel free to ask in comments, though!)

The bard of Book 9 of the Iliad, as we have it, that is, improvised very significantly in the story. I want to suggest now that that kind of improvisation has a very strong correlation to a kind of improvisation that may at first seem completely different: the improvisation engaged in by the player of an adventure video game.

If you’re a gamer, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. If you’re not a gamer, though, it’s not easy to make clear precisely what I mean on the page, because I’m talking about something books, and movies, just don’t do, but I’ll give it my best shot. Imagine you’re playing Halo (the one about the space marines fighting the religious fanatic aliens). Another of those cutscenes (little movies) has just ended, and the Captain has given you his pistol and told you to find your way to an escape pod and get off the ship. As the movie-type stuff ends, you head out the door, and immediately face a group of aliens who want to kill you. It would be fair to say that the game really begins here, for several reasons, the most important perhaps being that this game is a “shooter,” and this is the first time you actually get to fire a weapon.

Now from the very first moment, you have a great degree of control over what you do (that is, what your character does) in the game. You can choose whether to shoot, and which enemies to shoot. You could play the next minute of the game over an infinite number of times, and no two enactments would be exactly the same.

This facet of adventure video games, the decisive role of player improvisation, arises in their famous, controversial “interactivity.”

My own definition of “interactivity” is “permitting a person to participate in, through a measure of control over, the relevant experience.” (A more basic definition is “accepting user input”; that basic one is completely compatible with mine, I think, but not robust enough for the purposes of the kind of analysis I want to do here.)

If we’re to understand the importance of interactivity, I think we really have to see that the reason for interactivity’s seizing the cultural imagination is not that cultural activities weren’t interactive before—take sports, for one very graphic example, where user input is most certainly accepted—but that certain cultural practices that were previously not noticeably interactive (books, movies, TV) suddenly developed a much greater interactive capacity. Video gaming, to repeat, is the most obvious result, because entertainment, simply put, catches the eye and the imagination more readily than more purely informational practices like browsing a library.

But the trouble with declaring that interactivity is a new thing when it comes to entertainment and information is that it’s not true. The bards of the Iliad were exercising the same control over their mythic material when they came up with the remarkable statement of self-sufficiency that Achilles makes in Book 9 of the Iliad. The story of the “Embassy to Achilles” was itself an interactive improvisation and an interactive recomposition upon the existing theme of the “Wrath of Achilles.” The story of the “Wrath of Achilles” was a recomposition of the story of “The War at Troy.” In the other direction, the moving words of Achilles were almost certainly an improvisation upon the existing theme of “The Embassy to Achilles.”

It’s probably worth noting, given recent discussions on this blog (see here and here), that I don’t think it makes sense even to say that traditional books and films aren’t interactive. The decisive effect brought about by the audience of any work upon that work’s ultimate meaning should make us speak rather of different kinds and degrees of interaction than of interactive and non-interactive media. (Marie Laure-Ryan’s book Narrative as Virtual Reality [here] is at its best on this topic.)

Next time: if the bard is the gamer, what’s the bard’s audience?

The sand-box of epic and the rails of GTA (1)

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



There’s a wonderful moment in Book 8 of the Homeric Odyssey when Odysseus treats one of the two bards in the Odyssey (we’ll meet poor Phemius, the other one, another time) pretty much the way a gamer treats his or her controller, fulfilling the fantasy that herdsman from further down the blog has of being his own bard without the long apprenticeship and the bad wages.

Demodocus [that’s the name of the bard; Odysseus is talking to him here],
I praise you above all mortals.
Either the Muse, daughter of Zeus taught you, or Apollo.
For all too well, in order, you sing the trouble of the Achaeans,
All the things they did and sufered and all the things the Achaeans toiled at,
as if you yourself were there, or heard from another.
But come, change it up, and sing the making of the horse—
the wooden one—the one Epeius made with Athena,
which once heroic Odysseus brought as a trick to the city-center,
having filled it with the men who sacked Troy.
If you tell me this, giving due attention,
immediately I’ll proclaim to all people
that the god willingly awarded you a divine song.

It’s not outside the realm of possibility, though it’s absolutely impossible to prove, that this passage is the origin of the story of the Trojan Horse. If you know the Odyssey, you may instantly be objecting, “But what about Menelaus’ story in Book 4, when he tells of what happened when the horse was inside the gates of Troy, and Helen came down to see it?” The answer to that objection is very revealing: within the framework of oral recomposition of ancient epic, there’s no reason to think that an earlier moment of an epic must have existed when a later moment was composed.

By exactly the same token, it’s interesting to note, a player of GTA4 or any other adventure video game, can and almost always does, use information gained about a later part of the game to change his or her play in an earlier part of the game the next time he or she plays. Indeed, it’s nearly impossible to help it: if you know that a bodyguard with an AK-47 is waiting around the next corner, you aren’t going to charge in there next time, the way you did this time. Your next time through that level will be much more satisfying—much more artistic, even—then it was when you died, or only barely escaped.

At any rate, the reason to wonder whether this passage is the origin of the Trojan Horse is that what Odysseus is asking Demodocus to do is improvise a brand new song to celebrate Odysseus’ glory. In Book 1, Telemachus, talking to his Mom about Phemius, that other bard, tells us that the newest song is always most popular. Odysseus would certainly want, just on the face of it, to have a popular song sung about him.

And strangely enough earlier that day Demodocus has already sung a song that involves Odysseus. That one wasn’t about Odysseus alone, though—it was about how Odysseus and Achilles had a quarrel, and showed the two of them (Achilles is the great warrior-hero of the Iliad, you remember) on a more-or-less equal footing. In case you’re interested in this kind of detail, we don’t have the slightest bit of evidence that anyone other than the fictional Demodocus actually sang such a song, and classicists remain a bit mystified about why the real singer of the Odyssey would have his idealized self-portrait, Demodocus, sing such a song.

Here’s my own explanation: the singer of the Odyssey wants to show that Odysseus himself is smart enough to know he can use a bard like a game-controller, for his own purposes. Those purposes involve getting his hosts, the Phaeacians, to recognize what an amazingly cool guest they have, but all we have to see here is that Odysseus is using a singer to participate in the making of his own story. The earlier story, the one about Achilles and Odysseus, lets Odysseus in on the fact that Demodocus can sing Troy stuff. To make the gaming analogy, he’s got the game Iliad in his disc-tray.

Like a gamer starting a new mission in GTA4 Odysseus gets to decide which way he wants to make his avatar go, and how he wants to make his avatar approach the ancient equivalent of a boss-fight.

Imagine that gamer from the beginning of the blog playing the game “Iliad.” He’s controlling a character (his avatar) whose name is Odysseus (if the game follows one of the standard conventions these days, the gamer was given the choice of keeping that name, or of changing it to a name of his choosing; like “Steve” or “Zaphod”; let’s say he kept it). He’s gotten to the final level of the game, where he must somehow find a way to get the Greek forces inside Troy, in order to sack the city.

There’s some wood, lying off to the side of the scene, and some Greek warriors sitting around, drinking. If the gamer knows his Greek epics, of course, he’s going to know what to do—somehow he’s got to get the warriors to build the Trojan Horse for him.

You may have noticed that I’ve just opened an unbelievably large can of worms. In fact, it’s so large that we’re going to need a new post to deal with it.

Next: why you can’t go to Mass in GTA.