Operation KTHMA: the logagonistic system

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


Last Wednesday, the KTHMA team (that is, the students of CAMS 3212) tried out the logagonistic system for the first time in an encounter with their Athenians' old school-teacher. The logagonistic system is the equivalent of the combat systems to be found in many kinds of games, role-playing games (RPG's), whether tabletop or digitally-mediated, in particular. The system is based, to the extent I've been able to do so, on Corvus Elrod's Kiai-Megill Variant (KMV) of his HoneyComb Storytelling Engine. (My difficulty in using Corvus' engine is that we're all still eagerly awaiting its actual release, and so my own efforts are in fact based on my reconstructions from his sometimes cryptic posts about it.) On Friday the operatives (that is, the students) began an encounter that continued yesterday, with a minor tragedian.


The basic idea of the KMV, and of logagonistics, is of verbal contest. At the key moments of the course-game-story, the operatives have conversations. In those conversations the operatives discover the information that allows them to achieve course/game objectives. In their broad outlines, these conversations are played according to a game-play model that closely resembles the combat system to be found in games ranging from paper-and-dice RPG's to action games like Prince of Persia.


The genius of Corvus' idea for the KMV is in my opinion the use of a secret kept by each character in a conversational encounter as the measure of that character's distance from a failure-state. Once a character's secret has been revealed, the character is defeated; players of RPG's and many other kinds of game will recognize that the secret is thus a stand-in for "Health" or "Hit Points." In the KMV Corvus also uses the device of a suspicion for each character; I've elected to let the operatives form their own suspicions and follow up on them.


When I first considered the idea of the secret, I wondered whether it might not be too restrictive to allow the encounter to feel representative of a real conversation. A thought of the way we accept the pressing of buttons and the accompanying onscreen action as the swinging of a sword or the casting of a spell, however, made me realize that as those things are metonymies of real action, so secrets are metonymies of the real interpersonal dynamics of a conversation. It's hard to put into words how strongly the atmosphere of a KTHMA session demonstrates the truth of that realization.


Before the encounter with the schoolteacher, I gave each class-team a secret by posting it in a briefing only visible to that team. I must admit to having had fun devising these secrets, precisely because of the two constraints I put on myself:

1. Each secret had to have an integral relation to the career and worldview by which I've shaped each class.
2. Each secret had to have an integral relationship with a real event of great significance in the cultural history of Athens.

To put it another way, I wanted every secret to tie back into the goals and objectives of the course. It feels to me like it's worth noting that here again instructional design and game design seem to intersect: in an engaging game, game-mechanics like secrets need to be integrally tied to the player-objectives of the game. Unfortunately, I'll have to be vague about these secrets until one of them is revealed, but they tie the operatives' Athenian hosts into the history of Athens in the 5th Century BCE in ways that I at least think are fascinating; maybe more importantly, having those secrets has made the students do and share research on the period in a way I don't think they ever would have otherwise. I've told the operatives that the rewards for guessing another team's secret will be great.


Logagonistics occurs in a rudimentary turn-based system, upon which I improvise as the occasion warrants—for example, even if it's not the NPC-opponent's turn, strictly speaking, if the teams have got too bogged down in considering their next moves, I'll have the NPC launch an attack. On the operatives' turn, each team rolls a die; highest roll goes first. On each turn, the class-team has three options:

1. Simple discourse—ask a question or make a statement. If the question or statement is well-phrased enough, I score it as a hit, and have the NPC answer the question or respond to the statement in a way that reveals part of his or her secret. If the question or statement is too vague, I have the team roll a die; depending on the result, the NPC either reveals something or responds evasively.
2. Class-skill—deploy one of your team's skills (for example Objectivity or Novelty). According to stats that are more or less simply abstractions designed to differentiate teams from one another, the operatives wager power-points and spirit-points to modify their roll and their potential damage. The team rolls, and, on a hit, I take over and tell the team what they're saying to the NPC, in accordance with the skill; the NPC responds to them with a revelation whose importance corresponds to the damage on which the team wagered their power-points.
3. Role-play (RP) attack—this is the wildcard, and I've made it clear that it has the greatest potential rewards in terms of XP, stats-boosts, and gear-drops. The idea is to do something that RP's their character, potentially using the gear that they've collected so far (each has a weapon and other random things like a happy mask or a flag). This option clearly gives scope for the creative relationship to the material that seems to me to be at the heart of what's making Operation KTHMA successful.

In turn, at least thus far the NPC's have only simple attacks: I roll for the NPC to determine which team he or she is going to attack; I roll again, and on a five or six the NPC reveals a part of that team's secret. (Each team has previously communicated to me what piece of their secret will be revealed on a hit; they've discussed in their team-forums how to subdivide the secret for that purpose.) When the schoolteacher Geromenes hit Class 4 last Wednesday, the tension in the room was palpable—unlike anything I'd ever experienced as a teacher.


I'll leave you hanging as to the very significant encounter with Charicles the tragedian, but the logagonistic encounter with that schoolteacher was over quickly. The operatives, as their Athenian hosts, found the house of Thucydides son of Melesias (that name is important, but not for the reasons I imagine you're thinking, and for which I think almost all the students are thinking it's important), where they had had their early education from a slave named Geromenes. He was just finishing up a lesson about the first book of the Iliad, and he greeted them happily, but with a shadow behind his smiling eyes. (Gotta love narrative shortcuts.)


The encounter opened: the operatives asked why Geromenes seemed so guarded. Class 5 missed with their class skill, Lyrical Fancy. Then Geromenes, suddenly defensive, landed his attack on Class 4: he studied their faces, seemed to remember something, and said, "Wasn't your father involved with the law, a few years back?"


Class 2 then went all in on their Objectivity skill, and spent every point they had for Mission 1 (which would soon be over, admittedly) to get an automatic critical hit. "How can you teach children these homeric stories of heroic glory when they're so clearly bigoted tales of Greek prowess?" I told them they asked.


Geromenes broke down, weeping. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" he cried. "This is my secret shame! I taught all of you your Homer for so many years, and now I'm afraid that war against Sparta is coming, and you'll all do what you learned—you'll all fight, and die, in a pointless, bloody conflict. I know that some of the men are preparing to send their sons away—I beg of you, think hard about it!"

About (the lack of) the author

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phaeacian immersion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then he asks,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living Epic, the online course, live for registration!

Thanks to the wonderful folks at the UConn Center for Continuing Studies, we've got a very nice gateway into the first tangible effort of the Video Games and Human Values Initiative, my short course in January 2009 for teachers, parents, and anyone else who's interested, "Living Epic: The Power of Video Games in Culture from the Ancient to Modern World." Suitable for a virtual stocking stuffer, this course will be, above all, a great way for us to start reaching an audience of teachers who want to think about the educational potential of games in a new way.

To be completely clear, here's where you register.

The initiative itself now has a spiffy new Ning social network. I beseech you, if you like what we're up to, to head over, join up, and start talking about the future of this conversation. Most importantly, we're starting to talk about the proto-symposium, "Defining Play," inspired by the wonderful work of Corvus Elrod.