Living Epic--the Main Quest (map of posts)

The post series mapped out below is what I call the "Main Quest" of this blog--my argument that adventure video games are actually ancient.

The Living Epic series:

• What the title means, and what it implies
• What about game studies?
• The sandbox of epic and the rails of GTA (1)
• The sandbox of epic and the rails of GTA (2)
• Stories and sandboxes, stories and rails
• The sandbox-to-rails continuum
• The interactivity of the Homerids (1)
• The interactivity of the Homerids (2)
• The interactivity of the Homerids (3)
• The interactivity of the Homerids (4)
• The Choice of Achilles and the choices of Bioshock
• The profundity of Halo and Bioshock (and the Iliad) with read-worthy follow-up here
• The mysterious dual: the smoking gun of interactivity
• The bard's audience: participation and community
• The bard's role, divided
• Communal immersion, ancient and modern
• Makin' kleos, makin' fanboys
• Phaeacian immersion
  

Stories and sandboxes, stories and rails

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.



If it were actually possible in an adventure video game to do anything you want, obviously I wouldn’t really have any business comparing adventure video games to ancient epics the way I am, because, obviously, the epic singer (let alone his audience, even if that audience is the guy paying the singer) can’t tell any version of the story he wants—he can’t for example, make Odysseus give up on getting home to Ithaca. But if it turns out that in fact the interactive storytelling in adventure video games limits stories the same way ancient epic does, we’re getting somewhere: once we see those limits, we can start to talk about them, and also about the stories that lie inside them—the stories that can and do get told both in ancient epic and in video games.

One of the qualities that tends to be valued very highly in games (though because there are different styles of adventure video game, this quality isn’t something a good game has to have) is what’s often called a sandbox style, or a sandbox feel. Some games that have defined stories also even have a “sandbox mode” in which the player can do whatever he or she likes within the world of the game.

(Like every other term in the gaming lexicon, “sandbox” has been used to describe different things from time to time. I should make it clear that I’m not going to talk in this particular context about how games like “Civilization” and “Sim City,” which can be called simulations or strategy games, and some of which are called “god games,” are related to ancient epic, if they are at all. In these games, the player controls a civilization or a subset of a civilization, and may or may not be required to meet certain goals to “win” the game. The distinguishing features of the adventure video games I’m talking about are 1) playing as a hero and 2) having an adventure as that hero. As you can tell, we actually have a bit of a problem even with the word “game,” though nobody has any good ideas it seems at this point what we should say instead of “game.” I have my own ideas on the matter, and a term I like to think with, "performative play practice," but thats for another series somewhere down the road.)

The sandbox metaphor is of course an evocation of the infinite possibilities presented to a child by a sandbox. Right off the bat, it’s worth noting a big and important difference between a sandbox and a video game: the imaginary possibilities presented to a kid in a sandbox are infinite, but sandboxes don’t have stories, except to whatever extent a kid brings them in with him or her.

To put it in familiar gaming terms, sandboxes don’t have missions, or quests, or campaigns—again, except as a kid brings them in there and brings them to life, enacts them, in the sand. If a sandbox came with a story, kids could still choose whether to play the story, and how to play it, but if they did play that story, they’d automatically be limiting what they could do.

Likewise, there are games that allow you incredible freedom in where you can go in the game-world, but unless there’s some story, whether in the form of a series of missions or any other kind of stronger narrative, they aren’t games, or at least they tend to give people fits as they try to figure out whether to call them games or not. (Remember that the games I’m talking about in this series are the ones I’m calling adventure video games, in which the player controls a character who has an adventure.) Even if you’re not a gamer, you may have heard of Second Life, which has acquired a bit of notoriety for the strange things that happen there. Second Life is an example of a persistent world: it presents like a game in every way except that there’s no story. Because it doesn’t impose a story, even in the form of a particular kind of avatar, Second Life couldn’t be called an adventure video game.

On the other hand, another good example is Disney’s persistent-world offering, Club Penguin. In Club Penguin, kids control penguins and play a wide variety of minigames to earn virtual coins, with with they can purchase upgrades to their igloos. While Second Life can’t be called an adventure game, Club Penguin could be, since the player’s experience is fundamentally configured as the story of an upwardly mobile penguin. The player may also get a job as a secret agent for some traditional adventure game storytelling, but the fundamental experience is of being a penguin in the world of Club Penguin. It’s the limitation that makes for the story. You can do almost anything in Club Penguin except not be a penguin with earning potential, just as (I’ll show as I proceed) you can do almost anything in Grand Theft Auto except not be a character who jacks cars.

Having a story thus by nature limits what a player can do, just as having a story limits what an epic singer can do, and where he can take his audience in his song.

There’s a term for this limitation, too, in gaming circles: “rails.” When a game is “on rails,” the player has to go in a pre-determined course, like a train on its track. A game “on rails” is thus roughly the opposite of a “sandbox” game. When you think about it, every adventure video game can be described as having a ratio of sandbox-to-rails, because at the ends of the sandbox—rails spectrum a video game ceases to be a game and becomes something else: a virtual world at the sandbox end, an animated video at the rails end.

The sand-box of epic and the rails of GTA (2)

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.



In case you didn’t notice me opening that can of worms I said I opened at the end of my last post (I did try to sneak it in), let me put a label on it for you: “Interactvity and Narrative Freedom.” Here are the questions the worms are asking: if the gamer in this game Iliad knows he’s supposed to build the Trojan Horse, how free is he to tell his own version of the story? if Demodocus, bard of the Phaeacians, has received such a specific request from Odysseus to hear a particular story about a wooden horse, how free is Demodocus the bard to tell his own version of the story? if Odysseus wants to make himself famous enough for the Phaeacians, how free is he to request his own version of the story? if the singer singing this part of the Odyssey to some real audience in ancient Greece wants to eat tonight, how free is he to tell his own version of the story? if the lord of the house where the singer is singing wants his herdsmen to herd his goats carefully, how free is he to request from the singer his own version of the story?

Coming back to the gamer, if the game developer wants to make a million bucks, how free is he to tell his own version of the Iliad, or even of the basic story of “space soldier saves the universe and the human race” or "small-time criminal becomes big-time criminal"? How free, then, is the gamer, really? Why can’t you go to church in Grand Theft Auto?

You can tell I think these worms are fun worms to play with. They’re also very important worms, though. Here’s why: the thing about video games that everyone thinks is so new and so cool and potentially so dangerous—that interactivity leading to immersion thing we’re always talking about, and that I’d suggest makes people like Jack Thompson get mad—comes from the gamer getting to control his or her avatar in the world of the game. If that interactivity and immersion really are new—if the gamer really can build the Trojan Horse any way he wants, or even not build the Trojan Horse, while Odysseus can’t get Demodocus to sing the story of the Trojan Horse exactly as Odysseus wants but must let the story unfold the way it’s supposed to unfold—then this blog is a crock. If that stuff is new, I’m taking what’s maybe a slight resemblance and trying to blow it up into some big-but-silly argument about how gaming is really more than it seems.

So it’s a kind of make-or-break question, whether the gamer’s control over the story is real, and whether it has anything to do with older ways of telling a story, like the Odyssey’s way of telling the story of Odysseus. So figuring out some answers to the specific questions I asked above (the worms from the “Interactivity and Narrative Freedom” can) will mean that we start to understand where the comparison of video gaming to ancient epic storytelling can get us—if anywhere.

Here’s the answer, which I’ll explain more fully next time: you can’t attend Mass in GTA because (despite appearances) whatever else you do, you’re still the main character of GTA, in the world of GTA, and there are no Masses there.

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.

Niko Bellic, a new Odysseus

There’s more than a little danger in making assertions about a character (Niko) about whom one knows as yet very little. I won’t get to play GTA4 until at least Tuesday—and I suspect it will take me weeks to get to know Niko Bellic very well. But given the history of the GTA series and the trailers that I’ve caught sight of around the Web, I really don’t think I’m far off in comparing Niko to Odysseus, at least as far as one fundamental characteristic is concerned: their anti-heroism.

It’s something that’s usually overlooked in the eighth grade English classes that almost always constitute a student’s complete exposure to Homeric epic until and unless he or she decides to take a course on it in college, but Odysseus is not really a nice guy. That’s not to say that we aren’t meant to sympathize with him, but he’s a lying, cheating, stealing sonofabitch whose only significant redeeming characteristic is an obessive need to get home and put things right. The fact that his wife and son are there, in bad trouble, means that Odysseus’ return does have a fundamentally redemptive quality, because his wife and son are nice people—in a way that Odysseus doesn’t get to be nice because he had to go fight somebody else’s f’ed up war.

Anyway, the most emphatic expression of Odysseus’ anti-heroism is perhaps what he does to the maid-servants who have been sleeping with the suitors who were trying to get Odysseus’ wife Penelope to marry them. Remember that these maids, as the ancient audience would have been very well aware, wouldn’t have had a choice in the matter: sleeping with the powerful guys hanging out in their masters' house would have just been what happened to them. At the end of the epic, Odysseus has them strung up all together, in a mass hanging, their twitching legs described as vividly as one might expect of a Tarantino flick.

No, Odysseus isn’t nice. And neither is Niko. But if the reviews speak truth, that means that their stories have something very special, very epic, and very ancient going for them. They make us imagine what it would be like to be someone very different from who we are, someone much worse in many ways, but perhaps in a few ways much better than we are. We get the pleasure of being the kind of person who doesn’t think twice about stringing up a bunch of maids, or offing the target we’ve been assigned to off. But it’s pleasure because it’s pretend, and that’s the secret to the anti-hero: our enjoyment of him depends completely on our not being like that, on our being able to see that such measures could never, in real life, be justified.

Is GTA4 a living epic?

The short answer is Yes. A longer answer will take us into very interesting territory, the territory above all of the figure usually called the anti-hero. We’ll also have to stop in the sandbox, to see whether a game can be made so open and free that it breaks its continuity with the epic tradition.



Next time: GTA4 and the Odyssey.