Communal immersion, ancient and modern

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.



After Odysseus gets what he wants from Demodocus at the end of Book 8 of the Homeric Odyssey, and Alcinous has stopped Demodocus from singing so that he can ask why the hell Odysseus is crying into a curtain, Odysseus does, to a certain extent, fulfill his part of the bargain he made with the bard to sing the bard’s praises if the bard sang his. In the process, he gives us what I would hold up as a candidate for the first depiction of immersion in the Western literary tradition:

Surely indeed it is a beautiful thing to listen to a singer
such as this one here, like the gods in his singing;
for I, at least, think there is no practice that is more pleasurable
than when happiness arises among all the people,
and the feasters throughout the palace listen to a singer,
sitting in order. . .
But your spirit was inclined to ask me about my mournful
sufferings, so that I must mourn and grieve even more.
What then first, what last should I recite to you?

It’s the “sitting in order” listening to the singer and its connection to the pleasure of the occasion (a superlative pleasure at that, since Odysseus says there’s no other practice that has more pleasure), that I think makes it immersion. We know this image well from our own culture as well—it’s the same thing that happens at a really good movie, when a hundred people are sitting in their seats not noticing that there are other people next to them, not even aware that they themselves are breathing, so transported are they by the story.

There are plenty of other moments in the Odyssey that I could point to as filling out this picture, above all the moment when Odysseus pauses in his own story and the Phaeacians “stay, stricken to silence,” but the picture of a community immersed is the one I want to focus on, because it seems at first so different from what goes on in our game-rooms or at our computers, when we’re playing a game like Oblivion or Halo.

There may be something to be mourned, there, if we stop getting together to sit in order throughout the palace, but I doubt we will stop (especially since sports are going to go on, seeing that we have bodies, WALL*E notwithstanding, and people aren’t going to stop liking to act out plays).

Much more important, however, is the assured survival of the fundamentally imaginative, creative, and positive construction of community through immersion. What Odysseus is talking about is a cultural practice that had a crucial role in making the just-starting-out ancient Greek city-state (the famous idea of the polis) what it was, and what it became. The word I translate “pleasure,” is kharis which also, and more radically, means “reciprocal benefit.” In the early city-state, kharis made the community go round—people bearing kharis towards one another made up the fabric of the growing society.

That kharis is there in gaming culture. I would suggest that it’s more there in gaming culture than it is in film culture (though cineasts form some strong communities too!). The connection between the imaginative activity of gaming and the bonds we gamers form with one another is almost mystical. Those bonds are expressed the more strongly in the strong things we will occasionally say to one another, and hopefully be sorry afterward. Those bonds also enliven us to an extent so great that we will sometimes find our commitment to our gaming communities coming into conflict with our commitment to the communities of our families. Is it not so?

“Almost mystical,” I wrote, but not completely mystical, I would say. I believe that that connection is susceptible of analysis, and I intend to analyze it. Good thing for me Odysseus is intent, as the story of his adventures begins, on making it clear why he thinks he can out-bard the bard, and tell a story that produces an immersion even deeper than Demodocus’ produces, and that will form precisely the community that will worship the ground Odysseus walks on, and bring him home.

Next time: it’s not all about you, Odysseus! (Or is it?)

Normal gamers in Plato's republic

With this post, I'm going to start writing about my experience with, and notions about, adult gamer communities like SeasonedGamers.com (hereinafter SG) and GamerswithJobs.com (hereinafter GWJ). For all intents and purposes, this will probably be a series, too, but I'm getting a little tired of having to put boilerplate at the top of nearly every post I write, so I won't call it a "series."

One thing worth noting about the basic idea, though, is that it continues on from one of my pieces in The Escapist, “Creating the Normal Gamer.” I didn't get to say as much as I wanted to in that piece about what makes these communities special, and a blog seems like an ideal format to sketch out the rest of what I was on about.

Most importantly, this bunch of posts will give me the opportunity to talk about the ancient connection that I couldn't quite work into the original piece. Doing that will in turn give me another point of reference when I bend the Living Epic series back around to talk about community as it really works in gaming culture.

So my basic point in “Creating the Normal Gamer” was that the internet communities where adult gamers hang out are creating a new kind of gamer, a gamer I called, somewhat ironically—though not without a specific purpose—the normal gamer. These gamers hang out in such forums so that they don't have to wade through pages and pages of flames and flame-bait in such places as the official forums of the games they love. The specific purpose of using the phrase “normal gamer” was to express my belief that the reason the adult gaming communities have come together is to create a new version of normality, within their borders. That new version of “the normal” pushes out the legions of gamers who do the things we all don't like. Normality is of course always relative; the very centrality of gaming to our version of normality within places like SG makes us abnormal within most of adult mainstream culture. We don't call the gamers outside our walls “abnormal,” but that's more-or-less the way we treat them.

The classical connection is that Plato, a guy I've been coming to admire more and more since graduate school, a period when I loathed him with a passion that burned hotter than a thousand Helioses, was in my opinion trying to create his own adult gamer community. He was doing that, I think, because he couldn't figure out how else he should deal with the fact that mainstream Athens had decided to execute that original indy gamer--and the designer of Plato's own favorite game, elenchus—Socrates.

Am I actually saying that philosophy was originally a kind of video game (I'd never suggest that modern philosophy is, by the way)? Did you really need to ask?

This is going to take a while, I see, now that I'm this far in. I'm strong, though. I'm not going to call it a series.

If you happen actually to be reading this post, I'd love to hear what the name Plato means to you. The reason I loathed him in graduate school was that I thought he was a philosopher like Kant was a philosopher—you know, incomprehensible. He's not, though. Someday I hope I get a chance to give the “Gaming Plato” course that will serve as a companion to “Gaming Homer,” and tell you (if you're interested) that when Plato seems incomprehensible, that's actually because he's making fun of people like Kant.

So the thing I want to say about SG and GWJ and places like them is that when we hang out there and talk about, well, just about anything, from eschatology to scatology, we're actually doing a kind of philosophy—Plato's kind, the kind where you figure out how to be a good person. I've got a ton of examples to bring to the table, but there's one kind of conversation we have there that makes me think it's really philosophy: the fights we have about cheating. When we discuss whether a certain behavior is or is not something an SGer or a GWJer would do, we're having a dialogue about ethical philosophy, which is where Plato got started.

CVGHV Classroom 2.0 group

I've created a group in Classroom 2.0, a Ning network, for the Center for Video Games and Human Values, here. With any luck, we'll be able to get our virtual community up and running there, before moving it to what will probably be its ultimate home on a UConn server. I'd love to welcome any interested readers of this blog to that group. E-mail me at amphiaraus@msn.com if you'd like an invite.

For more about the center, see here!

Blog Banter: Digital Distribution

This post is my first contribution to the “Blog Banter” initiative! You can find more information about this cool project here.

It’s a little hard to find a specifically classical connection with regard to the question of the pros and cons of digital distribution, but it might be worth mentioning the way that in the early years of written culture, in 5th Century BCE Athens, people seemed to pay a lot of attention to what it meant to write things down. It was in those years that the texts of Homeric epic as we know it probably came together, and it would have been a very new thing to be able to hold a story in your hand in the form of a papyrus roll (what we think of as the book, which is properly called a codex, wasn’t invented until hundreds of years later).

The Athenian historian Thucydides bases a lot of his historiographical philosophy on the idea that he is writing for a reader who has a thing in his hands—a thing that contains the words Thucydides wrote. Above all, Thucydides hopes that the “thingness” of his history will mean that it will be a “possession forever,” a truer and better possession even than the city, Athens, that he loved and of which mourned the decline.

Are our games still possessions if we download them instead of carefully removing them from their boxes and putting them in our consoles or disc-drives? Well, yes—but only to the extent that they were ever possessions in the first place. I think we probably should try to get past the idea of possessing art, and it may be that digital distribution is an even greater help to that than we can see right now.

The act of downloading a game seems to me to make very real the idea that we’re experiencing the same work of art as all our gamer peers who are downloading the same thing. For me, art is always really about the communities it’s made for and that it makes. Maybe it’s just me, but digital distribution seems to me to make the community of gamers a little more real.

Thucydides wrote in a world he thought was continually falling apart, and in which he thought he wouldn’t find many receptive readers, because it must have seemed to him that so few people besides himself understood what had really happened to Athens (indeed, because so few people could even read at the time). He inaugurates writing-as-writing with the idea that community is doomed, as Athens was doomed.

I have a suspicion we can prove him wrong.

Check out the other Blog Banter articles below!

Silvercublogger, Mahogany Finish, Video Game Sandwich, thoughts and rants, weblog.probablynot.com, XboxOZ360, Zath!, Delayed Responsibility, Gamer Unit, Hawty McBloggy