The bard's audience: participation and community

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.



If the ancient epic bard had the same ability as a gamer to shape the story as he saw fit, to add for example an ambassador to the “Embassy to Achilles,” (see here) what about the bard’s audience? We’ve already seen that Phemius, the bard of Ithaca was, according to the Homeric bard of Odyssey Book 1, looking to sing the song that would please his audience most; that is, an ancient bard had an audience, and that audience had a degree of control over his song. The bard could tell the story as he liked, but he had to worry about whether it would help him make a living, and he was thus part of a larger community of people, all of whom were participating in the creation of the epic.

Isn’t there something here that breaks the comparison between ancient epic and video games? If the bard had to work with his audience, the way, say, a professional storyteller or an improvisational comic does today, doesn’t that mean that the gaming comparison has a fatal flaw, because it doesn’t account for that community element? Isn’t gaming, after all, an isolating activity? If the gamer is like a bard, isn’t he like a bard who never gets to perform, never brings his tales alive? Isn’t gaming, then, the death of the bardic tradition instead of its new life?

You won’t be surprised that I’m going to argue against that point of view. In this post and in the next few posts, I’m going to take my argument about interactivity into new territory. That territory is defined by two key terms that I think are fundamentally, though surprisingly, related: community and immersion. I’m going to show that the living epic model actually uncovers an aspect of gaming that usually gets covered up by what gaming looks like—individual people sitting on couches and desk chairs, wrapped up in moving images on their screens. I’m going to show that instead of dooming my comparison, the matter of the bard’s audience actually makes that comparison absolutely crucial.

I’m going to demonstrate, that is, that video games, through the very immersiveness that makes them look isolating have an amazing power to create communities as strong and constructive as the ones created by ancient epic. To put it simply, the community function of immersion, the way that immersive storytelling like epic and video games creates relationships between artists and audiences, and among audience-members, doesn’t—can’t—go away. That’s why game-companies have had to start hiring community-managers.

More on that part of the equation—the gamers-forming-unstoppable-communities part—later. For now, I want to look at the relationship between the bard and his audience through the myth of the epic tradition, and to begin to compare it with the relationship between game-makers and their audiences, the gamers, through the myths of the games they make.

I think the best way to do that is to go back to the moment in Book 8 of the Odyssey that we looked at in light of the sandbox-to-rails continuum a few weeks ago. In this passage, we find Odysseus, who’s in the audience of the bard Demodocus in the quasi-fantasy land of Phaeacia, investing to an extraordinary extent in Demodocus’ heroic songs. He sends over to Demodocus a really nice cut of meat, and then says to him:

Demodocus 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.

To understand where I’m going to take this passage now, you need to know that when Demodocus sings this song, Odysseus weeps. When Odysseus weeps, the king of the Phaeacians asks him who he is. When Alkinoos asks Odysseus who he is, Odysseus responds (we’ll look at this in detail in a future post) that he was enjoying Demodocus’ song, but, well, OK, he’ll tell his own story if Alkinoos insists. Very, very long story short, Odysseus’ tale is so cool and compelling that the Phaeacians don’t just take him home but also give him, literally, a king’s ransom in gifts to take with him to rebuild his shattered house.

In the passage I quoted, we see Odysseus telling Demodocus exactly what story Odysseus wants to hear, with confidence that Demodocus will do it, and help Odysseus accomplish his more or less propagandistic goal. It couldn’t ever have been like that in real Archaic Greece, but it could sure have been close, if you were a lord with a cut of meat to give. Odysseus uses Demodocus’ technical, bardic skill the way a gamer uses the technical skill of a game-developer, embodied in a game. Odysseus shares the story of his prowess with the Phaeacian audience the way a gamer shares his version of the game-story with other gamers.

It all comes about through immersion. More on that two posts down the line. Next time I’ll say more about how game-makers actually inherit the hard part of the bard’s job while gamers get the fun part.

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
  

The Alexandrian Mandate

Leigh Alexander has a great post up at SVGL that will hopefully galvanize the resolve of those who want to follow her call (which fits well, actually with what N'Gai Croal is doing these days).

As I wrote in Leigh's comments, I think she's a little hard on COD4, which I think deserves a lot of praise for doing what it does. Weird story from left field: Herodotus tells us that a tragedian named Phrynichus was fined by the Athenians for putting on a tragedy about a real disaster (the Capture of Miletus, but that's not important now), because the audience felt that the suffering was too familiar. It seems to me that distance is necessary, and helpful, a lot of the time.

But the basic drive to which Leigh calls us, to become better gamers, gamers who keep thinking about how our games, despite being played in an imaginary space, have everything to do with what we are and do in the "real world," is something we need to think much more about.

The Interactivity of the Homerids (3): The Moment of Immersion

Why do the in medias res thing I was talking about last time, though—besides that it’s a fun way to tell a story, and perhaps even that it “grabs” you? There’s actually a much more important reason for the beginning in medias res, and there’s a word for it that’s so important in gaming culture right now that it’s more or less a buzzword, and even a bit of a cliché by now: the word is immersion, and it would be fair to say that immersion is the phenomenon of gaming culture that I believe holds the key to understanding what games do, and what they can do.

Let’s approach it first from the broadest perspective. As in the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid, so also in Halo: the audience is thrown into the narrative, and left to follow the story’s clues about what part of the story they have come into, and what's going on. The effect is to make the participant more truly part of the story, whether the participant is holding a controller or a lyre, or just listening to a bard sing a story they feel like they already know, or watching a friend play Halo, because they’ve been put into the midst of it.

That was the way with ancient epic, and indeed I would suggest that Halo accomplishes this insertion of its audience even more effectively than ancient epic could, by waking you from sleep.

In Halo, too, what we might call the “moment of immersion,” when the story sucks the audience into itself, stands out very clearly, because at that moment, suddenly, the player’s controller actually controls the character. When we observe that the story-telling isn’t entirely in the first-person—that the cut-scenes have an essential role in telling the player what’s happening, and in giving meaning to the player’s actions as the character—it seems at first that the moment of immersion moves the player from what we might call “regular old storytelling” into the completely new, completely immersive form of storytelling of the adventure video-game.

But the point of this blog is to say that that moment of immersion is actually the same as the moment when the bard of the Iliad says “From the time when the two stood quarrelling, the son of Atreus, lord of men, and godlike Achilles.” At least that’s one way to put my big idea. Just to hang it out there, I’ll also put here in a single sentence the reason I think that claim is true: at both moments, the one in the Iliad and the one in Halo, the participants in the occasion, whether of gaming or of epic, take part in the creation of their own version of a story that for that very reason comes to be about them.

I think it’s fairly easy to see how the story of an adventure video game comes to be about the person playing the game—especially when we think of the sort of game called an RPG (role-playing game), in which a player creates a character over whose make-up he or she has a great deal of control (in that he or she chooses the character’s class and abilities and these days can even customize the character’s appearance to a very great degree). The moment of immersion is perhaps simply a very striking line of demarcation between a story about someone else and a story about the story’s actual real-time participants, in the telling of which those participants have, yes, a role to play.

It’s less obvious, of course, that the storytelling of the Iliad and the other ancient epics have something like that moment of immersion, and so to make this comparison clearer it’s necessary to go into some detail about the strange way those epics came together, and what that meant for the later epics that came along, and were created in a way that’s more familiar to us (that is, a writer like Virgil writing down the Aeneid on the Roman equivalent of paper).

Next time: the interactivity of the Homerids (yes, for reals). Also, what the heck a Homerid is.

My paper trail, so far

If you're interested in the issues I'm bringing up here, you might want to take a look at my two existing articles in The Escapist: this one, on Halo and Virgil's Aeneid; and this one, on the maturation of gamer culture and the birth of the Normal Gamer.

Another piece should be coming out at the beginning of May: a critique of what I see as Game Studies scholars' failure to take up the task of leading gaming culture into the mainstream.

“Living Epic”: What the title means, and what it implies

This is the first 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 title of this blog gives a pretty good idea of what I’m trying to do here. I want to announce that epic is alive, and that there are people creating epics like the “real” epics, the ancient ones, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Beowulf, and many others, every day. These people are video gamers, and I’m going to show that their culture is actually not new, but rather as ancient as those ancient epics.

The title is also meant to suggest that you can live epic, too, if you’ll only play more video games.

Imagine a gamer—let’s make him a 16-year old boy—on a couch in his family’s TV room in suburban Boston, his eyes fixed on the screen, a controller in his hands. He is attentive to a story of valiant deeds and eternal glory unfolding not just on the screen but in his mind and through the way he manipulates the action by playing the game. That story, a story he knows very well in its outline, and may know very well even in its specific detail, is unfolding in a way it never has before, because the gamer himself is helping it unfold, and he couldn’t do it the same way anyone else has done it, or even the same way he himself has done it before, if he tried.

Now imagine a young herdsman 2800 years ago, an inhabitant of Salamis,an island off the coast of Athens. He’s at a feast in his lord’s house, and the banquet is nearly over. There’s a singer with a lyre (think guitar) in his hands sitting to the side of the hall, and the young man’s eyes are fixed upon him. The singer is playing and singing an old, old story, but he’s playing it in a way the young man has never heard it before. It’s a tale of valiant deeds and eternal glory, and it unfolds not just in the singer’s words, but in the young man’s mind, and in the singer’s voice and the way he strikes the strings with his plectrum (think pick), made out of bone, or even ivory.

Now magine that the herdsman is so overhwhelmed by the experience that he becomes an apprentice of the singer, and learns to sing and play the lyre himself, well enough to tell his own version of the story. Now he is able to decide how the heroes do their deeds and win their glory, but the storytelling itself remains the same, even if as he sings to his own audience he couldn’t sing it the same way his master did, or he himself has sung it, if he tried.

Through the stories the young men are transported into a world of heroic myth, where warriors fight more fearlessly than real warriors could ever fight, and quarrel with one another, and laugh sometimes, and even cry sometimes. The warriors deliberate, and make choices, and suffer and enjoy those choices’ consequences. For the young men, the gamer and the ancient herdsman, these heroes live.

You can tell that I think there are similarities to be drawn between the two young men, and you can tell what I think some of them are—especially the story about valiant deeds and eternal glory. But there’s a similarity that’s almost out of view in these two pictures that will end up being my fundamental theme in this blog. The immersion of the gamer and the young herdsman in the story—their interaction with the controller and the screen, and with the singer’s voice and lyre—shapes them, even as it shapes the story. They are who they narrate themselves to be, and in the epics they experience, they learn to narrate themselves a little differently than they did when they entered the living-room or the banquet-hall.

So besides showing that the gamer and the herdsman-turned-singer are doing the same basic thing, I’m also going to talk about what I think that means: I’m also going to examine video games as an artistic medium, and to try to persuade you based on that examination that video gaming is a worthwhile cultural pursuit. I think there are still a lot of people around who need to be convinced of that, despite the fact that, unknown to most gamers, there are now professors (I’m not one of them, since my field is the ancient stuff) who teach and write about video games. I hope that some of those people who need convincing will profit from this blog, whether or not they start reading it (or finish reading it) with any desire to read any more of what those professors are writing about video games.

Part 2