The Cave, unpacked: part 3

Then, in that post, came this bit:

2) Plato hated Homer—the sheer number of times Socrates tells us, especially in Republic, that Homer (whom he thought of as a single person, though at this blog we know better) was pretending to be something he was not, proves that beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Again, this declaration is probably a bit too broad--the word “hate” is of course much too strong. If the statement is true, the negative emotions Plato felt towards the fictional Homer whom he believed to have been a real writer were probably much closer to anger, frustration, and envy than to hate.

If there’s an emotional basis to the famous passage from the last book of Republic where Plato has Socrates speak of the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, that’s what it seems likely to me to be: Plato sees how powerful his own education, centering on homeric epic, has been in determining the way he looks at and acts in the world, and is mad at the figure who perpetrated it. He’s frustrated that it was so hard for Socrates, and is so hard for him to think past that education into the new philosophical world that he wants to create in memory of Socrates. He envies, perhaps most of all, Homer’s seemingly ineluctable control over the ruleset of the cave-culture game within which the Athenians have risen to power, fallen from it, and finally ended up in a cultural position that Plato must have regarded as going nowhere.

This is, I think, the way game-designers hate games like HALO and BioShock, even as they often play them to death, and enjoy “hating on” them in every conceivable corner of the internet. Maybe in that very modern, fanboyish sense of the word “hate,” I was on target in my post--Plato is a Socrates fanboy, and he’s jealous of Socrates’ indie cred. So perhaps a more accurate formulation would have been “Plato was jealous of philosophy’s cultural credibility”--the game that he was designing, a game perhaps on best display in the middle to late dialogues, above all Republic, Timaeus, and Critias, needed to establish itself, just as the books of Herodotus and Thucydides sought to establish themselves, in contradistinction to the hegemonic game of “Homer.”

Remember that “jealousy” and “envy,” when used properly, are different, though related, emotions: we’re envious of what we don’t have (that we may have it), but jealous of what we do (that we may keep it): Plato’s emotion, such as it was, was perhaps the feeling that the grand practomime of philosophy could not but be under siege from the apparently grand practomime of epic.

The Cave, unpacked: part 2

So, since no one seemed to object to my idea of using Living Epic, for the foreseeable future, as a place to riff on my stuff at PlaythePast. . . The next bit of that post is:

Here’s what you need to know starting out: 1) Plato loved Homer—the sheer number of quotations from Homer, made in passing by Socrates and others, almost always provided to give unquestionable support to a commonly understood point, proves that beyond the shadow of a doubt.

I suppose if there’s a difficulty here, it’s in what I mean by the word “loved.” Let’s look at an example--and where better to find it than the story of the cave itself. Socrates, in telling his interlocutors about how strongly the philosopher, who’s been outside the cave, would reject the life of the prisoners, quotes the Odyssey. Not just any passage, either: Socrates quotes the famous words from the mouth of the shade of Achilles in the underworld, about how he’d rather still be alive as the meanest slave in the world than be king of the dead. Ironic, huh? The philosopher would rather be in the upper world--the “real” world--than in the lower one, just like Achilles.

More ironic: if I’m right that the shadow-puppet play of the cave is in large part Plato’s metaphor for the education provided by Athenian culture, comprising above all the epics of the homeric tradition, then Plato is using “Homer” against “himself.” The philosopher wants to be free, specifically of Homer.

But doesn’t it take a critic who loves Homer to create this fantastic, nostalgic web of irony and metaphor?

When I say in that post that Plato “loved” Homer, I’m using “loved” as a short-hand for something like “regarded as indispensable and ineluctable,” but this riff may let me follow on to some sort of greater love, albeit one much more complex. Homer was Plato’s education, as it was Socrates’; how could Plato despise it, when it had led him whither he had arrived, able to imagine a world outside the cave?

When we who are trying to use such insights to reform education yet again think about our own educations, I hope we can treat it much as Plato treated Homer--rejecting gently but firmly, speaking of ancient quarrels, but acknowledging, as Plato does in the story of the cave, our eternal debts.

The Cave, unpacked: part 1

I’ve been searching for a way to use this blog, where I’ve done so much that I’m proud of, as something other than an adjunct to what I’m doing as part of the team at playthepast. The difficulty is that the mission of playthepast is a superset of the mission with which I founded this blog, and there’s not a single thing that I’d post there that wouldn’t be appropriate here, either on the scholarship (how Homer and Plato can help us figure out what’s going on with games in the modern world) or on the pedagogy (how Homer and Plato can help us figure out how games can serve as an engine for educational reform) side.

On the other hand, I don’t feel as constrained here at Living Epic to avoid my tendency to formulate things abstrusely, and so as of today I’m undertaking the experiment of taking my recent string of posts about Plato’s cave (which are in fact mostly rewritings of posts originally made here) and unpacking them further, and more obscurely, here.

The posts at playthepast are written to bring the arc of my scholarly project into close contact with my pedagogical one. They pick up from the scholarly foundation I’ve built over the past seven years of the analogy between the form of practomime called homeric epic and the form called narrative videogame, and move through the scholarly edifice I’ve been building on it since 2008, of the way Plato’s reaction to homeric epic can help us contextualize videogames’ role in modern culture. From there, in recent weeks, the playthepast posts have turned towards applying the blueprints of that edifice to the building of learning practomimes like the ones on which my UConn team and I are at work.

At any rate, I want to start with the post that makes the turn to Plato. It starts like this:

This post takes us from homeric epic to a key moment of its reception in classical Athens, Plato. In it, I cover ground I’ve also covered in print, in a chapter in the collection Ethics and Game Design.

The first thing to say is that although I like my chapter in Ethics and Game Design very much, I’ve managed to move beyond it in the past year: in the chapter I manage to say, pretty much, “Plato tells us that mimesis only teaches when it gets interrupted the way Bioshock interrupts itself”; now, in these posts, I’m capable of saying also two more things, “I know how to interrupt mimesis to make that learning happen” and “I know how to analyze, and learn from, videogame mimesis when it doesn’t get interrupted.”

The former of those things is the basis of the practomimetic curricula we’re working on at UConn; the latter is the basis of my current work on the digital narrative videogame, which to this point comprises my analysis of BioWare’s epic style and will I hope soon also comprise analyses of the Bethesda, Bungie, and Square Enix styles.

So that kind of thing is my idea for Living Epic going forward. If you have a strong feeling about it’s worth or lack thereof, I’m pretty easy to find on social media these days, and I love both thoughtful conversation and bruising intellectual brawls.

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.

Red Dead Redemption diary, day 1: In medias res, again

It's not often that I get to play a game in synch with the rest of the gaming world—that is, when the game releases—and most of the time I consider that a good thing, because it means that like a good little scholar I get to absorb the critical context along with the work. I also get to take my time when I play a game late, and avoid the unpleasant realization of just how "bad" I am at games. (Oh, how little consolation it is that I'm "good" at, say, the Iliad.)

But with the start of summer coinciding with the release of Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption, and with my longstanding interest in the relation of the Western to the epic tradition (I teach the Iliad in my myth course with The Searchers as my opening gambit), I thought it might be fun to blog on a semi-regular basis in a sort of diary-commentary form. Here goes.

I got to play from 9 to 11 last night, after I got my kids into bed. I entered the practomime as a character whom I later learned is named John Marston. He got off a paddle-boat between two semi-official looking men, who were clearly making sure he went where he was supposed to go. In medias res—or, as my friend Nels puts it, in medium ludum, though I personally think the older phrase is better, because it operates at the level of the res (the matters, the subject) of the practomime.

How did I know I was the man with the scars? Three things spring to mind: 1) he was clearly the man on the cover of the game; 2) he was in the middle of the shot, and in the middle of the semi-official men (I still have no idea who they are [in medias res again]); 3) it's a Rockstar game, and if there's a single disreputable character on screen, it must be you.

I think I'll save my frustration with the horseback-riding and with the narrative itself for another post and explore this practomimetic framing for a moment.

A bard or a member of his audience, when striking up his lyre or listening to a lyre being struck, would have had a subtext already running: this bard sings this kind of song, and thus is likely to be about to sing this kind of song again. Not to mention: when bards sing, this is the range of possible subjects, whether or not this bard decides to sing within his usual domain of styles and subjects.

When the bard began for example μῆνιν ἄειδε. . . (the beginning of the Iliad as we have it), it was like seeing the Rockstar logo. When the bard continued and sang that the tale that night would begin with the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles, it was like seeing a scarred dude get off a paddle boat in the middle of the screen.

In medias res isn't just about the story—it's about the context of the story, and its relation to the tradition. Red Dead Redemption isn't just about John Marston: it's about the player's relation to John Marston, as broadly conceived as that relation can be—inside his or her gaming life, inside gaming culture, inside all of culture.

And that, of course, is where Plato comes in. What will Red Dead Redemption allow its players to learn about the West, and more importantly about themselves? What will those players be, after they have been John Marston? Despite the frustrations I'll bring up as we go, I think even I will emerge transformed by the beautiful and profound aspects of this practomime.

Further practomimetic adventures: a daring rescue

This is just a pointer to my latest update on LOTROreporter, in which I chronicle my students' rescue of their bardic leader from a (fictional) camp of 1337 (that is, leet; that is, "elite") gamers.

• The learning objective: analyze an anti-heroic bardic narrative.
• The activity: take part in a bardic occasion that tells the story of the rescue of the leaders of the bardic order.
• The result: madcap epic engagement (that is [shhh!], fun).

The table and the screen: a curious resistance

I've seen it frequently enough both in myself and in people I'm talking to—notably my students and my classicist colleagues—that it no longer surprises me. People who haven't spent time studying games seem to have a fundamental resistance to the nearly self-evident idea that video-gaming, or, as I've taken to calling it, digital practomime, is fundamentally the same thing as tabletop-gaming. Or, as Pete Border (whom I don't know except through this one post) put it in a post on the GLS Educators' Ning, "If a game isn't fun with everybody in a room playing it on a table, adding a computer won't help it."

It was a major breakthrough for me, which only occurred over the course of several months, to realize the absolute truth of the notion that ludic practomime (i.e., game-playing) doesn't really change in the essential elements of its construction of meaning as it goes from the Monopoly board, or paper-and-dice RPG's, or Live-Action Role-Playing, or even live-action sports, to those things' digital versions in what we usually call video games.

Just as that other kind of practomime, storytelling, is recognizably the same thing between book and computer screen, and even between oral composition and textual book, and even between book and film, the more obtrusively interactive kind of practomime that we call games is the same thing between table (and dice, and books, and board, and field) and screen. Which is not to say that books and movies themselves are the same--rather that storytelling as an act is consistent between them.

There are obviously things you can play easily on the screen that would be very difficult, if not impossible, to play on the table. If someone were able to drop objects of certain stereotypical shapes from a height down to you, and you were able to rotate those objects as they fell so that they fit together as efficiently as possible, it would be Tetris, and be recognizably the same as Tetris on the computer screen. But of course, as even the famous video of Live Action Tetris makes clear, Tetris is a game that's not possible in the physical world. Nor is it practical to get your friends to wear mushroom- and turtle-suits so that you can try to jump on them, a la Super Mario Bros., although it would—obviously, I think—be fun if it were possible.

And there's no question but that the integration of the verbal with the visual and the manual, and even the visceral, that comes in video games, along with the opening up of possibilities like jumping on Goombas and Koopas, has a role in our seduction into thinking that it is video games that are revolutionizing the way we think about art and education and even culture itself. But I don't think that the sheer impact of that integration, or those possibilities, can fully account for the resistance we find to seeing games (or practomime) as a single art form between table and screen.

So what does account for this difficulty, and why does it matter?

To a classicist trying to develop a field that I'm thinking of these days as "applied classics," the table-to-screen shift looks rather like the oral-to-written shift that leaves legible marks on the remarkable culture of 5^th Century BCE Athens, in the works of the tragedians (Aechylus, Sophocles, Euripides), the historians (Herodotus, Thucydides), and the first philosopher, Plato. I could go straight back to Plato's cave, and then add a soupcon of the Phaedrus, to say that Plato was trying among so many other things to get people to pay attention to the bad things (and the good) about the changeover, but I'm sure you're sick of me on the cave by now.

Instead, let me point to Thucydides' hope that his work, by taking full advantage of the technology of writing, would become a possession forever, a ktema es aei, as opposed to what he saw all around him, contest-pieces for immediate hearing—that is, for oral delivery and auditory reception. Thucydides was clearly including Homer and Herodotus among those whose work would not survive, or at any rate would not be useful for future generations. Similarly, my students seem to think of their gaming as occurring in a world apart from the world of tables and classrooms.

(The ktema es aei passage has a very great deal to tell us about practomime, and I plan to come back to it soon, because the "contest-piece" side of the equation is also the practomime side of the equation, as opposed to cultural material like textbooks and [traditional] courses. Deconstructing that opposition has, I think, a lot of potential for understanding the power of practomime in culture.)

But Thucydides' resistance to seeing the traction that oral composition has over our relation to the past is also closely analogous to our characteristic failure to see that a Dungeons and Dragons module and DragonAge: Origins are fundamentally the same thing. Playing pretend on a tabletop in the "real world" is in crucial ways the same as playing pretend in a digital medium. Thucydides is seduced by the textual as we are seduced by the digital. (Plato, notably, is not seduced this way, and his ability to break through the resistance to seeing the continuity of oral and written—and thus also the actual discontinuities—is perhaps what permits him to formulate the cave.)

It's important to fight against this seduction, I think, for at least two reasons, one of them metaphysical and the other eminently practical.

Metaphysical first: if we fail to grasp that digital practomime (i.e. the video game) is a continuation of tabletop practomime, we lose an opportunity to see the practomimetic construction of "reality"—or, to put it in my usual terms, we fail to learn the lesson of the cave, and instead simply become more deeply implicated in the unnecessary fetters that Plato so vividly put on his prisoners' limbs.

To fail in this way is analogous to failing to see that the Matrix trilogy is about all of culture, not just about digital culture, and to failing to understand that Facebook is an extension of "real-world" social relations, not a new way to relate to other people. As a teacher of the Humanities, I see an urgent need for my students' cultural competency and for my own career-survival, to persuade the world of the truth that the "real" world is as virtual as the online world, and always has been. Such an understanding would make clear for example that terms like "the digital humanities" misunderstand both our opportunities and our challenges.

Practical next: if we fail to see that we can do practomime with nothing more than our imaginations and our voices, and can build the technology up from there, and that e.g. Googlewave is easily a more powerful technology for practomime than any currently functional 3D digital world, we lose an extraordinary opportunity for doing culture, whether we call our practices—that is, the culture we do—art, or education, or even entertainment.

I would really like to see more teachers, yes, playing around with the possibilities both online and off-, both digital and physical, both table and screen, of the huge strides people like Jim Gee and Kurt Squire have made in studying what video games tell us about learning. I would really like to see more developers understanding the implications in this area of the explosion of social games, which seek to obscure the connection between the table and the screen even as they trade on it (how else to characterize the constant updates about Farmville and Bejewelled, that use your friends as marketing materials?). Also, though, I would really like to play more practomimes that take me back and forth from physical to digital. Like Wii Fit. But with gods and monsters.

Pedagogical practomime

This semester, as I mentioned below, I'm going all in on practomimetic education.

In my myth course, I've divided the three hundred students into teams of 15 who are going to compete in a series of mythomachies on such questions as "What's the better example of modern myth, Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings?" for the title "Lords of Myth." I'm also awarding Honor Points for answering trivia questions that I've stuck into the intros of my video lectures, and for doing cool stuff like coming up with innovations that make their fellow students' lives easier.

My (Gaming) Homer course is now a full-on Alternate-Reality Practomime (what most people, if they know what to call it at all, would call an Alternate-Reality Game [ARG]--the kind of game that entered the public consciousness really only with David Fincher's flawed-but-wonderful film The Game). Little bits of information about that will be emerging in various places, including here, as the semester continues, but, although I (Roger Travis) am not supposed to know about this, I (shadowy leader of a clandestine, ancient guild of bards) am now in the process of recruiting the students to fulfill bardic missions in The Lord of the Rings Online.

And, the real subject of this post, my advanced Latin course on Horace and Ovid is a practomimetic narrative in which the students, acting as young Romans in 8 CE, must make the choice between amor romanus (Roman love--that is, getting erotic with Ovid in Augustus' Rome) and amor Romae (love of Rome--that is, getting serious with Horace and getting with Augustus' fascist program). In the first fabula of the course, the students, all cousins one with another, have been sent to Rome to stay with their wicked uncle, Gaius Recentius Malus, and look after an important lawsuit in which the Recentii are attempting to recover a farm that was confiscated by Octavian (you know, Augustus before he really got going) after the Civil Wars and given to a veteran.

Their mothers have made Gaius promise that he will not let them leave the house until they have read and understood the Roman Odes of Horace, those first six poems of Book 3 that pretty much tell a young Roman how to cleanse his Augustan way. The fabula is called Carmina Romani Gravis "Poems of a Serious Roman."

We'll be using Google Wave for a great many of the course activities, including the explicitly practomimetic aspect (there are several other ludic elements, like collection of forms for Latinity Points, which I frame as a way that Gaius is making their study fun for them). For interest's sake, here's the document about practomime in the course that I've posted on the course website:

Practomime:

What it is

Alright, I'll concede it just for the moment: if you wanted to call practomime "playing pretend" or "playing a role-playing game" I wouldn't argue. Think about it: how much do people learn playing pretend, whether that's playing a game, acting in a play, going through a religious ritual, or reading a historical novel? I would contend that it's more than they ever learn in school.

How it works

From a purely technical perspective, the entire course is a big practomime. (In fact, if you think about it, every course you've ever taken [with the exception, to be sure, of my previous courses] is a boring practomime in which you pretend to be a student who's getting to know the stuff he or she needs to know to pass the course.) You are learning to be something like a Roman who could function in some small range of ancient Roman culture.

From a practical perspective, your sessions of reading Latin poetry, however, which would be interludes in the life of the Roman you portray, will in the world of this course dominate his or her practomimetic life. The rest of his or her existence—the times in which he or she gets to "do stuff"—will be squeezed in between the reading. This fact of course means that we get to skip the boring parts of Roman existence (sleeping, walking, eating non-banquet food) and concentrate on the interesting ones.

In between defined units of poetry, we will be doing this practomime. Some of it will occur in class-session, but most of it will happen in Google Wave, once I get you familiar with the system. Once we're up and running, you will be required to take at least one turn in each break between class-sessions (as you'll see in a moment, a "turn" is just an action you take in ancient Rome). You will find that there are many interesting things to be found out from the characters you meet, beginning with your uncle Gaius Recentius Malus, but if you would rather spend your time doing rather than talking, the only limits are your imagination and our fairly scanty knowledge of the period. At the start of the course, you will be confined to the house, but once the first fabula is over, you'll be able to roam the streets of Rome. As you'll see from the syllabus, I've got a broad idea of where I'm going to try to funnel you, and at some points I may have to tie you up to get you where I need you to go, but those moments will be few and far between.

So: aliquid age. Do stuff. That's how it works: decide what you want to do; determine how well it goes; tell the rest of us what you're doing, and you've done it.

(What follows [that is, how action is governed in the practomime] is a version of Corvus Elrod's HoneyComb Engine.)

Any time you set out to narrate yourself doing something, you'll roll a ten-sided die, either with the dice-link on Wave or with a real die in the classroom (zero is zero for this purpose—9 equals critical success; more fun that way [oops, I said the f-word]). The result on that die determines how well you succeed in what you've undertaken to do.

Thus, you'll first tell us what you want to do, then roll a die, then narrate what happens. There are ways to modify the roll which we'll discuss as the course moves along, but I want you to grasp, first of all, the simplicity of the concept.

Here's an example. I'm Gaius Recentius Malus, your uncle. I'm at a banquet and I've just been told that I'm to be prosecuted for adultery. I decide that I'd like to take a sip of wine to buy myself a moment to think. I announce to the class: "I'm going to take a sip of wine" or, better, "Vinum bibam." I roll a die, and get a 1. I narrate, perhaps, "Conor a sip vini bibere, but end up spilling it super togam meam."

Some guidelines

The purpose of practomimetic coursework is always to achieve course objectives. For this course (CAMS 3102 Horace and Ovid) that means that in your practomime your object is to enhance and to demonstrate your growing mastery of the thematic meaning of the poetry we are reading, of the language in which that poetry was composed, and of the cultural background from which that poetry derived its meaning. There are no limitations on what you, in acting the life of an ancient Roman, can attempt to do in the virtual world we are creating together, but in order to demonstrate your work towards course objectives a few guidelines will be helpful.

• Try as hard as you can to use Latin. Broken Latin is absolutely acceptable (e.g. "Pono money meum in arca" [arca means "safe"] would be perfectly acceptable, if you should happen to forget that argentum means "money"), as is incorrect Latin (I would never e.g. tell you that you should have used a Future Less Vivid condition instead of the simple present one you used).
• Try hard, also, to use the Latin we're seeing in the poetry. Echoes of Horace and Ovid in our practomime are exactly what I'm hoping for.
• Try to find out things about the story you're in. The course is going to put you in situations conducive to discovering the information and developing the cultural skills that will satisfy course objectives. How you do that discovery and development is up to you.

So I'm thinking it's going to be an immersive semester!

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.

Operation KTHMA: Day 4

The dice—one six-sided die for each class-team, borrowed from my kids' copy of Yahtzee—went out yesterday. I'd been going back and forth on whether the downside of distraction was worth the upside of engagement, and finally decided that the upside is potentially enormous (I have indelible memories of how I cherished my D&D dice and added to them over time), and the downside probably minimal. At any rate, with about ten minutes left in the class-session, Team 4 rolled a six, giving them the initiative in a conversation with a man with a heavy accent who had been muttering about how the Ionian storyteller—this man Herodotus, who the man knew had come from Halicarnassus—was telling lies about the Persians. Team 4 decided to ask how the heavy-accent man knew, and the man told them that they should go see a sailor named Iophon in the Piraeus; he knew they wouldn't take his own word for it, since he was a Persian, but Iophon was an Ionian, and had known Herodotus growing up. There the class-session ended.

Earlier in the session, I'd rated three operatives at Stage 1 for posts they'd made in the forums in the interim that were more or less in-character. One of them had won the piece of gear pictured above, for a particularly belligerent post. Then I'd introduced the Ancient/Modern Interweave Skill-Practice Exercise, which is a collaborate weekly multimedia project that each team must complete and post on most of the Mondays of the course. They'll then present their work to the rest of the KTHMA team in our Monday session. The idea is to use their class-skill in the modern world, and connect multimedia bits of modern culture with the ancient text. It's my fond hope that I'll be able to get their permission to post some of these here on Living Epic.

Then we'd turned to the mission-text, which was the second chapter of Book 1 of Herodotus, in which the writer tells of what the Persians say was the origin of the conflict between Persia and Greece. Either I'm fooling myself or even the non-Greeked students are becoming comfortable with having a big chunk of text in a foreign language with a foreign alphabet on the screen in front of them. My strong feeling is that the game-frame is absolutely crucial here; take away the high-stakes grade-related nature of complex classwork and suddenly everything comes naturally. I wish I had some kind of data to back this assertion up, but I've felt for several years that the biggest problem in my teaching was that I haven't had a way to present complex critical analysis without scaring the clear majority of my students into the disengaged torpor of "This is too hard to understand—I hope he'll just tell us what we need to know for the test." My previous solution, which was to say 1) there's no test and 2) OK, here's a list of precisely the stuff for which I'm actually holding you responsible, has always been unsatisfactory. Again, it's unsupported by data (yet!), but I think the game may be the answer.

As soon as I developed in the operatives a certain skepticism about whether Herodotus could be on the level about what the Persian λόγιοι (wordy-guys, story-tellers) say, the TSTT started to glow, the room faded away, and there they were in Athens again. They got a little lost on the way to the Agora, and ended up at the Acropolis, where the guards told them to get lost, but provided directions to where the Ionian storyteller was holding forth. When they arrived, they found that the crowd was already too big to get close, but they were able to listen to the bystanders, including the heavily-accented man.

I'm a bit surprised by how naturally the course/game has fallen into a turn-based system, and how cycling through the whole class to take the next turn simultaneously removes the vast majority of the pressure of being called on cold and preserves the tremendous benefit of that practice. It's been several years since the last time I tried cold-calling on my students in the traditional way, and I've regretted that because there's absolutely nothing like it for maintaining engagement. To make this turn-based class-participation even stronger, the next piece of the game-development is I think to come up with a handy chart of the possible actions for a turn, for example speech, movement, call to the Demiurge, attack, skill-use.

Tomorrow we'll be meeting the ghost of Homer head-on for the first time. Since I don't believe there was any such person, there unfortunately won't be any combat with the undead.

Game-rules and story-elements

Here at last is the fifth in the PPP series. The skeleton of this post was written more than a year ago, but in writing it I realized that I was having a hard time expressing the ideas without jargon, a difficulty that I've learned to take as a warning sign that I haven't thought something through, and one which obviously stands in the way of sharing the idea with the broad audience I'm hoping it will build. With a few semesters of explaining this notion to students and friends behind me, I think I can push on down the road of the PPP.

When I left this series hanging, so many months ago, we'd come to the end of the unpacking process as far as the definition of the PPP itself was concerned. In this post I’m going to get into the first corollary, a corollary so important as really to make it an essential part of the definition. Here’s the whole definition, again, as usual:

A PPP is an intersubjective performance that takes place in a cultural zone demarcated for play (that is, as not having a direct effect on material circumstances, although that demarcation does not mean in actual reality that material circumstances are unaffected). Within that zone conventions may be and usually are determined by rules analogous to the rules for the setting up of conventions in the misunderstood-as-unzoned “real world.”

The part I’m going to talk about in this post is the first part of the last sentence, which is about conventions within the zone of play, and their relation to what we usually think of as rules. I want to suggest that what we think of as “rules” and what we think of as the key elements of story-telling—genre, setting, plot, characters—are actually two varieties (flavors, even) of the same thing. Then, I want to suggest that that thing, whether it appears in a homeric epic or in a first-person shooter, gets its meaning from the way the PPP's participants (author, audience, designer, player) shape its relationship to the “real world” in their imaginations.

I think “rules” is as good a term as any, since rules and play are closely associated in a variety of areas, and play is the heart of the PPP. So I’ll keep using that word. Retaining “rules” also means that one end of the comparison is relatively neatly anchored—everybody has played games, and has an insinctual feel for what a rule is, even if "rule" remains hard to define exactly.

Interactive storyteller Corvus Elrod defines a game-rule as "a precisely-defined relationship within the gamespace." ("Gamespace" is Corvus' term for what I would call a game's particular instance of the zone of play.) This definition will seem abstruse at first, I think, but its usefulness appears quickly when we apply it, because it covers game-phenomena as diverse as "At the start of the player's turn, he or she roles the dice" and "When the player pushes the A-button in this situation, the player-character jumps" and "When the player has killed Andrew Ryan, he or she must disarm the self-destruct sequence for the story to proceed" and "If the player chooses those dialogue options, he or she will be given the opportunity to kill Carth Onasi." Each of those relationships is precisely-defined within the gamespaces of Yahtzee (among many, many others), Super Mario Brothers (among many, many others), Bioshock, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

We have rules pretty much nailed down, then. The other end of the comparison, though, is still floating free—why am I saying that rules and the elements of a story are the same thing? The answer is simple, though it will take a while to make it fully persuasive: story-elements themselves are precisely-defined relationships within the zone of play. Let's take the most obvious of story-elements first—plot. Plot is what happens in the zone of play constituted by the story—that is, from one important perspective, plot is the precisely-defined relationship between each event and every other event in the story. In the Iliad, for example, the plot of the beginning of Book 1 runs "Chryses comes to ransom his daughter; Agamemnon sends him away; Chryses prays to Apollo; Apollo sends a plague; Achilles calls a council." These events make the story not by themselves, but in relation to one another.

Similarly, character is a set of precisely-defined relationships between parts of a story. This point is self-evident on an obvious level, because Achilles is for example the leader of the Myrmidons and the friend of Patroclus. More importantly, in my view at least, character is a precisely-defined relationship on a deeper level as well: Achilles is the Achilles of the Iliad in that he is the greatest of warriors—that is, he stands precisely-defined in a relationship of superiority both to the other Achaeans of the Iliad and to all the warriors the bard's audience knows. Setting goes the same way: the Achaeans' being encamped on the shore near Troy is expressible as the relationship of where the Achaeans are to where the Trojans are and to where the Achaeans came from. Invididual features like ships and tents are then placed by the PPP's participants (the bard in this case) in relation to that relationship.

Here we run into a question of enormous importance—one that in my opinion demonstrates how crucial the contribution of homeric epic can be to an understanding of how games work. If a seemingly static set of story-elements like the plot and characters of the Iliad as we have it can be expressed in terms of rules, is there then no difference between interactive art and static art? (And, of course, if so, isn't that definition of "rule" clearly wrong?)

The answer is Yes, and No. (And No to the parenthetical question.) The nature of homeric epic is a wonderful guide here, because it demonstrates so clearly the transformation of interactive to static and back. Remember that what we have is a fossil of a once-living tradition of bardic recomposition. The bard begins with a set of rules in the form of a skeleton of plot, characters, setting: because of the bardic tradition's development, he sings within a set of precisely-defined relationships. Achilles for example isn't allowed actually to leave Troy. Achilles is the leader of the Myrmidons. The Achaeans are encamped on the shore near Troy. The bard may order events differently, change details of characters and details of setting, but he may not change the basic course of the story, just as the player of a game like Halo may sometimes do things in a different order, may play the Master Chief as reckless or cowardly, may experience different elements of the landscape the designers have made, but must always do the same things—and in the end, were someone to make a video, or write an account, that player will have produced a static version of the game/story.

The counter-intuitive truth is that that interaction between the participants of a PPP and the rules and story-elements of that PPP produces what looks like a static narrative, but that that static narrative is not actually a different sort of thing, but is rather yet another set of rules for the production of yet another version of the PPP. What looks like a static narrative, when turned into an intersubjective performance by, say, a reader, becomes a new—crucially, constrained in different ways—story or game.

Where does it get us to express the analogy between game-rules and story-elements? It allows us to approach, yes, the relationship between things like interactivity, immersion, and narrative in what I think is a more meaningful way. Among other things, it gets us completely beyond the notion that there's any fundamental split between gameplay and story. To think about rules and things like plot and character this way also helps us talk about the way that events in the zone of play relate to events in the "real world," and what that relation can mean to participants in PPP's.

In the next post, which will hopefully come without such a long hiatus, I'll start exploring the relationship between game-rules/story-elements and stuff in the "real-world." An understanding of games and stories as both being examples of PPP's can get us to some interesting places, I believe, in the intersection of ludonarrative art with the lives we live outside the zone of play.

Dangerous Immersion

This post takes us from homeric epic to a key moment of its reception in classical Athens, Plato. In it, I begin mini-series about Plato’s cave that’s pretty much a more fun version of a chapter I’m writing for an IGDA volume. Here’s what you need to know starting out:

1) Plato loved Homer—the sheer number of quotations from Homer, made in passing by Socrates and others, almost always provided to give unquestionable support to a commonly understood point, proves that beyond the shadow of a doubt.

2) Plato hated Homer—the sheer number of times Socrates tells us, especially in Republic, that Homer (whom he thought of as a single person, though at this blog we know better) was pretending to be something he was not, proves that beyond a shadow of a doubt.

3) Plato kicks Homer out of the ideal city in Republic on the grounds that his poetry does what Plato calls mimesis. Most people translate mimesis “imitation,” but I would prefer to translate it “identificative performance.” If you want to jaw about that, let’s do it in the comments. In any case, one of the things I’ve been trying to do in the Main Quest is show that that kind of identificative performance is also what we usually call “immersion.”

Plato’s idea, put forward in Republic, is that if you pretend to be somebody, or watch others pretend to be somebodies, you will become like them. For Plato, this power of mimesis presented dangers that, when he wrote Republic, seem to outweigh any possible positive impact. Looking at Plato and video games together, then, can be a way of looking at an essential question in video game criticism: How can, and how should, immersion fit into the rest of culture?

Even a brief look at Plato shows us that that question is both very old and very contentious from its beginning. Looking a little closer will do two things, I think—add complexity to our discussion of what video games are up to in our own culture, and give us some traction over that complexity.

Socrates: I said, “ . . . if they [that is, the prisoners of the cave] were in the habit of conferring honours among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that he would care for such honours and glories, or envy the possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer, “Better to be the poor servant of a poor master, and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after their manner?”

“Yes,” [Glaucon] said, “I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner.”

“Imagine once more,” I said, “such an one coming suddenly out of the sun to be replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have his eyes full of darkness?”

“To be sure,” he said.

“And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable) would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.”

It’s important to remind ourselves (and it will be even more important down the road) that Republic is Socrates’ first person narration of a very long day he spent at a friend’s house. The great dialogue—perhaps the greatest philosophical dialogue ever composed—is thus itself an identificative performance, a mimesis. More, it is a mimesis of a dialogue, which according to Plato’s own scale of harmfulness in Book 10 of Republic should be about as bad as representation can get.

The familiar myth of the cave, that is, is a mimesis in a mimesis in a mimesis. It finishes with the above passage, in which I contend Plato becomes the first video game designer. My point, as this mini-series develops, is going to be that the game of the cave—the competition for honors in commenting on the shadow-puppet play—gives us a framework for evaluating video games’ cultural potential and for shaping their cultural effects.

Even the choices, for example, of a game like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic(KOTOR) (often praised, of course, like other Bioware titles, for its “openness” in allowing the player to choose different ethical paths) appear from the perspective of the cave-game not to matter at all, since, like the honor-contests of the cave, the choices of the game are bounded by the game. We can argue with Plato on this score—as Aristotle argued with him in Poetics—but it’s hard to deny that whichever ending you finish KOTOR with, you’ve come to power and brought order to the galaxy. Light or Dark, you have reinforced a key part of a dominant ethic. While the cave-game doesn’t exhaust, by any means, the expressive power of KOTOR, it gives us a compelling index to its ethical dimension.

On the other hand, the relationship of the cave-game to the main point of the myth of the cave—philosophic education—tells us that there is in fact a way in which game ethics might be made to matter in culture: by making them disruptive. The ascended man is put to death, as Socrates was put to death, but look at the game Socrates is playing now: a game called Republic.

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?)

The bard's role, divided

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.



(I’m picking up here directly from the previous post in this series, so if you didn’t catch that one, you might want to skim it before continuing.)

Odysseus, who decides how the story is going to unfold. and Demodocus, who implements that decision, together are analogous to the gamer. Together they represent, in fact, a kind of impossible, ideal perfection of the relationship between bard and audience, wherein the audience knows exactly what they want, and the bard is capable of giving them precisely that. Impossibly until now, that is, for in narrative video games players get to do the fun parts of the bard’s job and get to be the bard’s audience, recipients of the product of the immense techincal skill required to make a game, analogous to the technical skill it took to sing the Odyssey.

There are, however, two crucial remainders from this quotient. First, game-developers are stuck with the difficult, if more rewarding (both spiritually and financially), part of the bard’s job—the use of masterly technical skill to create a mythic backdrop with which to interact to create the story. Second, other people, not playing the game (at that moment, at least), like the listening Phaeacian audience either watch the gamer play the game or hear about his amazing feats later.

They may seem trivial at first, but those two remainders actually are for me the salvation of gaming from the appearance it presents of a basic anti-sociality. Indeed, I think that the communal relationship between developers, gamers, and other gamers (as well as non-gamers like parents and spouses) will in the end bring the mainstream around much more than games like Rock Band and Wii Sports ever could. As much as those great social games of today, and others like them, get played at parties, giving gamers and game companies the opportunity to point to an obviously social practice, I think that only a fuller understanding of what individual gamers are doing in community when they play Shadow of the Colossus or Fallout (or Bioshock or Halo) will demonstrate how social gaming actually is.

The relationship with the game-makers, and the relationship with the other people who aren’t playing on a given occasion but with whom the gamer shares the experience are founded, I’ll show as this mini-series continues, in the experience of immersion. Those relationships, I believe, make gaming a true successor to the ancient epic tradition that played an indispensable part in making our civilization great.

The game-makers, like the bards, have immense technical skill. They know the nuts and bolts of storytelling in their medium backwards and forwards. It doesn’t make the slightest difference that while the ancient bards knew dactylic hexameter, modern developers know anti-aliasing, or C#. That means of course that I’ve been fudging my comparison to this point, leaving the programmers out of it. But I don’t have to fudge anymore: the developer gets his or her glory as another kind of successor to the bard.

The people who watch a gamer game, or read his or her posts on the internet, are exactly like the admiring audience of the bard—the community that bard and other bards form as they tell wonderful, immersive tales. I think if we want to make the comparison come out as well as it can, we should imagine one bard singing to an audience of fellow-bards, because most of the time the gamer is performing for an audience of fellow-gamers. There is much to talk about on this topic, but for now let me point to the communities like Bungie.net where devotees of living epic gather to show their devotion. It’s worth saying, I think, that an individual gamer actually becomes part of his own audience, and the audience of other gamers, on a regular basis—that is, as soon as he stops playing himself and starts thinking about playing.

Next time: communal immersion, ancient and modern.

May we compare video games to non-interactive media? In response to comments on my post “On the profundity of Halo and Bioshock” (2)

You can find the comments appended here. It seems like a good idea to attempt to summarize individually and then respond individually to what I see as the central points made by those who have my gratitude for taking the time to read my own arguments with attention, however harshly they chose to respond. I think I have good reason to hope that my interlocutors will correct with some rigor any misrepresentation on my part. The nature of the blog form (which I happen to think is in no way inferior to the scholarly-article form or even the scholarly-monograph form, forms that tend towards the insufferably self-indulgent) leads me to divide my response across a few different posts, of which this is the second (the first may be found here). I invite my interlocutors to engage me on each heading separately, in the interest of clarity of discussion.



The next heading represents a charge to which I have to plead “No contest”:

3. The charge of comparing video games to non-interactive media

I’m not pleading “Guilty,” because ancient epic, I am arguing in this blog, was in fact interactive. But it would be disingenuous, and would beg the question (in the true sense of assuming that which must be proven), to leave it at that, because the interactivity I’m talking about in the case of ancient epic isn’t necessarily immediately apparent to the modern gamer (or non-gamer).

I’ve got a bunch more to say on this topic as “Living Epic—the Main Quest” (to be found here) continues, but I think a focussed answer in this context will be quite helpful. Moreover, I think it will lead nicely into the next heading, Choice vs. Interactivity (to anticipate, I’m going to be arguing that choice in narrative games is actually a type of interactivity, and that the apparent conflict isn’t actually there).

So the meat of my response is going to be that although I’m not in fact guilty of the charge, the way in which I’m not guilty is complicated enough that it makes sense not to fight it, but rather to stand partly on the very firm cultural ground that cross-media comparisons cannot be called bad or wrong simply because they cross the lines between media. In classics we make comparisons of epic and tragedy to vase-painting all the time. It’s fun. You ought to try it. If you do try it, and don’t like it; or even if you leave it there on your intellectual plate like so many brussels sprouts, that’s fine with me, though I’d suggest that simple courtesy would urge that you not spit on the brussels sprouts.

Much more important, though, is the specific comparison I’m making, and I suspect that it’s actually the content of the comparison that caused several commenters to reject it with a blanket repudiation of cross-media comparison. What I think commenters on this topic are implying is that they don’t believe me when I say that any other medium besides games is or was in fact interactive.

Adequate definitions of “interactivity” are almost as hard to come at as those of “profundity,” but let me propose one: “permitting a person to participate in, through a measure of control over, the relevant experience.” I have a feeling this is going to be the thing we argue over the most. (If you’re going to argue with me about this topic, I’d love to hear your definition of interactivity—it would be great to have a few to put up against each other.)

If that’s an adequate definition of “interactivity,” the question becomes “Was ancient epic interactive?” Oral formulaic theory (see above all the work of Albert Lord) tells us that the bards made up the tales they were singing as they went along. If that’s not interactive, I don’t know what is—not only for the bard, but also for his audience, who have the chance to influence the way the bard tells the story. I know, though, that you may very well want to argue precisely that—that I don’t know what interactive is.

If you grant me that interactivity, though, the next question is whether that interactivity is susceptible of a comparative analysis that helps us understand epic or games or ourselves or all those things better? I submit that it is, for several reasons:

• 1) the content of narrative games and ancient epic is also similar, suggesting things we can say about the basic functioning of interactive stories across cultures;



• 2) very few people think epic was bad, but a lot of people think video games are bad;



• 3) very few people think ancient epic was bad because it was interactive, but a lot of people think video games are bad because they’re interactive;



• 4) on the other hand, certain Athenians (notably Plato) did think epic was bad, in large part because it was interactive, and a look at their criticisms, and other ancients’ (like Aristotle’s) criticism of their criticism is a way into a fun new conversation about gaming;



• 5) epic creates artistic effects that some of us would like video games to attempt;



• 6) it’s just damn cool to think about how new stuff isn’t really new, and it causes us to appreciate and understand our own culture much more.

See you next time, for the one about choice and interactivity (here)! Thanks for reading.