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.

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.

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.

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

This is a post in a series expressing the essence of my argument about how video games are actually ancient, how they reawaken the anicent oral epic tradition represented above all by the epics of the Homeric tradition, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The earlier posts can be found through the “Living Epic—the Main Quest” link on the right. Note that this blog is aimed at an audience that includes non-gamers; I apologize for boring the gamers in my audience by going over such things as the basics of game genres, but I hope they might want to see that as an opportunity to share my posts with non-gaming parents, teachers, and spouses.



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

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

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

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

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