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 mysterious dual: the smoking gun of epic interactivity

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.



When we last left Achilles, he was sitting in his tent refusing to fight, because Agamemnon took his girlfriend away. Meanwhile, Achaean warriors (that’s Achilles’ team; the word “Greek” isn’t really an accurate way to describe them) have been dying in large numbers. That’s the situation when Book 9 starts.

In Book 9 as we have it, bad old Agamemnon sends to the tent of Achilles three “ambassadors” in what’s been called forever after the “Embassy to Achilles”: Ajax (strongest of the Achaeans), Odysseus (smartest of the Acheans), and Phoenix (old friend of Achilles). When they get to Achilles’ tent, each of those ambassadors gives a speech about why Achilles should accept Agamemnon’s offer and come back to the fighting. It makes sense, and it builds to a very nice crescendo in the speech of Phoenix, after which, from an ethical point of view, the audience is in a lot of suspense about what Achilles should do, despite being in no suspense at all over what he will do.

But there’s this one facet of the episode (which, just to remind you of what I said a couple weeks ago, probably would have made a perfect tale to sing in an evening’s epic entertainment 2800 years ago) that doesn’t really make much sense at all: there are these famous dual forms, which seem, in Iliad 9, to refer to two ambassadors rather than the three we actually have.

What the heck is a dual form? Well, some languages have a special ability that English has almost entirely lost, to talk about two, and only two, things at a time. (English does have a vestige of it in our usage of “both,” which can refer only to two things at a time.) The dual is mostly useful for talking about eyes and hands and such, but occasionally it gets a workout in other circumstances, and Book 9 is one of those. Several times, despite our having three ambassadors, the version of Book 9 that we have, in the original Greek at least, speaks, for example, of how “the ambassadors both went along the shore.”

Those forms suggest very strongly that going so far as to add an ambassador and his speech was within the scope of possible improvisatory change by the bards of the Iliad. To spell out what seems very likely to have happened these thousands of years ago: one bard came up with a story about how Agamemnon sent Ajax and Phoenix, and used the dual number, because he was singing a tale about two ambassadors. Then, another bard, having heard the story as sung by the first bard, or perhaps having been a student of the first bard, decided to sing a different version of the same story. Whether as a tribute to the first bard, or because certain phrases had become basically unchangeable, or perhaps simply because it was allowable, and didn’t matter very much, this second bard retained the dual forms despite his innovation of the third ambassador, Odysseus. (The reasons for thinking that Odysseus is the addition rather than Phoenix or Ajax are complicated and not relevant here in the blog right now, though I think they will be soon; feel free to ask in comments, though!)

The bard of Book 9 of the Iliad, as we have it, that is, improvised very significantly in the story. I want to suggest now that that kind of improvisation has a very strong correlation to a kind of improvisation that may at first seem completely different: the improvisation engaged in by the player of an adventure video game.

If you’re a gamer, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. If you’re not a gamer, though, it’s not easy to make clear precisely what I mean on the page, because I’m talking about something books, and movies, just don’t do, but I’ll give it my best shot. Imagine you’re playing Halo (the one about the space marines fighting the religious fanatic aliens). Another of those cutscenes (little movies) has just ended, and the Captain has given you his pistol and told you to find your way to an escape pod and get off the ship. As the movie-type stuff ends, you head out the door, and immediately face a group of aliens who want to kill you. It would be fair to say that the game really begins here, for several reasons, the most important perhaps being that this game is a “shooter,” and this is the first time you actually get to fire a weapon.

Now from the very first moment, you have a great degree of control over what you do (that is, what your character does) in the game. You can choose whether to shoot, and which enemies to shoot. You could play the next minute of the game over an infinite number of times, and no two enactments would be exactly the same.

This facet of adventure video games, the decisive role of player improvisation, arises in their famous, controversial “interactivity.”

My own definition of “interactivity” is “permitting a person to participate in, through a measure of control over, the relevant experience.” (A more basic definition is “accepting user input”; that basic one is completely compatible with mine, I think, but not robust enough for the purposes of the kind of analysis I want to do here.)

If we’re to understand the importance of interactivity, I think we really have to see that the reason for interactivity’s seizing the cultural imagination is not that cultural activities weren’t interactive before—take sports, for one very graphic example, where user input is most certainly accepted—but that certain cultural practices that were previously not noticeably interactive (books, movies, TV) suddenly developed a much greater interactive capacity. Video gaming, to repeat, is the most obvious result, because entertainment, simply put, catches the eye and the imagination more readily than more purely informational practices like browsing a library.

But the trouble with declaring that interactivity is a new thing when it comes to entertainment and information is that it’s not true. The bards of the Iliad were exercising the same control over their mythic material when they came up with the remarkable statement of self-sufficiency that Achilles makes in Book 9 of the Iliad. The story of the “Embassy to Achilles” was itself an interactive improvisation and an interactive recomposition upon the existing theme of the “Wrath of Achilles.” The story of the “Wrath of Achilles” was a recomposition of the story of “The War at Troy.” In the other direction, the moving words of Achilles were almost certainly an improvisation upon the existing theme of “The Embassy to Achilles.”

It’s probably worth noting, given recent discussions on this blog (see here and here), that I don’t think it makes sense even to say that traditional books and films aren’t interactive. The decisive effect brought about by the audience of any work upon that work’s ultimate meaning should make us speak rather of different kinds and degrees of interaction than of interactive and non-interactive media. (Marie Laure-Ryan’s book Narrative as Virtual Reality [here] is at its best on this topic.)

Next time: if the bard is the gamer, what’s the bard’s audience?

Are choice and interactivity enemies? (In response to comments on my post “On the profundity of Halo and Bioshock” (3))

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 third (the first may be found here, the second here). I invite my interlocutors to engage me on each heading separately, in the interest of clarity of discussion.



Now we come to a set of comments that I think have more to do with the claims I was trying to make in the original post:

4. The matter of choice vs. interactivity.

The reason I think these comments start to get to the heart of the matter of the kind of profundity I was talking about is that I think that profundity arises specifically in relation to interactivity and player choice. I argued that the removal (or the simple absence) of player choice, when it stands in a meaningful relationship to the action and themes of the story being told, is capable of producing an artistically gratifying depth of meaning. The two examples I gave were the handling of the necessity of killing Andrew Ryan in Bioshock and the necessity of getting your warthog (jeep) to end of the level “The Maw” in Halo.

I may at some point decide to get into the literary, philosopical, anthropological, sociological, and psychological problem of “artistically gratifying depth of meaning” in this blog, but this isn’t the moment to do that. For now, it’s a way to unpack (slightly) the word “profundity,” which I said a couple posts ago probably needs to be put down to taste. To repeat a bit, two things I’m definitely not saying are 1) that Halo and Bioshock are more profund than any other work, whether a game or an epic or something else; or 2) that the specific effect of profundity I’m identifying is the only, or even the best, way for games (or anything else) to bring about an artistically gratifying depth of meaning.

Two commenters to the original post, Grey and J1M, had a very interesting debate about what the most important affordance of games for narrative actually is. (Sorry about the word “affordance,” but once you start using it you’ll find that you’ve needed it in your vocabulary your whole life.) J1M maintained that it’s player choice, giving the examples of Fallout and Deus Ex, where player choices can affect the course of the story to a very great degree. Grey maintained that it’s interactivity, giving the example of Shadow of the Colossus, where the player’s relationship with the horse Agro is created by the player’s actual physical interaction with the game in controlling Agro. J1M countered that interactivity has in the end really no more potential than the infamous “fart button” in Fable. Grey countered that real player choice denies the game-developer the authorial control that alone can create profundity.

(That last bit from Grey will lead me on in the next post to talk about the identity of the artist, so I’m going to bracket that aspect of the question for the moment.)

Here’s my take, partly from ancient epic and partly from game-play. If interactivity can in fact be defined the way I defined it in the last post, as “permitting a person to participate in, through a measure of control over, the relevant experience,” choice is simply that kind of interactivity that has a decisive effect on the course of the story. That is, at one end of the spectrum you have the fart button; at the other end you have the multiple endings of Fallout (and, to a lesser degree [perhaps much lesser]) Mass Effect and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

The question of meaning arises over the functioning of such interactivity in relation to the rest of the story. The fart button’s only meaning (as far as I can tell) is that the hero of Fable is real enough to be flatulent. I wouldn’t call that profound, but YMMV. The player’s relationship to Agro in Shadow of the Colossus is IMHO much more meaningful. The meaning of the choices in Fallout is perhaps no greater, but certainly very different. All those meanings arise out of interactivity.

All those effects of profundity seem to me to have strong and interesting analogues in the practice of ancient epic. The fart button is like the kind of running joke one finds in Homer (for instance the extreme old-age of Nestor), which the bard could either bring in or leave out; the relationship to Agro is like the bard’s relationship to Patroclus, Achilles’ best friend (who like only two other characters, and for reasons that we still can’t agree upon, is addressed in the second person from time to time); the real, story-making choices are like such game-changing Homeric elements as the Shield of Achilles, which must originally have been the work of one bard with a yen to shake things up.

My only point in relation to the preceding, with respect to Halo and Bioshock, is that the meaning I identified in them can be added to the list. All these profundity effects have a place, I think, in games; their use in individual games will only get more refined (even the fart button) as the medium develops.

Back next time with “Who’s the real artist? Is there a real artist? Does it really matter?” Thanks for reading.

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.

The profundity of Halo and Bioshock (and the Iliad)

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.



This moment, right after I’ve just put the work of Ken Levine and the work of the Homeric tradition alongside each other (in the previous post in the series), actually makes an ideal place to throw out an answer to a question that’s been bubbling under the surface of this blog from the very beginning, and is now ripe for a little more attention. Am I saying, a critic of video games might ask, that Halo and Bioshock are capable of the depth of artistic-philosophical expression reached by the Iliad in the Choice of Achilles? After all, when the Homeric bard has Achilles say that maybe the undying glory isn’t really worth it if you lose your life, he’s doing an artistic thing that we’re not used to thinking video games can do.

Here’s the answer: Yes, I am saying that. I’m also saying, though, that Halo and Bioshock and the other wonderful, thought-provoking games we’ve seen lately haven’t yet done that. They’ve come close, as I talked about in that previous post about the non-Choice of Achilles and the non-Choice of Killing Andrew Ryan, but, at least in my view, no artistic-philosophical cigar yet. (Tim Rogers’ eloquent way of putting it, that the artistry of Bioshock is the “very least we should expect from now on,” seems to me to be a slightly different way to say the same thing.)

The Iliad’s artistic-philosophical cigar, to refer back to our main point of discussion, has been awarded by generations of readers, for that moment when Achilles questions everything. That moment, with all its profundity, came into existence originally as an improvisation on—an interaction with—the pre-existing traditional story. That’s where we’re headed next, because in the moment before the player of Bioshock kills Andrew Ryan, he or she has an infinite number of tiny variations available within th game, despite the truth that until he or she goes ahead and kills Andrew Ryan, the game as we think of it—the story of the game—won’t proceed.

The profundity of that moment, or of corresponding moments in Halo when you absolutely must do something or the game won’t proceed, comes from the interaction of the necessity of doing that thing with the meaning of the thing you must do. The most obvious example in Halo is I think the end of the game, when the player must drive a jeep through a hostile landscape in a short enough time that the Master Chief can make it off Halo (the ring in space) before it explodes.

Even Ken Levine, the developer of Bioshock, hasn’t found a way to get to the depth of the way that interaction works in the ninth book of the Iliad, where the bard finds something for Achilles to say in relation to his necessity that’s so achingly sad as to make us better people for having read it. But we’re getting there.

The fact that we’re getting there along this particular road of exploring the power of interactivity means that we should spend some time looking at how it worked in ancient epic. The first thing we should talk about is probably the extent of the interactivity that was possible, to see what resemblance that interactivity bears to the interactivity of video games. The exact degree of interactive change that would have been allowable in the Homeric tradition is a subject of hot debate among the professionals who study this stuff (and probably always will be), but Book 9 of the Iliad actually presents us with a really interesting bit of evidence, which is so fascinating that I’m going to risk boring you, and give you the Ancient Greek tools you need in order really to understand it.

Next time: more than you ever wanted to know about the dual number.

(Note: I'm away next week, so I'm afraid you'll just have to wait to learn all about the dual.)

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.