The Bioware style (sketch 1)

I’m tuning up to write a chapter for a forthcoming volume on digital RPG’s, to be entitled Dungeons, Dragons, and Digital Denizens: Digital Role-playing Games and to be published by Continuum Books. Whether or not my contribution is finally accepted for the book, I think it should be a worthy--even ground-breaking--volume, given its editors’ emphasis on theoretical approaches to the subject in their call for chapter-proposals.

What you’ll see here, if you decide to read this post, and whatever others I manage to produce, is a series of probes in the direction of a methodology of game-criticism based on a fuller appreciation of games’ analogy to oral formulaic epic, and to homeric epic in particular, than I think game-critics have yet deployed. Here’s the abstract I submitted, for starters; I need to state clearly that the final version of the chapter--the one I’m working towards with these sketches--hasn’t been accepted for publication yet, though based on the abstract the book’s editors requested a final version.

Bioware’s epic style: oral formulaic theory and the recompositional process in three Bioware RPGs

Several writers, beginning with Janet Murray in Hamlet on the Holodeck, have observed the analogy between certain forms of digital game--most notably the RPG--and the oral improvisatory process that gave the world the Iliad, the Odyssey, and countless other works of the Western literary tradition. Briefly, the player of an RPG engages in practices that are highly and interestingly analogous to the practices of the homeric bards, as studied through the comparative materials collected from South Slavic bards and analyzed originally by Milman Parry and Albert Lord. The RPG-player uses the elements given him or her by the game, just as the bards utilized the tradition in which they had been trained; the RPG-player recombines and innovates upon these elements to produce a performance that is irreducibly unique in the occasion as the bard did the same to produce his epic performance. Indeed, as the homeric bard’s performances were later codified eventually to become the fossils we know as the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the singers of tales of other traditions’ into works like Beowulf and The Song of Roland, RPG-players’ performances are these days sometimes codified in video form and shared around games’ communities.

This chapter seeks to contribute to our understanding of the operation and cultural significance of the digital RPG by analyzing key moments in three RPGs by Bioware, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and DragonAge: Origins as instances of the same thematic recompositional process delineated by Lord and deployed as a methodology of “composition by theme” by scholars like Laura Slatkin. I demonstrate that a developed “Bioware epic style” may be identified in the way Bioware RPGs use a complex imbrication of dialogue trees, highly modular cutscenes, and party selection choices to allow players the opportunity to compose by theme themselves, creating performances that necessarily stand in relationship to other performances of the same game both by themselves and by others, just as thematic composition in the homeric epics--and in the Odyssey in particular--derives its most important effects from the interactions--indeed the interactivity--of the current performance with the possibility of other, different performances.

I demonstrate that in these three Bioware RPGs players’ choices of character origin, of dialogue, and of party selection, as well as of conduct towards party members, we see the mechanics of the Bioware RPG develop in each game as a way of shaping interactivity with the cultural materials given in the game. I also consider as contrast two other studio RPG styles, the Bethesda style and the Square Enix style, to illuminate the particular operation of the Bioware style. The chapter’s greatest contribution is thus likely to be in the comparisons and contrasts of three different games with one another and with other styles of RPG as outgrowths of a new practice of the oral epic tradition.

So my first notion of what my argument in the chapter will be is very much along the lines of a wonderful--though, I think interestingly flawed--paper by the brilliant classical scholar Laura Slatkin, called “Composition by theme and the metis of the Odyssey” (partly available here on Google books). I’ve taught Slatkin’s essay many times now in various courses on homeric epic, and it never fails to generate productive discussion about the exact extent to which we can say that an oral epic is about something or means something.

Strangely (note my irony), it’s a discussion that’s very highly analogous to discussions I have almost every day on Twitter, Facebook, and Buzz about the possibilities for meaning or “aboutness” in narrative video games. I’ve long ago dispensed, for my own purposes, with the notion that we can talk about games having “authors” in any meaningful sense. But the question of what effect that absence of authorship has on what I prefer to call “meaning-effect” is one with which even homeric scholarship, whose modern incarnation is of course older than video games themselves, and whose roots go back much, much further, continues to have great difficulty in dealing. Game scholarship has made advances in this direction--Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck holds its value very well in this regard--but there is much more to be done, and I’m hoping that my Bioware chapter will help do it.

At any rate, I think formulating this argument will take my own project in a direction it should definitely now go--the nuts-and-bolts critical discussion of what the fundamental comparison on which this blog is founded can actually tell us both about homeric epic and about games, and in particular about story-based video games. Slatkin’s argument is more or less that whoever put the Odyssey together did so 1) with a full understanding of the implications of the multiformity of the oral formulaic themes out of which he was making the thing we now know as the Odyssey, and 2) overtly to place himself (or, if you’d rather, the Odyssey’s narrator) in sympathy, and in friendly rivalry, with his hero Odysseus, in the aspect of metis (cunning). To make a corresponding argument about a game or a set of games would involve actually considering what the narrative materials of RPG’s are, and how they fit together--something that the critic of a novel or a film doesn’t do, something unique to oral epic and games.

My plan is to argue that in three crucial moments of the Bioware RPG’s I mention in the abstract, the player’s performances achieve their meaning-effects in a way describable in the same terms Slatkin uses of the composer of the Odyssey, a way particular to the Bioware style. I want to say that even on the first playthrough--and with increasing complexity as firsthand playthroughs and secondhand knowledge of others’ playthroughs accumulate--the player of a Bioware RPG must make meaning out of his or her performance not only through the performative choices s/he does make but also through those s/he doesn’t, not in the general sense true of all RPG’s but in the specific sense of a confrontation with the games’ potential performances, forced upon the player by the way these specific games deploy their thematic material.

I haven’t decided on the three key moments yet--and of I’ll course support my conclusions about them with many references to other moments in the games--but one of them is likely to be the moment in KOTOR at which the player chooses the way his or her performance will end. (I’m going to put it that way in this sketch because I want to keep it spoiler-free).

Just to end this first sketch with something concrete, I plan to argue that KOTOR configures the player’s performance in such a way that the choice between Light and Dark is a confrontation with the meaningful implications of the player’s performance to that point in the game, and so also with the potential meanings of the performative choices with which the game now confronts the player in the form of specific dialogue-options. As the player’s performance continues from that point, his or her composition by theme--that is, the theme s/he chose to elaborate at that crucial moment--works out its meaning-effects in great part through that performance’s relation to the player’s confrontation with his or her previous choices, above all through the specific valence of the Light/Dark scale that lies at the backbone of the game’s ludics.

Structuring, resolving, and elaborating this kind of choice is exactly what Slatkin’s Odyssey-composer does, with relation to the thematic materials of the Odyssean tradition. The performative choices he made, which echoed centuries of performative choices made by other bards, had the same relation to choices he’d made earlier in the recompositional occasion of his version of the epic: he was forced into the same kind of confrontation. The difference--and the reason I think we can talk about a “Bioware style” as opposed to an “Odyssey style” or a “Bethesda style”--is that the Odyssey-composer’s confrontation was in the register of metis, and involved things like similes, whereas the KOTOR-players’ confrontation is in the register of Light/Dark, and involves things like romantic cutscenes.

If I’m not mistaken about where I’ll go next (though admittedly lately I seem to have less than 50% accuracy on that score), I’ll be getitng more specfic, and more spoiler-y, about that moment in KOTOR. I’m excited about this chapter, and I’d love to discuss it with anyone who’s interested as it develops, in the interest of ensuring that it makes a real contribution to its fields.

I’m going to use the occasion of this post on which I’m eagerly seeking comments to experiment with turning comments off on the blog and requesting that if you're interested in commenting you do so on Google Buzz. If you haven’t experienced how interesting, prolonged, and downright valuable Buzz discussion can be, I recommend giving it a try! You’re most welcome to follow me on Buzz, here; you’ll find this post there, too, with any luck, and I hope to discuss it with you there!

Halo: Reach as practomime

The scarcity of ammunition dominates the campaign of Halo: Reach, at least for a non-elite player. This domination is entirely ludic: as the player depresses the triggers of his or her controller, the amount of available ammo goes down very quickly in relation to the toughness of the enemies around Noble 6, the player-character.

Noble 6 is always, always, running out of ammo. No powerful weapon, like a rocket-launcher or en energy sword, ever lasts for long; semi-powerful weapons like the Designated Marksman Rifle (DMR) and even the Magnum are in constant danger of becoming useless; even the lowly Assault Rifle often has to be exchanged for a Needler or the even lowlier Plasma Pistol. Not infrequently, the current checkpoint has to be abandoned simply because there's no more ammo on the map—not something that's ever happened to me in a game before. Indeed, and more importantly, I don't think I've ever experienced a ludic situation more in tune with the themes of its game: this is desperation conveyed subtly and pervasively, through every facet of the practomime. (It is very much worth noting that the Plasma Pistol, in the hands of an expert, is not lowly at all; such an expert will not experience this game-dynamic as I describe it here, though perhaps the ludic design of the AI and of the firefight scenarios may work for him or her as I describe them in this post.)

The nature of game-design dictates that wide variation in the hegemony of ammo-scarcity is possible in individual performances by individual players. Much of what I write here is in fact simply inapplicable to very good players of Halo, especially as regards the availability of adequate weapons and ammo. A superb player, even playing the game on Legendary difficulty, for example, will possibly never run out of ammo. A very large range of performances of the practomime of the campaign, though, by players of average ability, will I believe be fundamentally and thematically shaped by the scarcity of ammunition.

The constant running out of ammo goes hand-in-hand with two other ludic features of the game: the toughness and evasive abilities of the AI enemies and the frequent use of the firefight scenario with its waves of enemies. I want to suggest that these features together create a practomimetic meaning effect between ludics and narrative, by forcing players to perform the epic deeds I wrote about in my last post not only as power-fantasies (of which, of course, every form of epic, from Gilgamesh on, is full) but as complex enactments both of power and of its frustration.

As I wrote in my last post, the narrative shape of Reach traces the same kind of outline that's traced by many of the fossils left behind by oral formulaic traditions—including the homeric one. By itself, though, that outline does not make Reach—or any game—"epic" in a sense that's helpful from an analytic perspective. Only the living performance of the game by the player can do that—and that living performance is governed by mechanics like scarcity of ammo.

By that definition, to be sure, it might seem that no epic set down in textual form qualifies, since textual epic seems not to allow for live, improvisatory performance. But in fact the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid are like video captures of superb performances of a game like Reach. In being records of actual performances according to the rules of the epic tradition—even if those performances were never delivered orally, since written composition also constitutes performance—those texts present enactments of their respective practomimes.

Those epic texts have lost the living element of the tradition whose performance they record. Nevetheless, the players of the traditions (the anonymous bards who composed the final forms of the homeric epics; Virgil, consummate player of the classical epic) rendered them living in the performances there recorded. So too does, for example, any novelist or film cast-and-crew render their practomime living when they write and shoot it, though (and this is crucial) in novels and films the final audience has access only to the fossil. That audience may then bring novels and films alive through re-performance (cf. the kids who did a shot-for-shot re-make of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies [with the undead presenting a piquant irony, by the way]), but the nature of those forms locates audience performance after authorial performance and not inside and in place of it it, as in epic and games.

Reach, on the other hand, without its player, is an epic waiting to happen, a set of ludics waiting to be given enactment. More than any other comparison I could make, I think this one points out the value of thinking about games like Reach in the light of epics like the Iliad: these two kinds of practomime share the enormously important characteristic of living through re-performance, of gaining their meaning through iteration according to the rules laid down by the practomime.

The Iliadic warrior code, as expressed in the twelfth book of the Iliad--to kill or be killed, to gain the κλέος or to yield it to others—is explicitly related to the practice, and the ludics, of epic. The rules that govern the relationship between the bard's re-composition of the tradition in performance and the effect of that peformance, either on some lost epic occasion or on the text-Iliad we have include above all the rule that a warrior becomes a hero by gaining κλέος, and that he gains κλέος by killing opponents and taking their armor. κλέος, in turn, is as close to a win-state as the Iliad has: not only is the bard giving it to the heroes of epic, but, as the Odyssey makes plain in its depiction of bards, he is trying to win it for himself, in reciprocity with his heroic characters.

So when Achilles personalizes the warrior code into the horns of his ethical dilemma (life or κλέος, in a world where honor is meaningless), the themes of the Iliad itself—honor, death, glory, suffering—have everything to do with the practice that has given rise to it, and the ludics of that practice.

Halo's modern warrior code, as expressed over and over in the orders given to you both by characters and by the game itself (orders like "Defend Dr. Halsey") is to shoot those you have been told to shoot because the world must be saved. Just as the rule-based practice of the Iliad perpetuates the Iliadic warrior-code, the rule-based practice of Reach perpetuates Halo's: the code is explicitly related to the basic rules of its practomime, which in this case are the common dynamics of the shooter—quite simply, the next thing in the game won't happen until you have shot all the enemies you need to shoot in order to reach the necessary game-state. In cases where the ludic situation turns on activating a switch or reaching a certain point in the game's landscape, the player must of course shoot the enemies that stand in the way of his or her player-character.

The necessity of shooting enemies to reach the end of a scenario has no thematic, let alone narrative, meaning in itself. Halo's warrior code gives it that meaning by attaching specific orders to the rules. (I happen to think that such thematic and narrative communications as these orders expressing the code of Halo could also be characterized as a set of rules, but it's not of great importance that we look at it that way, so long as the integration of the thematic/narrative and the ludic is recognized.)

This is where the AI and especially the firefight scenario come in, because firefight expresses Halo's warrior code with an additional bundle of rules that dictates that waves of enemies attack the position being defended by the player-character, each wave more difficult to destroy than the last. At the same time, the incredible AI of elites and brutes ratchets the intensity of these waves higher and higher. I mean "incredible" with some precision; the effect produced upon the player is of disbelief that his or her game-mechanic-controlled enemy has eluded and defeated him or her.

These too are at base standard FPS dynamics (in fact, they're video game dynamics as old as Space Invaders); in the campaign of Reach, though, the sheer frequency of firefights, their integration into the unfolding of the narrative, and their thematic resonance with the campaign's narrative of last-ditch, doomed resistance makes for a ludonarrative consonance that casts the player as the forced savior of humanity.

There's an obvious comparison to be made with Hector of Troy, whose very name means "Holder" (Bungie obviously doesn't have a lock on overdetermined names like Noble 6). Hector's expressions of the warrior code, which were once upon a time recompositions of the Iliadic tradition, stand in contrast to Achilles', creating the conflict of identification that gives the Iliad a great deal of its power. Hector is holding out against the Greeks who out-number him; his death, and his funeral at the end of the Iliad, like the death of Noble 6, is a mechanic of the tradition, as he himself acknowledges over and over. This Hector comparison will I hope someday lead me to a comparison of Reach to Halo 1-3, and of Noble 6 to the Master Chief, since it seems that 6 perhaps plays Hector to the Chief's Achilles, but I'm afraid this post is already a monster of Odyssean proportions.

Scarcity of ammo, enemies who seem to outwit the player, and firefight together make the player's performance of Halo: Reach a practomimetic enactment of the same doomed, glorious heroism I described in my last post. These ludics, as I've said, are not innovative, but as in previous games in the series traditional game-design features are deployed in such a way as to create a practomime that is shaped by, and in turn itself re-shapes, ancient themes that seem unlikely to leave world culture any time soon. We can deplore their presence; we can eschew their performance; but it's worth noting that while Plato threw Homer out of the Republic he would probably have let Halo in: armed conflict was a fact of life for him, as it is a fact of life today, and Homer's practomime is only tossed out because his heroes aren't, well, noble.

Halo: Reach as epic

One of the things that fascinates me most about the epic traditions of the world is the way bards naturally sing their tales within cycles. The Greek word κύκλος just means "circle," and the cycle with which I'm most familiar—the ancient Greek one—is usually just called the ἐπικὸς κύκλος "epic circle." Every other oral epic tradition that I know of, whether the Japanese monogatari or the French chanson de geste naturally forms its tales into a circle of stories, each one having its beginning in medias res and its ending de mediis rebus (out of the midst of things) in order that another tale may be told, once again in medias res. Around the tales, just over the horizon, lies the whole story, never to be told completely, always to be glimpsed, night after night, as long as you have a bard around to give you those magic glimpses. Even the Iliad and the Odyssey, freakishly long as they are in comparison to what could actually have been sung in a night, only give us pieces of the puzzle, with their references to other tales, to be sung by other bards, like the stories of Heracles and the stories of the War at Thebes.

Epic cycles thereby create a particular species of a well-known literary trope: ring-composition, which is probably best defined as a story ending where it began, although there are also more technical definitions that involve higher degrees of narrative. The idea that the stories of epic return whence they came is an essential element of the hold they have over us, one we can also see in contexts like Lucas' "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. . ." and now in Halo: Reach, which ends both where it (Halo: Reach) began and where it (Halo, in the form of Halo: Combat Evolved began).

I won't spoil how exactly this happens right now—though I plan to revisit it once the game has been out for a few months--, but in what I found a striking series of epic moments I got to play not just the end of the game I was in, but also the beginning of the game I was in and, even more, the beginning of the game I had played years ago. When the 24th book of the Iliad foreshadows Achilles' death in the lost epic the Aethiopis, the feeling of eternity, and of continuity with the lived experience of the audience, is no stronger than it is when we catch site of the Halo ring at the end of Halo: Reach.

The symbolism of the circle itself adds a great deal, despite its imprecision: unlike a ring, no story can really end where it began, because something has happened. Between the feeling that things stay the same and the feeling that things change, a conflict played out on an enormous scale, lies epic, whether ancient or modern. Eternally, we feel, will live the heroes' glory in the bards' traditions—even, or perhaps rather especially, when those bards are we ourselves and our participation in the tradition of that glory will live on after we are gone. Changing and evanescent as is our own particular contribution—the stuff that happens, and happens differently, every time—it plays its part in the eternal circle.

(Plus, ringworlds are just really cool. Larry Niven knew it, and so does Bungie.)

In this next section, I'm going to be engaging in what I consider some mild spoiling—mild because I think anyone who knows the Halo cycle would have no trouble guessing basically what happens in Reach, and to those who don't know the Halo cycle these details are essentially meaningless. Nevertheless, if you like to come to your games entirely fresh. . . well, why are you even reading this?

Cortana, the artificial intelligence who guides the player through Halo 1-3, takes on a role of extraordinary importance in Reach, despite only speaking at the end of the game. From one perspective, Halo: Reach is actually, in its entirety, about Cortana. Cortana's role takes the player of Reach from thematic concerns of the eternal circle and the return to the beginning to the more immediate epic concerns of getting the job done, both in the sense of fulfilling the duties imposed upon a Spartan and in the sense of playing the game in a fashion competent enough to get Noble 6 from point to point within it. The figure of Cortana both binds the game-narrative together as an integrated whole and serves as the narrative metaphor for the onward-pressing mechanics of a shooter: she is the reason to keep going, to keep shooting Covenant and pressing on.

It's almost as if (meaning, I want to argue but don't have the critical courage to go all in and say that) Cortana is the Helen of Halo. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the figure of Helen of Sparta (aka Helen of Troy) has a strange and potent relation to the bardic tradition. When we see her on the walls of Troy, she introduces us to the Achaean kings. When we see her in her bed-chamber, she is weaving a tapestry that depicts all the deeds of the Achaeans and the Trojans. When Hector berates her, she says that she knows she's terrible, but that everything has happened in order that they all become aoidimoi "song-worthy." When we see her in the Odyssey, strangest of all, she claims to be the only true match for Odysseus' intelligence, setting up a comparison she is sure to lose to Penelope but which makes Penelope a new, better Helen (remember that like Helen Penelope is faced with a ton of suitors; Penelope's job is to make sure she gets out of it better than Helen did).

Cortana is a person and yet not a person, a character and yet not a character—and always your way into the heart of the Halo story. "Now would be a very good time to leave!" rings in the imaginations of every player of Halo: CE, and her words at the end of Reach, over-the-top as they may seem, are just what Helen might have said about the heroes of homeric epic: "We will remember your courage."

Cortana's role as the Helen of Halo is all the stronger because like the Iliad Reach is about dying nobly. The broad meaning of the Iliadic tradition turns on the idea of the beautiful death—beautiful specifically because it is a death undergone in order to win the kleos that comes from dying for honor and duty without reference to one's own interest (as Achilles fights because he is duty-bound to his comrades to fight, despite acknowledging that Helen isn't worth fighting for). In Reach, your player-character's identity as Noble 6, part of Noble Team, is only the tip of this self-sacrificial iceberg.

We should not turn away from a fundamental problem here: I'm a guy on a sofa, not a Spartan giving his life to save humanity. Indeed, the very interactive nature of the practice of playing Halo tends to emphasize, rather than cover over, the enormous gap between pretending to be Noble 6 sacrificing himself and actually dying nobly: when the game ends, we're still on the sofa.

Being there on the sofa, like sitting in a bard's audience, though, finally connects Halo and games like it to the epic traditions they have reawakened: through them we become integrally involved in deeds we could not possibly realize in our own lives, but which we must acknowledge our longing, and perhaps our duty, to attempt. From this dynamic comes those frequent epic moments when a hero performs a deed no one alive "now" could do: we are not epic heroes—it is for us merely to try to be like them. The Halo cycle calls us to great deeds by making us part of a story of which, in the end, we feel ourselves only to be weak echoes.

Teaser: coming posts about Halo: Reach

The epic tale of my relationship with the game Halo has arrived at a new and, for me, frankly, magical place. I had the privilege to play through Halo: Reach on Tuesday at an event held by Microsoft and Bungie to allow reviewers to get a thorough look at the game. I can't deny the the thrill I felt to be told by Joe Tung, the producer of the game, that I was the first person outside Bungie to finish the single-player campaign.

I've made no secret over the last four years of my admiration for Halo and for its creators. I've variously described it as epic, profound, and educational; I've even written a chapter for the forthcoming book Halo and Philosophy that says that Plato would have let the guardians of the Republic play Halo.

I'm not going to try to review the game (especially not in this post, since I'm not allowed to publish anything that might be construed as a review until 10 September). I am, though, planning a series of three posts from my particular perspective as the guy who sees in Halo much of the promise of narrative games' reawakening the epic tradition: "Halo: Reach as epic," "Halo: Reach and the idea of narrative canon," and "Halo: Reach as practomime."

Operation LAPIS: the HUD mechanic

The mechanic of a heads-up display, usually called a "HUD," is well known to players of a wide variety of different kinds of games. Probably the most familiar kind of HUD for most gamers is the one found in games with a shooting component: the overlay of various important pieces information on the picture of the virtual world in which your character is trying to complete his or her objectives. Two of those pieces of information are nearly universal: a targetting reticle (the little shape in the middle of the screen that tells you where your firearm will deliver its projectile) and some kind of health-bar (the indicator of how much more damage your character can take before he or she reaches some kind of failure state—most often analogous to death).

Learning to manipulate the HUD of an FPS or an RPG is perhaps the most basic objective of games that have such a mechanic. After all, if you can't use the information in the HUD effectively, you won't achieve any other game objective. Games have become very good at teaching players—that is, creating the opportunity for players to learn—how to use their HUD's through simple game-opening tutorials, but the reason they've been able to get so good at it is that basic nature of the mechanic, like all game-mechanics, is itself an opportunity to learn. The reason experienced gamers can pick up a huge variety of games and play them almost right away is that through game after game they've learned the HUD mechanic by doing things in games with HUD's. In that sense, the HUD is a kind of microcosm of the potential of game-based learning.

What if learning how to read Latin were like learning to use a HUD? What if the information overlaid on the screen were information about the grammatical and cultural aspects of an ancient situation, to respond to which a student had to interpret and assimilate that information?



LAPIS operatives, as we've discussed in previous posts, will find themselves in ancient situations that demand that they read Latin and respond like Romans and in accordance with the worldview of their characters. To assist them, in the same way that a health-bar assists a gamer playing, say, Halo, they will have a HUD that contains vocabulary, grammar notes, and cultural information—including multimedia and links to places to obtain more information. They will absolutely need to use the information in their HUD's to contribute effectively to the team collaborations where they will be assessed on their progress towards mission objectives. Remember that teams of students control a single Recentius (player-character), and that they will need to collaborate on what action to take in response to the prompts they receive from the TSTT.

From the pictures you can see that we envision the HUD being displayed on mobile devices. To marry the ARG aspect of LAPIS to students' actual lived experience with the technologies of everyday digital culture by sending them information vital to their mission on their handheld devices—well, you can just call it potentially engaging. The same information could also be displayed in a browser tab, though, so students will have multiple ways to access their HUDs.



"Student-centered learning" is a term that gets thrown around a lot. The HUD may be the best mechanic I've ever seen for letting players and students keep the learning centered on them. At the same time, the HUD mechanic shows clearly a fundamental relationship between game mechanics and learning activities: in a game, as in LAPIS, a player manipulates information given by the game to reach objectives. The mode of manipulation is a mechanic; the process of reaching the objective is an activity. Thus, in a traditional course, one could describe using a glossary as a mechanic; in fact, the LAPIS HUD is in a certain sense a glorified glossary. If there's a breakthrough here, it's in the way the mechanic is integrated into the activities and learning objectives of the course: whereas a traditional glossary has no integral relation to what students are doing when reading Latin (that is, to look up a word in the glossary isn't actually a part of reading but rather takes students out of that activity and into the glossary), using the HUD is explicitly a part of the ongoing narrative of Operation LAPIS. When students use the HUD, they will be working towards their real learning objective—not just decoding the words of a passage of Latin, but performing as a reader of Latin.

By integrating the scaffolding of the HUD into the overall practomime of LAPIS, we believe that we've given students a way to engage the material of introductory Latin—grammatical and cultural—on a very deep level. More, the basic activities involved in achieving mastery of this material are made part, as they should always be made part for the scholar as well as the student, of the greater quest for the highest goals of humanistic learning: preserving and improving our civilization. That’s why the Demiurge has recruited them, after all; that’s what they’ll do if they manage to play through all the operation’s missions and at last find and read the LAPIS SAECULORUM.

Operation LAPIS is ĪTE!

I'm incredibly excited to let my readers know that the first-ever fully practomimetic introductory language course, Operation LAPIS, is about to launch. (ĪTE means “Go,” by the way.) Operation LAPIS will be running this school year both here at UConn and at Norwich Free Academy, under the able command of Karen Zook (UConn) and Kevin Ballestrini (NFA) as Demiurges. We've been working all summer on designing the practomime and getting the materials together, including most recently a wonderful set of CARDs (Classical-Attunement Reward Devices) like this one, which will be awarded to students for collecting examples of pronouns (for more information about the CARDs in particular, see this post by Kevin.)

I'll let the Demiurge himself introduce the premise:

DEMIURGE ONLINE
BEGIN TRANSMISSION
SIGNAL “First Contact” START

Congratulations, recruit. The Demiurge has selected you as an operative in Operation LAPIS. The Demiurge wishes to express his hope that you will prove an asset to the operation, and to Project ARKHAIA as a whole. He also wishes to explain your mission.

Project ARKHAIA is a secret initiatve of the Demiurge to preserve and build up civilization by identifying and interpreting the key cultural practices and works of the ancient world. The project is divided into several different missions, including Operation LAPIS.

The essential mechanic of all the operations of Project ARKHAIA is to recruit students as operatives of a system called the Texto-Spatio-Temporal Transmitter (TSTT). You may think of the TSTT as a supercomputer running advanced artificially-intelligent simulation software, or you may think of it as a time-machine. Either way, the TSTT has been programmed by the Demiurge to take mission operatives back to the ancient world. There, they collaborate with other operatives to control ancient Greeks and Romans tasked with discovering the secrets that can save our own world. Inside the TSTT, operatives learn to act as Greeks and Romans, and in particular to understand their languages, ancient Greek and Latin.

These secrets are encoded in the TSTT in the form of texts which operatives must read and understand. Of course, in order to read and understand them, operatives must learn the languages and cultures of the ancient world. Without that leaning, the secret texts would be meaningless. The secret text of Operation LAPIS is the LAPIS SAECULORUM (“Stone of Ages”). Your mission, recruit--operative, now--is to discover what the LAPIS is, and where you can find it.

As you progress in your attunement to the TSTT and the classical world, you will receive Latinity Points, which will eventually be disguised as your grade in order to maintain operational secrecy. You and your team will control a Recentius--one member of an ancient family--alongside the Recentii of other teams. You will gain levels of attunement, and gain the ability to decide your Roman’s destiny even as you learn more about that Roman’s story. You will collect the essential elements of the Latin language and the Roman culture, and receive special Classical-Attunement Reward Devices (CARDs) to indicate your progress. Above all, you will discover the secrets of the men and women of ancient Rome who shaped the destiny of the entire world: tradesmen, bankers, matrons, senators, courtesans, emperors.

The Demiurge has recruited you to achieve no less a task than to save civilization, but the path you and your team will take will be your own.

END TRANSMISSION

The course, that is, is framed as an RPG inside an ARG. The operatives (students), divided into five teams, each of which controls a young Roman, must go to ancient Pompeii and answer prompts like this one:

>Outskirts of Pompeii, Italy, 79CE<

Your Recentius is standing, on a bright Italian summer day, on a road near the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. Refer to the TSTT navigation device for geographic orientation.

There is a field nearby, with an olive tree in it.

Persona tua est in viā.
Malus est in viā.
Malus inquit, "Quid nomen est tibi?"

Prompt: Answer the ruffian; you are not required to tell him your actual nomen.

Click here for your HUD.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be blogging much more about the mechanics of LAPIS, and about the way we're trying to assess its affordances for engaged learning. We have an amazing, and growing, team working on the operation, and we can't wait to see what paths Karen’s and Kevin’s students choose.

That Bioshock is tragedy

The distinction between epic and tragedy seems very clear to us. Even if we lay aside the definitions those words carry in everyday English ("epic"="awesome"; "tragedy"="really sad story"), and get technical and literary, we do pretty well with the old-fashioned, "real" definitions: an epic is a long story (properly, a long poem) about a great event (like the Iliad); a tragedy is a performed enactment of a serious action (like Romeo and Juliet). Those at least are serviceable definitions that cut through the myriad of transferred senses and connotations that have befallen these words over the many years through which they've journeyed from Ancient Greek into English. They're also the definitions I'm going to be using in this post; if you're interested in figuring out where I got the reasoning that led to them, you might have a look at a reference work or two. (Wikipedia's articles aren't terrible, either.)

The question I want to consider in this post is whether it's helpful to think about these ancient genres together in connection with our ongoing attempt to figure out what video games are good for. I'm going to suggest that by describing Bioshock as a tragedy (in a technical sense, at least) we gain the ability to relate the game to artistic tradition, and to compare and contrast its themes and cultural effects with those of other works of the tragic tradition in particular. With that ability, we may also be able 1) to assess Bioshock's cultural achievement more accurately and more effectively, and 2) to describe its artistic elements—mechanics, dynamics, aesthetics, thematics—more thickly and with more satisfying effect.

I've spent a great deal of time talking on this blog about how some of the most popular video games—in particular the standard-issue FPS and the standard-issue RPG—deserve consideration as epics in the epic tradition that goes back to the dawn of Western storytelling, and how in particular they reawaken the oral improvisatory tradition that gave us the homeric epics. But I'm going to say now that although Bioshock partakes of the same characteristics that make other FPS's epic, it uses those characteristics in a way that places it in the tradition of tragedy as well.

That is, the line between epic and tragedy is not as bright as it seems, when—as now and in the 5th Century BCE—artists like Aeschylus and Ken Levine are exploring the limits of artistic storytelling.

I feel like I can make this argument above all because the distinction between epic and tragedy was unclear to no less a crtic than Plato, who groups Homer in as a tragedian at a very important moment in a very important work, Book 10 of Republic:

Therefore, Glaucon, I said, whenever you meet with any of the eulogists
of Homer declaring that he has been the educator of Hellas, and that
he is profitable for education and for the ordering of human things,
and that you should take him up again and again and get to know him
and regulate your whole life according to him, we may love and honour
those who say these things --they are excellent people, as far as
their lights extend; and we are ready to acknowledge that Homer is
the greatest of poets and first of tragedy writers; but we must remain
firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous
men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State.
For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either
in epic or lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind, which by
common consent have ever been deemed best, but pleasure and pain will
be the rulers in our State.

Plato makes it very clear elsewhere that he can tell the difference between epic and tragedy. In other passages he doesn't lump them together the same way, but his insights into mimesis lead him, as we should also be led, to recognize that the essential nature of tragedy somehow transcends the customary form of "performed enactment of a serious action"—that is, in Shakespeare's words, "Two-hours traffic of our stage." In this moment in Plato I find the birth of what I sometimes call "capital-T Tragedy," or "Universal Tragedy" or simply "the tragic."

Aristotle will later try to formalize this notion into the pity – fear – catharsis meme, but I find his strictures to be ambiguous and overly-prescriptive. I would rather say that what we're dealing with is the evocation and manipulation of sympathetic identification. When we see Priam suffer, when we see Oedipus suffer, we feel for them.

If we're willing to follow Plato's reasoning, we end up with a much more flexible way of talking about the things art does to us and with us—and in particular about the things games do to us and with us. For example, we can use the idea of tragedy to talk about Bioshock.

"A man chooses; a slave obeys." This memorable line, delivered at a memorable moment, constitutes the core of Bioshock's thematics of necessity. I have argued elsewhere that Bioshock is a philosophical meditation on the relationship of culture to interactivity; my argument here runs in parallel—that this meditation expresses itself in great part in the register of necessity, and that this expression makes Bioshock tragedy.

To put that in a less complicated way, tragedy is about having no choice. The earliest of the great tragedies of Western literature, Aeschylus' Oresteia, illustrates this idea pretty well: Clytemnestra has no choice but to kill Agamemnon because Agamemnon had no choice but to kill Iphigenia; Orestes has no choice but to kill Clytemnestra because she killed Agamemnon.

It's equally important to note that tragedy's situations of "no choice" are also about the way the freedom of choice is taken away: the reason the Agamemnon, the first tragedy of the Oresteia, is effective is that from the audience's, and the tragic chorus', perspective as ordinary humans, it seems like choice is possible. Clytemnestra could refrain from killing Agamemnon. From the perspective of the characters, though—despite the fact that they claim over and over that they are acting freely—they do what they must. Clytemnestra is the spirit of revenge, the Fury of the House of Atreus: the revenge she takes is, from the divine perspective (whether you believe in some pantheon of gods or you simply see Necessity as a fundamental principle of the human condition), absolutely inevitable.

All of the other typical elements of tragedy—the pity-fear-catharsis, the suffering, the sympathy, even the perspective of the tragic chorus and the unity of time and place—, can be traced to that basic "no choice" mechanic. All of them involve the relationship of the audience to the problem of necessity. What happens when we realize that we're not in control of our own lives?

Similarly, when we realize as players of Bioshock that we really have no choice—that we can't not commit an atrocity, that we can't not disarm the self-destruct, that our "choices" about saving and harvesting little sisters are ethically meaningless—we're forced to consider what it means that from the perspective of Divine Necessity we are powerless, as Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes, and Oedipus, Antigone, and Creon are powerless.

Looked at in this light, narrative games may turn out to be the most perfect medium for tragedy ever conceived. Games in general arise in the restriction of choice just as tragedy does, after all; that's what rules and mechanics are. To this point, though, most designers have sought to construct rules and mechanics so as to preserve and to maximize the illusion that game choices are unrestricted. Bioshock is one of the few games to go in the opposite direction (Shadow of the Colossus is, in its own way, another). There are hopeful signs that more may be to come: DragonAge: Origins works the same play of necessity at several important moments.

There's much more here, and I hope to continue exploring even such relatively minor tragic elements as the unity of time and place in Bioshock, because the setting of Rapture is so fascinating. One important corollary, though, which I started trying to write into this post but which quickly revealed itself as another post in the making, is the nature of sympathy in relation to the tragic chorus and what I consider its analogue, the player-character. Could it be that having an avatar whose choices are taken away meaningfully is the same as watching a bunch of singer-dancers in masks tell you the cryptic backstory of a bloody myth?