About (the lack of) the author

This post is a contribution to the March in-gathering of Blogs of the Round Table, Corvus Elrod’s wonderful community of video game critics.



It’s my belief that video games have the potential to help us let go, once and for all, of our belief in the author. What I’m going to say here in response to Corvus’ provocation is a lightly revised version of something I posted last summer, when I got into a very productive dispute with a few of my fellow ludamants (oh, why not—“ludophile” is a barbarism, in the technical sense, being a mixture of Greek and Latin).

Film studies is well known for the famous debate usually referred to as the “auteur debate.” Put very briefly, the central question was “Does (or should) a film have an author?”

The reason to ask the question with respect to film is that most of the time, there are a lot of people involved in the making of a single film. The two sides of the auteur debate were the people who thought it was a good thing to spread authorship around (they were the Hollywood types) and the people who thought it was better to have films controlled by a single vision (they were above all the French filmmakers of the 50’s and 60’s) as much as possible.

The old auteur debate has nothing on the problem of authorship (or, if you will, “artistship”) in video games, because instead of just debating whether Ken Levine did (or should) have complete control over, and should get all the credit for, Bioshock, there arises in the case of video games the question of whether the player has a role in the creation of the art.

The foundation of the debate remains the same, though—the notion, espoused by some, that true beauty (or artistry, or profundity, or whatever else you like to find in your aesthetic experiences) can arise only when a single composer (let’s use that word instead of “author” and “artist”) has the opportunity to communicate his ideas to his audience through the medium of a work of creative production (call it “art,” if you want). If the audience is somehow able to change the composition of the work, according to this model, the composer’s ideas may not be communicated as they should be, and true beauty may not arise.

I find that notion to be an interesting fiction—a fiction that can be very helpful both for a composer and for an audience from time to time. I don’t think there can be any doubt that great works of art have emerged from it.

But I would maintain very strongly that it is a fiction for all that. Composers have decisive effects on the interpretation of their works, but audience members have even more decisive effects, because they’re the ones who get to say what it meant to them and to their communities. (There are theoretical ways to talk about this topic, above all the century-old idea of the “intentional fallacy,” but there’s no need to bring them in to understand the matter.)

And when we contemplate much more complex, and much livelier, models of composition like ancient epic and video game, I think we see that trying to make the composer a controller of ultimate meaning, and to base one’s standard of beauty and profundity around that control, is unlikely to produce art that takes advantages of those models’ unique affordances. It seems to me, that is, that trying to argue that the best aesthetic experiences to be had in games come about through a conventional idea of authorship makes games into (weak?) imitations of written forms like novel.

Here’s another place where I strongly believe a comparison with ancient forms like epic and tragedy can be really helpful. Particpatory art can probably be forced to produce the same kind of deep meaning to be found in non-particpatory art, but I’m of the opinion that it realizes its potential more greatly, and does more for us and our civilization, when composers embrace the opportunity to allow players to participate in the creation of the art.

I think, actually, that that’s what Ken Levine did in Bioshock, because the moment of having to kill Andrew Ryan makes sense only in contrast to the interactivity the player has been allowed to enjoy elsewhere in the game, which in turn creates (in my opinion) a deep meaning that exists between the individual player’s individual choices and the composer’s control.

To make an analogy back to ancient epic one more time, Ken Levine's contribution is mostly like the pre-existing, immutable (though in actual fact slowly-changing-over-time) mythic story, while the player is mostly like the bard (and also like the audience, but we’ll talk about that some time down the road). The analogy is not exact, and that's one of the reasons I find it so exciting, because it means there's a lot of work still to be done. Game developers clearly get to do a lot of the work of the bard as well, in creating the game world and in defining certain crucial apsects of the interaction. But it’s in the interaction itself that I think some of the most profund (and the less profound) meanings of ancient epic arose, like the (non) Choice of Achilles, and will arise also in video games.

Is this the only way for epic, or games, to achieve true beauty? Of course not. It’s a pretty cool way, in my opinion, though. All of which leads to an answer I would propose to Corvus’s question to what extent a video game designer should exert control over his or her game—to whatever extent the designer wants, recognizing that the ultimate meaning of the designer’s work is always already out of his or her hands.

Phaeacian immersion

This is a post in the "Living Epic: the Main Quest" The earlier posts can be found through the "Main Quest" hub.

This post is about how adventure video games, which seem to be about various out-there characters like space marines, elven warriors, and canine divinities, come to be about you, and about how the story of Odysseus’ adventures comes to be about the people to whom he’s telling the story. If I do my job right, this post will build one important bridge across the gap between what happens inside games like Halo, World of Warcraft, and Fallout 3, and what happens outside them, between the people who play them and the people who make them.

A while back, I argued that Odysseus’ adventures have the important purpose of turning his audience into fanboys of Odysseus, just as the bards tried to turn their audiences into fans of the bards, just as many games are set-up to turn gamers into fans of the game-franchise.

Now I’m going to argue that the way Odysseus does that is to shape his performance so that his adventures aren’t just about him, but also about his audience, the Phaeacians.

When you start to think about the “adventures” of Odysseus this way, there’s evidence all over the place, from the Lotus-eaters to the Island of the Cattle of the Sun, but there’s one passage that seems to me to crystallize the thought. It’s the middle of the night, and the middle of Odysseus’ story about how he went to the land of the dead (we’re talking about the middle of Book 11). He’s just spent the last ten minutes or so talking about a series of royal women he met there, with little epitomes of their stories included. For one very important example, he runs into the mother/wife of Oedipus, whose name in the Odyssey is Epikaste (see what I mean about how chageable all this was?).

And then he says that it’s time for bed. His hosts first promise him presents, then beg him to keep telling the story. Alcinous, king of the Phaeacians, first says that he thinks Odysseus’ words have the ring of undeniable truth:

“Odysseus, we as we look at you do not imagine
that you are a deceptive or thievish man, the sort that the black earth
breeds in great numbers, people who wander widely, making up
lying stories, from which no one could learn anything. You have
a grace upon your words, and there is sound sense within them,
and expertly, as a singer would do, you have told the story. . .”

Then he asks,

“But come now, tell me this and give me an accurate answer:
Did you see any of your godlike companions, who once with you
went to Ilion and there met their destiny?”

Odysseus thanks his hosts, and then says that Yes, as a matter of fact, he did see both Agamemnon and Achilles there. He goes on to narrate the most memorable part of the entire adventures, his encounter with those who died at Troy.

There’s an interactivity here, as Alcinous plays Odysseus like a console—an interactivity that is clearly to a certain extent contrived by the bard to present a sort of ideal version of what the job of a bard is really like. Don’t forget that Odysseus only a short time before had asked Demodocus for a specific story; now Alcinous is doing the same. There is, however, a crucial difference: when Odysseus makes his request to Demodocus, he’s asking for a song such as might be sung by a bard. When Alcinous asks Odysseus if he saw any of the other Achaeans in the underworld, he’s very explicitly asking for what he considers the truth, but in a way that’s obviously intended to make the bard’s audience realize that Odysseus is making it all up, and in a way that makes it clear that Odysseus’ metier and his greatest talent is to make up exactly the story that will get him what he needs, by plunging his audience in the story so deep that they can’t tell truth from fiction. Now that’s immersion.

But it’s also immersion accomplished through a very specific mechanism that I think may prove to be the key to all immersion in the end: intersubjective self-performance. By that term I just mean telling a story about yourself (“self-performance”) to someone else (“intersubjective”). The reason Alcinous and the rest of the Phaeacians are so struck by Odysseus’ story is that he’s there in front of them, talking to them from the perspective of the man who was there, who did the things he’s telling about. Again, it’s paradoxical but true that this self-performance makes the story about its audience, people who can be counted on not to have been there, or they wouldn’t have the proper relationship with the story.

The reason for the immersion, the strange psychological audience-involvement, is that the storyteller himself makes the connection: I, Odysseus, the one telling you the tale am I, Odysseus, the one who saw these places and did these things. The masterstroke of the apologue (the adventure-tale of Odysseus that stretches from Book 9 to Book 12) is that the preposterous nature of the tales makes them both extraordinarily entertaining and strikingly thematic—that is, the immediately graspable “truth” that Odysseus is telling fish-stories makes his achievement in self-performance truly great: only he could sell these stories, and that makes his a sort of ideal model of the bardic occasion’s capacity for immersion.

How could that work in a situation where the storyteller is not Odysseus, the best storyteller imaginable, a man who can make you believe he was there? How could that work for a bard? I think we can look to adventure video games for the answer. What is it that makes us, like Alcinous, travel the circuit from immersion to interaction and back? The idea that it’s happening to us. What is it that makes us keep on through Halo or Bioshock or even Fallout 3? The idea that we have to do it, if it’s going to get done. We’re simultaneously Odysseus and Alcinous, and we look to the designers of our games as Odysseus looks to Demodocus, as the author of the occasion—not of the story, but of the occasion—for us to tell our tale so well that it feels undeniably true. Corvus Elrod has recently and compellingly explicated semiotics' concept of fabula in a very similar direction.

What’s more, the fictionality of Alcinous—that is, the fact that he’s a character from the fantasy-land of the Phaeacians where they have ships that travel instantaneously from port to port—tells us something else very important about the inherent intersubjectivity of this self-performance: it can be fictively constructed. When we play a single-player RPG, for example, even though there’s no one else in the room, we’re still doing intersubjective self-performance, strangely enough, for the NPC’s of the game. The occasionally-ludicrous citizens of Albion in the Fable games are only the most obvious example of the crucial connection between immersion and (fictive) intersubjectivity.

Odysseus’ tale-telling to the Phaeacians tells us that adventure video games’ interactivity and their immersiveness are fundamentally bound together (we knew that, of course, but perhaps we tend not to express it often in relation to other art forms), but also more importantly that the circuit formed by interactivity and immersion is fundamentally rooted in the performance of the self to others, whether real (think fellow-players in an MMO, or the official game forums and how invested gamers are in them) or imaginary (think, for example, of Sergeant Johnson or Andrew Ryan).

Where does that get us? It's been pointed out many times that, really, all art-forms are interactive, or, in Ian Bogost's term, procedural. In talking about how video games differ nevertheless from other (always) interactive art-forms, critics emphasize a huge range of different characteristics of games' storytelling and play mechanics. In relation to Odysseus' immersion of the Phaeacians through interactivity I think we see a model that might open a new part of that discussion: how narrative games provide a modern occasion for an ancient, fulfilling kind of self-performance--one that other art-forms don't provide because the interactivity-immersion circuit in them is almost invisible, whereas, in living epic, it's right there before your eyes.

Serious games, human values, and classics

This post is an index to the discussion we've just kicked off at VGHVI about what VGHVI should say and/or not say about the Serious Games Movement. My contribution has classics content (Plato!), as you might expect. It's also here on the wiki, where I'd love your suggestions on how to refine it.

Senior fellow Stephen Schafer of English at Digipen University has contributed "The Pscyhecology Game," a fascinating analysis of the Story-Based Game within a Jungian frame that I, as a myth-guy, find incredibly interesting despite not really being a Jung-fan.

My colleague in educational psychology at UConn, senior fellow Mike Young, will make his contribution soon.

Since this is my own blog, I hope I may be excused for saying, well, "Squee." This conversation already is a dream come true for me--interdisciplinarity takes patience, but when it happens it's pretty awesome--at least for a fanboy of reasoned discourse like me.

The forum thread for carrying on the debate engendered by the reasoned discourse is here. I hope you'll stop by and at least write a line or two about your own view of serious games and their movement.

Oedipus the RPG (Blogs of the Round Table)

(If you're interested in reading Sophocles' version, click here; it's probably worth noting that my ludization of the tragedy originates in my own highly contentious reading of its plot and themes. Above all, I believe that the Athenian audience would have recognized that Creon is in fact attempting to seize the throne from Oedipus.)

The game begins with a fade in from a screen upon which appear only the words “You are a citizen of Thebes. A man named Oedipus is now the king of your city. Almost everyone in the city has been infected by a plague, and no one knows why.”

The player’s character is indeed a citizen of Thebes, in the time of a terrible plague. At the start of the game, he or she can choose to go with a mass of other citizens to the house of Oedipus, tyrant of Thebes, or simply to explore the city. The gates of the city are closed and under quarantine, but, other than that spatial limit, and the increasing percentage chance that the player character will be infected with the plague and grow gradually weaker, at last becoming immobilized with the disease until the resolution of the story finally frees him to lead a perfectly uninteresting but potentially endless life in the city, he can go to a large variety of ordinary places and do a large variety of ordinary things.

On the other hand, if the player chooses to follow the crowd, he or she may become involved in the story of Oedipus’ attempt to solve the mystery of the murder of his predecessor—and, it will turn out, father—, Laius. The player is able to question a large variety of NPC’s along elaborate dialogue trees—trees so elaborate that it is practically impossible to exhaust them (and the player is told as explicitly as possible that he or she should NOT try; indeed, NPC’s eventually refuse to keep talking if the player seems intent on exhausting the dialogue; moreover, talking too long to NPC’s will cause the player to miss parts of the ongoing story); pieces of dialogue are frequently enhanced by brief cutscenes that illustrate the back-story; these, and the final cutscene of the game, are the only traditional cutscenes.

The rest of the story plays out in real-time, whether the player character is there or not; it is occasionally difficult for the player to find the location of the story-action.

The player’s only task in the game—and this task is hidden from the player until he or she uncovers evidence of the conspiracy against the tyrant—is either a) to convince Oedipus that he is not guilty of the murder of Laius, by discovering the crucial pieces of information necessary, and thus to become the trusted advisor of what remains of him after the story’s disaster, or b) to join with the conspirators and bring him or herself into power along with Creon and Teiresias. That is, the main quest is simply to bring the story to its conclusion, by interfering in it effectually. Doing so brings a cutscene contextualizing the story, and then the credits.

It is more than possible—in fact it is easy—to avoid participating in the action of the game completely. The action unfolds over a game time-frame of approximately 10 hours. Progress-saving checkpoints occur only when the player has completed a piece of the story—something that must be done on the game’s internal schedule. Returning to the last checkpoint is at the discretion of the player; when he or she does, he or she is then free to attempt to continue with the story, or to wander off its path again.

With only a little bit of work on the main quest, however, it becomes clear to the player that something is wrong with the case mounting against Oedipus. From that point on, the game is a gradual but very fast-paced build towards the decision of whether Oedipus is in fact worth saving, and how to go about saving him. It turns out that there is no way to prevent Jocasta from committing suicide or Oedipus from blinding himself, but that bribing the herdsman and/or Teiresias (who, it turns out, have been bribed already by Creon) precipitates a scene in which Oedipus is shown the ultimate horror: the folly of his self-conviction.

If the player does not accomplish this bribery, he or she may instead go to Creon and threaten to expose his treachery, in which case Creon introduces the player as the new second-in-command of Thebes at the close of the action, as Oedipus is herded back inside the palace blind and polluted. If the player is watching, he or she will also see Creon talking to Teiresias, obviously planning the player-character’s downfall.

The central idea of this game might be called “tragedy by other means”—that is, in sketching it out I’ve attempted to create the opportunity for the player to experience tragic identification with Oedipus. I have no idea whether anyone but me would ever want to play it, of course. Above all, I want to thank Corvus for the topic!

Epic values, game values: what’s so funny 'bout glory, honor, and violence?

Once I’ve gotten someone—whether a fellow academic or a teacher or a parent—through their initial “You’ve got to be kidding” response to the basic idea of Living Epic, one of the issues that he or she frequently wants to talk about almost immediately is whether the values of the Iliad and the Odyssey really are values we want to be supporting in 2008. That is: even if we grant your thesis, Roger, that gamers are like bards, does that really mean that we shouldn’t be yanking the controller our of our son’s hands before he becomes Colonel Nathan Jessep?

To spin that thought out slightly, one could even stipulate that the values of the homeric epics were constructive for archaic Greek culture, but still maintain that they are destructive for our culture—that being alive in 800 BCE necessitated a warrior code, whereas being alive in 2008 CE can only be hampered by one.

For some reason, I always hear Stephen Colbert respond to this one in my mind, “Why do you hate America?” It’s not unimportant, I think, that a very large number of people in our society, and a much larger number in the human species, haven’t got over the idea that martial glory and the use of force to obtain legitimate ends are practices worth transmitting to the next generation.

But I think we’re probably better off to leave Colbert and those he parodies (Victor Davis Hanson springs to mind, just because VDH is a classicist by training) on their high conservative horses, and, because it results in a more comprehensive argument, to look at it from the liberal, pacifist point of view. If we want a world without war, how can we possibly value cultural forms that glorify violent acts?

Some very important ground has already been gained, I believe, when we have this discussion rather than (or perhaps in addition to) the subtly but crucially different one about whether video games that feature violence do or don’t make gamers more violent. When we take the ancient perspective on the matter, I think we can see that a full discussion will involve a process of critical thinking that can’t help but benefit us, even if we should conclude at the end of it (thought I doubt this will be our conclusion) that we have to take the controller out of the gamer’s hands forever, rather than just in certain very limited situations like age-inappropriateness. It’s hard to argue that learning about archaic Greek culture, and the way that classical Greek culture received it, is an unhelpful thing, quite apart from the fact that thinking in these terms removes at the outset the edge of hysteria that still seems to cling to discussions about video games.

So I think we have to go in two directions: first, the critiques of violence levelled by the bards themselves; second, the Plato/Aristotle divide on the matter of tragedy. I’ll treat the first direction now, and leave the second for another post (suffice it for now to say that Plato wanted to toss all of homeric epic and Athenian tragedy out because it made people bad, while Aristotle thought that that same material actually made people better).

Both the Iliad and the Odyssey contain glorfications of violent military prowess; both arguably also contain glorifications of atrocities (Achilles’ needless slaughter of Trojans, Odysseus’ cruel execution of the serving maids). These works, however, as they have come down to us, which we should be careful to note is not the form in which they would always have been experienced by their original audiences, also have some of the most subtle and moving condemnations of needless violence, and some of the most resonant probing of the concept of glory upon which their entire traditions are based. Achilles’ refusal to fight, the basis of the Iliad as we know it, and Odysseus’ encounter with a regretful Achilles in the underworld, the heart of the Odyssey as we know it, are only the most obvious examples.

As I said the last time I wrote on this theme, the idea that glory is hollow is meaningless without the idea of glory. If we’re going to have the idea of glory, we’re going to have such things as homeric epic and violent video games. I would argue that this doesn't just apply to Call of Duty, but also to Grand Theft Auto and Far Cry 2, which don't seem on the surface to be about the same things, because, as the Odyssey also shows, what happens in war begins and ends at home.

If we’re lucky, we’ll also have bards who show us Agamemnon’s folly, and Colonel Nathan Jessep’s misplaced honor, and the way that Africa always wins. That last example links to a brilliant post by Tom Armitage that demonstrates, conclusively to me, that games are now levelling the critiques we need them to level so that we can go farther, just as Athens needed the embryonic critiques of the bards to make it to the full-throated ones of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Thucydides, Euripides, Plato, and Aristotle, none of whose works would have existed without the bards, their warrior-code, and their critique of it.

Do we need the ideas of glory and honor, though? Would we be better without them? Reasonable people can perhaps disagree about that, but I’m hopeful that some number even of my fellow liberal academics would be hesitant to expunge those ideals from our ideology, if only because so much of our past would become incomprehensible without them.

Ah, but does that mean we should allow our children to be indoctrinated in those ideas? No. But I’m surely not the only liberal academic parent who’s seen that honor and glory are quite possibly the best ideas we’re ever going to find to temper the ineluctable need to fight. Even mercy and peace have value only in opposition to that need. That’s just Saussure 101, I suppose—but then, if you don’t accept the semiotic gospel according to Saussure, you probably weren’t worried about honor and glory in the first place.

Sententia novi anni (or, new year's resolution)

I don't usually have anything to put under the "Resolution" rubric, but Dan Golding's wonderful post, and the still more wonderful philosophy behind his blog "Subject Navigator," make me want to be a better blogger.

Thus: I resolve to post here regularly--weekly, at least--in 2009.

Indeed, motive coincides with opportunity, since I have a couple weeks now in which I can concentrate on the "Living Epic" course and VGHVI to the exclusion of most other things save finally playing some of the games I've meant to play since the fall semester began. Moreover, my XBox 360 went to the great red-rimmed nether-realm this morning, so the time to play 360 games won't begin for a while yet.

Perhaps most helpfully of all, the students in the course are calling me to make more persuasive, more interesting, and more comprehensive formulations of all the themes of this blog, and I'd be foolish and even negligent not to try to bring some of those formulations over.

Thanks, Dan, and thanks also to everyone who's encouraged me to keep going. Tomorrow, some further thoughts that have been brewing about the values of ancient epic, and the values of games of violent glory.

Living Epic, the online course, live for registration!

Thanks to the wonderful folks at the UConn Center for Continuing Studies, we've got a very nice gateway into the first tangible effort of the Video Games and Human Values Initiative, my short course in January 2009 for teachers, parents, and anyone else who's interested, "Living Epic: The Power of Video Games in Culture from the Ancient to Modern World." Suitable for a virtual stocking stuffer, this course will be, above all, a great way for us to start reaching an audience of teachers who want to think about the educational potential of games in a new way.

To be completely clear, here's where you register.

The initiative itself now has a spiffy new Ning social network. I beseech you, if you like what we're up to, to head over, join up, and start talking about the future of this conversation. Most importantly, we're starting to talk about the proto-symposium, "Defining Play," inspired by the wonderful work of Corvus Elrod.