Pragmatic Paragon, 14 March: planning

My plan for today's session: take the Pragmatic Paragon in where the Hasty Renegade went yesterday; don't get lost this time; see whether not getting lost makes me feel more heroic.

Pre-session question: what is the importance of the second playthrough? Is there a sense in which a second playthrough is actually somehow a "real" first playthrough? Focus for that question: the issue of getting lost. Because I spent so much time being lost in my Hasty Renegade session last night, it feels like today's Pragmatic Paragon session will be my "real" introduction to the performance materials.

Is there then a "rehearsal" dynamic at work in practomime that I haven't noticed yet?

The triumphs and sorrows of Hasty Renegade

I always forget that whatever career I play first, the dominant feeling of much of that career will be frustration, as I run around trying to figure out where the next objective is. Thus, as I moved towards the completion of an important diplomatic cum military mission to rescue a Turian VIP, I spent ten minutes running in circles shouting "Why don't I have a map? Why don't I have a map?"

I did, thankfully, arrive in the nick of time.

One thing I notice looking at the "War Situation" through my Renegade's eyes; I feel real despair based on the amount of time it will take to build the resources, and the learning curve involved in figuring out how to do so. Along with that feeling comes the idea that it's well to encounter these odds with this character: she's tough enough to take it, and tough enough even to lose. I have the feeling that I wouldn't want to let my Paragons try to find their ways through this maze of mechanics.

It's this interference of player concerns and performative concerns, of course, that I'm trying to analyze. I take my inspiration from the way the bards of Iliad and Odyssey (particularly the latter) let their own concerns as bards shape their tellings of the stories of their heroes. Immersion is nice, but if we want to understand how it works, we have to see it in the context of performances by players who live outside the world into which their performances immerse them; pretending that there's some, I don't know, "Magic Circle" that prevents my frustrating at not having a map from mattering within the gamespace would be silly.

The sieve of reflection

As this new way to blog about living epic emerges, one thing that seems to make sense is to intersperse occasional reflective posts that will function as a sort of intellectual sieve, and help figure out what if anything from from the past day or so of play is worth keeping around for analysis.

Some candidates:

• Hasty Renegade has always had a very interesting relationship with Garrus, and so seeing him alive last night (I was truly convinced that he was one of the four I'd lost in this career) was a really narratively significant moment, but in a way that took me out of the diegetic situation, since Hasty Renegade herself obviously couldn't have forgotten that Garrus was alive. In an ideal medium, perhaps, it would be possible for me to play in such a way that my surprise at seeing Garrus somehow did get communicated into my performance, but that wouldn't change the bifurcation of performance and player--the reason this moment was interesting and potentially enlightening for my understanding of my performance and of who I am becoming as a result of it was that my extra-performative surprise resonated with the feeling I've always attributed to Hasty Renegade of professional admiration of Garrus from a distance, tempered with a healthy dose of rivalry. Since they're both snipers, they very rarely go on missions together, and when Hasty Renegade explored Garrus' dialogue tree in Mass Effect 2 I was conscious of reacting with a mixture of sympathy and renegade-ish disdain for his letting his emotions get the better of him no matter how much he pretended not to be. This dynamic is potentially interesting in the way it provides a perspective on interaction between inside the story and outside the story through player-performance.
• "Nonrepresentative" keeps bubbling to the top of my mind. My question is "Nonrepresentative of what?" My preliminary answer "the tradition." For me at least this seems to be the first direct evidence of communication of a tradition that in the days of the bards was associated above all with two things: professionalism, and the Muses. To tell me that my Mass Effect 3 performance is nonrepresentative is to tell me that I lack a relation to some font of game-performance inspiration. Many blog-posts in that vein, I think, to come.

Planning my performances

Career 3 ("Perfect Paragon") is going to be my cautious/highly-elaborated career. I'll take every assignment, search every bit of space that seems to have a reasonable likelihood of yielding materiel to help the cause.

Career 1 ("Hasty Renegade") is going to be my "How much can I salvage?" career. I'll go straight for the jugular and continue her tradition of cutting corners in the interest of getting results.

Career 2 ("Pragmatic Paragon") is going to be the career I try to play for verisimilitude. I'll attempt to react quickly, in accordance with my ideas of what I myself would do, in the interest of trying to find my "real" relationship to the character, outside of the kind of analysis I want to try to do on 1 and 3, and more importantly among the careers.

That said, it probably makes sense to play out career 2 before I do the more involved 3 and 1. Right now, I'm in Perfect Paragon, cautiously exploring the galaxy map and considering the Cerberus outpost Admiral Hackett has advised my PC to deal with. I'll probably see if I can take care of that, then switch to Pragmatic Paragon.

I'm still on Narrative combat.

"A nonrepresentative Mass Effect experience"

Those are the words with which Mass Effect 3's description of "Narrative" difficulty closes, in the game's options-menu.

When one of my students, already tens of hours into the game on Thursday (when I was perhaps an hour in on career paths 1 and 2), told me about the two "Narrative" settings--which I hadn't seen, and hadn't read about since I have such a hard time distinguishing hype from actual news that I no longer read about games ahead of time unless (see HALO) I'm critically invested in the hype itself--I wanted to cancel class and drive home instantly to set my game on these settings and see how it made me feel.

I still haven't used the "No Decisions" dialogue option, located under a section of Options labelled "Narrative," which, if I understand correctly, turns conversations into cutscenes, but I played for an hour yesterday with the "Narrative" combat option.

I loved it. When a homeric bard sang a battle-lay, the spears went straight through the warriors' hearts, unless the battle were a very distinctive one--you know, a boss-fight. The bards knew that their practomimes made their audiences feel more heroic that way, just as makers of westerns and war-movies know that enemies always die quickly.

I suspect, by the same token, that I'll hate "No Decisions" dialogue, which, at least according to my initial reaction to the idea of the mechanic, would have the opposite effect on my feeling about the performance-materials of the game. I plan to save one of my careers, turn that option on today for half an hour or so, then load the save and say goodbye to "No Decisions" dialogue forever. I can't imagine that BioWare isn't tracking how many people are using which options, so I'll be very curious as to whether we either hear anything about the statistics or, maybe more importantly, "No Decisions" dialogue returns in future games.

"Narrative" combat is not new; both BioWare and Bethesda games have always had ways to make things easier on older players' aging reflexes. What is new is calling the lowest setting "Narrative," and characterizing that setting as "nonrepresentative." I can't wait to unpack this mechanic further, but one wonders whether the first bard to sing about Achilles' withdrawal from battle, and the first bard to sing about Odysseus lying, cheating, and stealing his way home, were similarly characterized as "nonrepresentative."

Why I want to trace these Mass Effect careers

Here's what I'm most interested in. To what extent does one career actually make my performance either 1) substantively different (by "substantively" I mean different in what gets coded into a save file) or 2) emotionally different--that is, in the way it feels to me--in another career, and why, and how?  I can already see that an irrevocable decision made in one career makes it feel very different to make a different choice in another career, even with something as simple as the Normandy's surgeon.

I suppose that in the back of my mind there's a looming question of a nearly odious nature: with Mass Effect 3, has BioWare created a work unlike any previous work of art in the combination of the plasticity of its performance materials and the irrevocability of the most important choices it affords?

Mass Effect career 3 choices

I don't know if this will be valuable even to me, but why not?

• "Acquired war asset" Diana Allers (journalist)
• Went to hospital before council to see Ashley (couldn't even bear not to do this on my Renegade; on that career it's Kaiden, not Ashley, who's alive, and I'm considering romancing him)
• Saw Dr. Chakwas alive (dead on my other careers, I think) in the hospital. Took her as Normandy's surgeon. Can't deny that that felt awesome. In particular, it felt awesome precisely because Chakwas is dead in my other careers, and that I didn't take a surgeon at all in career 2.
• Thinking I may start a fourth career to see what the default for the non-player of the first two games is like.
• Went into Bailey's office before council and saw my old journalist nemesis. Saul Tigh as Bailey is something I'd love to spend some time thinking about.
• Discovered, and made extensive use of, the X button to get through long cutscenes.
• Did not use Renegade power on journalist nemesis; was typing and failed to use Paragon power and so had to re-load and go through hospital and council again.
• Bought all volumes of poetry at hospital Sirta terminal.
• Took the Paragon power, and am overjoyed. Asked journalist-nemesis, to whom I'd been nice in ME and whom I'd punched in ME2 to "keep asking the hard questions."

Am using the voice commands as much as possible in this career. I still need time, I think, but being able to perform a version of the lines is really interesting, and may be a literal game-changer for me.

Living Epic--making it really live?

Yet another idea for re-purposing this blog in the wake of my activity on Play the Past: keeping track of my actual living of epic, beginning with Mass Effect 3. My ME3 careers:

• Female renegade, soldier, sniper with fully-developed adrenalin rush. She cut corners in ME2 and ended up losing four of her companions. Romanced no one.
• Male paragon, adept, spammer of Singularity. Messed up at the end of ME2 and similarly lost four companions. Romanced Liara in ME and no one in ME2.
• Male paragon, adept, spammer of Warp. Got the 100% ending of ME2. Romanced Liara in ME and Jack in ME2.

Here's why I think this will be worth doing: I don't know of any other accounts of multiple parallel performances specifically directed at analyzing the performance materials and their relation to the actual performances.

The first thing I'm interested in talking about is the "Narrative" combat difficulty, which, I'm told by the game itself, gives "a nonrepresentative Mass Effect experience." It may be nonrepresentative, but when you're playing 3 careers, it's really great.

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.

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.

Achilles' phat lewtz

A fun version of some of the stuff I've been talking about in the Living Epic Main Quest came out today in the Escapist.

While I'm posting, I should apologize for not posting over the past few weeks--between teaching and the exciting-but-oh-so-time-consuming labor of synthesizing the Center for Video Games and Human Values from hydrogen, I haven't been able to formulate a post that I'd want anyone to read.

But things are certainly proceeding nicely both towards the courses in Winter and Spring and towards the rising of the center from the fertile imaginations of so many amazing people with their different approaches to games-and-culture. As always, more to come!

The bard's role, divided

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next time: communal immersion, ancient and modern.

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?

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.

Was I wrong to praise mainstream, console games? (In response to comments on my post “On the profundity of Halo and Bioshock” (1))

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 first. I invite my interlocutors to engage me on each heading separately, in the interest of clarity of discussion.



Since I’m just getting back into the swing of things, I’ll start with a couple to which I really have no response other than “Guilty as charged.”

1. The charge of praising unworthy examples of the art of video game, by calling Halo and Bioshock profound.

2. The charge of praising console gaming.

As I’ve said in my preliminary responses, I think a fair reading of my post demonstrates that I’m not claiming that the terrible twosome of Halo and Bioshock are more profound than anything else, including a restaurant menu, if that menu happens to be read in the right context. As several commenters noted, the Iliad (along with a great many classic works which were originally popular entertainment) tends to be mistaken for being something that it’s not, with respect to profundity.

I think the combination of readers’ split-second reactions to the juxtaposition of the word “profundity” and the work Iliad, and the works Halo and Bioshock, may explain how they responded to the post. However that may be, I stand by my basic point, that these games, despite their flaws, including any flaw inherent to their platform, have what I would describe as profound moments. The definition of “profound” is however, finally, very hard to agree upon, and it may be that you’ll in the end simply have to criticize my taste, if not dispute it. (I’m going to handle the matter of how I think that profundity comes about under a different heading.)

The sub-charge of illiteracy, made explicitly by at least one commenter, and a subtext of several others’ remarks, follows nicely here. I would seek to challenge the notion that I have not played a lot of very good games, several of which struck me as more profound, in their ways, than Halo and Bioshock. I cannot claim to have played all the games brought up by commenters, but for every phenomenon inherent to the art of video games that they describe in relation to a game I haven’t played, I have been able to associate a version of the phenomenon in a game I have played; that is, I know what they’re talking about.

But in the the end, characterizing me as illiterate seems to me simply an ad hominem pseudo-argument to justify a failure to engage my claims. If I say something true about video games, why does it matter whether I’ve played Pong? We all know the feeling of having a professor tell us we’re not worthy of talking about work X because we haven’t read work Y or critic Z. Sometimes it’s absolutely true that the point we’re trying to make is vitiated by information we haven’t considered. More frequently, though, the professor is doing that because he doesn’t think it’s worth his time to consider the matter from a new perspective. I try not to do things that way.

Commenters have brought in examples from several different games, in particular Fallout and Shadow of the Colossus, but to my mind these examples, while they lead to fascinating further discussion, aren’t precisely on point with respect to my post, since my post is about a particular aspect of games that connects them to ancient epic, and is not in any way exclusive—that is, I’m not saying that anyone else is wrong about what’s profound because I’m right about it; I think there’s a whole bunch of room for profundity all over the place.

On the other hand, as I continue with the response, I’ll be venturing into territory that wasn’t really covered in my original post, and where I think these examples will be very relevant indeed. There, I’ll come up against the arguments of commenters and in a few cases submit that they’re not looking at the matter in the most helpful possible way. Here are the other responses to my post that I plan to handle in the coming few days.

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

4. The matter of choice vs. interactivity: here.

5. The problem of the identity of the artist: player or developer?: here.

Thanks again for this great discussion.

Living Epic--the Main Quest (map of posts)

The post series mapped out below is what I call the "Main Quest" of this blog--my argument that adventure video games are actually ancient.

The Living Epic series:

• What the title means, and what it implies
• What about game studies?
• The sandbox of epic and the rails of GTA (1)
• The sandbox of epic and the rails of GTA (2)
• Stories and sandboxes, stories and rails
• The sandbox-to-rails continuum
• The interactivity of the Homerids (1)
• The interactivity of the Homerids (2)
• The interactivity of the Homerids (3)
• The interactivity of the Homerids (4)
• The Choice of Achilles and the choices of Bioshock
• The profundity of Halo and Bioshock (and the Iliad) with read-worthy follow-up here
• The mysterious dual: the smoking gun of interactivity
• The bard's audience: participation and community
• The bard's role, divided
• Communal immersion, ancient and modern
• Makin' kleos, makin' fanboys
• Phaeacian immersion