Communal immersion, ancient and modern

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.



After Odysseus gets what he wants from Demodocus at the end of Book 8 of the Homeric Odyssey, and Alcinous has stopped Demodocus from singing so that he can ask why the hell Odysseus is crying into a curtain, Odysseus does, to a certain extent, fulfill his part of the bargain he made with the bard to sing the bard’s praises if the bard sang his. In the process, he gives us what I would hold up as a candidate for the first depiction of immersion in the Western literary tradition:

Surely indeed it is a beautiful thing to listen to a singer
such as this one here, like the gods in his singing;
for I, at least, think there is no practice that is more pleasurable
than when happiness arises among all the people,
and the feasters throughout the palace listen to a singer,
sitting in order. . .
But your spirit was inclined to ask me about my mournful
sufferings, so that I must mourn and grieve even more.
What then first, what last should I recite to you?

It’s the “sitting in order” listening to the singer and its connection to the pleasure of the occasion (a superlative pleasure at that, since Odysseus says there’s no other practice that has more pleasure), that I think makes it immersion. We know this image well from our own culture as well—it’s the same thing that happens at a really good movie, when a hundred people are sitting in their seats not noticing that there are other people next to them, not even aware that they themselves are breathing, so transported are they by the story.

There are plenty of other moments in the Odyssey that I could point to as filling out this picture, above all the moment when Odysseus pauses in his own story and the Phaeacians “stay, stricken to silence,” but the picture of a community immersed is the one I want to focus on, because it seems at first so different from what goes on in our game-rooms or at our computers, when we’re playing a game like Oblivion or Halo.

There may be something to be mourned, there, if we stop getting together to sit in order throughout the palace, but I doubt we will stop (especially since sports are going to go on, seeing that we have bodies, WALL*E notwithstanding, and people aren’t going to stop liking to act out plays).

Much more important, however, is the assured survival of the fundamentally imaginative, creative, and positive construction of community through immersion. What Odysseus is talking about is a cultural practice that had a crucial role in making the just-starting-out ancient Greek city-state (the famous idea of the polis) what it was, and what it became. The word I translate “pleasure,” is kharis which also, and more radically, means “reciprocal benefit.” In the early city-state, kharis made the community go round—people bearing kharis towards one another made up the fabric of the growing society.

That kharis is there in gaming culture. I would suggest that it’s more there in gaming culture than it is in film culture (though cineasts form some strong communities too!). The connection between the imaginative activity of gaming and the bonds we gamers form with one another is almost mystical. Those bonds are expressed the more strongly in the strong things we will occasionally say to one another, and hopefully be sorry afterward. Those bonds also enliven us to an extent so great that we will sometimes find our commitment to our gaming communities coming into conflict with our commitment to the communities of our families. Is it not so?

“Almost mystical,” I wrote, but not completely mystical, I would say. I believe that that connection is susceptible of analysis, and I intend to analyze it. Good thing for me Odysseus is intent, as the story of his adventures begins, on making it clear why he thinks he can out-bard the bard, and tell a story that produces an immersion even deeper than Demodocus’ produces, and that will form precisely the community that will worship the ground Odysseus walks on, and bring him home.

Next time: it’s not all about you, Odysseus! (Or is it?)

Normal gamers in Plato's republic

With this post, I'm going to start writing about my experience with, and notions about, adult gamer communities like SeasonedGamers.com (hereinafter SG) and GamerswithJobs.com (hereinafter GWJ). For all intents and purposes, this will probably be a series, too, but I'm getting a little tired of having to put boilerplate at the top of nearly every post I write, so I won't call it a "series."

One thing worth noting about the basic idea, though, is that it continues on from one of my pieces in The Escapist, “Creating the Normal Gamer.” I didn't get to say as much as I wanted to in that piece about what makes these communities special, and a blog seems like an ideal format to sketch out the rest of what I was on about.

Most importantly, this bunch of posts will give me the opportunity to talk about the ancient connection that I couldn't quite work into the original piece. Doing that will in turn give me another point of reference when I bend the Living Epic series back around to talk about community as it really works in gaming culture.

So my basic point in “Creating the Normal Gamer” was that the internet communities where adult gamers hang out are creating a new kind of gamer, a gamer I called, somewhat ironically—though not without a specific purpose—the normal gamer. These gamers hang out in such forums so that they don't have to wade through pages and pages of flames and flame-bait in such places as the official forums of the games they love. The specific purpose of using the phrase “normal gamer” was to express my belief that the reason the adult gaming communities have come together is to create a new version of normality, within their borders. That new version of “the normal” pushes out the legions of gamers who do the things we all don't like. Normality is of course always relative; the very centrality of gaming to our version of normality within places like SG makes us abnormal within most of adult mainstream culture. We don't call the gamers outside our walls “abnormal,” but that's more-or-less the way we treat them.

The classical connection is that Plato, a guy I've been coming to admire more and more since graduate school, a period when I loathed him with a passion that burned hotter than a thousand Helioses, was in my opinion trying to create his own adult gamer community. He was doing that, I think, because he couldn't figure out how else he should deal with the fact that mainstream Athens had decided to execute that original indy gamer--and the designer of Plato's own favorite game, elenchus—Socrates.

Am I actually saying that philosophy was originally a kind of video game (I'd never suggest that modern philosophy is, by the way)? Did you really need to ask?

This is going to take a while, I see, now that I'm this far in. I'm strong, though. I'm not going to call it a series.

If you happen actually to be reading this post, I'd love to hear what the name Plato means to you. The reason I loathed him in graduate school was that I thought he was a philosopher like Kant was a philosopher—you know, incomprehensible. He's not, though. Someday I hope I get a chance to give the “Gaming Plato” course that will serve as a companion to “Gaming Homer,” and tell you (if you're interested) that when Plato seems incomprehensible, that's actually because he's making fun of people like Kant.

So the thing I want to say about SG and GWJ and places like them is that when we hang out there and talk about, well, just about anything, from eschatology to scatology, we're actually doing a kind of philosophy—Plato's kind, the kind where you figure out how to be a good person. I've got a ton of examples to bring to the table, but there's one kind of conversation we have there that makes me think it's really philosophy: the fights we have about cheating. When we discuss whether a certain behavior is or is not something an SGer or a GWJer would do, we're having a dialogue about ethical philosophy, which is where Plato got started.

The bard's audience: participation and community

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



If the ancient epic bard had the same ability as a gamer to shape the story as he saw fit, to add for example an ambassador to the “Embassy to Achilles,” (see here) what about the bard’s audience? We’ve already seen that Phemius, the bard of Ithaca was, according to the Homeric bard of Odyssey Book 1, looking to sing the song that would please his audience most; that is, an ancient bard had an audience, and that audience had a degree of control over his song. The bard could tell the story as he liked, but he had to worry about whether it would help him make a living, and he was thus part of a larger community of people, all of whom were participating in the creation of the epic.

Isn’t there something here that breaks the comparison between ancient epic and video games? If the bard had to work with his audience, the way, say, a professional storyteller or an improvisational comic does today, doesn’t that mean that the gaming comparison has a fatal flaw, because it doesn’t account for that community element? Isn’t gaming, after all, an isolating activity? If the gamer is like a bard, isn’t he like a bard who never gets to perform, never brings his tales alive? Isn’t gaming, then, the death of the bardic tradition instead of its new life?

You won’t be surprised that I’m going to argue against that point of view. In this post and in the next few posts, I’m going to take my argument about interactivity into new territory. That territory is defined by two key terms that I think are fundamentally, though surprisingly, related: community and immersion. I’m going to show that the living epic model actually uncovers an aspect of gaming that usually gets covered up by what gaming looks like—individual people sitting on couches and desk chairs, wrapped up in moving images on their screens. I’m going to show that instead of dooming my comparison, the matter of the bard’s audience actually makes that comparison absolutely crucial.

I’m going to demonstrate, that is, that video games, through the very immersiveness that makes them look isolating have an amazing power to create communities as strong and constructive as the ones created by ancient epic. To put it simply, the community function of immersion, the way that immersive storytelling like epic and video games creates relationships between artists and audiences, and among audience-members, doesn’t—can’t—go away. That’s why game-companies have had to start hiring community-managers.

More on that part of the equation—the gamers-forming-unstoppable-communities part—later. For now, I want to look at the relationship between the bard and his audience through the myth of the epic tradition, and to begin to compare it with the relationship between game-makers and their audiences, the gamers, through the myths of the games they make.

I think the best way to do that is to go back to the moment in Book 8 of the Odyssey that we looked at in light of the sandbox-to-rails continuum a few weeks ago. In this passage, we find Odysseus, who’s in the audience of the bard Demodocus in the quasi-fantasy land of Phaeacia, investing to an extraordinary extent in Demodocus’ heroic songs. He sends over to Demodocus a really nice cut of meat, and then says to him:

Demodocus I praise you above all mortals.
Either the Muse, daughter of Zeus taught you, or Apollo.
For all too well, in order, you sing the trouble of the Achaeans,
All the things they did and sufered and all the things the Achaeans toiled at,
as if you yourself were there, or heard from another.
But come, change it up, and sing the making of the horse—
the wooden one—the one Epeius made with Athena,
which once heroic Odysseus brought as a trick to the city-center,
having filled it with the men who sacked Troy.
If you tell me this, giving due attention,
immediately I’ll proclaim to all people
that the god willingly awarded you a divine song.

To understand where I’m going to take this passage now, you need to know that when Demodocus sings this song, Odysseus weeps. When Odysseus weeps, the king of the Phaeacians asks him who he is. When Alkinoos asks Odysseus who he is, Odysseus responds (we’ll look at this in detail in a future post) that he was enjoying Demodocus’ song, but, well, OK, he’ll tell his own story if Alkinoos insists. Very, very long story short, Odysseus’ tale is so cool and compelling that the Phaeacians don’t just take him home but also give him, literally, a king’s ransom in gifts to take with him to rebuild his shattered house.

In the passage I quoted, we see Odysseus telling Demodocus exactly what story Odysseus wants to hear, with confidence that Demodocus will do it, and help Odysseus accomplish his more or less propagandistic goal. It couldn’t ever have been like that in real Archaic Greece, but it could sure have been close, if you were a lord with a cut of meat to give. Odysseus uses Demodocus’ technical, bardic skill the way a gamer uses the technical skill of a game-developer, embodied in a game. Odysseus shares the story of his prowess with the Phaeacian audience the way a gamer shares his version of the game-story with other gamers.

It all comes about through immersion. More on that two posts down the line. Next time I’ll say more about how game-makers actually inherit the hard part of the bard’s job while gamers get the fun part.

The Center for Video Games and Human Values

The Center for Video Games and Human Values, based at the University of Connecticut, serves as an interdisciplinary nexus for online courses and online scholarly activities like symposia and research fellowships. All these activities are designed to advance our understanding of how video games and their culture can shape our values constructively for the enrichment of society.

I will offer the center's pilot courses, "Living Epic" (a short course for high school teachers and parents) and "Gaming Homer" (an undergraduate credit course) in the winter and spring of 2009. For more information on the courses, click through the links below or contact me at amphiaraus@msn.com

Click through these links to get involved in the center!:

• Classroom 2.0 group announcement
• Classroom 2.0 group
• CVGHV wiki
• Facebook page (fan us!)

Since my friend Michael Abbott is at the Games, Learning, and Society conference this weekend, and has just put up a remarkable post announcing the revolution that’s emerging from the work of James Paul Gee, and since there’s also a story in the New York Times today about how the price of fuel is creating a tipping point for online college education, it seems a felicitous moment to make a relatively formal announcement about what I’ve been putting nearly all my energy into for the last few months.

As a medium that embraces the humanities and social sciences, technology, and the worlds of business and education, video games demand analysis from multiple angles and on multiple levels. We believe that video games have grown to extraordinary cultural prominence without benefit of such a truly interdisciplinary analysis; in particular, video games are a dominant cultural force among students now in the midst of their secondary and post-secondary education, only a few of whose teachers have any understanding of how gaming is shaping their students.

To meet the need for such analysis, the center will offer a slate of online courses aimed at several inter-related groups: high school teachers and parents, and their advanced students, undergraduates in various disciplines, and interested people in the gaming culture, all of whom share a fundamental interest in ensuring that video gaming both increasingly earns the societal respect it deserves and increasingly deserves that respect. In order to address video games in their broad effect on culture and to engage gamers in its discussions, the center will advocate an approach that addresses popular and ambitious games like Halo, Grand Theft Auto, and World of Warcraft, demonstrating for example on the one hand their cultural relationship to Homeric epic and on the other their educational relationship to the way students who play them learn.

The center’s first course will be a two-week online short course for high school teachers and parents in January of 2009, called “Living Epic: Video Games and the Epic Tradition.” An undergraduate credit course, CAMS 3208, will follow in the spring semester, and the center’s first full year of operation will begin in the fall semester of 2009 with several courses offered by the first fellows of the center. My colleagues in this endeavor include Michael Abbott and Jeff Howard, the author of Quests, and if we can make our schedules come out right, Michael and Jeff will offer two of our first courses.

These courses will involve in-game class work, in the form of in-game laboratories and in-game discussions; they will also involve contacts with the people who are creating the games we explore and analyze. To that end, the center is already forming partnerships with developers and publishers; these partnerships will be announced as the kick-off date of the pilot course approaches.

At the same time, the center will provide a (virtual) place for scholarly research and discussion about the relation of video games to values. Fellowships from the center will support individual research projects at the intersection of video gaming and scholars’ own disciplines, while the interdisciplinary nature of the center will provide extraordinary opportunities to strengthen those projects through the cross-fertilization of ideas from other fields. An ongoing virtual symposium, with a guest symposiast from a field such as game development or game journalism, on a topic like “Immersion” or “Character in Games,” will involve contributions from the fellows, their students, and the center’s alumni; the proceedings of this symposium will be compiled and published once a year.

We believe that video games’ greatest innovations in education, business, the social sciences, the humanities, and most of all in games themselves will arise from a deeper understanding of games’ connections among all these disciplines. When scholars and students alike understand these connections better, they will be better prepared to advance the state of gaming as it relates to their own fields.

The center will exist almost entirely online, and we hope to make that online existence at once a place to gather a community of learning and a laboratory for the study of what games are and can be. Using open-source tools like those from Sun Microsystem’s Projects Wonderland and Darkstar, we will create and then build-up a virtual center that will serve as the focus for a growing community of fellows, students, and alumni, to carry on the center’s work of learning both through online teaching and through online discussion.

If you’re interested in enrolling in the center’s course offerings, or want to inquire about applying for one of the center’s first fellowships, please make contact with me at amphiaraus@msn.com. The details of the fellowships in particular are still coming together, and there’s a great deal of room for innovative ideas in how they might work. A formal fellowship application, on the other hand, will probably be available in January.

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
  

(Gaming) Homer Course-design (3): Units (syllabus, more or less)

This is a post in a series taken from the preliminary version of the course-design document for CAMS 3208. Dig in and see what you think! Please do let me know if you’ve got suggestions for other activities, or if you think anything needs clarification. I really want this course to be something gamers with the slightest interest in the ancient world, and classicists with the slightest interest in gaming, are drooling to take. :D

At some point, probably in January, I'll post the actual syllabus for the course, but the following is pretty close to what it's going to be. If you're feeling really clicky, you can correlate the letters A-E in parentheses with the goals and objectives in the first post in the series, and the readings with the list of activities in the second. Think of it as a game! ;-)

Unit 1. The bardic occasion, then and now (A, B) (3 weeks)

• Activities: (reading) Iliad 2, Odyssey 8-9, Lord, Singer of Tales; (gaming) Play a level or quest three times, preferably in co-op; (discussion) in-game discussion; develop interview questions for developers.
• Sub-objectives: 1) describe the bardic occasion; 2) summarize oral formulaic theory; 3) produce a report of a gaming session as a bardic occasion.

Unit 2. The Aristeia and levelling (A, B, C, D) (2 weeks)

• Activities: (reading) comparison of aristeiai, Nagy, Homeric Questions; (playing) level an RPG hero; (discussion) in-game discussion; conduct and analyze interview; proxy visit to MMO developer studio.
• Sub-objectives: 1) describe the practice of the aristeia, with examples from Homeric epic; 2) produce a report of a videogame aristeia, with reference to ancient material.

Unit 3. Gear (B, C, D, E) (2 weeks)

• Activities: (reading) Iliad 18, Selected passages; (gaming) Equip Master Chief correctly for the situation, gain gear for an RPG character; (discussion) in-game discussion.
• Sub-objectives: 1) describe the function of arms and armor in Homeric epic; 2) produce a report of a videogame despoiling and resulting combat, with reference to ancient material
  sub-obejctive; 3) produce a report of RPG gear aggregation, with reference to ancient material.

Unit 4. Ethical critique (C, D, E) (2 weeks)

• Activities: (reading) Iliad 9, 24; Odyssey 11, 22; Nagy; (gaming) play an RPG scenario light and dark; play Halo “save the marines” moment; (discussion) in-game discussion; develop interview questions, conduct and analyze interview.
• Sub-objectives: 1:) descibe the ethical critiques mounted by the Iliad and the Odyssey; 2) describe a potential affordance of videogames for ethical critique; 3) produce a report on an experience of an ethical videogame situation, with reference to ancient material.

Unit 5. Minigames (C, D, E) (1 week)

• Activities: (reading) Iliad 23, Odyssey 8; Nagy; (gaming) Lego Star Wars; (discussion)in-game discussion.
• Sub-objectives: 1) describe the functioning of embedded harmonizing reprsentations like funeral games in Homeric epic; 2) produce a report on an experience of a harmonizing minigame with reference to ancient material.

Unit 6. Psychology/Sociology of Epic (C, D, E) (1 week)

• Activities: (reading) Iliad 20, Odyssey 23; (gaming) Halo 2 Arbiter level; (culture) forum observation; (discussion) forum discussion.
• Sub-objective: 1) describe the psychological model proposed by the Homeric epics; 2) describe the pscyhological model proposed by an adventure videogame, with reference to ancient material; 3) produce a report on observations of psychology and/or sociology in a gaming community, with reference to ancient material.

Unit 7. Anti-heroism (C, D, E) (1 week)

• Activities: (reading) Odyssey 11, Iliad 22; (gaming) Grand Theft Auto series; (culture) forum observation; (discussion) in-game discussion.
• Sub-objective: 1) describe the figure of the anti-hero in Homeric epic; 2) produce a report on an experience of playing as an anti-hero, with reference to ancient material; 3) produce a report on anti-heroic behavior on a gaming community forum, with reference to ancient material.

Unit 8. Community and Polis (A, C, D, E) (2 weeks)

• Activities: (reading) Odyssey 9; Plato Apology and selections from Republic, selections from Herodotus and Thucydides; Nagy; (culture) forum observation; (discussion) in-game discussion; design, conduct, analyze developer-community-manager interview.
• Sub-objectives: 1) describe the role of Homeric epic in the rise of the Greek polis in the 7th and 6th Centuries BCE; 2) produce a report on findings about the role of community in gaming culture, with reference to ancient material; 3) produce a speculative report on the affordances of adventure videogames for community-building in the modern world, wirh reference to ancient material.

The Alexandrian Mandate

Leigh Alexander has a great post up at SVGL that will hopefully galvanize the resolve of those who want to follow her call (which fits well, actually with what N'Gai Croal is doing these days).

As I wrote in Leigh's comments, I think she's a little hard on COD4, which I think deserves a lot of praise for doing what it does. Weird story from left field: Herodotus tells us that a tragedian named Phrynichus was fined by the Athenians for putting on a tragedy about a real disaster (the Capture of Miletus, but that's not important now), because the audience felt that the suffering was too familiar. It seems to me that distance is necessary, and helpful, a lot of the time.

But the basic drive to which Leigh calls us, to become better gamers, gamers who keep thinking about how our games, despite being played in an imaginary space, have everything to do with what we are and do in the "real world," is something we need to think much more about.

(Gaming) Homer Course-design (2): Activities

This is a post in a series taken from the preliminary version of the course-design document for CAMS 3208. Dig in and see what you think! Please do let me know if you’ve got suggestions for other activities, or if you think anything needs clarification. I really want this course to be something gamers with the slightest interest in the ancient world, and classicists with the slightest interest in gaming, are drooling to take. :D

Here's the planned range of course activities for the course. I'm incredibly excited not just about the cool individual items (in-game labs and discussions, interviews with designers and community-managers, internet forum observation), but by the way they're all going to fit together in the matrix for the course, so that every unit (the next post in this series will have the specific units) is going to have a mixture of enlightening and fun stuff to do.

Readings: Homeric Iliad, Homeric Odyssey, A. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambrdige, MA: 1960); G. Nagy Homeric Questions (Cambridge, MA: 1996)

Lectures by podcast and video podcast

In-game labs in Halo, Fable, Lego Star Wars, and The Lord of the Rings Online

In-game discussions in The Lord of the Rings Online

Internet forum discussions

Internet forum labs through observation of discussion on gaming web-forums

Designing, conducting, and analyzing interviews with developers’ personnel (incl. community-managers) about what it means to be an interactive storyteller

Visits by proxy (video podcast) to developers’ studios

Quibus lusoribus bono?

My provocation of the field of game studies and its practitioners has appeared today in The Escapist. My heart quails a bit at facing the consequences of this kind of piece, but while I admit some hyperbole in the cause of getting a conversation going, I stand by my central point, that the attempt to marry game criticism to game design is not a good idea.

At any rate, I'm in the process of trying very hard to put other people's money where my mouth is, and thereby to keep that mouth flapping. This is as good a time as any to announce that there's a Center for Video Games and Human Values in the works, for which my course "(Gaming) Homer" is actually the pilot. The center will be based at UConn, but its true existence will be entirely online, and it will include scholars of game studies, should they want to participate, alongside a truly interdisciplinary mix of the Humanities, the Social Sciences, Fine Arts, Education, and Business.

I'm pleased to say that Michael Abbott and Jeff Howard are my extramural collaborators on this project. I'm hoping they'll keep me from saying anything quite so provocative in the future, since they're much more sanguine about game studies than I am!

My paper trail, so far

If you're interested in the issues I'm bringing up here, you might want to take a look at my two existing articles in The Escapist: this one, on Halo and Virgil's Aeneid; and this one, on the maturation of gamer culture and the birth of the Normal Gamer.

Another piece should be coming out at the beginning of May: a critique of what I see as Game Studies scholars' failure to take up the task of leading gaming culture into the mainstream.

“Living Epic”: What the title means, and what it implies

This is the first 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 title of this blog gives a pretty good idea of what I’m trying to do here. I want to announce that epic is alive, and that there are people creating epics like the “real” epics, the ancient ones, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Beowulf, and many others, every day. These people are video gamers, and I’m going to show that their culture is actually not new, but rather as ancient as those ancient epics.

The title is also meant to suggest that you can live epic, too, if you’ll only play more video games.

Imagine a gamer—let’s make him a 16-year old boy—on a couch in his family’s TV room in suburban Boston, his eyes fixed on the screen, a controller in his hands. He is attentive to a story of valiant deeds and eternal glory unfolding not just on the screen but in his mind and through the way he manipulates the action by playing the game. That story, a story he knows very well in its outline, and may know very well even in its specific detail, is unfolding in a way it never has before, because the gamer himself is helping it unfold, and he couldn’t do it the same way anyone else has done it, or even the same way he himself has done it before, if he tried.

Now imagine a young herdsman 2800 years ago, an inhabitant of Salamis,an island off the coast of Athens. He’s at a feast in his lord’s house, and the banquet is nearly over. There’s a singer with a lyre (think guitar) in his hands sitting to the side of the hall, and the young man’s eyes are fixed upon him. The singer is playing and singing an old, old story, but he’s playing it in a way the young man has never heard it before. It’s a tale of valiant deeds and eternal glory, and it unfolds not just in the singer’s words, but in the young man’s mind, and in the singer’s voice and the way he strikes the strings with his plectrum (think pick), made out of bone, or even ivory.

Now magine that the herdsman is so overhwhelmed by the experience that he becomes an apprentice of the singer, and learns to sing and play the lyre himself, well enough to tell his own version of the story. Now he is able to decide how the heroes do their deeds and win their glory, but the storytelling itself remains the same, even if as he sings to his own audience he couldn’t sing it the same way his master did, or he himself has sung it, if he tried.

Through the stories the young men are transported into a world of heroic myth, where warriors fight more fearlessly than real warriors could ever fight, and quarrel with one another, and laugh sometimes, and even cry sometimes. The warriors deliberate, and make choices, and suffer and enjoy those choices’ consequences. For the young men, the gamer and the ancient herdsman, these heroes live.

You can tell that I think there are similarities to be drawn between the two young men, and you can tell what I think some of them are—especially the story about valiant deeds and eternal glory. But there’s a similarity that’s almost out of view in these two pictures that will end up being my fundamental theme in this blog. The immersion of the gamer and the young herdsman in the story—their interaction with the controller and the screen, and with the singer’s voice and lyre—shapes them, even as it shapes the story. They are who they narrate themselves to be, and in the epics they experience, they learn to narrate themselves a little differently than they did when they entered the living-room or the banquet-hall.

So besides showing that the gamer and the herdsman-turned-singer are doing the same basic thing, I’m also going to talk about what I think that means: I’m also going to examine video games as an artistic medium, and to try to persuade you based on that examination that video gaming is a worthwhile cultural pursuit. I think there are still a lot of people around who need to be convinced of that, despite the fact that, unknown to most gamers, there are now professors (I’m not one of them, since my field is the ancient stuff) who teach and write about video games. I hope that some of those people who need convincing will profit from this blog, whether or not they start reading it (or finish reading it) with any desire to read any more of what those professors are writing about video games.

Part 2