Adventure Video-games and the Epic Tradition

This is a paper I gave 10.21.06 at the Classical Association of Connecticut's Annual Meeting. I used parts of "Halo" to illustrate my points.

Video-games have a terrible reputation. If zealous politicians aren’t pandering to their constituencies by saying that they demand accountability from game publishers, grim-faced policemen are revealing that the latest perpetrator of a violent crime is known to have played video-games. Really, in public rhetoric these days, video games are worse than Hip-Hop, or the Internet. Indeed, video games are almost as bad as the theatre in Shakespeare’s London, or Homer seen through the eyes of Plato.

Why are video-games so bad? Well, a concerned interlocutor might say, they expose children to violence. Don’t the movies and TV do that? Well, yes, but video-games are different. Different how? Well, they get children used to doing violence, because they’re interactive; the children play as characters who shoot people.

Didn’t Plato call that mimesis, and say in the Republic that his philosopher-kings shouldn’t engage in it? Didn’t he take that back in the Laws, saying that mimesis was the foundation of education? Didn’t Aristotle try to worm out of the problem by saying that mimesis is simply natural? Haven’t we, that is, had this debate before?

Our anti-video-game interlocutor would probably employ one of two answers: he or she might say, how can you compare video-games to Homer and tragedy?! Video-games aren’t art! They don’t even tell stories! They’re just electronic imitations of shooting and other criminal activity!

Or, he or she might say, But video-games are different from Homer and tragedy! They immerse the child in the world of the game, so that the child can’t escape the inculcation of evil.

Call these the charges of non-aesthetics and of immersion. I’ll be dealing with both of them. I’ll be arguing that, to the contrary of the charge of non-aesthetics, video-games do tell stories just like other forms of real narrative art. Some of these stories, I’ll suggest, may be fruitfully analogized to the stories of the ancient epic tradition. That part of my argument will be made mostly by implication, as I deal with what I consider the more interesting and important charge—the charge of immersion. I’ll be arguing to the contrary of that charge of immersion that the interactive mode of story-telling in adventure video-games is actually a re-awakening of the improvisatory nature of the ancient epic tradition.

But the time has come to acquaint those of you who haven’t played an adventure video game (which is the blanket term I’m using for the dominant form of video-game, and by which, for those in the know, I’m referring to such genres as role-playing games and first-person and third-person shooters in addition to the games usually called “adventure games” which include such games as the wonderful “Prince of Persia,” and a game I don’t like, but enjoy analysing, the cause celebre “Grand Theft Auto”), or watched one played, with what I mean. To any gamers in the audience, much of this will seem like old hat, but even you may see things differently when you view a game inside the frame I’m setting up for it.

At any rate, having an example of an adventure video-game burnt into your retinas will help a great deal in what follows. So this is the beginning of a very famous, really wonderful game called “Halo.” Let me note that this game is violent, but let me also kick off my comparison today by noting that it’s nowhere near as violent as the Iliad or the Odyssey. This game is a first-person shooter, which is the most popular kind of game in the US right now. Elsewhere, role-playing games tend to be more popular, but, to repeat, for my purposes in this talk, I’m considering those two genres together.

[opening sequence of "Halo"]

You’ll notice first of all that we begin in medias res of a story. As in the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid, so also in “Halo”: the audience is thrown into the narrative, and left to follow the narrative clues about what has happened to set the story in motion.

Indeed, I would suggest that “Halo” does this insertion of its audience even more effectively than ancient epic could, by waking you from sleep. Note, though, that the story-telling isn’t entirely in the first-person: there’s narrative that sets up your awakening, just as there is front-matter in any good epic, before the story really kicks off. You know, the stuff about strong souls of heroes, the dogs and birds, the Will of Zeus, and all that.

You may see where I’m going. I’m going to argue that the celebrated interactivity and immersiveness of the story-telling to be found in the most popular and typical form of video-games today is not really a new kind of story-telling, but that in certain important and interesting ways it rather brings back to life an essential part of the sort of story-telling to be found in the epic tradition of the Homeric bards, and even of the later, literate use of bardic material by poets like Virgil. For this reason, I suggest in this talk, we who like to think that we know the best kind of stories when we see them should not dismiss video games as incapable of a range of things we think distinguish good art from bad art, and from non-art; nor, perhaps more importantly, should we dismiss video-gaming as a culturally worthless pursuit; nor, perhaps most importantly, should we dismiss recidivist video-gamers as insusceptible to the charms of Classical Literature.

Instead of dismissing games and gaming, we should, I suggest, rather attempt to critique them, in hopes that through critique we may help them tell better stories, and tell stories better.

I should also say parenthetically that I don’t intend this comparison to suggest that other narrative forms we have today don’t bring the epic tradition back to life—simply that I think video-games do do so, and in a way I find very interesting and even provocative. Moreover, I should also say that I don’t mean to suggest that the epic tradition is the only affinity adventure video-games have to earlier modes and genres; that’s clearly untrue, since if you asked game developers what sort of entertainment they are trying to emulate—and even improve upon—they would, I think, probably all say that their art is an extension of film—above all of the various adventure film genres like sci-fi, fantasy, and sometimes even psychological thriller. If you’ve never been exposed to the art of the video-game before, your first thought may well have been “It’s a lot like a movie.”

In fact, a brief sketch of the complex comparisons one might make between the relations of adventure video-games to film and to the epic tradition will prove a good way into the problem of what exactly the comparison I’m making today (the epic tradition one) has to contribute to the discussion of what video-games are and what they can be. There’s no doubt that one of the strongest feelings one has when playing an adventure video-game is of being inside a movie. In certain games, especially of the kind called role-playing games, one also has at times the feeling of being inside an epic.

That kind of comparison, though, only poses the question of the comparison I’m interested in in this discussion the more strongly, through that “feeling of insideness,” which is really, I would suggest, only another way to say “immersion.” It’s not as interesting, in the end, I’d suggest, to talk about that sort of affinity with film and even epic, because it doesn’t get at the heart of the matter—what makes video-games different but, paradoxically, the same.

To put the problem more concretely, I’m asking whether we can discuss in an interesting way what happens when what are usually called the “cut-scenes” (the third-person animations that could very welll simply be brief scenes from a science fiction film) end and the actual game-play begins. Obviously, I think the answer is yes, and I’m going to argue that one interesting way to talk about what happens at that point is to analogize it to what a bard, and an epic poet in imitation of a bard, do to and with their audiences.


There are three areas of correspondence between adventure video-games and the epic tradition that I want to call attention to: the correlation between interactivity and formulaic recomposition, the analogy of the stereotypical plots of video-games and the stereotypical plots of epic myth, and the correspondence of first-person, identificative, immersive play and what might be called the heroic identification of ancient epic, by which an epic hero becomes a cultural ideal. I suspect that concerns of time will allow me only to get to the first two of these because I really want to leave time for discussion, but if you all would rather sit in stunned silence at the conclusion of the talk, I’ll take that as my cue to launch into the third point, which will probably bring us into the territory most worthy of discussion, because it’s the “charge of immersion” that seems to set off alarm bells for those who have watched what appear to be slack-jawed kids with their eyes glued to the TV screen, trying to perpetrate acts of violence on virtual life-forms.

I’ll get the argument that’s farthest out there out of the way first. As we’ve known since the 1950’s, thanks above all to the work of Parry and Lord, ancient Greek epic emerged from an oral tradition of recomposition of traditional stories according to a highly-developed system of bardic improvisation. When a Homeric bard went to sing what he might well have called “The Embassy to Achilles,” for example (what we know as Book 9 of the Iliad), he was not singing it exactly as he had sung it before, but was rather re-composing it for the immediate performance occasion. The exact degree of change that would have been allowable is of course a subject of debate, but the famous dual forms, which seem to refer to two ambassadors rather than the three we actually have in Iliad 9 seem to suggest very strongly to me that going so far as to add an ambassador and his speech was within the scope of possible improvisatory change. I want to suggest now that that kind of improvisation has a very strong correlation to the kind of improvisation I’ll show you now, in “Halo.”

["Cyborgs and AI first," an early chaper of "Halo," played two ways]

As you can see, I got to the same place in the narrative along three different narrative paths. This ability to improvise within the game world, and, perhaps a bit more contentiously, the game story, seems to me to be the essential element of the interactivity of video-games, whether “Halo” or “World of Warcraft,” the famous Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. You, the player, choose your path; in the case of some games, you even choose your character.

I’m suggesting that that interactivity is actually, in a fundamental way, the same as the freedom of the bard to shape his song within the system of epic poetics.

But is this resemblance only superficial? I would argue that it actually goes deeper than is immediately apparent, and in a direction that will, contrary to appearances, carry us into the territory even of literate epic like the Aeneid. Indeed, the obvious objection, that it is the bard, and not the audience, who performs the improvisation in the oral formulaic composition of epic, in truth reveals the cogency of the comparison, when looked at from a more exact perspective than gamers and scholars of epic generally tend to. At the epic occasion, as we see brilliantly oulined in Book 8 of the Odyssey, the bard re-composes his songs in a fundamentally interactive relationship with his audience. Odysseus, you may remember, establishes a relationship with Demodokos, the bard of the Phaiakians, with an explicit bargain at the center of it: if you can sing the epic song about the fall of Troy well enough to satisfy me (and, of course, by strong implication, if you give me, Odysseus, the glory—kleos, that epic word of words, is what we’re talking about—to which I’m entitled), I will tell everyone that you are the best bard I have ever run across. My own reading of the passage leads me to think that the bard of this story from the homecoming of Odysseus is playing deliciously with the idea that Odysseus is asking Demodokos to sing a song he has never heard before, a performance of almost complete improvisation and therefore a feat of immense technical skill, but a more conventional reading will do as well for my purpose at the moment: the interaction between Odysseus and Demodokos involves much more than putting a cut of meat into a Homeric jukebox, for Demodokos must perform his song to a standard set by his patron pro tempore.

Conversely, between decks on the Pillar of Autumn—or even in the crime ridden streets of "Grand Theft Auto’s" various seedy locales—the player is not, in fact, free to do anything he or she wants. Certain paths that may have looked open in the section I just played are in fact closed. Even the widest open style of adventure game—the kind, like "Grand Theft Auto," sometimes called sandbox games, by analogy with a sandbox in which a child may build what he or she likes—must have boundaries and does not, by definition, allow you to go outside them.

In a certain sense I am saying that the vaunted interactivity of video-games is a type of illusion, or even of trickery, that furthers the immersive nature of the audience’s experience, just as Odysseus’ relation to Demodokos reflects an immersion in the narrative of ancient epic on the part of the epic composer’s audience.

If, then, the interactivity of adventure video-games revives the occasion of oral epic, what of literate epic like the Aeneid? To the extent that literate epic itself reawakens the oral recompositional occasion—which I believe is a great and interesting extent, especially from this perspective—, adventure video-games correspond to it as well. I’ve chosen “Halo” as my specimen today, actually, because I see a very interesting comparison to be made between this game and the Aeneid. In both narratives, a semi-human hero, who is affiliated with the martial virtues of the work’s target culture, with whom the audience is very strongly identified makes the world safe for civilization. That correlation in content, to which I will return in a moment when I turn to the stereotyped mythic material of epic, derives, I would suggest, from a correlation of narrative mode: Aeneas is the hero he is because of his relation to other, older epic heroes, especially Hector, Achilles and Odysseus, just as Hector, Achilles, and Odysseus were improvised into the forms in which we know them through the oral re-compositional process. I’m suggesting, then, that the interactivity of the epic tradition actually inheres in this form of mythic narrative.

That suggestion does in fact bring us to the mythic content both of epic and of video-games. As this game of “Halo” proceeds, what you’ll see is a plot gesture that’s both original and hackeneyed, just as, for example, Odysseus’ wanderings—and Aeneas’—are both original and hackneyed.

[the life-pod sequence from the end of the "Pillar of Autumn" level of "Halo"]

What I want to emphasize in this excerpt is the emphasis on the main character as being affiliated with a storied group of soldiers, the famed US Marine Corps. What are the Marines doing in space? Well, it’s a tradition you can trace back, perhaps, to Robert Heinlein’s novel Starship Troopers (though his space-paratroopers were resolutely army), but more importantly for my point today, it’s a tradition to which we can ascribe direct lineal affiliation with two other Marines in Space games, Doom and Quake, each of which has spawned multiple sequels. Nor is the mythic paradigm anywhere near played out, for in addtion to the sequels to Halo, the most anticipated game of this year is Gears of War, which, ahem, explores the same themes.
There are many other places games can go, of course—role-playing games all tend to go to a Tolkien-esque world of one sort or another, and it’s very fun to play as an Elf or an Orc—and, perhaps most interestingly for a comparison with ancient epic, World War 2 shooters have saturated the market over the last five years, some of them so good as to rival films like Saving Private Ryan in intensity. These, too, though it’s little remarked in the game-criticism such as it is, are reworkings of the mythic material of previous games, as well as of movies and, gasp, actual books.

Just as, I would argue, Aeneas is a reworking of Achilles and Odysseus, and within the oral occasion, Achilles and Odysseus are reworkings of other heroes, and even more, of themselves in earlier recensions.

To grasp the importance of this similarity, we first need to perceive its relation to my first point, about interactivity and recomposition, then draw what seems to me an inevitable conclusion about its affect on the aesthetics of epic and video-games.

First, the revision of stereotypical epic myth, its incremental progression from one version to another through the interaction between bard and author on the one hand and audience on the other, is actually a writing large of the interaction inherent in the basic recompositional occasion of oral epic. What amounts to small changes in the epic as it develops from performance to performance becomes, on a larger scale, the iterative re-working of the mythic themes themselves. The move, for example, from the story of the “Wrath of Achilles” to the story of the “Embassy to Achilles,” or, to be a little more neo-analytically contentious, from the “Embassy to Achilles” to Odysseus’ meeting with Achilles in the underworld, is a larger version of the move from a version of the Embassy with two ambassadors to a version with three.

In the case of video-games, I’m suggesting by analogy, the stereotyping of mythic material at the level of the game (“Doom” leads to “Halo,” for example) is continuous with the interactivity of the games at the level of the game-play. As it’s possible, as I showed a little while ago, to find your way to the next checkpoint along a potentially infinite, yet paradoxcially-constrained-by-the-game-designer, number of paths, each of which generates a slightly different narrative, so game-makers re-make the same game into different games, over and over. To the extent that this phenomenon, which is a richness of narrative material when viewed from the inside of the tradition, and a poverty when viewed from the outside, is a conscious choice on the part of designers, it should I think be attributed to the market—which is the same force that Telemachus is talking about, something like 2800 years ago, when in Book 1 of the Odyssey he tells his Mom that Phemios, the bard of Ithaka, should be allowed to please his audience by singing the song of the Homecomings of the Achaians—a new song, to be sure, but one about old heroes.

Second, this point of similarity seems to me to lend a great deal of weight to the notion that adventure video-games are a narrative form in the midst of rapid development. Everything we know about the epic tradition that led to the Iliad and the Odyssey tells us that those tremendous works were the result of a very long process of development, a process of which, much later, Vergil was a beneficiary—and don’t on my account, hesitate to add Dante, Cervantes, and Melville to the list of beneficiaries. Who knows what will become of this form of narrative art that can perhaps be traced, though multiple points of origin like Zork, the original Doom, and paper-and-dice Dungeons and Dragons, only to the 1980’s, only a generation ago? Are there classics in its future? I find it hard to say No.

How can I say all this, though, about an art-form, if it is an art-form, that’s so clearly anti-social? (That particular interlocutor, incidentally, sounds a great deal like my wife.) Don’t kids spend many hours in front of their game consoles during which they should be reading Homer? Or at any rate playing baseball, that other inherently mythic pursuit?

It’s that objection that brings me to my third point of comparison, which, like the second, grows out of the implications of the inherently interactive nature of video-games: the immersion in the game-world that results from that interactivity. I’m going to suggest that this immersion, as I suggested at the beginning of the talk, is exactly what Plato was worried about in the third book of his Republic: identificative performance, mimesis. To be sure, the interactivity of video-games has a different appearance than the improvisation inherent in ancient epic—or indeed the improvisation that would have been felt on the occasion of a new tragic performance at the City Dionysia, when the audience had no idea in what direction Sophocles, for example, had decided to take the story of Oedipus—but the fear is the same: the viewer, seemingly chained to his seat, watching a shadow-puppet play, has become a Homer-zombie, or a tragedy-zombie, or a video-game-zombie.

I don’t mean to suggest that video-games don’t pose a different, and worse, danger than Homer and Vergil posed and pose. No one could deny that video-games are easier to get sucked into, and easier to lose much more time to, than ancient epic, even as the game of time for all of us, especially kids, becomes ever more zero-sum: time spent video-gaming is, in the realest possible sense, time lost to Homer and baseball. And video-games are far more available to kids than the epic occasion was even to its most materially-blessed audiences those three millennia ago.

But there is a positive side to the power of video-games as well, that comes precisely in its power of identificative immersion. Plato himself, in the Laws, revised his ideas about mimesis, and made choruses the bedrock of education; such a powerful tool for the shaping of the self, I believe he realized, should not be passed up, but rather critiqued and put to use. The Homeric bards felt the same power, else Achilles (and, I should say, Hector) and Odysseus would not be so obviously normative as their respective epics make them—both heroes, that is, are clearly felt within their epics to be the model of the best of humanity. Aeneas is a figure of proto-Roman virtue. Epic, that is, has at its heart the strongest possible identification between its audience and its central heroes. So strong is it indeed that Socrates appears to be thinking of himself as Achilles at the end of his life.

Film does this too, of course—my generation is a generation of Luke Skywalkers, for instance—but strange as it seems, I think video-games do it in a way more like ancient epic than the way in which film does it, because of the identificative immersion that springs from their interactivity.

What, then, should classicists do about video-games and video-gamers? Pay attention, I suppose.

My "Halo" and the Aeneid article

From The Escapist magazine.

My latest blog. . .

"Nemo quin antiquitatem amet," which means "There's nobody who doesn't love antiquity." The title is a bit of a joke, because the statement doesn't appear to be true, and also because the word "quin" introduces what may be the most difficult point of Latin grammar, the relative clause of characteristic. I hated the word "quin" for many years, but now I've learned to love it--a little bit like my attitude toward Thucydides and Plato, actually.

At any rate, this new blog results from my reflection after giving my gaming and epic talk at ClassConn (the Classical Association of Connecticut Annual Meeting) yesterday that I need a blog that's specifically addressed to classics-conversant people, in addition to the other one, which is specifically addressed to gamers-with-brains. (Anyone reading this blog who'd like to get a look at the other one should feel free to seek me out via the usual relatively easy methods--that is, find my school e-mail address, which is exactly what you would expect it to be after a moment's thought, and e-mail me.)

I'm Roger Travis, Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at the University of Connecticut. Welcome!