Class discussion for "Living Epic" online course

[Roger Travis]

The idea is that this thread will be our virtual classroom. Someday, this will all be done in a virtual world, and we'll be putting stickies on a board somewhere in cyberspace. But for now, sing, goddess, of an exciting class discussion. . .

Instructions:
Write at least 250 words in this forum, for each module, on the subject of either the ancient bardic occasion or the comparison between it and the practice of adventure-gaming. Please focus your discussion on how you think an understanding of the bardic occasion in which the homeric epics were put together affects the way we should look at those epics today. As you follow-up on discussion, and post a second time, please also work in your experience in your Module gaming sessions as an analogy for the bardic occasion. When you have completed this discussion activity, return to the module in the HuskyCT platform to read the instructions for the next activity in your current module.

[Roger Travis]

Good morning! Let me start by asking whether anyone's got any nuts-and-bolts questions about the course--that is, questions that relate to procedures, activities, or basic objectives.

I'm thrilled to be getting underway!

[Donald Curtis]

This is posted here, as well as on the "Living Epic Discussion Board" Please let me know if one is more appropriate than the other!

In watching Roger play club Penguin, it occurs to me that bards may have done exactly what gamers do once they are familiar enough with a game: that is they rush through certain sections to get to the action that they like best.
On the other hand, while a gamer has the luxury of skipping over the back story or framework of a narrative as they please, the bard may not have possesed the same luxury. Though the story the bard would tell was most likely one familiar to the audience, as the game is to the frequent gamer, there would always have been audience member for whom it would be the first telling. To breeze through the "windmills" as Roger did in Club Penguin would have been to deny a portion of the audience the real nuance and context of the tale. We all remember the action of the Odyssey, but there are other subtle elements of the story that make it whole. The bard can pick and choose the elements of a story on which he wishes to focus and elaborate, but a good bard must even tell what may be considered the more "dull" parts to give the story its proper texture.
The more experienced audience members may have wandered in and out of the performance depending on personal levels of interest during certain chapters of the tale, and in that way the gamer becomes the restless audience member, skipping that which he knows to be exactly the same every time.
And that may be where the two forms diverge for me. To a certain extent, the bard's audience was at his whim. He could take the audience wherever he wanted to take them, show them whatever he chose to show them. He could tailor a performance to his specific audience, and the best could probably read their particular audience's reactions during a performance and alter their own performances accordingly, but still the bard was the ringmaster (for lack of a better term), and as I understand it, the audience was still just an audience.
In the gaming world, it appears as though the gamer plays both roles; that of bard and audience. This may be preferable to the individual who wants to explore all the realms of the fictional landscape, but does it benefit the story at all? In acting out a narrative of our own creating, albeit within a composer's framework, are we short-changing ourselves out of the greater story? If a morality tale is what these epics truly were in their day, would they have been as effective if the audience watching could just "fastforward" to the next battle?
I'm thinking that the games' composers may be the true bards here, and that gamers are just the audience members. We may be experienced or inexperienced audience members, exploring every nook and crannie of a game, or simply wandering in and out focusing on the parts we like and getting right to the action, but we are still just acting out the story that's already been written for us. We aren't making any choices or following any paths that the programmers haven't already predicted. If we do, we run into dead-ends in the games, boundaries that cannot be crossed. In this sense, we become like a veteran of the bards who may wish over and over to learn more about a certain peripheral character or event in a story that the bard never really considered worthy of elaboration. The best bards were the ones that made their audience believe that they werre in the action, controlling it, had a stake in it. In believing that we are the story tellers in these games, are we really just afirming the fact that we are at the whim of very talented story tellers?

[Roger Travis]

Thanks for kicking it off, Donald! I can't wait to respond to the very compelling points in your post--but I want to do it with some caffeine in my system! :D

[Roger Travis]

Donald Curtis said:

And that may be where the two forms diverge for me. To a certain extent, the bard's audience was at his whim. He could take the audience wherever he wanted to take them, show them whatever he chose to show them. He could tailor a performance to his specific audience, and the best could probably read their particular audience's reactions during a performance and alter their own performances accordingly, but still the bard was the ringmaster (for lack of a better term), and as I understand it, the audience was still just an audience.
In the gaming world, it appears as though the gamer plays both roles; that of bard and audience.

I think that in what we might call the "standard model" (gamer alone with gaming device) this is absolutely correct, but I want to note briefly that that standard model is increasingly giving way to a multiple-model world, where players create stories called machinima using the stories and worlds of the games they're playing. There's a part of the Molyneux interview that has a direct bearing on this issue, and I'll try to remember to re-load the question when we get there.

This may be preferable to the individual who wants to explore all the realms of the fictional landscape, but does it benefit the story at all? In acting out a narrative of our own creating, albeit within a composer's framework, are we short-changing ourselves out of the greater story? If a morality tale is what these epics truly were in their day, would they have been as effective if the audience watching could just "fastforward" to the next battle?
I'm thinking that the games' composers may be the true bards here, and that gamers are just the audience members. We may be experienced or inexperienced audience members, exploring every nook and crannie of a game, or simply wandering in and out focusing on the parts we like and getting right to the action, but we are still just acting out the story that's already been written for us. We aren't making any choices or following any paths that the programmers haven't already predicted. If we do, we run into dead-ends in the games, boundaries that cannot be crossed. In this sense, we become like a veteran of the bards who may wish over and over to learn more about a certain peripheral character or event in a story that the bard never really considered worthy of elaboration. The best bards were the ones that made their audience believe that they werre in the action, controlling it, had a stake in it. In believing that we are the story tellers in these games, are we really just afirming the fact that we are at the whim of very talented story tellers?

I love the point about the "veterans of the bards"!

I don't think we should fool ourselves into thinking that the primary audience of the Iliad and the Odyssey was interested in the ethical dimension of the story. My students certainly aren't interested in the ethical dimension of Halo until I force them to be. They skip the cutscenes, they bypass the drama, just as an ancient Greek who wasn't a bardic aficionado would have noisily chewed his food while the bard spun a heartbreaking simile about an ancient oak falling in the mountains. We see the suitors behaving this way in the first book of the Odyssey.

And yet. . . there are others, who engage in what strikes me as most like bard-to-bard engagement, who treat the games given them by the developers as a young bard would treat the work of an older bard. And some of them go on to be developers, and the world begins again. Remember that the model isn't just the bard and the audience-it's the bards who have gone before, the bard of the occasion, and the audience of the occasion, some of whom may one day be bards themselves.

One last note--both bards and game developers seem to become very adept at filling in the story in ways that don't interrupt the flow for those who have heard/played before: when you read the homeric epics, you realize you're not actually learning very much backstory at all, but that the story is so involving that it doesn't matter, just as, really, the cutscenes in most games don't matter in the slightest, from the point of view of the "gameplay-story."

Whew. I'm far from exhausting the wealth of ideas in your comment, Donald! But I hope that's a start. :D

[Richard Staron]

Roger Travis said:

Donald Curtis said:

And that may be where the two forms diverge for me. To a certain extent, the bard's audience was at his whim. He could take the audience wherever he wanted to take them, show them whatever he chose to show them. He could tailor a performance to his specific audience, and the best could probably read their particular audience's reactions during a performance and alter their own performances accordingly, but still the bard was the ringmaster (for lack of a better term), and as I understand it, the audience was still just an audience.
In the gaming world, it appears as though the gamer plays both roles; that of bard and audience.

I think that in what we might call the "standard model" (gamer alone with gaming device) this is absolutely correct, but I want to note briefly that that standard model is increasingly giving way to a multiple-model world, where players create stories called machinima using the stories and worlds of the games they're playing. There's a part of the Molyneux interview that has a direct bearing on this issue, and I'll try to remember to re-load the question when we get there.

This may be preferable to the individual who wants to explore all the realms of the fictional landscape, but does it benefit the story at all? In acting out a narrative of our own creating, albeit within a composer's framework, are we short-changing ourselves out of the greater story? If a morality tale is what these epics truly were in their day, would they have been as effective if the audience watching could just "fastforward" to the next battle?
I'm thinking that the games' composers may be the true bards here, and that gamers are just the audience members. We may be experienced or inexperienced audience members, exploring every nook and crannie of a game, or simply wandering in and out focusing on the parts we like and getting right to the action, but we are still just acting out the story that's already been written for us. We aren't making any choices or following any paths that the programmers haven't already predicted. If we do, we run into dead-ends in the games, boundaries that cannot be crossed. In this sense, we become like a veteran of the bards who may wish over and over to learn more about a certain peripheral character or event in a story that the bard never really considered worthy of elaboration. The best bards were the ones that made their audience believe that they werre in the action, controlling it, had a stake in it. In believing that we are the story tellers in these games, are we really just afirming the fact that we are at the whim of very talented story tellers?

I love the point about the "veterans of the bards"!

I don't think we should fool ourselves into thinking that the primary audience of the Iliad and the Odyssey was interested in the ethical dimension of the story. My students certainly aren't interested in the ethical dimension of Halo until I force them to be. They skip the cutscenes, they bypass the drama, just as an ancient Greek who wasn't a bardic aficionado would have noisily chewed his food while the bard spun a heartbreaking simile about an ancient oak falling in the mountains. We see the suitors behaving this way in the first book of the Odyssey.

And yet. . . there are others, who engage in what strikes me as most like bard-to-bard engagement, who treat the games given them by the developers as a young bard would treat the work of an older bard. And some of them go on to be developers, and the world begins again. Remember that the model isn't just the bard and the audience-it's the bards who have gone before, the bard of the occasion, and the audience of the occasion, some of whom may one day be bards themselves.

One last note--both bards and game developers seem to become very adept at filling in the story in ways that don't interrupt the flow for those who have heard/played before: when you read the homeric epics, you realize you're not actually learning very much backstory at all, but that the story is so involving that it doesn't matter, just as, really, the cutscenes in most games don't matter in the slightest, from the point of view of the "gameplay-story."

Whew. I'm far from exhausting the wealth of ideas in your comment, Donald! But I hope that's a start. :D

[Richard Staron]

Having just created a "penguin, (5 words I never thought I would ever say), and having looked at World of Warcraft, let me offer that it seems to me that the gamer is all 3: bard, action figure (hero or villain) and audience. The gamer becomes a bard AFTER a quest, large or small, because at that point she/he has a story to tell. The gamer is the "ulysses" with a small "u", the hero, villain or whatever, as she/he goes through the quest. The gamer is audience in that she/he must play by the inherent capabilities and limitations of the game's creator. But one big difference I see, especially in World of Warcraft, is that the gamer's actions, choices and results are NOT determined by gods. This is not to say that there isn't magic, but rather the gamer is able, by cunning and skill, to gather the necessary implements to complete the quest. One other observation is that I do not see any elements of luck or chance in Penguins or WofW, unlike real life.
So, can we say that the demise of "gods" in video gaming reflects not the lack of "gods", rather current culture where such things are relegated to private ceremonies? But by taking out the elements of luck and chance, are we not now saying that ultimately the gamer, through experience, should be able to conquer all?

Richard

[Richard Staron]

P.S. My brief experience with WoW is due to our son. And I have to say the graphics are impressive, the knowledge base necessary to play this game is astounding - there's hope for the next generation!!!

[Edward]

I very much enjoyed the lectures for this module, and the games. I'm interested in playing some more advanced games, because while I saw the connections that have been pointed out, they seem much more like childhood nursery rhymes than soaring Homeric epics. However, I also understand and appreciate the need to start slowly!

A few reactions to the lectures and the games:

As an English teacher, I appreciated the emphasis on formula and theme in bardic singing. This is the heart of great jazz and improvisation. In the theater, beginning improvisers play games with very few guidelines, since they are not really capable of handling them yet. As the actor becomes more advanced, the rules can be made far more complex, and then the challenge becomes to navigate all the many obligations and hurdles with the same sense of spontaneity as a beginner. (Kindergartners are far more advanced actors than most adults, because they are incapable of not being spontaneous at that point.) In fact, the truly breathtaking performances are the ones with the most complex limitations and obligations, and what amazes us is not the simple ability to solve them, but the cleverness with which this is done. Whose Line Is It Anyway is a good example of this, though there are far more advanced improvisers. The same would be true of jazz, of course. Jazz performers state a familiar theme, and then see how far they can get away from it without losing its inner essence, and the more syncopated it becomes, the more thrilling to listen to. The great jazz player hovers just on the edge of what is recognizable, sometimes stepping over it, but always coming back just at the right moment.

What has always concerned me as a theater artist, however, is the problem that the experience is always infinitely more valuable for those involved in the production than those who are attending. No matter what level, or how impressive the performance, the audience can only receive a husk of what happens in rehearsal (it may be a beautiful husk, a golden husk, a thrilling adventure of a husk - but it's a husk all the same). Huston Smith once told the story of the scientists who invented the Polaroid Camera. They were working so hard for weeks on end that they decided to take a break, and one scientist said, "well, now at least we can go Christmas shopping," to which the other scientist said, "It's January 5th!" The point was what a profound difference there is between inventing a Polaroid Camera and using one. This has always been for me the crucial difference between being an actor or director and an audience member.

So what video games offer, as I think Donald might have already said, is the chance to be both audience member and actor. The performative aspect is of infinite value. And just like with improvisation and jazz, there are levels of expertise, and this must have been true with the bards as well (Roger talked about this). It is encouraging to know that what has been handed down from the ancients is equivalent to the most advanced gamer, not all the regular ones. This does not devalue the average, but it puts the Homeric texts we have in perspective. We can't forget the multitude of Salieri's for every Mozart, or Robert Greene's for every Shakespeare. But as teachers, surely we must understand that a student writing a pedestrian essay for the first time is just as valuable and necessary for that student as it was the first time a genius did it. So while Club Penguin feels a bit elementary, and we can wonder how much it really develops the brain, it was clear to me when I played it that it has all the rudimentary elements necessary for such an experience, in the same way learning handwriting is essential to writing a master novel. (Speaking of - my four-year old niece is here for the weekend, and I'm going to play Club Penguin with her to observe what goes on in her head as she plays).

Another topic related to this is how the theme develops based on its audience (what Roger brought up with Telemachus' speech to Penelope). This resonates deeply with me as a theater director. When you act or direct, you either unconsciously or consciously shape the performance based on your audience - either their expectations or their predicted response, or, in really great theater, their actual response in the moment itself. This is seen in comedy, when an audience laughs, and that character becomes stronger, the actor surer. My own experience with this could fill an entire book, and the most recent example was directing Big River (the story of Huckleberry Finn), which opened one week before the election. I did not intend this when I chose it 6 months before, but seeing Jim chained up with a sign that says, "Sick Arab, but harmless when not out of his head" on opening night, just 7 days before the election of a black man whom people were calling an Arab, was an extraordinarily powerful experience. I did everything I could not to make the play political, since I knew it would be political on its own no matter what I did, and I wanted to counteract that and emphasize the artistic side of the play. And that's exactly my point - I chose to emphasize everything non-political so that the play would not be reduced to a simple polemic, and could have a greater artistic resonance. The political in this case was unavoidable, so I emphasized all the rest of the elements that make the story more universal. Even though it was a story we all knew (or thought we did), the choice of emphasis is what makes the artistic interpretation valid. All of the words had to be said, all of the major events had to be told exactly as they are in the script, but the interpretation comes in what you do with everything else - lighting, sound, music, gesture, props. The tools at the storyteller's command are incredibly diverse, and the greatest storyteller is the one who colors within the lines of the script, but makes you think you are looking at the picture for the very first time.

And so to me, this is what it must have been like for the bards, and certainly the analogy holds true for video games. However, I am not yet convinced that the analogy holds beyond the superficial comparisons. The reason for this is that I haven't played any of the high adventure games. I played Pitfall and Age of Empires years ago, which is as far as I got. My students tell me Halo and World of Warcraft are much more different, so I'm eager to try them and see if they allow the player to reach higher realms than what I've experienced up to this point. Certainly I can see a confrontation with ethical conundrums, and I'm interested to see if matters of interpretation and choice are really exploited to their full potential. [As a side note, I'm also interested in discussing the possible addictive nature of these games, as evidenced by the number of World of Warcraft Widows.]

The last thought is a tangent, but one I can't get out of my head right now. Something I can't get around is that what's missing from this is a physical element. Now I know that audiences at bardic occasions would not be doing calisthenics, so the comparison is perhaps not a fair one. But the unconscious is best unlocked in conjunction with exercise, and most of the exercise in video games seems to be the hands and the eyes. I don't know much about Wii, and I'm not sure how involved that has become with adventure games, since it seems like mostly tennis, etc. Maybe a wave of the future. The reason I bring this up is recently I've been doing some geocaching, which is a sort of treasure hunt with a GPS, and I've been impressed at the integration of nature and technology (for those who don't know about it, check out geocaching.com). This has inspired my boyhood love of adventure, even though what you find are usually just silly trinkets, but I find it much more engaging than any sort of video game personally - at least so far, since I'm really a novice. But it also brings back my days of backpacking, where the high you receive when you finally summit a particularly difficult mountain is so much more pure and clean than any other feeling I've ever felt. As I worked my way through both Club Penguin and Runescape, I found myself itching to get up, and maybe that's why video games haven't appealed to me as much as they have to others. I wonder if virtual reality will ever answer this, though I'd hate to live in a world like Wall-E.

This is a longer post than I expected to write, so I'll end here and look forward to next week.

[Mark Pearsall]

After listening to the lecture series, I have to reconsider the role of the game and the player. I had originally come to this with the notion that the game was the storyteller (i.e. bard) and the player was the audience. It was difficult for me to imagine at that point how the bard telling his story was comparable to the way that games change with every playing since I had the roles confused. This really helps to clarify and thus make sense.

I, too, have had some frustration with the two games we are playing. First of all, my penguin keeps coming up with some weird number as his name. But beyond that, it is hard to go from Oblivion or LOTRO to those other games. But, they are free and that adds a lot of appeal in a course setting.

Runescape is a bit more to my liking, although the combat system is bugging me at this point. Clearly there is interactivity in the game. I had to learn how to milk a cow. I needed to distinguish between a milk cow and a beef cow to do that. I had to look for chickens and find eggs while everyone else was killing them and taking their eggs before I could get to them. I had to try out stabbing versus slashing attacks when fighting a goblin. My character, Hipponax08, lives in a predetermined world with cities and geographical creations (swamps, rivers, mountains, etc.) but he (I) chooses which buildings to enter and which quests to undertake. I learn to chop down trees and make a fire so I can cook better. I retrace my steps to the baker to get extra ingredients so I can stock up on bread before I go on my quests after I learn that food is needed to recover from injuries in this world. I am clearly a novice bard, but I am learning the formulas I need to become better at telling the story. Others will go or have gone on the same quest to help the chef make a cake but their experiences were different. Same cake, different ingredients or, at least, order of combining the ingredients in a manner of speaking. Is it art? Maybe. Maybe not yet. Was it entertaining? Yeah. But it would not remain entertaining if I kept doing things the same way or had to go on the same quest always. It would then be frustrating or boring. What then would be the point in playing? What actually is the point of playing? I have some thoughts on that but would like to hear your thoughts first.

[Mark Pearsall]

Richard Staron said:

But one big difference I see, especially in World of Warcraft, is that the gamer's actions, choices and results are NOT determined by gods. This is not to say that there isn't magic, but rather the gamer is able, by cunning and skill, to gather the necessary implements to complete the quest. One other observation is that I do not see any elements of luck or chance in Penguins or WofW, unlike real life.
So, can we say that the demise of "gods" in video gaming reflects not the lack of "gods", rather current culture where such things are relegated to private ceremonies? But by taking out the elements of luck and chance, are we not now saying that ultimately the gamer, through experience, should be able to conquer all?

Richard

Are you comparing this to the Iliad and Odyssey? If so, you need to be careful because the gods in these works do not have to be considered so literally. They may in fact be personifications of ideas they represent - Athena pulling Achilles back by the hair and telling him to not react with violence in Book I may just be Achilles seeing the wisdom of holding back. As far as luck and chance in Club Penguin, try the jet pack adventure more than once. The coins and fuel and other objects are not always in the same place or same order. They are randomly generated in more or less the same place but there is an element of chance there. This element is more prevalent in more sophisticated games. It is part of what makes it impossible to play the same scene in the same game exactly the same way.

Then, of course, we could always talk about the gods versus fate in the Iliad...

[Tom Russo]

Mark Pearsall said:

Richard Staron said:

But one big difference I see, especially in World of Warcraft, is that the gamer's actions, choices and results are NOT determined by gods. This is not to say that there isn't magic, but rather the gamer is able, by cunning and skill, to gather the necessary implements to complete the quest. One other observation is that I do not see any elements of luck or chance in Penguins or WofW, unlike real life.
So, can we say that the demise of "gods" in video gaming reflects not the lack of "gods", rather current culture where such things are relegated to private ceremonies? But by taking out the elements of luck and chance, are we not now saying that ultimately the gamer, through experience, should be able to conquer all?

Richard

Are you comparing this to the Iliad and Odyssey? If so, you need to be careful because the gods in these works do not have to be considered so literally. They may in fact be personifications of ideas they represent - Athena pulling Achilles back by the hair and telling him to not react with violence in Book I may just be Achilles seeing the wisdom of holding back. As far as luck and chance in Club Penguin, try the jet pack adventure more than once. The coins and fuel and other objects are not always in the same place or same order. They are randomly generated in more or less the same place but there is an element of chance there. This element is more prevalent in more sophisticated games. It is part of what makes it impossible to play the same scene in the same game exactly the same way.

Then, of course, we could always talk about the gods versus fate in the Iliad...

[Roger Travis]

Thanks for the great discussion, guys!

Responses in no particular order:

1) (response to Mark and Richard) The coins are actually in the same places in Jet Pack every time--which seems to me actually to strengthen the comparison, because the tradition is the tradition, as soon as it's been sung into the form in which a bard finds it on a given night--his own compositions being included, of course. So it's up to the player to change his or her path through the coins, just as it's up to the bard to remake the tradition by responding to it. Not a perfect analogy, of course, but essentially IMO correct and helpful. That doesn't get in the way, though, of what you were saying about the gods. And I would say also that there is a lot of chance involved when the player is taking on the role of hero--it's just that the chance exists in the real world, as you for example either manage to get to the end of a level or not. :D

2) (response to Ed) The depths and heights of the experience (response to Richard): Yes, you'll absolutely find more that's meaningful and even profound in Halo and WoW, but if you're looking to get a glimpse of the true potential you might actually want to start with a very simple game, Passage, which is a real conundrum--and it's under very interesting discussion in another thread in this forum!

3) (response to Ed) The physical element is something I think about a lot, too. Certainly finishing a big quest in an RPG is a very different feeling from winning a wrestling match, or even a game of chess. But I guess I think as long as we don't stop wrestling and climbing mountains and playing chess, there will also be an important place for adventure games.

4) The gamer as hero, as well as bard and audience (response to Richard). My own notion is that the "hero" part of the equation is actually identical to an important part both of the "bard" and the "audience" parts of the equation. That is, the way a singer identifies with his hero, and the way the audience identifies with that hero, are what give the hero his fictional "life"--that is, I think it's the same function as is fulfilled by engagement of audiences with works of art across the cultural spectrum.