Homer (Page 2)

I wrote at the end of my last post about the way game designers and game players, in the analogy between narrative games and homeric epic, have certain parts of the role of the bard divided between them: the player gets the most obviously fun part of the bard’s job–combiningContinue Reading

This post picks up where my last one left off, and does the heavy oral formulaic lifting I mentioned before. If we take the phrase “Playing the Past” as loosely as I think all of us here would like, playing the past is exactly what the homeric bards were doing,Continue Reading

This post serves as a prelude to some heavy oral formulaic lifting I’m planning to do in a subsequent one, following on from the more general argument I made about immersion in my previous two posts on games and homeric epic. Hopefully, these posts will clarify both the similarities betweenContinue Reading

Registration opened last week for the online course/game I’ve been working on since last summer. The formal title of the course is Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies 1101 Greek Civilization, but as an Alternate-Reality game I’ve titled it Operation ΜΗΝΙΣ. Μῆνις (menis) means “wrath,” and it’s the word used byContinue Reading

The beginnings of practomimes, whether oral traditional epics or narrative video games, can, I think, tell us a great deal about some fascinating similarities and differences among how performers through the ages–bards, storytellers of all kinds, video gamers–expressed themselves artistically. Such comparisons seem to me to pay huge dividends notContinue Reading

Halo’s modern warrior code, as expressed over and over in the orders given to you both by characters and by the game itself (orders like “Defend Dr. Halsey”) is to shoot those you have been told to shoot because the world must be saved. Just as the rule-based practice of the Iliad perpetuates the Iliadic warrior-code, the rule-based practice of Reach perpetuates Halo’s. . .Continue Reading