In my last post I suggested that the approach to homeric epic developed by Gregory Nagy beginning with The Best of the Achaeans, when considered in relationship to the rulesets of play-practices that digital culture and above all digital games make more apparent every day, provide an opportunity to describeContinue Reading
So at the end of the Rules of the Text series, I put forward the claim that “playing the past is an absolutely essential part of living the present.” Testing that claim is the purpose of Epic Life. Thus I mean in Epic Life to take the formulations I madeContinue Reading
Let’s start with the cards themselves. They work like epic formulae (e.g. the “cunning” in “cunning Odysseus”) but with game-mechanics, and with pictures, some of them lovely and some merely serviceable. For more card games that may excite you, you can visit slot online. In homeric epic, certain formulae —Continue Reading
In my last post I discussed the most basic rule of the epic game: kleos. Oral epic developed in such a way as to provide glory to heroes by naming them at the end of the poetic line. Now I’m going to push forward and show how that simple mechanic WhenContinue 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
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
One of the things that fascinates me most about the epic traditions of the world is the way bards naturally sing their tales within cycles. The Greek word κύκλος just means “circle,” and the cycle with which I’m most familiar—the ancient Greek one—is usually just called the ἐπικὸς κύκλος “epicContinue Reading
We discussed Ethan Watrall’s foundational role in The Story of Play the Past, with regards to the Play the Past website, and community. Because of the demands and responsibilities incumbent to his role as Play the Past founder and manager—not to mention his academic career—Watrall’s writerly contributions on the blogContinue Reading
My intention for this post was to write something specific and reasonably authoritative on how the character of Stede Bonnet as seen (as performed by means of, really) in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag differs from what we know of the historical Stede Bonnet, and what I think the differenceContinue Reading
I’m going to use two examples in this post, Call of Duty and Mario Kart, in order to further my continuing humanistic analysis of the shooting mechanic. In my last post I argued that the concept of “emersion” might be very useful as a way to describe variations of theContinue Reading