bard

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 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

There’s a wonderful moment in Book 8 of the homeric Odyssey when Odysseus treats Demodocus, one of the two bards in the Odyssey (we’ll meet poor Phemius, the other one, very briefly later in this post) pretty much the way a gamer treats his or her controller, fulfilling the fantasyContinue Reading