{"id":5681,"date":"2016-08-16T10:00:21","date_gmt":"2016-08-16T14:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=5681"},"modified":"2016-08-16T10:48:54","modified_gmt":"2016-08-16T14:48:54","slug":"the-line-end-formula-smoking-gun-of-play-mechanics-in-oral-epic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=5681","title":{"rendered":"The line-end formula, smoking gun of play-mechanics in oral epic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Part of a series<\/a> on the educational affordances of interactive narrative.<\/p>\n

ba da Bum ba da Bum bum<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Podas \u014dkus Akhilleus <\/span><\/i>(pronounce the final “eu” as “yoo” if you have to\u2014it’s a diphthong: the final <\/span>Bum<\/i><\/b>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Polum\u0113tis Odysseus <\/span><\/i>(same here).<\/span><\/p>\n

“Swift-footed Achilles.”<\/span><\/p>\n

“Cunning Odysseus.”<\/span><\/p>\n

These are line-end formulas. Think of them as series of key-presses in a digital role-playing game to produce a player-character’s most common attack, and you won’t go far wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n

It doesn’t seem like much, but the line-end formula might be described as giving birth to the Western literary tradition, out of its oral-formulaic roots in the <\/span>Iliad <\/span><\/i>and the <\/span>Odyssey<\/span><\/i>. In its simple essence, it functions as the smallest unit of <\/span>kleos<\/span><\/i>, usually translated “glory” but really having much more to do with what we call “fame.” When the bard sings the name of a hero and describes him by his most renowned characteristic\u2014the characteristic that indeed <\/span>becomes <\/span><\/i>renowned through the system of epic poetry’s ensuring that the epithet (“swift-footed” or “cunning”) receives frequent repetition\u2014he has bestowed on the hero what Lin-Manuel Miranda memorably describes in the musical <\/span>Hamilton <\/span><\/i>as a “dollop of fame.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Thankfully, there’s no need to get into the weeds of the famous meter of epic, called dactylic hexameter, although the subject is a fascinating one. What you need to know to understand the analogy I’m drawing between the tradition that gave us what we call the <\/span>Iliad <\/span><\/i>and what we call the <\/span>Odyssey <\/span><\/i>and modern digital games is only that the <\/span>ba da Bum ba da Bum Bum <\/span><\/i>of these tiny units of glory proved to be the foundational building blocks upon which professional singers of tales could assemble tales of adventure that eventually became so much more.<\/span><\/p>\n

Just as the player of a digital game\u2014let’s take the very familiar example of <\/span>Super Mario Bros. <\/span><\/i>as a starting point\u2014learns to build his or her play-performance on the foundation of basic sequences of button-pushes and, in later games, thumbstick movements at precisely timed moments, the bards (think of the bard wanna-be herdsman I described above) learned to deploy the names of the heroes. Just as the first level of <\/span>Super Mario Bros. <\/span><\/i>presents few challenges, and from the larger perspective the first digital games present a great deal less complexity than later levels and later games, we can discern especially in the <\/span>Iliad <\/span><\/i>the traces of the earliest stories erected on the foundation of the line-end formulae: what today we tend to call the “battle books.”<\/span><\/p>\n

It’s not terribly germane to the more important structural point I want to make in this series, but it’s nonetheless very interesting in its own right, that these battle scenes, which most readers of the <\/span>Iliad <\/span><\/i>skim or skip altogether, are possessed of a level of graphic violence to rival the most parent-and-teacher-worrying videogames. Of course, ancient Greeks had perhaps more reason to use their educational technology of interactive-narrative to prepare young men to fight than we have to do the same with our young citizens. Nevertheless, the development of these simple, violent narratives into the foundation of so much good in Western Civilization might persuade us to worry less that even violent video games are ruining generations of students.<\/span><\/p>\n

What <\/span>is <\/span><\/i>germane about the battle books is that they evolved into a larger unit called the <\/span>aristeia<\/span><\/i>, which we can compare with great utility to what in digital games usually goes by the name “boss-battle,” though the <\/span>aristeia, <\/span><\/i>as we’ll see, involves a good deal more that we can profitably compare to elements of digital games than simply the final battle.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Part of a series on the educational affordances of interactive narrative. ba da Bum ba da Bum bum Podas \u014dkus Akhilleus (pronounce the final “eu” as “yoo” if you have to\u2014it’s a diphthong: the final Bum). Polum\u0113tis Odysseus (same here). “Swift-footed Achilles.” “Cunning Odysseus.” These are line-end formulas. Think ofContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[32,419],"coauthors":[206],"class_list":["entry","author-travis","post-5681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-articles","tag-homer","tag-homeric-bards"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5681"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5683,"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5681\/revisions\/5683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5681"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=5681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}