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Aporistic Games �& Classics��Seva Khusid, University of Chicago, 2024

not anymore!

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Plan:

Why are we even talking about games?
What (interesting) work can we do with them?

Case 1: using Classics for estrangement.

What am I trying to do now?

Case 2: using Classics-as-field.

How else to think in, through, alongside games?

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Games are sets of rules.
These rules create a play-space, magic circle.
Everything in the magic circle is understood as not real.
But unreality does not undermine the importance of play.
Role of play in culture: rituals, contests, rites of passage.

How does this translate to video games?

Loose retelling of Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 1949

Video games are a young artform, but games themselves are prehistoric. The seminal text on play-element of culture is Homo Ludens of Johan Huzinga, and already in 1949 he latches on to three crucial things about games: they are interactive, they are rules-based, and they are personal.

The rules are what the games are made of. “Rules” is a broad term here: it can mean literal rules of how poker hands work, it can be children playing make-believe and saying “this stick is a sword”. It can be a location or circumstance: a football stadium defines a play-space, and, in a sense, so do the courtroom, the parliament hall, and the theatre stage.

As soon as you play by these rules, you are in a play-space: the magic circle, Huizinga calls it.

As a player, you understand that it is all pretend: but you also give the utmost respect to that pretend. You do not tell children “your doll is not really drinking from the empty cup”, or actors “you are speaking English, you are not the Prince of Denmark?”. Least of all do the players themselves undermine their play. You never say “these are just painted papers” when playing cards, or “this is just me” when playing the role of the Santa Claus.

On the opposite, this unreality enhances the cultural role of play. Contests and competitions are treated with the gravitas of real combat, but they are at the same time explicitly not real, boxing bruises do not destroy friendships. Most importantly, consider rites of passage: they are the symbolic and sometimes practical representation of the change in life. You get to play the role before you have to live it. Therein also lies the educational and transformative components of games.

But all this is written about games defined broadly, and mostly as it is seen in the cultures much more immersed into their games; or, at least, less genre-savvy and cynical about them. How do we trace these same lines in video games?

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Games are sets of rules.

To play a game is to internalize its ruleset.

Image sources:

https://www.gamerevolution.com/guides/944506-baldurs-gate-3-bg3-legendary-items-list-locations-weapons-armor-act-1-2

https://tenor.com/view/mario-game-fall-baited-fail-gif-7458795

https://i.kinja-img.com/image/upload/c_fill,h_675,pg_1,q_80,w_1200/033f5c3ba990fcc2ce362861f54d84b7.jpg

https://shared.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/203290/header.jpg?t=1604338987

See Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games, 2007

So we come to game studies. Interactivity and rules meet proceduralism: because now the games are not just loose rules, every action in a game is now a product of a rule in the code. And as you play by these rules, your experience in-game can be fine-tuned by the author.

Any game is a set of rules, be they explicitly stated, like descriptions in a role-playing game, or implicit, like gravity in Super Mario. And to play a game means to work within that set of rules, internalizing it as a fact, making it a habit. Ian Bogost calls this procedural rhetoric: educating their player and instilling particular beliefs and attitudes through the rules of the game.

This is used in educational games – to my mind comes the McDonalds training material made for Nintendo DS, eSMART 2.0. There you are asked to practice every step of work at one of their restaurants. But it is also not hard to see how such a tool could also be used for propaganda: so, for example, the US-army funded and creatively named “America’s Army” punishes the player for shooting civilians and allies – insinuating that the same punishments work in their actual army.

But despite and beyond these dubious practices, the underlying tools of persuasion through games are the usual elements of game design. This sets out the scene for procedural rhetoric: the way games impose an attitude on their players. But where some scholars are concerned with the application of deliberate rhetoric, be it for propaganda or for education, others see the harm in rhetoric that the designer might not be aware of.

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Design readability
Immersion
Approachability
Marketability
Designer’s habit/familiarity
Consequences of other design elements

Sarah Grey applying Adorno’s critique of media to games.

“A Refusal to Play Along: Videogaming and Ludic Thought.”, 2010, 25-29

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(These are uncharitable readings)

war is bad, but not as bad as a dragon eating the world

war is bad, but we will rebuild one way or another

war is bad, but strong men must do what strong men must do

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(These are less uncharitable readings)

Power corrupts:

the world-eating dragon sees the world as its plaything, and so do you, the player.

Any society is greedy and violent. War never changes, because neither do we.

An idealist in power will commit atrocities and motivate them by his devotion to a better cause.

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Ludic thought

Attitude reached when immersion breaks
Readiness to observe and think
So, sort of lucidity?
Break from immersion – and from the game-imposed mindset

One. In 2010, Dr Sarah Grey writes her doctoral thesis on the notion of ludic thought. In general terms, it is a particular attitude that emerges when the player stops being immersed. It, when reached, compels the player to make interesting observations and produce knowledge through their act of play. The specific kind of this knowledge is not as important: Grey is unconcerned with the content of the game, and her examples range from observations directly about the narrative to random stray curiosities that are sparked by the game and applied outside of it.

But the overall point Dr Grey makes is that by carefully estranging the player from the game, by forcing them to not just go through its motions but to think about what they represent about their underlying structures, the player will be able to break out of the mindset enforced by the procedures of the game.

So how does this immersion-breaking attitude arise?

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Aporias

Unexplained and alienating
Bugs and visible seams
But also deliberate mysteries

Dead time

Undesigned and unguided.
In-game, but not playing it.

Image sources:

https://teamico.fandom.com/wiki/Runic_language

https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrim/comments/fimgbs/any_other_chests_like_this_this_one_is_near_the/

Dr Grey talks about two kinds of estrangement: aporias and dead time. Dead time is a term taken from Adorno and refers here to the time spent without designed content. Wandering through the game’s world. Jumping through an overlooked gap in collision and falling through the solid objects. Spending longs stretches of time doing things the developers never planned you to be doing (but certainly expected, their job is to expect everything). Still, immersion is broken here because this experience is not designed, it is unguided, and so it does not push the player to think in specific ways.

By contrast, aporias are more sudden. They are the unexplained, alienating elements that conjure a mystery for the player. It is less ‘I see a building on this mountain, I wonder what is there’ and more ‘why is this rock labelled as a chest’. But bugs and other wrinkles are only one way to produce an aporia. A deliberate example Dr Grey gives is of the game Shadow of the Colossus using a made up language for its dialogues and giving no subtitles: the player cannot in principle know what is being said. But they can make educated guesses and perhaps even understand – or think they understand and then be subverted as the narrative progresses.

And at this point we come to my second core text.

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Procedural dialectic for historical games

History in games is usually for aesthetics only.
Causes and effects are subsumed by the narrative or mechanics.
Brechtian estrangement:

“‘I did this’ <…> has got to become ‘he did this, when he might have done something else.’”

Application: playing as a defined person and considering their reasons.

Alexandra Petrus, Dialectical Games: Applying Devices of Epic Theatre to Digital Games Portraying Historical Narratives, 2021.

In 2021 Alexandra Petrus writes her Master’s thesis. Petrus shares the motivations of Grey: she wants her players to critically engage the game. Specifically, Petrus wants to make historiographic games; but games that claim to be about history are not usually interested in the events and causes as much as they are interested in the aesthetic of the period. Think of historical strategy games: their players are usually impersonal, disembodied, omniscient about their country and armies. Always in control, too. From the other end, the games that paint a personal narrative in a historical setting tend to be interested in the stories rather than causes and effects.

To resolve that, Petrus turns to Berthold Brecht’s Epic Theatre. Brecht wanted his audience to develop a critical eye to the characters on stage: to distance from the pathos of the performance, and to engage in ethical reasoning. This extends to the actors. Petrus quotes his response to Stanislavsky: “‘I did this’ <…> has got to become ‘he did this, when he might have done something else.’”

Petrus wants this same change of attitude in the player: her project focuses on the West German militant Baader–Meinhof group, and so she wants the player to ask what drives the protagonist, a student who joins with the group, to perform ever more radical actions for the group. By analogy with Bogost, Petrus calls the set of tools to shape the player experience this way “procedural dialectic”.

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Procedural dialectic: estrangement tools

Dialectics of the game as in-game choices;
Undesirable outcomes that seem avoidable;
“Ropes and flies” of the exposed backstage.

Image source:

https://cdn.nexus.gg/assets/vidya/99ac39b3293f499fbe3e7fe25f57c161/images/screenshots/1.jpg

So, translated from theatre into games, the tools are: representing the dialectics – the actual question of the project – as in-game choices. But then make the player question either choice they make by showing some undesirable consequence that might have been avoidable. Lastly, distance the player from the game-world by exposing the conventional and make-believe elements of the game: the ropes and flies, as it were.

Now, this is probably rather esoteric, so let’s see an example. A game by a Polish studio, inspired by the siege of Sarajevo, This War of Mine. It is about civilians surviving a siege: lack of medication, lack of food, constant threats of shelling. Marauders. So you, the player, must find a way to provide for yourself and for whichever companions you have by your side.

There we have it: difficult decisions where every misstep can cost your life or the life of one of these companions. Worse, sometimes things you need for your survival are found in the hands of others. Do you threaten them, do you rob and leave them to hunger and disease? Do you attack outright? So there are the difficult decisions, here framed not just by the narrative, but also by the mechanics – so, procedural rhetoric again. But you are also never in the shoes of this person on-screen, you issue in-game commands and make decisions, but you do not feel the same hunger, cold, fear as they do.

Your camera is distanced in this side view, your actions are framed by the broader landscape of devastation. And that is a kind of estrangement, perhaps not exactly ropes and flies, but a way to keep the distance between the player and the character. Mechanics posit the question: how far should a person go to survive? And the camera keeps this question relevant to you. There is an interplay with Artaud’s theatre of cruelty here, no? The content is emotionally powerful, it is a gut punch after a gut punch, but the player’s accountability is retained; and so, they keep asking “why do I do this” and “could I have done differently”.

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Aporistic games

Find a genuine puzzle to explore
Build a game about it, but do not answer the question
Guide the player to take a stance on the matter
Try to show what problems might follow
Iterate

Result: the player is compelled to think�and develops a sophisticated position.

ἀπορέω

to be at a loss, be in doubt, be puzzled
in Dialectic, start a question, raise a difficulty

So, to recap. We can use procedures of the game to make assertions: for teaching, for propaganda, for shaping the rhetoric of our piece. We can construct the game to distance the player from the events and to frame some specific question or topic for them to think about. And we can use disruptions and empty space in the experience to provide time for them to think.

My Master’s thesis came in as an attempt to synthesize these approaches.

My proposal: take what you would consider an aporia. Select a question that you, as a designer, have no answer to. Build a game that, by direct representation or by metaphor, would force the player to face this question. Give them a way to respond. And then, because it is your job to expect everything, try to anticipate their response – and produce a convincing argument for why it is insufficient. Keep going, and over time the game would take the dynamic of a Socratic interrogation: you propose an aporia, the interlocutor offers one solution after the other, and, in the end, they either leave with a satisfying answer, or recognize that the question is unsolvable.

No need to gloss aporeo for you, of course.

By the ways of Grey and Petrus, such a game would require a high degree of awareness from the player. But by its structure – presenting an imaginary scenario and asking to make a judgement about that scenario – it works as a thought experiment and a set of objections to whatever solutions you, the designer, anticipate. Being a thought experiment, it hopes to spark the thought, start the discussion, and, hopefully, arrive as some knowledge, even if that knowledge is ‘producing a satisfactory answer is really hard’.

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Aporistic games

NB: the game should not assert an answer.

We are presenting the puzzle, not a solution.

E. R. Dodds, “On Misunderstanding the ‘Oedipus Rex”:

“What value could there be in a 'proof’

whose premises are manufactured by the artist?”

✨ GOOD! ✨

😞BAD!👎

The trick is that the question at the heart of the game must be unanswered. That is a problem of all procedural rhetoric: if the player disagrees with the ruleset, the rhetorical message will never land. Think of that America’s Army game: its propaganda falls flat because we can challenge its rule as not true to life. Here we can get some wiggle room: the aporia can be framed in that Brechtian manner, very clearly communicating that the game is just that, a framing device. We do not solve ethical thought experiments with appeals to physics, after all. But we also trespass if we presuppose an answer and bend our framing device. To wit: if a game simulates the trolley problem but clearly labels the options as “good” and “bad”, it is begging the question.

In that sense, this approach departs sharply from Socratic dialogue as a literary form for the sake of keeping true to elenchus as a form of dialogue. If we want the thinking to happen in the player’s head, we must be careful not to estrange them from the conversation altogether. And I am reminded of E.R. Dodds’ annoyance at reading Greek tragedy as somehow argumentative or proving some ethical point. No, the art – on this approach and for these purposes – is illustration and frame, and all the work happens inside the audience’s heads.

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Aporistic games

Socratic (Sophist?) roots to the method.�Is it informed or merely inspired?

Greek tragedy as cautionary tales for their audiences?�Goldhill, Simon. 2020. “The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology .”

Greek comedy as social satire?�Didactic elements in Hesiod?�Stoddard, K. B. (2003). The Programmatic Message of the ‘Kings and Singers’ Passage.

Not yet “Classics in games”!

But can be used to guide thinking�about Classics.

RECEIVING

Now. This far this has been a game studies & design talk, so where’s Classics? Well, throwing around the words “aporia” and “dialectic” does bring us to Socrates – or even sophists, with using games for rhetoric and all – but what are these figures doing here? Is this line of thought informed by Classics or merely inspired?

Let’s seek a connection with Greek theatre here: Goldhill argues forcefully that tragedy used Thebes as inversion of Athens, for a sort of cautionary tale; and Prometheus Bound, if it really was performed in Sicily by their tyrant’s invitation, could be read as a cautionary tale for that same tyrant. But cautionary tales, same as social satire, same as Hesiod’s didactics, are all assertive. They are closer to procedural rhetoric, purely didactic material.

So, when my method takes the dynamic of an elenchus, but does not actually interact with the culture around it, is it actually using Classics? Are we, as it were, receiving yet?

Yet, even if the method itself is not inherently rooted in Classics, it aligns with the sort of work we do. What my project asks of the player is to construct frameworks, ways of thinking about something. And this could go two ways.

It could be open-ended: imagine a choregos simulator, having to choose a playwright and direct a production for Dionysia, thinking what would be an impactful and enjoyable piece of art for your audience, the Athenians in the 5^th century BCE. Or, on the contrary, very directed: maybe a conversation with a bunch of Roman friends in the aftermath of Caesar’s murder, deciding whether you would join Brutus in the civil war, trying to convince your friends.

Either approach is more speculative than our usual work, of course. But its goal is to introduce the player to the context – so, traditional didactic element – but it then asks them to consider the ways in which the Athenians or Romans thought and what words and conceptual devices could reach and impact them. In a sense, it is similar to the old philological practice of writing letters and speeches under the famous names.

But still, our discipline gets intensely technical when it comes to fundamental questions. Even with Prometheus Bound, I can imagine a game of discussing its authorship with Mark Griffith, but there is very little to translate into rules there. Games for Classics appear more aligned with Petrus and her historiography, with assertive expression. But for now let’s turn to the game I made for my thesis and see how that uses Classical elements to frame its question.

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Proof of concept: game Gnosis

Aporia: goals and means of academic discussion in Humanities
Game mechanics to model the flow of dispute
Narrative repeatedly comes back to the main question
Overall: the question ‘what are we trying to achieve here’� directed at the player

Use of Classics to estrange

…but not too much!

The game I made to showcase this approach is about academic discussion. My aporias, my genuine puzzles, are: do we care for our theories to be good at explaining or good at persuading? If I subscribe to one school of thought and my opponent – to the other, do I try to convince them, do I try to find a synthesis of our ideas? If we can accept several stances and choose whichever suits the situation, don’t we lose integrity a little bit? And should we ever convince ourselves against skepticism?

I construct the procedures of the game to emulate the flow of debate, focusing at first of some imaginary theological dispute. But the questions of our ends and our means, the questions of what is valued in this sort of debate, are repeatedly brough forth in-narrative and in how the mechanics of the game impact that narrative. Overall, it is informed by a certain disillusionment about how Humanities produce knowledge – and by hope that the player might understand that worry and offer a satisfying solution to it.

And late antiquity fit this project like a glove. I needed to separate out this question of end goals from the everyday matters of academia and to make the player see academic discussion, as framed by the mechanics, through its processes rather than its content. Hence the theological dispute: it is foreign, it is strange, but it is also recognizable. My framing narrative of imaginary scholarship in an imaginary church gives the player enough clues to connect it to their academic experience, but also set the stage for further estrangement.

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So, let me retrace my design steps. I wanted the game to be about academic discussion, so search for the truth is at least a theme. I decided to imagine a Byzantine temple of some Neoplatonic mix of faith and philosophy, never existing in our world but conceivable. For the visuals, we went with vaguely Greek Orthodox garb.

To make the discussion tangible I gave it a fantastical twist: the religious aspect of this temple is seeing the abstract ideas and concepts realized into tanginble objects.

The player is an initiate now about to receive full priesthood – thinly veiled metaphor for doctoral defense. So, the player elevates themselves closer to the world of platonic ideals. The material world dissipates and ideas become solid, visible and tangible – but for that, no longer entirely intelligible, opaque. With this Platonist reversal I get my thematic core of the game.

Next, I needed to translate discussion into mechanics. Well, when speaking, you can either assert the status quo, disagree with it, or find a blind spot and focus on that. Hence we get our three interlocutors: orthodoxy in the middle, heterodoxy to the right, and this secret third thing to the left.

The character on the left talks about developing theory on the orthodox grounds, but also about going into apocrypha, but also not really committing to a fundamental view – but it does not really matter what exactly she is doing. That is because uncertainty, or, rather, abstraction is my main instrument here: the player will interact with the discussion without having any idea of what the specific stances are. I allude to some doctrine, but not its contents. What matters is the dynamics of the debate, not any specific beliefs.

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As the player begins their journey into the world of ideas, the temple walls disappear and give way to the abstract background and equally abstract shapes. The discussion, as I said, is tangible: represented with these three shapes labeled as the Hope, the Associations, and the Foundations. Associations should have really been called implications. There is a sense of hierarchy and of their role in the dialogue, but the thesis they make up is deliberately unintelligible.

The interaction with this composite Thesis is equally surreal. The optics of a scholar help them perceive and understand ideas. Here, they are your literal eyes. If you can only see red, you will never understand a blue idea. Your tools for contribution, your ways to alter the Thesis that you now perceive, are your hands. And the ways in which you express your newfound concept are your language: your mouths.

This borders on body horror. As you navigate the nauseating non-space of ideas – this background is actually animated in-game to swirl and move – you internalize others’ ideas into yourself, growing new eyes, sprouting new limbs. This is deliberately made to confuse, perhaps even trouble the audience and to make the Neoplatonic temple from the start seem like a familiar and safe space that you now miss.

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The role of Classics here, then, is mediation. Antiquity is distant but understandable. The diverse cast is not at all implausible in the, say, fourth century. Their expressions and attitudes are a bit unfamiliar, but relatable. The yellow-red man complains about being disillusioned about his academic project, the green-tinted woman shares that she reads Sappho in her spare time, the blue-tinted girl is quick-witted but distracted with a problem she stayed the whole night up solving. The estrangement at this stage is from the, uh, aesthetics of modernity that keeps the actual content, the heart of these characters and their interactions with the player, familiar.

And then comes the second step, the jarring abstraction of the main gameplay. Now the strangers from a strange past become your comrades. They are as confused and disoriented as you. And the abstraction at hand does the same thing to the subject matter of the gameplay as what the setting does to the subject of the narrative. I strip away the detail and I leave the bare function, the bare process: mechanically, of the discussion, narratively, of interacting with your peers in this discussion. And so, just as surrealism is a tool of estrangement and – I apologize for overusing this word – framing the gameplay, and so is antiquity used here as a tool of estrangement.

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Resources for the games bit

Key texts:

Grey, Sarah Cameron Loyd. "Dead Time: Aporias and Critical Videogaming." symploke 17, no. 1 (2009): 231-246.

Grey, Sarah Cameron Loyd. “A Refusal to Play Along: Videogaming and Ludic Thought.”, 2010.

Alexandra Petrus, Dialectical Games: Applying Devices of Epic Theatre to Digital Games Portraying Historical Narratives, 2021.

Games as rhetoric:

Bogost, Ian. "2. Persuasive Games, A Decade Later" In Persuasive Gaming in Context edited by Teresa De La Hera, Jeroen Jansz, Joost Raessens and Ben Schouten, 29-40. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021.

Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007.

Classicists:

Dodds, E. R. “On Misunderstanding the ‘Oedipus Rex.’” Greece & Rome 13, no. 1 (1966): 37–49.

Goldhill, Simon. 2020. “The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology .” in Nothing to Do with Dionysos?: Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, by John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin, 97-129. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Stoddard, K. B. (2003). The Programmatic Message of the ‘Kings and Singers’ Passage: Hesiod, ‘Theogony’ 80-103. Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-), 133(1), 1–16

Other ways to think about meaningful gaming:

DJ Anderson, Bringing Philosophy to Gaming, Not Gaming to Philosophy in Analytic Teaching and Philosophical Praxis, 2019.

Nguyen, C. Thi, Games: Agency As Art, Thinking Art (New York, 2020; online edn, Oxford Academic, 23 Apr. 2020)

Huizinga, Johan. 1949, 2016. Homo Ludens. Kettering, OH: Angelico Press.

Hooton, M., and C. Ryan. 2025. “oWL, Bear, ::machine:: : Virtual NPC design as a shamanistic mode of resistance.” In Ludic Inquiries into Power and Pedagogy in Higher Education, 58-70. New York: Routledge.

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HARVEST�OF NAMES

A LACANIAN GAME

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PREMISE AND PRELIMINARIES

Main theme: identity-construction from role models
Game in direct conversation with Persona series

There: Jungian archetypes
Here: Lacanian mirror stage

Different core gameplay, different psychoanalyst, same ethos
Main perspective: societal and personal construction of womanhood
Three story layers, three points to make

I want to make a game about constructing a self out of many role models and ideals a person aspires to.

There is a genre-defining game series that built its identity around role models: Japan-made Persona series, drawing heavily from Jungian psychoanalysis and even more so – his esoteric metaphysical beliefs. In that game, the social masks you wear are literal spirits and demons in the collective unconscious. You play as a high schooler and wears these social masks by day, but by night you summons these archetypes to battle the metaphorical demons of the Collective Unconscious.

Where the main theme of Persona was and is finding a true self, I want my game to deny that such a thing is possible. I want to assert that identities are flexible, and that will be my rhetoric, my assertion and not the question. Instead of Jungian archetypes, set in stone and, in a way, eternal and larger than life, I want to use Lacan and his mirror-stage: a person approaches the sort of self they want to be, and as they come closer to their ideal, they update that idealized vision. The pursuit is endless because you will always see details that you do not yet have; and sometimes still you will want to substantially change your ideals.

So, I take their core ethos of Persona series and subvert it. Instead of Jung, Lacan. Instead of a methodical turn-based gameplay, something more dynamic. But the heart of that series is young people trying to find themselves, and I want that to remain. To ground the discussion of identity before I reach the really abstract stuff, I want the first narrative layer to be about womanhood: how that identity is constructed socially and personally. An ever-relevant theme, not too alienating. But once the player is eased into our conceptual structures, I would then expand the message to discuss how identity is structured in general.

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GAMEPLAY LOOP

Daily routine: student life sim

Time-management challenge
Character interactions
Player power & story progression

Action: turn-based and fighting

Story progress unlocks dungeons
Fights with preset enemies
RPG phase: dialogue and loadouts
Combat phase: a round of fighting

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CORE SYSTEM:[IDEAL]s�

Message

Our alternative to Personas: synthetic concepts of how one should act in life.
Basic ones come from role models: fictional and historical characters.
Abilities are metaphors for the general way of life. Used in both action and downtime gameplay.

Mechanics

Each basic [IDEAL] is a historical or mythological figure.
Learning more about them develops the stock [IDEAL].
Player can mix their [IDEAL]s, carrying over chosen abilities and stats.

Identity-construction, finally. A buzzword for a name, but the idea is all the same – an idealized self. Instead of an archetype, represented by a mythological figure or a mythologized person, these are synthetic. I read about Anne Carson and I think “hey, I wish I was as cool!”, and now the set of characteristics – the person I am not, but the person I want to be – is updated to be a bit more like Carson. If I never had any idea about who I want to be and act like, then it is the same as taking the idealized, sanitized vision of Carson for an archetype I want to emulate. But if I already have influences from, say, Maud Reed, Franz Berto, Kate Cook – if my idea of who I want to act like is informed by all these wonderful people – then Carson just contributes to this synthetic entity.

Mechanically that is represented by the protagonist learning, as they broaden their erudition, about impressive people. The more you know, the fuller you can emulate them, and the more you can draw from to inform your decision “I want to be like them”. That is then translated into abilities, representing a person’s way of going about their daily problems. Because I need gameplay, this also doubles as the abilities in the combat section of the game, so a bit of a metaphorical representation there.

But here is the interesting thing: these metaphors will be limited. I cannot in principle make a hundred different [IDEAL]s for individual inspiring people, each with a unique set of eight or so abilities. Some will share their effects, or visuals, or both, and so we get an interplay of syncretism and synthesis. Because now Carson and, again, off the top of my head, Nabokov, might end up having the same attributes, the same bits of their behavior. And, inversely, when you synthesize your IDEAL, you will be able to only keep the bits unique to Nabokov and Carson, and discard the similarity. So what is that new – person? entity? – that now informs your ideal self? And in-narrative I will make sure to bring this question to forefront as well.

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[IDEAL]s�and ability synthesis

Abilities in detail

Each [IDEAL] has 6-8 abilities for combat. They reflects personality traits. Combat stats depend on those.
Conversations often have dialogue options locked behind a threshold of the personality trait.
Too much or too little of a personality trait will narrow your options.

Ability mechanics

Categorized by input length (complexity).
An [IDEAL] only knows 6-8 abilities and of specific lengths (e.g., only 3 short).
Patterns across all: e.g., [BACK]+[HIT] input would always send a projectile.
Shared animations, different extra effects.

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STORY OUTLINE

THREE INTERWOVEN

ROUTES

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CHAINS OF SIGNIFIERS

STORYLINE OF THE PLAYER

A student feels isolated at a university after arriving.
At her lowest emotional point, she goes to see the meteor shower by the sea. A star flies past her, she slips.

She falls through the waters and into the unreal cave of Prometheus.
He recognizes her turmoil and calls her Io: the two share desperation. �Our Io overcomes hers. (Cf. PB 747)

The player story is what the game begins with, our Point of View character. She is customizable, but not in-depth: certainly name, maybe major, possibly visuals as a sprite reskin. My target audience should feel like she could be from the same cohort as they are.

She is a fresh undergraduate, finding herself at the crossroads of identity. There are usual pressures found at that stage of life, the place is unfamiliar, there may be implications of transferring after troubles elsewhere, or of post-Covid awkwardness, or maybe of some other reason for her to feel isolated and unable to break that isolation.

Early in the semester, people gather to look at the shooting starts. She tries to join, but struggles to find a group without feeling like she intrudes. So, in an isolated area of the shoreline she stands alone; and when the star falls past her, she slips into the cold water.

That is the point at which we depart realism and embrace the metaphor. She is completely dry and untouched and not underwater. She is deep underground, and before her – chained Prometheus, as he is at the aftermath of the play. He addresses her as Io, introducing the player to the IDEALs as a mechanic. Just like the Io of myth, our Io is desperate, harried, isolated. And, well, with the fall to water, there is an easy parallel with Io in the play exclaiming “why didn’t I hurl myself off this rock”. Io in the play is comforted by someone understanding her suffering, and eventually led to if not healing, then at least some sort of empowerment.

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Character arc

Io will investigate the fallen star and the power of [IDEAL]s alongside the other strange happenings in the town.
Through her journey, she will find whatever friends and define herself however she wishes.
That might mean refusing intelligible definitions outright!
The final obstacle of her storyline is Pandora: synthetic womanhood.

Systems

[IDEAL]s define Io’s character stats.
Io’s dialogue options depend on those.
As Io becomes a part of the university and town community, her actions and words shape the public perception.
It is easier to confirm these perceptions and hard to act against them.

As the other narrative threads progress, the player will develop their [IDEAL], as well as gain access to several [IDEAL]s to switch on-demand.

This would free her from the imposed role model of Io, though – just as Prometheus said – she may also choose to embrace Io and go with�her until the end, reaching that [IDEAL]’s greatest potential.�

Mechanically we get a second interesting thing happening with identity, because the ideal self translates into numerical values, affinities to certain habits and behaviors. Think of it as a number of vectors, tendencies. As Io navigates her life, some things will be easier to do than others depending on how she positions herself. But then, the perception of her by the other will also impact it. If somebody knows her as a knowledgeable friend, it will be easier for her to be convincing than if she meets them for the first time. So, again, pulling at the themes of identity.

�Lastly, if the player devotes a substantial portion of their in-game year to exploring womanhood and its imposed norms, they will eventually meet Pandora as a final obstacle of this storyline: the fake woman, the ultimate imposed femininity. Tentatively, there are two resolutions: Pandora may be turned back to clay through a boss battle – or, perhaps, given a different fate.

The name “Chains of Signifiers” is here mostly a pun on Lacan – Prometheus bound, but bound by chains of meaning, and the same chains bind all of us. It is a strange case of reception because I am neither really re-producing the original text nor using them as a point of reference for something distinct. These Prometheus and Pandora know they are more symbolic than real, that is to say.

And among the sources for Io the protagonist there will our scholarship. In one sense, it is that the abilities and characteristics of an IDEAL are derived from how the figure reaches us, with inconsistencies and debates. But in the exact same way, the dialogue options being dependent on public perception means that sometimes you are forced to challenge the others’ reading of you. Whenever I can, I will try to direct the player towards this parallel.

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HARVEST OF NAMES

BACCHIC THROUGHLINE

To enact a role is to become it. A drunken student in the university town acts-becomes Dionysus.
Over the academic year, Dionysus manifests and his power grows.
He must be stopped by a deadline or else the game ends abruptly.

Main story & gameplay framing.
Themes: desire for justice, agency, desire for freedom.
Progressively opens combat areas and alters the state of the town for the life sim sections of the game.

Strongly inspired by:

Károly Kerényi,

Dionysos: Archetypal Image

of Indestructible Life

Now, the storyline of the player is trying at once to be coy with Classics and to tackle worries relevant to the modern audience. I am drawing, no surprises here, from my time at St Andrews. The womanhood throughline is made under the impression of its strong feminist community, and it might be tempting to set the game about constructed identity on the island known for its political turmoil over what makes a woman a woman.

With the second narrative thread I am trying to push further in both the classical and the political: it is the titular Harvest of Names.

We saw two dynamics with role models and archetypes: synthesizing them or else enacting a different person. Now we are getting to syncretism, syncretism of two kinds.

On the one hand, we have the syncretism in-culture. Hermes Trismegistus is a product of Thoth and Hermes but is neither. When cultures meet, distinct entities are recognized for their shared qualities and become a new, third thing.

But something similar happens, I think, when a Classicist or a folklorist or any other source of order and categorization in the world of myth begins drawing connections. When we begin to investigate individual instances of a hero, or of a monster, or of a god, the distinct and self-contained portrayals quickly give way to the shapeless, self-contradictory entity that includes into itself all those instances.

Whichever of these instances outweighs the others in its influence, that one will become the main name to the cultural presence beneath, and others would be reduced to aspects. And, since legendary people become objects of culture, unbridled syncretism brings them under the single name too.

This Harvest of Names is what Dionysus will plan to do in the game.

He is first summoned by enactment. Yes, this is Donna Tart reception: Dionysus is a crowd deity, so when several students get drunk, they enact his presence.

Neither becomes Dionysus completely, rather, Dionysus emerges across their shared experience.

Becoming embodied in them by that enactment, and by becoming their IDEAL, he will lead them to perform a sort of structural recreation of Bacchae:�creating a conflict, bringing the public into the state of frenzy, and then destroying the town.

Each of these steps will have a possible catastrophic resolution that the player must prevent by beating the relevant level in time.

But no amount of work can fully dismantle his project, until the final confrontation with Dionysus the eschatological deity.

His storyline is a discussion of the quest for freedom – Dionysus the Name-Gatherer is radical freedom personified, be it of literal, revolutionary, or philosophical sort. And a careful player might find a way to placate the god without unnecessary tragedy.

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Zagreus the Hunter

A notorious man is hunted and killed by someone in the first weeks of the semester.
Authorities react with a crackdown. Through autumn, student life is disrupted.
The vigilante is elusive, as if not even real. Sympathisers are punished anyway.
Io finds the vigilante: he was possessed by Dionysus.

Dionysus the Saviour.

The spring is consumed by riots. Entire streets blocked.
The leader is gone but the crowd has a mind of its own.
If not stopped, Dionysus will see the city burn and will lead the charmed crowd to the hills.
But now it is not a person or an avatar: Io is opposing the deity itself!

Bacchus the Riot.

Students facing injustice defend their friends.
Winter is spent in quiet anticipation. Once the ice thaws, the town will erupt.
A charismatic protest leader emerges. Nobody knows who they are.
Io confronts him: this is Dionysus manifest.

For the three seasons of the academic year, three chapters. First, Zagreus, embodied in one of these drunken students, hunts down – perhaps even kills – somebody truly terrible from the city. I wasn’t actually sure how to make them sufficiently unlikeable without making it into a caricature, and then the latest US healthcare news occurred. Anyhow, somebody who is morally appalling, but the action is brutal and an act of vigilantism.

That shakes the quiet town: the police and the university disrupt the student life, playing into the hands of Dionysus. The vigilante themselves is never found, but any vocal support for their cause is punished. Io and her friends will hunt down the Hunter aspect of Dionysus and free from it the actual person who did it.

But whatever Io does with them – turn them in or let go – the supporters keep facing administrative and academic pressure. An injustice was met with unsanctioned violence, but now the sanctioned violence is used to quell any angry voices. This never works, and the town is ready to erupt as soon as the ice thaws. The protests get louder, always led by the same voice – but there are inconsistencies. Now it’s a man, now it’s a woman, now it’s a first-year, now it’s a PhD. Io realizes: their leader is Dionysus, and the appearances are changed like gloves. He speaks with a hundred mouths. If not confronted, he rouses the students so much that the violence begins overnight and overwhelms the city.

But even if the more violent plan is thwarted, the crowd is still about to explode. And the university is still overwhelmed by the sudden radical rhetoric and the palpable anger at an injustice. Worse, even without that manifestation of Dionysus, the crowds act as if under a single will. This is the culmination of Bacchae, but it is also the cultic face of Dionysus: once the city burns, the crowd will leave for the hills.

Kerenyi, through a linguistic argument, distinguishes two kinds of life in Greek mythological thought: the definite, lucid, human life, and the indefinite, unaware life in the forest and among the Bacchants. But the Orphics were, to my knowledge, primarily interested in the eschatological benefits of their life in cult. If Io wants to prevent that eschatological twist, she will have to oppose the Orphic deity itself.

Well, you can see the influence of the student responses to the political upheavals of the last half a decade. Bacchae the play works here as a structure, but the player is not the protagonist of that play; instead, this Dionysus is making the Pentheus out of the authorities of the town.

Because this is just an outline of the story, I do not know how to resolve all of its tensions. Perhaps, the player – our Io – is really the Teiresias of this play, the mediator between the divine and the human injustices. Perhaps there are several roles to enact, perhaps she is our third speaking actor on this metaphorical stage. But even this is just a framing device, leading up to the actual question of the game.

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REVOLT AGAINST MEANING

PROMETHEAN LAST EXAM

The story so far revolves around the constraints of structures and the violent fight against them
Prometheus is defined by his chains: he is the archetypal rebel only because he got punished
If the player understands the procedural dialectic about identity and constraints, we will ask them:

Between the powerless acceptance�of socially-formed identities and�losing oneself completely in search for�absolute freedom,�is any solution satisfactory?

Prometheus believes that identity is the last shackle to be broken. The player must respond.

The first two storylines dealt with how societal structures define who we can choose to be, and how the societal structures are fought and shattered.

This storyline is about fighting definitions.

Prometheus is the rebel, the benevolent titan, the sufferer for all mankind – but that identity, fundamentally, is a consequence of his punishment. If he never got his wedge through the chest, he would have stopped being the tragic rebel and become yet another helpful deity of arts and crafts – like the one of Kabeiroi. And even in the original myths, whenever Prometheus is freed, he must always bear a piece of the rock with himself as his everlasting punishment. That piece of rock is literally what makes Prometheus Prometheus.

Our Prometheus does not like that. He wishes to lose his chains, with them – lose his Prometheus-definition. Hesychius of Alexandria glosses the name Ithax as the Herald of the Titans, another name of Prometheus – this is identity our Prometheus wants to return to.

In the previous storyline, the player struggled against the deity of absolute, excessive freedom of action. Here they face the absolute freedom of definition. And in both cases, they do not have to reject the radical, destructive option completely. It might well be salvageable.

If the player understood all the previous procedural dialectic about identity and constraints, we will ask them:

Between the powerless acceptance�of socially-formed identities and�losing oneself completely in search for�absolute freedom,�is any solution satisfactory?

�The player must respond, and we will produce a way for them to do so – but the content of that response will be their own.

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RECEPTION?

Dialogue with Classics
Dialogue with Classicists?
Still not Classics in a game?

Hopefully eventually on sevakhusid.games

So, that is it, the extent of my vision. We are back to the question, are we receiving yet?

In the first game the role of Classics was mediation. In that, I was guilty of using the cultural fleur just as a supporting tool. But here, it seems, Classical texts and their produced meanings are fully realized as characters. They are, at any rate, agents in the world of the game, and sometimes more so than the actual people.

Next, the schtick with Kerenyi and Dionysus is an attempt to translate a portion of our work – the obsessive and sometimes strenuous search for connections – into the mechanic. We synthesize things that fit together nicely. We construct personalia out of scattered reports. We may be not as willing as Kerenyi to say that Dionysus is the son of the Cretan snake Deity, and also the father, and also carries in his torch the Star of the Labyrinth Asterios – each of these utterly mad steps is grounded, if not proven, and it is in this ability to find connections I see the greatest feature of Classics for this project.

But this game is, ultimately, not about Classics. It is in dialogue, but it is not the methods and issues: the interactive experience. It is not Heaven’s Vault, a game about an archaeologist reconstructing a language. It is not a game of cultural guesswork and endless academic arguments either. So, it is not Classics in a game.

And so, at this point I stop and ask for your opinions. With the tools described, what options do you see to reflect your experience with the discipline in mechanics? Should we even try to? And for my little project: do you have any suggestions, any disagreements, any warnings? I thank Anna once again for letting me present today and am looking forward to the discussion – the floor is yours.