Epic Style: Re-compositional Performance in the BioWare Digital RPG
Since 1997, when Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck appeared (Murray 1997), critics have from time to time been exploring the analogy between oral traditional epic, as studied especially by Milman Parry (Milman Parry and Adam Parry 1987) and Albert Lord (Lord 1981), and digital games. Most prominently in recent years, perhaps, Emily Short, critic and creator of interactive fiction, has been writing a column entitled ‘Homer in Silicon’ (Short 2011) that explores the narrative potential of digital games in general and textual interactive fiction in particular, though largely without specific reference to Homer. From a theoretical perspective, these efforts have been hampered by an insufficient attention among critics like Murray and Short to the specificities of oral formulaic theory as developed especially by Lord and the homerists who came after him. In this chapter I aim to move this area of games criticism forward by describing a particular segment of narrative practice in games – the performance style allowed to the player of the BioWare RPG – as a practice of the same kind of composition by theme described by Lord in traditional oral epic. To this end, I discuss three BioWare RPGs: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (hereafter KOTOR), Mass Effect, and Dragon Age: Origins (hereafter DAO).
I argue that what I call BioWare’s epic style, as a practice of composition by theme, allows the player to perform re-compositions of the thematic material (‘theme’ in this chapter means ‘recurrent element’ – see below) of the game that instantiate an identification of player with player-character (hereafter PC) that has characteristics we can describe as distinctive of the BioWare RPG: the identification is manifest in a distinctive way, and it is related to the cultural meaning of the game in a distinctive way. These distinctive features of the BioWare style arise in a combination of the modularity of the content of the games and the use of what I term ‘sliders’, which index the player’s performance choices according to scales that have an integral relation to the cultural meaning of the games. (The term ‘content’ as used in games criticism is somewhat ambiguous. In this chapter, I use the term narrowly, to mean ‘verbal and visual information accessible to the player in the course of playing the game’.) When we describe these distinctive elements of the BioWare style in the terms of oral formulaic theory as part of a practice of composition by theme, we gain theoretical traction over their role in gaming culture and in broader culture: player-performances of BioWare games transform the public role of the homeric or Southslavic bard into a new and interesting mediation of private and public, where the game allows the player to negotiate his or her identity in a way analogous to performance practices of oral epic, but crucially different in the way players shape their gaming identities as members of a performing audience.
The modern study of traditional oral epic in general, and homeric epic in particular, begins in 1928, with the publication of Milman Parry’s first work on the Iliad and the Odyssey (found in Milman Parry and Adam Parry 1987). After Parry’s early death, his student Albert Lord continued the work Parry had done on Homer into the comparative study of homeric poetry and the oral poetry of the Southslavic guslars. In 1960, Lord published The Singer of Tales (Lord 1981), which remains the seminal work in the field, and has inspired the modern study of traditional epic in relation to its oral roots. What Parry discovered about Homer, and then confirmed by the comparison to Southslavic epic that Lord brought to fruition, was that homeric poetry contains the evidence of its origin in a system of oral formulas out of which the homeric bards – the singers of tales of Dark Age Greece – composed the songs we know as the Iliad and the Odyssey. Those epics, Parry demonstrated, came about in a system of bardic re-composition in which bards performed new versions of their tales every night.
As Janet Murray pointed out in Hamlet on the Holodeck (Murray 1997, 185–94), that re-compositional system makes living oral epic a multiform narrative system highly analogous to the systems in digital games that allow players to perform re-composed versions of the games’ narratives a potentially infinite number of times, varying their performances according to the possibilities available in the games, as the homeric bards varied their tales according to the possibilities available in the poetic system in which they had been trained. This broad analogy captures the imagination. The argument that the videogames that seem by so much the newest art form of the modern world in fact reawaken a millennia-old tradition of storytelling is of the kind most enjoyable for a scholar to make. In my argument in this chapter, however, I am seeking to go much further, and to demonstrate that by making the analogy in a very precise deployment of the theoretical concepts pioneered by Parry, refined by Lord, and deployed since 1960 in homeric scholarship, we can describe a specific style of digital game, within a specific genre, more thickly than it has yet been described (I borrow the idea of thick description from Geertz’s [1973] application of it to anthropology).
Lord’s 1951 article ‘Composition by Theme in Homer and Southslavic Epos’ (Lord 1951) defines ‘theme’ as ‘recurrent element of narration or description’ (Lord 1951, 73) and proceeds to demonstrate that the homeric bards, like the Southslavic guslars, built their tales out of modular themes, which they must have learned (as the guslars learned) to deploy like building-blocks as an essential element of their training. Themes, to put it another way, are modular pieces of content, subject to variation themselves, out of which, in turn, a skilled performer can build his or her performance. The process of composition by theme makes every performance of oral epic a re-compositional process as well, because even the first time the bard performs a theme, he is re-composing it from the performance materials available to him in the traditional system in which he has been trained. Lord suggests in that essay a process of analysis of such composition by theme in Homer that scholars like Laura Slatkin have taken up (Slatkin 2006). A composition-by-theme analysis examines the way the bard has deployed his themes in a given passage or set of passages of Homer, and describes the effect that deployment has, either within the culture of the bard, or within the millennia-long reception of homeric poetry. I propose to carry out that kind of analysis not of a fossilized epic tradition like the homeric epics but of the living epic tradition of the BioWare RPG.
The idea of composition by theme might be applied to almost any digital game, because player-performances of these games are built from elements that recur thanks to the basic constitution of games’ ludics and contents from fixed digital materials. The first ten minutes of a player’s performance of KOTOR, for example, consist of choices between content-elements that could fairly be called ‘themes’ like ‘conversation with a tutorial NPC’ and ‘battle’ and are varied according to the exact way the player performs them, especially including dialogue choices he or she makes, for example whether to have Trask Ulgo, the first non-player-character (hereafter NPC) his or her PC meets explain various details about the situation. We might make the same kind of description of a level of HALO, in which the player’s performance is built out of the weapons he or she chooses for his or her PC, enemies the PC kills, paths the player chooses to take through the level, and cutscenes triggered by specific player actions – all of which fit Lord’s definition of ‘theme’ in that when the player, or another player, plays that same level again, those same elements can, and usually do, recur.
Moreover, we can describe as thematic – in Lord’s sense of ‘theme’ – the essential stylization of the content of digital games, both within a single game and across broad ranges of games of individual genres and even of multiple genres. The taverns of DAO and the nightclubs of KOTOR and Mass Effect, for example, are all versions of a theme we could call the digital version of the ‘assembly’ theme to be found both in Homer and in Southslavic epic. Indeed, that same theme recurs not only in BioWare games but also in the guild halls of Bethesda games and even the inns of a game like The Lord of the Rings Online. When we shift our consideration to the themes ‘battle’ and the related ‘single combat’, both of course staples of Homer and Southslavic epic, we find corresponding themes not only in the digital RPG but also in the FPS and action-adventure game.
In fact, we can contextualize such an application of oral formulaic theory to RPGs quite neatly within important tropes of more familiar theoretical constructs of game studies, in particular Ian Bogost’s analysis of videogames as unit operations (Bogost 2006, 3–6) and his development of that analysis into descriptions of videogames as sites for the enactment of procedural rhetoric (Bogost 2007, 44–6). From the perspective of game studies, the analytic work done on homeric and other traditional oral epic since Parry and Lord is actually a form of unit operations analysis; the formulas and themes of oral traditional epic are a precise poetic analogue for the units Bogost describes, and the techniques of composition and elaboration used by the bard are a precise poetic analogue for the procedures Bogost analyzes as operating upon those units.
Themes, as defined by Lord, are inherently modular. Any recurrent element may be deployed fungibly as a modular building-block in service of the overall performance of a narrative. I show in this section, though, that the modularity of theme to be found in KOTOR, Mass Effect, and DAO has the special quality of being particularly manifest to the player. This manifestation of the re-compositional process makes the player’s performance in turn manifestly a re-composition, because the results of thematic choices among manifestly modular options compound themselves into versions of the game’s themes whose exact shapes are entirely dependent on the choices the player has made.
For example, fundamentally modular choices of party-characters to accompany the PC and places to go in the game’s world redound into modular visual sequences in dialogue segments. If the player of KOTOR has chosen the NPC Carth Onasi as a member of his party, the player will see and hear Carth offer a particular opinion when the player has the PC confront some boys who are teasing a non-human. If the player has chosen a different party member, he or she will not encounter Carth’s opinion. The version of the ‘Talk to cruel human boys’ theme with Carth’s opinion is a re-composition based on the choice to bring Carth; by the same token, the version of the theme without Carth’s opinion is equally a re-composition based on the opposite choice. The modularity of the party-selection screen, the choice of where to move, and the dialogue itself, make the role of composition by theme entirely manifest to the player, even if the player would never think to call the process by which he or she makes decisions and experiences his or her resulting performance ‘re-composition’.
Three kinds of modularity determine re-compositional performances in KOTOR, Mass Effect, and DAO: party selection, narrative-geographical selection, and dialogue selection. The first two of these function more or less independently of one another, although in certain narrative-geographical locations one or more party-members are pre-determined because the narrative-geographical sequence concerns them most nearly. The third (dialogue selection) compounds choices made in party and narrative geography into elements of the player-performance, like Carth’s opinion in the example given just above, but also has an independent dimension, especially where the expression of a player’s decisions about the PC’s character is concerned. I treat each of the three in turn.
Each of the games features a party-selection screen that appears whenever the player chooses to enter a new part of the narrative geography of the game. In these screens, the player must choose two (KOTOR and Mass Effect) or three (DAO) of the available party-characters to accompany his or her PC in the upcoming sequence. The version of the themes (for example, ‘visit to Denerim’ in DAO, which might include a version of ‘visit to a tavern’; or ‘visit to the Presidium’ in Mass Effect) that the player then performs is built in very significant part out of the performance materials that become available when the player chooses particular party-characters. To the example of Carth’s opinion about the taunting boys given above, we can add, in Mass Effect, the example of any number of sequences in which the player may choose the sniper Garrus as a companion instead of the Biotic (a science-fiction kind of wizard) Liara, changing the battles (or, to put it another way, the ‘battle’ theme) of an upcoming ‘invasion of an enemy installation’ theme at an essential ludic level. More fundamentally, with respect to the eventual final meaning of the player’s performance in relation to the compositional system of the game, a player of DAO whose PC is a female and who has pursued a romance with the party-character Alistair might bring Alistair and Wynne along and hear in the midst of a tense situation a conversation between them about his intentions vis-à-vis the PC. All these variations in theme are manifestly modular in great part because of the party selection screen – the player chooses how he or she will re-compose the performance materials of the game to produce his or her current performance.
Similarly, each of the games features some kind of narrative-geographical interface. KOTOR, the earliest of the games, has only a selection screen that looks like a dialogue choice, allowing the player to choose which planet to visit next aboard the Ebon Hawk, but its function is the same as the galactic map in Mass Effect and the map of Ferelden in DAO. In each case, the various narrative-geographical locations of the game (for example, the planet Manaan in KOTOR, the Citadel in Mass Effect, and the city of Denerim in DAO) appear to the player as themes (again, even if the player would never to think to call them that) – recurrent elements of narration and description. To make a choice from one of these interface screens is to re-compose the current performance from the available materials at the very least in terms of the order of the episodes; moreover, very frequently a later theme will unfold significantly differently depending on previously made choices of narrative geography. The most obvious example is probably the locations of narrative geography in which the PC meets and recruits new party-characters, for example the Jedi Jolie Bindo on Kashyyk in KOTOR; if the player’s PC goes to Tattoine before Kashyyk, the PC’s party on Tattoine will not include Jolie. Analogous examples are present in both Mass Effect and DAO. As with party selection, the player’s selections of narrative geography make manifest the ongoing process of composition by theme.
Finally, the many dialogue selection screens display the same manifest modularity. In the dialogue selections of KOTOR, Mass Effect, and DAO, the player has the opportunity to shape his or her current performance in several important ways, including brevity or length of conversation, the discovery or failure of discovery of background information, and – perhaps most importantly – relation to the game’s performance slider(s): light/dark, renegade/paragon, approval/disapproval (discussed at length just below).
Mass Effect’s dialogue wheel, on which not the exact words Shepard will speak, but a sort of epitome of them, is displayed, along with Shepard actually speaking the dialogue according to the player’s selections, distinguishes that game from KOTOR and DAO. In the latter two games, the presumably exact words to be uttered by the PC appear on the selection screen – ‘presumably’ because the player does not see or hear the PC say those words. Whatever the effect of this difference upon Mass Effect’s place in the development of the RPG and/or its relation to other arts such as film, the dialogue wheel is certainly entirely analogous to the dialogue selection screens of other BioWare games where composition by theme is concerned; the player has the opportunity to vary the themes as he or she performs them through Shepard just as he or she does through the PCs of KOTOR and DAO.
These three aspects of re-compositional performance practice in KOTOR, Mass Effect, and DAO thus serve to foreground the process of re-composition itself. As the homeric bards and the Southslavic guslars learned to build their songs out of themes such as assemblies, battles, arming scenes, and verbal contests (a training detailed at fascinating length in Lord 1981), the player of the BioWare RPG learns to assemble his or her performances out of the themes available, and to compress or elaborate them, to order them, and to perform them virtuosically through an ever-growing understanding of the party-characters of his or her PC’s party, of the narrative geography of the galaxy or of Ferelden, and of the conversational options open to the PC under given circumstances.
All this modularity would perhaps distinguish the BioWare RPG a little as a set of performance occasions analogous to those of the bards; we might even be excused for calling the modular ludics of these games a ‘BioWare style’. The truly distinguishing feature of the BioWare style, though, has to this point barely entered this chapter. I now show that the sliders of KOTOR, Mass Effect, and DAO make the BioWare style as distinctive as the styles that separate the bards of the Iliad from those of the Odyssey (on this fascinating topic, once the sum total of what was called the ‘Homeric question’, see especially Nagy 1996 and Nagy 1979).
KOTOR, Mass Effect, and DAO each have what I call here a ‘performance slider’: a scale (or, in DAO, a set of scales) that measures and displays the status of the player’s performance as the PC in relation to what I will argue below is the cultural topic of the game as a whole. In KOTOR, the slider measures the number of lightside and darkside points the player has received for choices he or she has made in the course of dialogue selection, like supporting or chastising the cruel boys of my first example. The player’s current position on the slider determines what background color is displayed along with the slider on the game’s character screen. When the player’s PC, for example, gives credits to those in need, or does battle on behalf of the weak, the PC gains lightside points, and the slider moves up and towards the blue; when the PC, for example, refuses to give, or attacks an NPC in order to commit robbery, the PC gains darkside points, and the slider moves down and toward the red. The PC’s position on the slider also determines how many points of Force energy are used in the invocation of certain Force skills like Heal (lightside PCs expend fewer) and Force Lightning (darkside PCs expend fewer).
In Mass Effect, the slider is not positional, but rather appears as the sum total of paragon and renegade points, displayed to the upper left and lower right of the PC respectively on the character screen. The area covered by the blue paragon scale and that covered by the red renegade scale together go to make up the player’s position on the slider, which measures the player’s dialogue choices in the general matter of showing kindness or exercising authority, for example when a crew-member of Shepard’s ship, the Normandy, confesses to misgivings about the mission. The paragon dialogue choice, in general, expresses empathy (in this example, the choice might read ‘We’ll be fine’); the renegade dialogue choice, in general, expresses self-serving authoritativeness (here the choice might read ‘Act like a soldier!’); there is always also a middle choice (for example ‘We can’t think about that now’) that adds no points on either side. It should be noted that the paragon/renegade slider is not apparently zero-sum, the way the light/dark slider and the approval/disapproval sliders are, and that description of it is complicated by there not always being both a paragon and a renegade choice (sometimes only renegade and neutral, or paragon and neutral, are provided), but because there is a finite number of paragon and renegade points available both in any given theme and in the system as a whole, the final effect is in fact zero-sum, although it is possible to explore both sides of the slider in a single performance of Mass Effect in a way impossible in a single performance of KOTOR or DAO. The PC’s position on the slider determines the player’s opportunity to gain the Charm and/or Intimidate skills; these skills, in turn, unlock significant dialogue options such as those that can save Shepard the necessity of killing one of his or her crew-members, Urdnot Wrex.
In DAO, the sliders appear not on the PC’s own character-screen but on the party-character’s individual screen, and represent the character’s approval or disapproval of the actions of the PC. These scales can be affected either by dialogue choices, as in KOTOR and Mass Effect, or by the giving of certain gifts to be found throughout the narrative geography of the game. The PC’s position on these sliders determines whether dialogue options with the party-characters are open to them; these dialogue options, in turn, open others, including, for example, options that themselves lead to themes (that is, quests) that the player would otherwise have no opportunity to perform.
KOTOR’s light/dark slider may be described in several ways. The most usual way to describe it is as a morality scale, by which the player’s choices are given what observers describe, broadly, as moral consequences in relation to the ongoing events of his or her performance. Indeed, as an element of game-design, the slider has been harshly criticized on that understanding of it as a morality scale (Sicart 2009, 207–11).
The light/dark slider may also be described, though, as a ludic system by which KOTOR differentiates player-performances. As the player accumulates a balance on one or the other side of the slider, choices of character configuration – that is, the cost to the PC of certain powerful skills – are shaped by where the PC stands on the slider. For a player on the light side of the slider, skills like ‘Heal’ are less costly, and skills like ‘Drain Life’ are more costly. The player’s dialogue choices are thereby registered at the level of the gameplay so as to differentiate his or her performance from other possible performances at that level, in a way parallel to the differentiation at the level of dialogue, where the player must choose to say certain things and not to say others – choices that trigger the game’s awards of lightside or darkside points.
At the same time, in a broader context, the light/dark slider differentiates the player’s performance in relation to the range of possible performances as a Jedi in the Star Wars universe, whose dualistic light/dark ethical system is essential to the game, as it is to every part of the discourse of Star Wars. The climactic decision in KOTOR, for example, of whether finally to side with the Jedi or with the Sith adds either an enormous number of lightside points or an enormous number of darkside points to the PC’s total, and thus places him or her decisively in relation to the ongoing performances of the Star Wars universe, whether in games, on film, or in text.
A brief comparison to homeric epic may be helpful in clarifying my point. When a bard first chose to have Odysseus lie to his father in what we know as Book 24 of the Odyssey, and when a bard first chose to have Patroclus call Hector his ‘third slayer’ in Book 16 of the Iliad, those choices differentiated those performances from every performance that had gone before, but they did so in relation to the existing epic materials – those new themes, that is, were already based on old ones (‘lying’ and ‘battle-taunting’). In the re-compositional process, bards made their choices in developing their themes based on their knowledge of, and skill in using, the themes that had gone before.
Indeed, when subsequent bards followed them and used those themes (‘lying to father’, ‘victor as third slayer’) in their own performances, they enacted similarly unique performances in relation to the existing themes, despite the fact that they were using a pre-existing theme. To describe the difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey in a way that goes beyond the obvious and takes into account their geneses in bardic tradition requires that we describe the differing relationships between performance and theme in the two epics. That kind of analysis can tell us, for example, that the bards of the Odyssey re-composed their performances so as to take advantage of their hero’s own relationship to performances like theirs, and demonstrate their virtuosity at such composition.
That sort of argument is well known to scholars of homeric epic; it has, to my knowledge, not been attempted in criticism of the digital RPG. I want to argue, though, that it should be attempted, because, for example, at the moment of decision between Jedi and Sith, the player of KOTOR re-composes his or her performance, even the first time, out of the elements given by the game, and above all in relation to his or her PC’s position on the light/dark slider. This is, I believe, the basic nature of re-composition in the BioWare style: the player at every moment shapes his or her performance with reference to a ludic system that renders the performance meaningful in relation to the entire system of the game, which is at the same time an overdetermined version of the player’s world that productively mystifies him or her about the meaning of his or her choices, both in the game and in ‘real’ culture.
From this perspective, the homeric equivalent of the BioWare style would perhaps be a sub-genre in which bards sung their heroes’ words and actions according to a very stylized set of requirements (there are certainly examples of poetic genres with not dissimilar stylizations – think of haiku) that, rather than the Iliadic focus on glory or the Odyssean focus on wits, enforced a focus on a ‘scale’ of diction that related words to themes. Odysseus would, for example, lie to his father if the bard had earlier called him ‘Odysseus the crafty’, or not lie to his father if the bard had called him ‘Odysseus the wise’; Patroclus would be third-killed by Hector if Hector had previously boasted that he was ‘great in glory’.
I am thus arguing that what makes the BioWare style special is the way it ties the player’s performance explicitly to a fundamental ludic system that itself both represents and determines the register of the game’s range of performances. In KOTOR, that range has to do with the light/dark duality of the Star Wars universe; because of the light/dark slider, performances of KOTOR are always characterized in terms of where they fall on its spectrum: light, dark, or neutral. Because that light/dark duality was from its beginning in the original film Star Wars (now known as Star Wars: A New Hope) a mystifying allegory of real-world ethics, the KOTOR-player’s performance functions to express, and perhaps even to shape, his or her practices outside the game. The BioWare performance slider bears an essential relation to the cultural topic of the game.
In KOTOR the light/dark slider does not simply index what the player, and any observer, are supposed to think about the player-character within the overall sphere of culture (that is, is the PC a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ ‘person’ when measured by the standards of the community of which the player and observers are members). Much more importantly, the light/dark slider indexes how the player-character stands according to the fictively created governing rules of the fictional universe in which the player and observers imagine the narrative action of the game taking place. In KOTOR, the Force, the ‘energy field’ that ‘gives a Jedi his power’, ‘is created by all living things’, and ‘surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together’ (Star Wars, dir. George Lucas, 1977), itself indexes the player-performance in the world of the narrative. KOTOR, like all Star Wars narratives, takes the Force as what I am calling its ‘cultural topic’, and the light/dark slider makes the re-composition by theme of the player-performance about it, too.
The Force, like the Council in Mass Effect and the Ferelden/Blight conflict in DAO, is what KOTOR is most generally about. Also like Mass Effect’s Council and DAO’s Ferelden/Blight conflict, the Force renders an ideological negotiation from the ‘real world’ in fictive terms. The Force is a fictive reification of important ethical questions of modern culture – in particular of the claims of the Other on the self; the Council is a fictive reification of questions about nationalism and Western exceptionalism in the modern world; the Ferelden/Blight conflict is a fictive reification of questions about loss of freedom to the State in times of crisis.
KOTOR revolves around the PC’s efforts to bring the Sith under control and restore order to the galaxy. As the Jedi represent the yielding of self in the effort to create harmony, the Sith represent the strengthening of self to bring the world under the self’s control. The PC’s position on the light/dark slider thus measures the player’s current performance’s meaning in relation to the central conflict of the game which, from the first cutscene in the PC’s dream, phrases the question of the PC’s identity as a search for where he or she fits into the struggle between the Jedi and the Sith, the light and the dark sides of the Force: with his or her performance’s changing position on the light/dark slider, the player progressively answers that question.
Mass Effect’s paragon/renegade slider is equally tied to the cultural topic of the game. The performance materials of Mass Effect orient themselves around the efforts of an interstellar United Nations to save the galaxy with the help of Shepard, the PC. The paragon/renegade slider indexes a player’s choices of how to behave with respect to that organized government, in an overarching context which, from the game’s opening cutscene, stages Shepard’s actions as an ongoing assessment of the capacity of the human race to take a vital role in affairs of galactic salvation. Shepard becomes the first human ‘Specter’ – that is, member of the elite galactic security organization charged with furthering the aims of the multi-species Council; Shepard’s actions, both paragon and renegade, are constantly evaluated by NPCs as examples of human conduct, above all at the conclusion of the game when Shepard must choose either to save the Council (and leave the fate of the galaxy in grave doubt) or to save the galaxy.
DAO, as befits the ongoing development of the style, presents more complexity, but the multiple approval/disapproval sliders of individual party-members, though they complicate the game’s performance possibilities in myriad ways, nevertheless have the same connection to the cultural topic of the game: DAO’s performance materials are about the nature of Ferelden and of the threat to its safety (the Blight), and the question of what the cost of saving that, or any land so constituted, must be. The NPCs of the PC’s party in DAO – above all, Alistair and Morrigan – present a system for shaping player-performances that enact a particular answer to that question, an answer unique to that performance. Each NPC has an individual relation to Ferelden. Alistair is the reluctant heir who has been mistreated by the power-structure. Morrigan is a witch from The Wilds whose motives are unclear for most of the game, but in the end have everything to do with the Blight, and in particular nothing to do with saving Ferelden: her aim all along has been to be impregnated by a Grey Warden (the Ferelden-saving order of warriors of which both Alistair and the PC are initiates). Leliana, Wynne, Oghren, Zevran, and Sten each have a very particular relationship to Ferelden; none has as decisive an effect on the player-performance as Alistair and Morrigan do, but each adds thematic possibilities that change what the performance means in relation to the cultural topic Ferelden/Blight.
The NPC sliders of approval/disapproval differentiate player-performances with respect not only to any idea the player might have about liking, disliking, loving, or hating this or that NPC, but also with respect to the much more embracing question of what the PC should do as a Grey Warden to save Ferelden, and how he or she, and with him the player and any observer, should feel about it. What affects the DAO sliders are decisions made about how to deal with the Ferelden/Blight conflict. A player-performance that employs choices that please Alistair is a composition whose re-compositions of themes are very different from one using choices that please Morrigan; the differences in thematic re-composition, moreover, represent fundamental reshapings of the meaning-effect of that performance as a version of the Ferelden/Blight conflict.
It would require much more space than I have in this chapter to fully explore the relationships of these sliders to the meanings of their games. It should be clear, however, that those relationships to cultural significance makes the BioWare slider different from, for example, the Bethesda one. The Bethesda reputation (e.g. Oblivion) or karma (Fallout 3) slider indexes player-performance not to the cultural topic of the game but to an apparently transparent game-representation of a ‘real-world’ ideological evaluation. Karma in Fallout 3 and reputation in Oblivion both differentiate player- performance in a way roughly analogous to that of the light/dark slider, but Fallout 3 is not about karma, nor is Oblivion about reputation, in the way that KOTOR is about the two sides of the Force, Mass Effect is about how Shepard deals with the Council, and DAO is about the people of Ferelden.
The combination of modularity and sliders produces a particular kind of relationship between player and re-compositional ludic system that I will call ‘re-compositional PC-identity’. The constitutive ludics – manifest modularity plus sliders – of the composition-by-theme process of the BioWare style force players of these three games to form a specific kind of identification with their player-characters – an identification that enacts a subjectivity manifestly negotiated between the game’s thematic system and the choices the player makes within that system. Here I borrow from apparatus theory, but the argument does not require elaborate theoretization; as I detail below, the interpellation involved in the combination of modularity and sliders is literally forced on the player by the ludic systems of the games, in that he or she must periodically visit the screens bearing the sliders (the key terms ‘apparatus’ and ‘interpellation’ originate in Althusser 1971; apparatus theory as applied in film criticism, with an emphasis on spectatorship that has, I believe, a great deal to offer games criticism of elements like the character screen, the party-selection screen, and the narrative-geography screen, is developed in e.g. Baudry 1999). The player of a BioWare RPG must relate to his or her PC through the performance of modular themes and the manipulation of sliders effected thereby, with the result that his or her performance enacts an apparently visibly unique claim to selfhood (apparatus theory, following Lacan 1977, 1–7, rigorously maintains that any recognition of the self is a mis-recognition).
The paragon/renegade slider in Mass Effect can serve, with its strong similarities to the light/dark slider in KOTOR and the party-character sliders in DAO, as an emblem of this re-compositional PC-identity; the negotiation of modular themes involved in performing a particular version of Mass Effect produces a manifestation in the ‘Squad’ screen of what kind of human the player’s Shepard is. Because the cultural topic of the game is the status of the human race vis-à-vis the other races of the galaxy, what the player sees on the squad screen is a visual index of a numerically determined relationship between his or her performance and the meaning of that performance with respect to the cultural topic. That is, the player’s identification with Shepard – the way he or she is performing Shepard as a performative extension of him or herself (including any performance that operates as a denial, through the performance, of Shepard’s status as that kind of extension) – is visible as a negotiation on the squad screen, a screen the player must visit every time Shepard gains an experience level if the player is to continue playing the game.
KOTOR and DAO share the essence of this ludic negotiation of re-compositional PC-identity. When we compare the paragon/renegade slider to the light/dark slider in KOTOR, we see the essential similarity of the two systems – every experience level, and usually many times in between, the player of KOTOR sees his or her re-compositional performance’s relation through the slider to the task of saving the galaxy. Although the DAO system differs in that the sliders are not centrally located, it is similarly essential to continuing the game that the player visit the party-characters’ individual screens with great frequency (at least those of party-characters the player has chosen to adventure with), and each party-character’s approval/disapproval slider is displayed prominently on that screen. Just as in Mass Effect, the player sees a visual representation of a quantitative index of the relationship of his or her performance as the player-character to the in-progress cultural meaning of that performance of the game.
Through the manifestation of that negotiation, I would suggest, the player gains a special impression of individuality and of fullness that distinguishes the BioWare style, an impression that shines through on community sites like the official BioWare forums (see for example BioWare Inc. 2011), where players of BioWare games share their experiences of that game and describe their performances in terms that often might justly be described as rapturous. Whereas the homeric bards and their analogues in Yugoslavia performed their thematic re-compositions in relation to a public occasion and a public role, the player of the BioWare RPG performs him or herself to him or herself, with any performance to a third party mediated through that single-player experience, gaining a self-identity that we may describe theoretically in the terms I use above, as a subjectivity of manifest negotiation. Manipulating the modular themes of the games in relation to the games’ sliders performs the player’s subjectivity as not only capable of saving a world worth saving, but also as capable of making that salvation meaningful outside the game through the relation of the sliders to the games’ cultural topics.
Because these sliders are influenced by the player’s individual re-compositional performance of the games’ modular themes, and because they in turn influence the availability of further modular performance materials like powers and dialogue choices, the player’s re-compositional PC-identity renders the game meaningful to the player not just as an occasion for the performance of play, but as an occasion for the performance of a specific kind of self, unique to the BioWare style. As the bards of the Odyssey performed themselves as heroes through their manipulation of themes like ‘Banquet’ and ‘Battle’, and the bards of the Iliad performed themselves as preservers of heroic glory through their manipulation of themes like ‘Embassy’ and ‘Ransom’, the re-composer, whether bard or RPG-player, must always perform him or herself, but must also always perform him or herself differently according to the constraints of the occasion. Those constraints, as they exist in KOTOR, Mass Effect, and DAO, constitute what I have here described as BioWare’s epic style.
The sheer individuality of that style, along with the obviousness of the manifest modularity that I have suggested is its hallmark, has made the BioWare RPG, in my view, the ideal starting point for an investigation of composition by theme. That individuality can indeed cause us to wonder whether this kind of analysis has any application to other styles; if the re-compositional identity I am describing in BioWare RPGs comes about through the uniquely modular operation of what Bogost would call these games’ procedural rhetoric and I would call their re-compositional style, how could we possibly discuss another style of RPG, such as the Bethesda or Square Enix style, using this theoretical model?
The question may actually open, rather than foreclose, exciting critical possibilities. From the standpoint of oral formulaic theory, games like The Elder Scrolls series and the Fallout series afford their players, broadly speaking, several of the same kinds of theme as the BioWare RPGs: the countless dungeons of The Elder Scrolls and subway tunnels of Fallout serve as a clear (though very far from exhaustive) example. As I showed above, the renown and karma systems of Bethesda games do not make the same kind of interpellation as the performance-sliders in BioWare RPGs, not least because the player does not face them regularly as s/he progresses, so those systems become simply another aspect of the games’ thematic material; but the contrast thus developed between performance-slider and renown/karma points the way towards a description of the Bethesda style focused precisely on its tendency to obscure, above all through its reliance on a seemingly boundless open world and seemingly limitless choices for character development, the interpellative dynamics of the Bethesda RPG.
Apparatus theory tells us that interpellation occurs whenever a subject misrecognizes itself; the open-world narrative geography and ‘open-character’ PC development of the Bethesda RPG interpellate a re-compositional identity that depends on the PC’s relationship to that geography and NPC organizations like the Fighters’ Guild and the Wizard’s Guild in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and the Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout 3. Re-compositional performance of the materials to be found in places like the Fighters’ Guild guildhalls results in rising through the ranks of such organizations, and gives access to otherwise-inaccessible parts of the ‘open’ world like the headquarters of the guild. In turn, the cultural topic of these organizations, reinforced by the often striking design of the narrative geography associated with them (for example the ‘Citadel’ of the Brotherhood of Steel being the Pentagon), sets the PC in relation to the games’ overall cultural significance.
It seems possible to argue along such lines that re-compositional identity is at work just as powerfully in the Bethesda style as in the BioWare one, and that analyses of composition by theme in other styles of digital RPG may be in order. I hope therefore that this chapter may prove useful not only in understanding the three RPGs here analyzed as performative practices, but also a growing range of other RPGs, and even of games in other genres.
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