Inheriting Traditions: Hero Construction and Landscape in the Oddworld and Skyrim Video Games Thomas Brassington, Lancaster University The Video Game Format • ‘[video games] are “played” rather than “read”, “watched”, or “listened to”’ p. 25 Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) • ‘in this active relationship, something crucial happens to the human subject’ p. 94 Neil Badmington, Alien Chic: Posthumanism and the Other Within (London & New York: Routledge, 2004) Oddworld • Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee and Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus are both set on the planet Oddworld, specifically on the continent of Mudos. They are largely set in massive industrial complexes laid out in the platformer game style. • In both games, your primary objective is to shut down (blow up) RuptureFarms (Oddysee) and SoulStorm Bewery (Exoddus). Second, you should save at least 51% of your fellow mudokon slaves from the various industrial complexes that you navigate. Skyrim • Set in the province of Skyrim, you are about to be killed when a dragon attacks. This allows you to escape from Helgen, and after a short amount of time you discover that you are the legendary ‘Dragonborn’. • Largely, the main plot of the game is not important. What’s more important about Skyrim is its sheer size and how you can easily become every single legendary character in myth and folklore there. It very much exists in its own legends. Inheriting traditions: Oddworld • Oddysee and Exoddus inherit from a multiplicity of traditions. Importantly, they inherit from dystopia, science fiction, and post modern satires of traditional hero narratives • The game’s are highly politicised and informed by anti-capitalism, gothic modes are present, but used sparingly, as well as frequent allusions to pop culture, American history, and contemporary global issues: • Soylent Green and SoulStorm Brew; • Abe and Abraham Lincoln; • Over farming as an example of out of control capitalism • ‘dystopian fictions are typically set in places or times far distant from the author’s own, but it is usually clear that the real referents of dystopian fictions are generally quite concrete and near-at-hand’ M. Keith Booker, The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism (Wesport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994) Inheriting Traditions: Skyrim • Skryim functions very much within its own established world, and in-game mythologies. • These are clearly constructed from traditional ‘High Fantasy’ narratives (i.e. Tolkien and Norse/Greek warrior mythologies). • Even then, these have been filtered through phenomena such as Dungeons and Dragons, Magic: The Gathering, and other Role-playing games rather than their original sources. Examples of inheritance: Oddworld • ‘The Gothic mode emerges readily in science fiction that explores power, anxiety, resistance and capital’ p. 1 Sara Wasson and Emily Alder, ‘Introduction’ in Gothic Science Fiction 1980-2010, ed. by Sara Wasson and Emily Alder (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press) • ‘The great defining texts of the genre’ (We, 1984, Brave New World) Booker, Dystopian Impulse Examples of Inheritance: Skyrim • ‘Fantasy seems to have, like the folk talks from which it sprang, a restricted number of recurrent motifs and elements: there are young, questing heroes, wise controlling sages, irredeemably evil monsters’ p. 2 Peter Hunt, ‘Introduction: Fantasy and Alternative Worlds’, in Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction, ed. by Peter Hunt and Millicent Lenz (London: Continuum, 2001; repr. 2003) • ‘the world of [skyrim] seems to be at root a ritual: everything is done for the sake of song and legend – characters are living out gnomic predictions, or consciously writing themselves into future history-books’ p. 33 Hunt, ‘Introduction’ The Dragonborn • The hero (you) in Skyrim • An unstoppable killing machine • ‘a reliance on subterfuge have almost faded from heroic myth today […] the little man, the riddler or trickster, has yielded before the type of warrior hero, the paradigm of the fittest survivor’ p. 36 Marina Warner, ‘Boys Will be Boys: The Making of the Male’, Six Myths of Our Time: Little Angels, Little Monsters, Beautiful Beasts, and More (London: Vintage, 1995) • In this emphasis on warrior strength, the new stories conform to very ancient ones, stories which were grounded in the different social circumstances of a military or pastoral, archaic society […] Slaying monsters […] feeds the definition of him as a man.’ pp. 33-34 Warner, ‘Boys Will be Boys’ • ‘The hero tale, still the staple of contemporary fantasy, has been essentially a male preserve’ p. 3 Hunt, ‘Fantasy and Alternative Worlds’ • ‘gamers inadvertently subscribe to the game’s heteronormative ideology by having to choose characters of various races that are either blatantly female or blatantly male’ p. 38 Ensslin, The Language of Gaming Abe • Mudokons are not the ‘steroided out, muscle-bound heroes you want to be, they’re the poor schumucks you actually are’ Lorne Lanning, ‘Game Developer’s Conference 2000’ <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeHVf2x1kjo> • ‘modern Gothic is often gripped by anxiety that humans are dominated, shaped and devoured by the built structures of late capitalism’ p. 9 Wasson and Alder, ‘Introduction’, Gothic Science Fiction • ‘by focusing their critiques of society on spatially or temporally distant settings, dystopian fictions provide fresh perspectives on problematic social and political practices that might otherwise be taken for granted or considered natural and inevitable’ p. 19 Booker, Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature Player/game interaction: landscape • ‘alternative worlds must necessarily be related to, and comment on, the real world’ p. 7 Hunt, ‘Introduction’, Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction • ‘Literature of the fantastic has been claimed as “transcending” reality, “escaping” the human condition and constructing superior, alternate, “secondary” worlds.’ p. 2 Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (New York & London: Routledge, 1981; repr. 1995) • ‘Fantasy may be turned to many ends, but it is most successful when it recounts two sorts of progressions. One is the movement from immaturity to maturity […] the other is the healing of an ailing land or society’ p. 7 Brian Attebery, ‘Fantasy as an Anti-Utopian Mode’, Reflections on the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Fourth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, ed. by Michael R. Collings (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986) Skyrim • ‘virtual world, or landscape, inviting players to explore and navigate using diverse audio-visual and haptic resources’ p. 5 Ensslin, The Language of Gaming • ‘traditional mythic figures of masculinity like the warrior and the rapist circulate and recirculate every day, setting up models, not counter- examples, and the forms which convey them do not contain argument or counter-argument, as in Greek tragedy, but reiterate the message’ p. 38 Warner, ‘Boys Will be Boys’ • ‘Cartography is, by definition, an attempt to tame the world around us, to transform it into a product of our own and, in being able to write and read it, cut it down to our size’ p. 60 Armitt, Fantasy Fiction: An Introduction The Magog Cartel • Collective name for the industrial sites navigated in Oddysee and Exoddus, consisting of RuptureFarms, Necrum Mines, Fee Co Depot, Slig Barracks, Bonewerkz, and SoulStorm Brewery. • ‘The corporation is above and beyond any of its executives or employees— or slaves. So by making [players] defeat RuptureFarms as the end boss […] we thought it would add a bigger sense of climax’ Lorne Lanning quoted in ‘Oddworld Inhabitants’, Hawaii e-Book Library <http://www.hawaiilibrary.net/article/whebn0007034418/oddworld%20inhabitants> • ‘The “New Weird” […] “a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts romanticized ideals about place found in traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models as the jumping off point for creation of new settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and fantasy”’ p. 6 Wasson and Alder, ‘Introduction’ Gothic Science Fiction Conclusions • ‘games are complex representational, textual and media phenomena that carry multi-layered ideological content.’ p. 31 Ensslin, The Language of Gaming • ‘To wear a mask is to become someone or something different, other, or perhaps merely to hide an original identity’. P. 104 Badmington, Alien Chic • ‘warrior fantasies today offer a quick rush of compensatory power, but pass on no survival skills—either for a working or family life.’ pp. 33-34 Warner, ‘Boys Will be Boys’, Six Myths of Our Times • ‘alternative worlds must necessarily be related to, and comment on, the real world.’ p.7 Hunt, ‘Introduction’, Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction Bibliography • Armitt, Lucie, Fantasy Fiction: An Introduction (New York & London: Continuum, 2005) • Attebery, Brian, ‘Fantasy as an Anti-Utopian Mode’, in Reflections on the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Fourth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, ed. by Michael R. Collings (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986) • Badmington, Neil, Alien Chic: Posthumanism and the Other Within (London & New York: Routledge, 2004) • Booker, M. Keith, The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994) • Hawaii e-Book Library, ‘Oddworld Inhabitants’ <http://www.hawaiilibrary.net/article/whebn0007034418/oddworld%20inhabitants> • Hunt, Peter, ‘Introduction: Fantasy and Alternative Worlds’, in