bookwarmgames Friday Night Lights

From Caedmon to The Wire: World Pictures and the Play of Language

We find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make sense of what we see around us and to ask: What is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from? Why is it the way it is?

To try to answer these questions we adopt some “world picture.”

—Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

I’ve been reading Philip Pullman again, and reading as much as I can find of what he alludes to in the course of his stories. Among the books Dr Hannah Relf lends to young Malcolm Polstead, our protagonist in La Belle Sauvage, is A Brief History of Time, which exists in our universe as well. While I enjoyed The Body in the Library by a parallel Agatha Christie, presumably, which is the first book he chooses to borrow from her library, it’s the world picture conjured up by Hawking–and not the specific account of space-time so much as the idea of a “world picture” as such, as a way to answer fundamental questions–that has led me to think about Pullman’s project anew. After all, one of the first, unforgettable images from The Golden Compass is literally the picture of a world, another world visible in the aurora, projected from a lantern slide; and some of the final images in The Rose Field… well, we’ll get there when we get there.

Pullman’s illustration for Chapter 2: The Idea of North

Sometimes it becomes possible for an author to revisit a story and play with it, not to adapt it to another medium (it’s not always a good idea for the original author to do that), nor to revise or “improve” it (tempting though that is, it’s too late: you should have done that before it was published, and your business now is with new books, not old ones). But simply to play.
And in every narrative there are gaps: places where, although things happened and the characters spoke and acted and lived their lives, the story says nothing about them. It was fun to visit a few of these gaps and speculate a little on what I might see there.
As for why I call these little pieces lantern slides, it’s because I remember the wooden boxes my grandfather used to have, each one packed neatly with painted glass slides showing scenes from Bible stories or fairy tales or ghost stories or comic little plays with absurd-looking figures. From time to time he would get out the heavy old magic lantern and project some of these pictures on to a screen as we sat in the darkened room with the smell of hot metal and watched one scene succeed another, trying to make sense of the narrative and wondering what St. Paul was doing in the story of Little Red Riding Hood—because they never came out of the box in quite the right order.
I think it was my grandfather’s magic lantern that Lord Asriel used in the second chapter of The Golden Compass. Here are some lantern slides, and it doesn’t matter what order they come in. – Philip Pullman, the “lantern slides” edition of His Dark Materials

While most people I’ve talked to have expressed disappointment with the ending of The Book of Dust, and that was my own initial reaction, I’ve found it is growing on me with rereadings, particularly as I’ve been listening to the audio versions read by Michael Sheen. It doesn’t hurt that his interview with Pullman, accompanying the final volume, is the best of its kind that I’ve found so far. Particularly resonant are their discussions of the procession and the story, commenting on a little demonstration or rhetorical flourish of Pullman’s in another interview, a video for the Bodleian Library; and of the alethiometer contrasted with the myriorama as images of reading and writing or telling stories.

From procession to story, around 2:30 in Behind the Desk: Philip Pullman

So it strikes me that the first requirement of a compelling world picture–speaking only for myself–is that it should partake of that commingling of beauty and truth which Keats’ Grecian Urn attests. If in time irradiating its truth-beauty some contradiction should arise in our perception of that dear picture between the sense of its truth and its felt beauty, then we have to either discard it–Lewis has written powerfully about that in The Discarded Image–or, recurring again to Keats, we can abide with it at the limits of our “negative capability.”

This is where I strive to engage with Pullman, rather than rejecting him, believing us “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason,” as he himself has pointed the way, having these very lines quoted by another one of his scholars, Dr Mary Malone, in The Subtle Knife. When I think of his work as a kind of invitation to think and feel in this way, its challenges, while no less agonistic and at times agonizing, take on a beautiful, sporting quality. And like few other authors, Pullman conduces to the “having of wonderful ideas,” in Duckworth’s model for learning, and to “the realization that prayer consists of attention,” in Weil’s formulation, which I take to be an end beyond the end of learning for its own sake.

“The poem was the authority here, not the teacher.”

One thought I’ve been noodling on along the way, which I’ll just lay down as best I can for now, is that language–language learning at the most basic and most advanced levels alike, literacy and reading of all degrees of interpretive complexity, and literature at its furthest avant garde edge–seems to live and move and leap ahead by way of play.

To adduce a handful of instances representing the movement between world-pictures and worlds:

  • Homeric games and the bow-stringing challenge
  • David dancing before the Lord; dance for Huizinga “the purest and most perfect form of play that exists”
  • Caedmon’s Hymn, considered the first English poem, and the story of its composition given in Bede
  • Chaucer’s pilgrims, making of their tales “ernest” and “game”
  • Shakespeare’s wandering players and kings and the “invention of the human” (Bloom)
  • Joyce’s “shout in the street” in Ulysses, and its echoes back in Araby

If these are the leaps that come to mind, still there are immense degrees of nuance in between each of them. Between Shakespeare and Joyce, a fair amount of literature survives. Or to zoom in further: between Keats’ vision of (his Bright star‘s vision of)

The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores

and Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach with its “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” and the near-contemporary Oxford Movement; or between Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron pushing at the boundary of reason with no little energy, with Mary Shelley producing Frankenstein as a byproduct of their play; or to jump ahead, within the work of a single writer, from Nabokov’s “link-and-bobolink,” “the correlated pattern in the game,” in Pale Fire to his Terra and Antiterra in Ada, where the “game of worlds” becomes almost literal; so much of any writer’s work which we still read seems to consist in the give and take between modeling and effacing world pictures.

And it seems like this is always including, if not in fact by way of, metaphors of play.

Where they get especially ambitious–or playful–writers absorb scientific and religious worldviews alike into their imaginations. Spariosu has given a much fuller treatment, and Sloek a much richer theory, but there is Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Don Giovanni; Bakhtin’s reading of Rabelais; Dostoevsky’s incorporations of scripture, and Bulgakov’s rewritings of it; Vonnegut’s invention of Kilgore Trout, or Milosz’s Bruno; John Crowley’s other worlds; Pullman’s, and his sprite-like narrators… 

I’ve tried to stick to the English language, but translations have crept into my magic circle, as literature itself wouldn’t mean much in any language without the likes of Homer, the Bible, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky connecting ideas to images, but also helping their readers with the task of making connections between ideas and action, and thus knitting together the inner world or life to the outer, even up to and including that “consummation devoutly to be wished,” though Benjamin asserts that the storyteller is as much generated by as generating death, “death of the author” be darned.

Still, the question arises–the one Hawking asked back at the start–of what world picture or model best facilitates such summing up of the incommensurables, the infinitesimals, or which anyhow values it as an endeavor worth attempting, whether we have the language to express it or no. And it is a question to which in these posts I am continually responding, and trying to understand others’ responses.

For me, this has to include the roots of the language, religious and scientific and poetic alike. Caedmon has to be there, as well as Hawking, and Christie to help us solve the mystery. Then, perhaps with a little help from our friends, we can also better parse the world-pictures that assail us on the screens that surround us, like this one:

Just now hearing about this eruption of PlayStation iconography at last year’s Super Bowl halftime show by Kendrick Lamar, for example, and about shadow boxing from Babcock, so we’ll see if we can collaborate to write something about that. Or the great chess scenes in Nabokov or The Wire:

And I still haven’t read the large claims of the likes of McGonigal and Combs for the ameliorative power of games, nor Bogost on their rhetoric and persuasiveness, nor Miller on the theology of the same.

Looking next time, though, at Kendrick Lamar’s design patterns, with some serendipitous discoveries in Ortega y Gasset, starting with “The Sportive Origin of the State” (Translated into English; original Spanish) via Postman’s Technopoly (and footnoted in good old Homo Ludens to boot).

bookwarmgames Current Semester, Games in Literature

Books on the Writing Desk

I am looking forward to reading–a familiar feeling for me, but with an unusually heightened clarity and specificity at the moment–several things this month. Towards the end of October in this year of our Lord 2025, the third volume in Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust is set to release. About 40 years after we first met Lyra and Pan in The Golden Compass, we might finally be seeing their final adventure. For years (albeit many fewer), I’ve made it my scholarly hobby-horse to commentary-write, read, interview and podcast on Pullman’s work, and I’m eager to pick up where I left off, now that there is a kind of boundedness to his latest project. My pet theory is that this new book, and the series of which it is a part, is closely linked to his earliest published writing, two novels for adult readers of literature which are largely forgotten… but who knows.

This photo from The Bookseller website suggests some of what we might expect The Rose Field to include (or to open onto, if the picture dates from after the book’s composition), to judge based on the stack of books on the desk in front of the author: Baudelaire, Wallace Stevens; Pullman’s own Northern Lights; dictionaries of modern English usage (Oxford, naturally) and of Merleau-Ponty; All That Is Solid Melts Into Air; The Reader Over Your Shoulder; 101 Middle Eastern Tales and Their Impact on Western Oral Tradition, and a couple of books and loose sheets of paper too small to tell what they are, as well as a big book at the bottom of the pile whose spine is obscured by a tape dispenser. Another reference work? A Bible? And what about all the other books ready to hand over his shoulder? I wonder.

Where do ideas come from? How do we decide which ones to give room in our mind? These are questions which Pullman (and his young readers) and Persona 4 both seem interested in, and to which they give unusually thoughtful responses in the form of their stories. At least part of an answer, though, is suggested by the books we place in front of us, aids and distractions in equal measure as we sit down to write. It’s always tempting to read more instead of writing. In particular, I’m thinking of what Pullman is reading, and yet I’m sure that neither reading that stack of books nor an nth read-through of his own books would prove as effective an apprenticeship as the work of writing three pages a day and telling stories aloud, from memory, to children. Or anyhow this was his practice as a writer and teacher, as he recounts more than once, and it seems to have served him well.

The long-awaited Historiographies of Video Game Studies, while I read it over the summer, insofar as it is possible to read anthologies like this cover to cover, will certainly bear revisiting soon as I set to work on a submission for the zine follow-up to my virtual talk at The Manchester Game Centre. As Jacob Geller recently gave an interview on GSSB, I’m reminded again that both he and Cameron Kunzelman have other essays and books, too, that I’ve been meaning to read.

I still owe Aaron Suduiko a piece on EarthBound in response to the “Comprehensive Theory” series on his website. It’s been a year already since I talked with him and the writer, Max Gorynski. I wonder what they’re up to.

Brian Eno, in conversation with Ezra Klein and evidently in his book, defines art as something like play for grown ups, which must be at least partly true.

Nel Noddings, contrasting the rule-bound and relational in her foundational work on the ethics of care, comes close to refuting Kierkegaard and Sloek alike, with her readings of the binding of Isaac and the myth of Demeter. And Benjamin (Walter, not Kozlowski) might come close to undercutting Tolkien on myth and fairy tales, though I take solace in not quite being able to understand what he is saying towards the end of his essay on Leskov, “The Storyteller.”

Friends and students who I flatter myself I’ve inspired in some way have been sending me things they are writing, and I look forward to reading more and sharing them with other readers, if I can, soon.

Most pressing, though, there is Moses Norton, aka The Well Red Mage or Red for short, who has just released his Definitive Book of SNES RPGs (vol 1). While it has yet to ship, I’ve got the pdf here and am eager to read it and interview the author. Biased as I am, I have to believe the book itself will matter more than what any of us might say online, and I can’t wait to see it take up space on my desk and time in my mind.

bookwarmgames Current Semester

A Year of Myth in Games

By some measures, 2025 marks 50 years of computer role-playing games, and the Well-Red Mage Moses Norton suggests a few ways of celebrating accordingly. From playing and replaying RPGs to reading and writing about them, I’ve been preparing for this challenge for a lifetime, it seems, without knowing it.

I have yet to choose my 12 games, one for each month, to try to complete this year, but I appreciate the stipulations that make the challenge seem a little more within reach. For example, games one has started but never beaten are allowed, so both my file of Pokemon FireRed, started at the tail end of 2024, and my long-dormant FF8 save, which I’m spurred by Ben’s essay to pick up again, are fair game. The rules also specify that all “beating the game” entails in this case is reaching the end of the main story. The completionist in me is torn, then, between wanting to participate–finally playing through the rest of Planescape: Torment, perchance?–and knowing that to do so is to accept that my runs are likely to be cursory, fragmentary, and rushed, even if I do complete the historic challenge. I recognize from the outset that it isn’t very likely that I will.

Red’s list, shared on social media and discord

A similar spirit of fraught completionism is animating my scholarship this year, such as it is, here at the Video Game Academy, where I’m intending to write up all the unfinished drafts I have lying around. Cleaning the digital shed is how I think of it, looking forward to such light as might come along through the process.

We have been known to favor story-driven games, RPGs as well as visual novels, in our courses, and in our reading and theory-building we tend towards the myths at the roots of those stories. In the occasional writing meant to accompany and record all this playing and reading, it is natural that we should circle around the same themes time and again–innocence and experience, language, wisdom, courage, and friendship–rather than proceeding with an argument straight forward to its end. So often, that end is really to invite readers to contemplate anew what has seemed only a distraction or entertainment. And given that I am a halfhearted completionist at best, it is no wonder that I have so many stray essays only half begun, and that finishing them will mean putting them in the bare minimum of readiness to be read.

As a theme for the year, halfhearted completionism doesn’t really have the ring, however, that The Year of RPGs, or even The Year of Myth in Games properly does. So let’s go with that, understanding between ourselves that what we’re bound to deliver might not quite live up.

Along the way, sooner rather than later, I trust, we’ll get to that brief outline of Sloek’s Devotional Language I’ve been promising and attempt to explicate its bearing on the project of reading games mythologically. It’s not an easy book to find, but it’s one that we revere enough to shell out the textbook-high price for a used copy (or in a pinch, to scour the web for a pdf). Professor Kozlowski has been known to name-drop Sloek in his lectures, too.

Should you choose to review the extant literature rather than awaiting updates from us, however, a myriad of resources await the student of myth in games. Alarmingly, the wily Spariosu, who has been there long before us, tallying up philosophers and fiction writers from Homer to the late 20th century, hasn’t yet managed to transform the academy with respect to its stance towards games. And yet it is thanks to the far from mythically inclined Game Studies Study Buddies that I ever heard of his work. See also their discussion of what might be the first dissertation on storytelling in games, “Interactive Fiction: The Computer Story Game Adventure,” by Mary Ann Buckles, and their proposal for a countervailing archetypal work of game studies to supplant Huizinga and Caillois, Beyond a Boundary, by CLR James.

Contemporary broadly Jungian interpretations which might be of interest include two recent doctoral dissertations from Pacifica Graduate Institute, “Myth in Translation: The Ludic Imagination in Contemporary Video Games,” by Robert William Guyker, Jr, and “The (Virtual) Myth Conservancy: A Framework for Virtual Heritage and Game-Based Learning,” by Ashland Pym. On the assumption that anyone willing to read a blog post about such tomes would also be willing to at least skim the originals, a review of these is probably not forthcoming. But that is the beauty of abstracts, like this one from a conference in 2022, or the endless rollout of hits for a search of “keywords: myth and games” at (the admittedly very spammy) academia.edu. Video essays, likewise, are an endless trove of far more polished content than we’re ever likely to produce.

I wonder what ever became of this project of a “virtual myth conservancy”

To conclude for now: the myth at the heart of this project of ours at the Video Game Academy has always been the myth of the Lewisian light-looker-along and Tolkenian mythopoetic seeker of truth. It’s the Augustinian longing for a paradigm of a story to apply to our own lives, rather than an accumulation of facts, however playful. It’s the myth of creation, of the garden and the fall, of the exile and return to the land and the faith of our homes, where the TV glows with game systems and the local library and school cafeteria shelves are well stocked. It’s a certain blend of the erstwhile American Dream and the perennial search for meaning: the quest for the grail and the fight against the dragon, the legend with a core of literal and metaphorical truth in the midst of extravagant lies and beside-the-point problems, the poetry of the god-shaped absence in a culture where God has been said to be dead for a long time, and yet we act as though he lives. Our party has gone ahead and killed him time and again at the end of the main story of plenty of RPGs, and still there are countless others to play.

Call it cliché, call it poetry if you like, though rhetoric or ideology are also apt. When it comes to quibbling over words for getting at the relationships between games and myth, we have all day, all year, and more.