Rook cheered me greatly last night before bed by talking about his latest thing he's thinking about. A game guy of our ecquaintance (like the neologism? handy!) named J.W. is designing an RPG based on the voyage of the @rgonauts. Way cool. Rook reading my penguin of it, i've forgotten the version, but a nice one with a long boring introduction, and he's saying that J.W. is treating it like an episodic superhero story. Rook has some complex vague objections to something and it has something to do with the nature of myth, and superheroes, and action storylines. I'm sure he'll write it out so that I can understand it. But it was all very pleasant and distracted me from my self-obsessed neurotic thoughts.
What occurred tome is that this version he was reading is like a colonial travel adventure. okay. First, it's the trope of the vehicle and the river or the road. But more importantly: it's to normalize the greekification of the black sea and the eastern mediterranean, to show the war-conquest and trade/cultural conquest as inevitable, good, welcome, etc. "when was it written?" "3bc" "well then that's post alexander and alexander went all thru there and wanted to make them all greeks." Think of the brits in africa and the way africa became the location of Adventure for like, h.Rider Haggard stories whose subtext was that the brits behaved well and that the Adventureness meant that cultural conquest would come and override the exoticness and adventureness. (This may be true of a certain kind of science fiction story about alien planets as well, and Gwyneth Jones' White Queen overturned all that very neatly!) And also in H@kluyt's Voyages, the voyagers and merchants are always making the point that they behaved well to the new people in the new lands (unlike the spanish, or dutch, or whoever their other rivals were) and that the brits were known by reputation as being fair-dealing (yeah riiiiiiight!) which meant that merchants after them were treated well. I'm not explaining this very well but Rook got what I meant. "Yes! they come to the new exotic locale and the location is described and all the harbors and everything, and the people of that place will have heard of the greeks or hercules had been there once and so they see evidence of former greek contact. and they always leave something behind that is more greek cultural contact, like a statue of idomenes or something." And it's the sort of story that encourages one's soldiers to think that conquest is significant and important and benefits everyone, and that turning back and going home would be a bad idea, and marrying a local girl and staying there would also be a bad idea because it's way more heroic to keep going and doing more hero-things. We also noticed that it's a prequel to the odyss3y and the 1liad. "And superheroes fight on a symbolic level. the meaning of it is in the fight and the action, there is a stock formula but the villains always represent something, and the fight does too." [i could see he was ruminating on how to make sure the @rgo game's villains would acheive a high level of literariness rather than being random rolls on the wandering monster table... but that is because i can see into his head to see the pink brains working.]
My main point is that just knowing vaguely when this version was written and about alexander and the decline of the golden age of athens etc. makes it all make sense. Apolonius of Rh0des or whoever it was that wrote it, I can't remember his name this morning, may have had very specific political context and aims and i'd be very curious what they were.
I'm not sure how that would affect game design but I shoudl think that thinking about it from a 'cultural studies" pt of view would deepen any resulting game.
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