This is a 7000-word essay that I submitted for a course in EFL University, Hyderabad. Read Part II here.
Neil Nagwekar
H00MAELI20190056
Revisiting Indian Classics (LIT 109)
Professor Thirupathi Kumar
2 May 2020
Gamers, Gods and the Existential Struggle of NPCs in OP Lands - Part I
Many of the initial predispositions toward the novel school of thought commonly referred to as game studies, stem from and are perhaps informed by the estranging nature of their jargon. Unlike most other humanities, game studies are in inextricable links with the ever-changing landscapes of popular culture and information technology, thus constantly threatening swift redundancy of its newfound discoveries. Even of terminologies that—despite the tremulous nature of this realm—retain relative universality, it would be understandable if veteran literary critics or poststructuralist theoreticians encounter difficulties in apprehending their significance; here, phrases like ‘role-playing games’ or words like ‘immersion’ spring to mind.
It seems to me that central criticisms of game studies emerge from this sense of alienation. There has, perhaps understandably, existed a notion that these simplified yet innumerable jargons have concealed the possibility of their entire school of thought being no more than simply another form of narrative; that is to say, cybertexts posit themselves as essentially different from prose, poetry, film or television narratives, when this essential difference is seemingly absent.
While the late blossoming of this school may explain its curious terminologies, one must turn to Espen Aarseth’s Introduction to Cybertext to apprehend the inherent differences within the very spirit of their ideas. The cybertext, according to Aarseth, retains its individuality through its emphasis on ergodic literature; a form of narrative that prioritizes the reader’s traversing of the text. In the case of books or films, ergodic literature would manifest itself in ambiguous meaning and infinity of interpretations, which is to say that two people, upon traversing the same text, can interpret, say, the character of Lord Krishna in two different ways.
However, what sets videogame studies aside is an emphasis of ergodic literature not in ambiguous meaning but variable expression. Aarseth, in his Introduction, elaborates:
This may be hard to understand for the traditional literary critic who cannot perceive the difference between metaphorical structure and logical structure, but it is essential. The cybertext reader is a player, a gambler; the cybertext is a game-world or world-game; it is possible to explore, get lost, and discover secret paths in these texts, not metaphorically, but through the topological structures of the textual machinery. This is not a difference between games and literature but rather between games and narratives. (Aarseth 4)
What becomes increasingly clear is that, while even the most postmodern text would keep the reader in a certain state of powerlessness (of being a passenger, voyeur or mere interpreter of the tale), the cybertext reader directly intervenes into the action of the story; even confronting the risk of rejection through failure of completing the story’s tasks. It is this essential difference that forms the rock upon which game studies builds its church, and that has provided this argument with its necessary tools of analysis.
One of these tools is the term OP or ‘Overpowered’ characters. To explain this concept whilst remaining tethered to the world of mythology (if not, for the time being, Indian mythology), let us examine the playable character Kassandra in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (henceforth Odyssey), a video game set in ancient Greece.1 Kassandra, a protagonist of the game and one of the gamer’s avatars2—as in most role-playing games—can continually upgrade her combat skills, weapons, armours, etc. This will aid her progress in the game’s storyline, since the antagonists and missions will, naturally, over time become harder and harder to defeat.
While this is generally applicable as well, let us for now isolate ourselves to the singular example of a horse. In the beginning, the gamer’s mount Phobos is perfectly normal in speed, climbing ability or stamina. Phobos is whom game developers themselves categorize as having common skin; which is to say, in ancient Greece, any strawman or blacksmith would recognize this horse as ordinary or unimpressive. However, Odyssey offers the gamer the chance to upgrade their avatar’s horse from common to rare, epic and eventually legendary. If, then, the gamer progresses from the common skin of Phobos to the legendary, fire-skinned mount of Abraxas (with his maxed-out statistics on speed or skittishness), they reach a stage wherein the conflicts of the game become child’s play.
Since their horse is one of the best in the entire game-world, no enemy in Athens or Sparta can hope to, say, dismount Kassandra or defeat her in a race. It may be said that the horse and his mount have, to all the occupants of this ancient land, become a benchmark of the superlative. To reach this stage on multiple levels—wherein horse-riding, combat and, by extension, any conflicts that the videogame offers appear well-within the capabilities of the character’s skills—is to be Overpowered. Therefore, in Odyssey, OP characters will most likely have maxed-out statistics in most facets, wield weapons of godlike power and decimate entire armies without assistance.
The difference, then, between Phobos and Abraxas parallels the difference between the commoner and Kassandra, the difference between the ordinary disk and the sudarshana chakra, between man and god. In R.K. Narayan’s The Ramayana (which, in a modern time, attempts to repackage one of the classic retellings of the epic), a simple glance at the manner of the battle between Rama and Thataka from a cybertext perspective is illuminating:
Thataka threw her three-pronged spear at Rama. As it came flaming, Rama strung his bow and sent an arrow which broke it into fragments. Next she raised a hail of stones under which to crush her adversaries. Rama sent up his arrows, which shielded them from the attack. Finally Rama’s arrow pierced her throat and ended her career… (Narayan 13)
Even a casual glance at this passage uncovers similarities between Rama’s abilities and, to continue the aforementioned example, an OP Kassandra in Odyssey. While, granted, it could be argued that the sources of their powers are different (more on that anon), their end manifestations would, to either a common subject of Ayodhya or a Trojan fishmonger, appear as the same. In relation to ordinary men and women, it would be understandable if the abilities of OP characters and human incarnations of gods (even, for that matter, asuras like Thataka) are unfamiliar enough to simply be homogenized.
It is here that certain key facets of OP characters must be clarified. Firstly, it is not necessary that only one person within a certain space (Ayodhya, Ilium, etc.) deserves to be crowned as an OP character. Granted, while the concept depends upon an inherent hierarchy of talents, it is not only the sole person at its summit who becomes worthy of the term, but also an entire cluster of people at the top and closer to the top of the hierarchy. Therefore, in Odyssey, certain non-playing characters3, story antagonists, allies, etc.—assuming, of course, that they possess the requisite skills—may also be classified as OP; just as in Mahabharata, it is not only heroes like Krishna, Arjun or Bheem, but also Karna, Bheeshma or Drona who can, in game studies, be classified by the same term.
The second clarification may be inferred among the elaborations of the first. An OP character’s strength is purely in relation to the time and space that he occupies, and most importantly of the people that constitute it. The identity of the OP is, then, relative to the identity of the ordinary. Therefore, in Ramayana, Rama, Lakshman and even the astra-wielding Ravana are OP within the geographical space of ancient India and Lanka, as well as in comparison to the qualities ascribed to the average human being. Let us, for the sake of convenience, coin the term OP lands to denote this time, space and demography within which these beings are considered superlative. Thus, in Ramayana and Mahabharata, OP lands would constitute the entire worldly space within which the action unfolds.
Lastly (and this clarification, too, may be inferred from the first and second), it is not necessary that only the avatar has license to be OP. Characters not in control of the gamer, be they NPCs, mere conduits for the progression of the story, or both, may also be classified as OP. However, to understand the close relation between an OP character and the person controlling his actions and decisions i.e. the gamer, let us, only within the confines of this argument, temporarily assume that an OP character and the player’s avatar are one and the same. Once this brief assumption is made, a curious parallel emerges between game studies and Indian mythology.
It is common knowledge that Rama and Krishna are the seventh and eighth incarnations of Vishnu the Preserver respectively. Let us for now exclude the stated motivations behind Vishnu’s entry into the world in human form.4 In a purely objective sense, one may view Vishnu as both a separate presence i.e. his physical presence in Vaikuntha or any other transcendental realm external to Earth, while at the same time a human presence in OP lands and material realms like Rama and Krishna; who, incidentally, are also capable of wielding godlike weapons and performing miraculous feats. Can we, then, extend the aforementioned analogy between OP avatars and Indian mythological heroes, to the gamers and gods that control these respective characters?
Souvik Mukherjee, in his discussion of Vishnu and the Videogame, explores these very complexities and parallels of identity. There are a few points of analysis where similarities may be found between the gamer and the god; for instance, the schism between the OP avatar and the one controlling them. In the context of videogames, let us juxtapose Odyssey with Narayan’s The Ramayana. It goes without saying that, unless the visual medium of storytelling explores Bandersnatch5 levels of postmodernism, the avatar (regardless of whether they are OP or not) is unaware of another person controlling their actions and decisions. That is the case with Kassandra and it is also with Rama; who, in Narayan’s text, is unaware that he is an incarnation of Vishnu. There is a slight inconsistency to account for, as not all incarnations of Vishnu are blissfully unaware of their heavenly origins. Krishna, for instance, from chapters seven till eleven in Prabhupāda’s edition of Bhagavad-gita (among, of course, innumerable other sources) explicitly acknowledges his divinity.
However, whether the character in question is aware of their actions and decisions being guided by gamer or god does not change the aforementioned essential nature of their relationship i.e. of one being a conduit for the other. Thus Mukherjee states:
We humans are like deities; at least, external souls with respect to a virtual world that exists only inside a computer simulation. (Mukherjee)
Mukherjee also explores the nature of immersion. When one plays a videogame like Odyssey, the motivations of the avatar Kassandra are initially different from that of the gamer. While Kassandra is initially a Spartan mercenary with her own stated ambitions that can change as the game progresses, the initial aim of the gamer controlling her does not go beyond entertainment.
It is worth acknowledging those several gamers that remain in this stagnant stage of entertainment; blissfully and understandably uninterested in the nuances of the story. For them, wars and battles are mere means of escapism and, as a consequence, many videogames are developed to accommodate this demand. For gamers who wish to maintain an impersonal, non-immersive relation with their OP avatar and their OP lands, nuances in morality are readily discarded. As Debra Ramsay in Liminality and the Smearing of War and Play in Battlefield 1 briefly mentions:
…although World War II is a favourite setting for videogames set in real-world conflicts, and launched the hugely successful AAA franchises […], these games rarely reference the Holocaust… [Ramsay]
Having said that, despite the gamer’s initial motivation being mere entertainment, immersion may cause the growth of another branch—an affability for the gamer’s character and, once they become OP, the OP lands. While most game studies critics term this as ‘involvement’ Mukherjee prefers the term ‘incorporation’, wherein the gamer and his avatar are being introduced to, and are therefore simultaneously internalizing and assimilating, the game’s consciousness.
(While it is true that the OP avatar is a mere vessel for the gamer to explore a foreign world, it must be noted that gamers, immersed or otherwise, cannot wreck the fundamental fabrics of the videogame. This does not mean exploiting the game’s glitches or traversing in blue hell.6 It means that, while the gamer controlling an OP Kassandra can kill NPCs like running hot knife through butter, they cannot make her fly an airplane, play bowling or kill characters that the game developers have deemed important to the story.)
The gamer thus has a double consciousness7, as immersion leads to—along with apprehending the sociocultural realities of the game—a genuine attachment with the OP avatar under the gamer’s control. While various studies by Scholl & Tremoulet (2000), Mori (1970), etc. have validated this admittedly obvious observation, Coulson et al., in their study of Real Feelings for Virtual People, took things a step further and successfully explored interpersonal attractions between gamers and NPCs.
The success in their findings implies that the gamer is now, almost unconsciously, certain in his identification with his OP avatar, and has moved on to developing relations with relatively simply coded virtual NPCs that only interact directly with the OP avatar. The fact that the gamer is able to form genuine emotional relations with mere two-dimensional, artificial, computerized NPCs is a major breakthrough in our analysis. It further validates the claim that it is not Krishna, but Lord Vishnu who forms close bonds with Arjun; a claim that may be validated by Vishnu revealing himself to Arjun in the pages of the Gita.
Now that all the finer points have been clarified, we have built the material foundations to shift the focus of our analysis from the parallels between the gamer, the god, the OP avatar and the Indian mythological hero, to the relation between the NPCs to their OP avatar—that is also to say, the relation of lesser characters like Sumanthra and Kooni to Rama, or between Shakuni or Keechak to the Pandavas.
Footnotes
1. Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey features two playable characters Kassandra and Alexios. The argument only focuses on Kassandra for convenience.
2. In game studies, ‘avatar’ is the common noun ascribed to the character controlled by the gamer. This is not to be confused with the Hindu term avatar, meaning incarnation. The similarity between both terms has been commented by James Cameron in relation to his movie Avatar (2009): “With the popularization of the term, now it’s not just Hindu gods who can descend upon different worlds, but people. Today, avatars come in the form of characters ready to fight in some virtual battlefield…” (Mukherjee). During the course of this argument, ‘avatar’ will denote the videogame character, and ‘incarnation’ will denote anthropomorphic forms of gods in mythology.
3. In game studies, non-playing characters (henceforth NPCs) describe any character in a videogame that cannot be controlled by the gamer.
4. The intent of Vishnu is described, perhaps most succinctly, by Krishna in the Bhagavad-gita: “Whenever and wherever there is a decline in religious practice, O descendant of Bharata, and a predominant rise of irreligion—at that time I descend Myself” (Prabhupāda 226).
5. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018) is an interactive film that allows the viewer to make important choices for his protagonist that determine one of multiple endings. It is known for its reflections on self-aware plotting, meta-commentary and the issue of fate versus free will.
6. ‘Blue hell’ is a videogame concept referring to a large, empty area beneath the game’s terrain and landmass. This glitch is mostly found in games of the Grand Theft Auto series.
7. ‘Double consciousness’ must not be ascribed to Mukherjee, who prefers the term ‘multiple consciousness’.
Originally written: 2 May 2020
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