Sphinx

I have made my first, incredibly tentative, step into the world of “Gaming the Past”*: using simulation games, in this case interactive text, to explore historical issues. It is, with crashing inevitability, based on Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue, considered from the Athenian perspective, and you can test the first version at http://www.philome.la/NevilleMorley/might-and-right-the-athenian-version. Part II, allowing you to play the Melian side, will follow in due course – and, once I’ve got these both up and running, I will then be developing some contextual material to tie the two together. All feedback and comments gratefully received. Yes, I know the links are going funny colours on an apparently random basis; working on this…

In some ways, it’s amazing that I didn’t think of this idea before; after all, I’ve been happily repeating the claim that the Melian Dialogue is regularly cited by pioneering figures in game theory as a foundational text (see e.g. my discussion of Yanis Varoufakis‘ take on the subject). We have two ‘players’, with different starting positions and different goals, and so inevitably they’re likely to follow different strategies. Of course, the original episode has just the one outcome, which thus appears inevitable, and I should stress that recreating the real course of events is not the primary aim of the game, ‘cos that’s ridiculously easy for either side. However, Thucydides’ presentation of the Dialogue as a dialogue surely invites us to consider the counterfactual possibilities of this episode, to wonder whether there were any circumstances in which the Athenians might have relented or the Melians might have found the one argument that saved them. Turning this into an interactive game emphasises such possibilities, and perhaps also helps to emphasise the different constraints working on those involved – even the Athenians.

I do feel completely out of my comfort zone here; it’s at least thirty years since I’ve done any sort of coding, apart from basic .html, and I was completely rubbish at Basic at the time. Further, my experience with games for the last twenty-odd years has been limited to Jonah Lomu Rugby, SimCity 2000 and Final Fantasy VII, and even that was years ago. But the great thing about the Twine utility, and the interactive text format, is that it takes me back to the sorts of games I really felt I understood: Level 9’s text adventure games like Return to Eden and Lords of Time on the dear old Amstrad CPC464, and the book-based Fighting Fantasy adventures. It quite takes me back to the days when I attempted to code Winnie the Pooh as an interactive fantasy quest…

*To adopt the phrase used by Jeremiah McCall, who’s been instrumental both in helping to inspire this project, with his own Path of Honours game giving me an idea of what might be possible with fairly simple, free-to-use software, and in providing huge amounts of advice and support as I gradually got to grips with the less simple aspects of the software… Thanks also to Shawn Graham, via whose Twitter feed I first encountered the idea of #archaeogaming – since this project isn’t exactly archaeological, I’m not sure if that’s quite the right label – and to Seth Honnor at Kaleider, who kept on at me with the idea that the Melian Dialogue ought to be made into a game until I finally realised that he was absolutely right…