on it, as well as buying time for compositional effort for the performer. And finally,
oral narrative is ‘empathetic and participatory’ - the performer and audience are both
immersed in the narrative, to such an extent that, in an example given from African
narrative, the narrator slips from third to first person, his identification with the hero,
Mwinde, completed in the grammar of the telling.
The similarities between Cloud and, say, Achilles, are striking. He is formulaic - like
Achilles, he always fights in the same way, always wears the same clothes, and is
partly controlled by gods in the shape of players. Achilles is “infused with strength”
by Apollo, nourished with nectar and honey by Athena, and given high-quality
armour by the god Hephaistos. Cloud is infused with health points, and equipped with
weapons, protective devices, and magical properties by the player-as-god. He is a
‘heavy hero’: exaggeratedly attractive, good with his sword, and equipped with a
mysterious myth of origin, combining ordinary mortal and supernatural features, like
Achilles. He operates agonistically - his problems are expressed in terms of physical
combat or the overcoming of physical obstacles. He moves in a world replete with
redundancy - the experience of playing him is to keep revisiting the same places
again and again until familiarity shows us the next step; or fighting the same monsters
over and over until we learn their weak points.
In certain important ways, games obviously depart dramatically from traditions of oral
narrative. The differences of commodified and electronically-mediated culture, of
texts moving rapidly across and between global audiences, and of the dependence of
these texts on a wide range of kinds of literate practice, are among the issues that need
to be considered. The argument to be made here is not that games, in some simple