This Week: Choose Your Own Odyssey

Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey is part of a long line of film adaptations, but Homer’s epic poem has quietly shaped another medium: role-playing games. The structure of The Odyssey is practically a blueprint for tabletop and video game RPGs from the ‘boss fights’ with escalating difficulty to the way Odysseus levels up through the tale. Professor Roger Travis explains how ancient bards were similar to game masters today. Laura Jenkinson-Brown argues that Odysseus’s choices are like a dialogue tree in a choose-your-own-adventure book. That’s why she wrote one called “You Are Odysseus. Plus, John Haygood and Jonathan Drake tell me how they’ve created tabletop role-playing games that reward players for embracing the values of the Homeric world.