Having an eagle feed on your liver every day would be painful, to say the least. Physically painful. And to say that rolling a boulder uphill for all eternity is physically tiring would be a gross understatement. Yet, in Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment, I didn’t feel physically hurt or taxed (well, perhaps my fingers beg to differ after getting well-acquainted with the ‘G’ and ‘H’ keys) in that manner when playing through the tortures of Sisyphus or Prometheus. No, the torture depicted on the screen and the torture experienced by the player are quite different.
In all of the tortures depicted in the game, the idea of success is constantly dangled in front of the opponent. For some of the tortures, it becomes readily clear that success is deliberately designed to be impossible. For example, it doesn’t take too much mathematical knowledge to realize that Zeno’s paradoxical punishment, in which the player is told to press the ‘G’ and ‘H’ keys rapidly in order to complete a 100 meter race through a low-resolution interface, will never end— every time the player gets halfway to the finish, the character sprite is taken back to the beginning of the race, and they are told that the distance remaining has been halved. When playing through the punishments of Zeno, Danaids, and Tantalus, the player may find it easy to quit trying to succeed or even play, because they are able to arrive at the conclusion that the task is impossible.
Yet, with regards to the punishments of Prometheus or Sisyphus, the inevitability of pure failure doesn’t seem as entirely obvious to the player at first glance. While the player may know that their eventual failure is inevitable, there is a certain curiosity that may drive the player to endure as long as possible. For example, in Prometheus’ torture (where the character must attempt to push a boulder up a mountain by pressing ‘G’ and ‘H’), while the player may acknowledge the mountain is endless, they may wonder what would happen if they manage to push the boulder past the top border of the screen. It isn’t entirely obvious that doing so is impossible, and the circumstances of failure in this mini-game are ambiguous enough that the player may feel compelled to blame failure on their own lack of ability rather than being a natural result of the exercise. As such, players may feel compelled to try again. A similar phenomenon may happen when playing through Prometheus’ torture, as players may wonder whether it is essential for the eagle to completely peck out Prometheus’ liver in order for the day counter to increment— after all, a day is a finite time period, isn’t it? This curiosity of wondering what would happen if a boulder was pushed off-screen, or what would happen if Prometheus managed to survive, liver intact, into another day, is the core of what makes this mild form of torture compelling.
Another aspect that separates the gameplay of this game from the presumed experience of physically enduring any of those tortures is that there is humor in the game that serves to offset much of its misery. One could argue that even the name of the game— Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment— is quite humorous with its tonal disparity. Aubrey Anable argues in her book chapter "Games to Fail With" that there is an inherent sense of humor associated with failure in games, as players are forced to repeatedly come to terms with their own ability-related inadequacies in order to improve and progress. Perhaps this deep-seated humor that Anable describes is another aspect that keeps us going through the torture as our failure counters increase.
Ultimately, Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment creates a mild torture that is defined not by its physical painfulness, but rather by its ability to sustain itself through curiosity and humor. But even that’s not enough to stop me from eventually taking my hands off the boulder.
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