EPISODE 27: RECOMBINATORIAL STORYTELLING WITH ROGER TRAVIS
Episode 27: Recombinatorial Storytelling with Roger Travis | 26 May 2026
Stephen and Trent interview their great friend and classics scholar, Dr. Roger Travis, whose forthcoming book from McFarland proposes a theory of recombinatorial storytelling in ancient epics and cooperative adventure card games. The trio discusses:
Halo 2, The Aeneid, and reflections on Cultural Truth Value;
Homeric bards as gamer-designers who leveraged an available technology (dactylic hexameter) to recompose myths;
The repetitive “formulas” of ancient epics and their relation to modern cooperative adventure card games;
Worldbuilding as a “social forces sandbox” that constrains and enables narrative possibilities;
The shared structure of ancient Greek mythology and contemporary transmedia storytelling;
Greek tragedy as a “snapshot” of living performance;
The history of fiction writing and its parallels to curricular design;
The Iliad, The Odyssey, and the Telemachy as instructional genre fiction for social education;
Mirroring recomposition from the ancient world via modern transmedia stories like Star Wars;
Treading the narrow line between fossilized and fluid storytelling;
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as the world’s first video game;
Evolutionary tension between the desire for novel stimuli and the biochemical need for predictability; and
Recomposition and worldbuilding as peas in a shared pod of iterative narrative creation.
Episode References:
Travis, R. (2010, November 18). A note on the word “practomime” [Blog post]. Play The Past. https://www.playthepast.org/?p=198
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Homer. (1996). The odyssey (R. Fagles, Trans.). Penguin Books. (Original work published ca. 8th century B.C.E.).
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Aeschylus. (1922). Seven against Thebes (H. W. Smyth, Trans.). Perseus Digital Library. https://scaife.perseus.org/library/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0085.tlg004/ (Original work published 467 B.C.E.)
Plato. (1961). Letters. In E. Hamilton & H. Cairns (Eds.), The collected dialogues of Plato (L. A. Post, Trans.). Princeton University Press. (Original work written ca. 360 B.C.E.)
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Valve. (2007). Portal (Version 1.0.0) [Video game]. Valve.
Squad. (2015). Kerbal Space Program (Version 1.0) [Video game]. Private Division.
ZA/UM. (2019). Disco Elysium [Video game]. ZA/UM.
Pope, L. (2013). Papers, Please (Version 1.4.15) [Video game]. 3909.
Lem, S. (2002). Solaris (J. Kilmartin & S. Cox, Trans.). Harcourt Brace. (Original work published 1961).
Tchaikovsky, A. (2015). Children of time (Children of Time series, Book 1). Orbit.