["Penguin Cap" by CarboHydroM]
Before we begin, please join me in welcoming back our good friend,
Lili, whom you may remember as the talented lady behind the webcomic,
"Name Game", which you can find in its new home, namegamecomic.com.
Anyway, she'll be tackling art duties for us today!
High five! :)
There are a handful of fundamental concepts that pervade modern entertainment, whether it's games,
movies, books, or graphic novels, there are some ideas that you see pop up again and again.
Today and next week, we're going to be talking about one of those: The Hero's Journey.
The Hero's Journey is a concept originated by Joseph Campbell in his
1949 book, "The Hero with a Thousand Faces".
The basic tenant is that there are certain commonalities to how cultures around the world formulate their myths and stories.
The extrapolation that many modern entertainers make, for better or worse, is that because so many of our
foundational myths may follow the pattern outlined by Campbell in the "Hero with a Thousand Faces",
if they emulate this pattern, it will help them to create something that resonates with any audience.
Perhaps the most famous example of this is the classic "Star Wars" trilogy.
Lucas has repeatedly said how much he relied on the Hero's Journey when crafting the "Star Wars" mythos,
but you see the Hero's Journey in pop culture all the time.
In fact, it's shockingly common in RPGs.
"Final Fantasy" games are LITTERED with the Hero's Journey.
Fantasy novels tend to take it as a given.
Even most of your summer blockbusters end up using it in some form.
But like any theoretical concept, it's a lens-- a way of looking at certain storylines and ideas.
It's a tool to help us gain perspective and guide us when our own writing is rudderless.
But like any lens, its value is in narrowing our focus, so there's a lot that it leaves out.
In fact, many problems with modern storytelling can be attributed to viewing the Hero's Journey as a
FORMULA for how to create rather than a tool to help us examine our creations.
It's how you get so many banal fantasy adventures or say me feeling action flicks.
But that said, there are some excellent uses of it that show why this is such a powerful concept.
So let's go to one of those, and use it to explore what the Hero's Journey actually is.
Without further ado...
(pop)
Yes.
The Hero's Journey is traditionally separated into a series of individuated stages.
"Journey" follows these so closely that I'm pretty sure they're giving us a hint at to what they were doing with the title.
But what makes "Journey" unique amongst all the various products that rely on the Hero's Journey
is that it really makes you live each of these stages
rather than simply observing someone else going through the process.
So we're going to take a look at each of these stages in "Journey",
and see how they use them there in order to explore The Hero's Journey as a whole.
We're gonna try to explore how we can use this concept in games to create unique and meaningful play,
rather than say me stories about a boy who has to embark on an epIc quest and save the world and so on.
You know the tune.
The first stage in the Hero's Journey is the Call to Adventure.
This is the moment that signals to the hero that they have to move beyond the ordinary and everyday existence
they once had and pursue some larger goal.
It's Princess Leia's hologram in "Star Wars", basically.
In "Journey", this is the very opening.
It's the star that you follow that shows you your way to the mountain.
This sort of agent assigned guiding the hero to adventure is very common in the Hero's Journey.
In fact, Campbell often talks about the Call to Adventure, often being a vision of the journey's goal--
a sort of coming-to-awareness of an internal objective you didn't know you had.
The key here is to not complicate the Call to Adventure and make it interesting
have it kick in our understanding of the ordinary, but don't have it be something too complex.
It can be an old man showing up in your doorstep with a pack of dwarves,
or a kindly uncle giving you a ring.
It can be finding a sword in a stone or a king ordering you to go get a Golden Fleece,
but if you want to use the Hero's Journey effectively, keep this part simple.
We don't need much to buy into the Hero's Journey.
By definition, we're going to be leaving the realm of the ordinary anyway,
so we don't need a very complex setup to get us to go on a journey.
The real meat, what's interesting about the Hero's Journey, is how the hero tackles that journey,
and deals with leaving the world they know.
So, save your complexity for the character of the hero,
rather than for how they get into the adventure in the first place.
The second step in the Hero's Journey is the Refusal of the Call.
It's the moment the hero turns away from his destiny and tries to return to the life he knew.
In anything following the Hero's Journey paradigm, this is either impossible or utterly calamitous.
Usually, it's the moment that we get to see the hero's reluctance
and we get to empathize with them as a human being.
It's the "remove this cup from me" moment.
The best examples of anime tend to execute on this well, using an attempt to deny
destiny and the futility of doing so to humanize characters
who are substantially more powerful than will ever be.
This is the stage that keeps us from seeing the characters in the story simply as
all-powerful plot devices and instead lets us associate the story with our personal lives.
And, to be honest, when we first played "Journey," we didn't see this stage in there.
We even dismissed it as impossible to achieve this level of characterization
without dialogue and a pre-scripted narrative, but one day while James was teaching
the design club at Digipen, one of his students pointed out to him that in fact
pretty much everyone experiences the Refusal of the Call in "Journey".
Kind of blew our minds, actually.
The student said that at some point pretty much everybody playing "Journey" deviates
from the pre-scripted path and tries to explore the desert, only to be blown back towards their inevitable and unavoidable goal
Intrigued by this idea, James then watched a half-a-dozen people play "Journey",
and sure enough everyone did it within the first 30 minutes.
This was incredible to us as from a mechanics-as-metaphor perspective, the designers were having you
live the Hero's Journey and experience the frustration of the Refusal of the Call
in a way that merely telling you about it in a game context could never do.
This meant that they had taken an inherently negative constraint of their game
that they couldn't build a big enough world or deliver the experience they wanted to
while letting the player explore to their heart's content and they gave that meaning,
thereby making their invisible walls not as terrible and immersion-breaking
as the invisible walls you find in many games.
Now, that's design! ;-)
Okay, I can see by the way things are going that we are not covering all of this in one show.
Next week, I promise we'll get through the rest talk to about how "Journey" delivers on them,
and how we can use that in other games.
See you then!
["Twin Seeds Flyby" by Level 99]