I read Richard Bartle's two-part series on the Hero's Journey (1,2) in 2013 when it was published on his blog. It is a worthwhile read, describing not just the Hero's Journey itself from a technical perspective but also the kinds of mistakes that students make when they try to write stories that follow the pattern. I found this juxtaposition invaluable in helping me understand the Hero's Journey because it exposes the common misconceptions and fallacies.
I have taught my game design seminar every Fall since Bartle's publishing his essay, and I usually reference the series as part of a set of optional assignments. One of the options is to do exactly what Bartle writes about, which is to draft a plot outline that follows the Hero's Journey, and I have only had one or two students do this over the years. The other option I have offered is for students to attempt taking an existing video game that they believe follows the Hero's Journey and have them map the game events to the formula. All of these attempts have failed aside from one that I can remember, but more importantly, they have all led to fruitful conversations on the difference between power fantasy and Hero's Journey. Indeed, as one might expect, almost all the games that students would write about violate the primary climactic definition of the Hero's Journey by having the player defeat a boss rather than atone with the father.
This year, I have had to make significant changes to my game design course. All of the important ideas that would come up in natural conversation around students' presentations have had to shift into more didactic individual experiences or transactional discussion board posts. One of the changes to my module on stories and games was to require students to read Chapter 5 of Koster's Theory of Fun for Game Design, in which he discusses what games aren't—that is, he talks specifically about how games and stories do different things, and that stories can be added to games, but that doesn't make games stories. The other major change was to require students to complete the exercise that Bartle describes in his piece on the Hero's Journey: my students were challenged to create a plot that follows the instantiates that pattern.
Honestly, I was surprised at the results, which I read this morning. I expected that they would by and large do well, given that they had Bartle's writing as a guide. Yet, in keeping with Bartle's implicit prediction—given that he explains all this to his own students, and still they get it wrong—about 80% of the submissions demonstrated significant structural misalignment with the form.
The errors seemed to fall into two categories, although I am doing this analysis from memory rather than rigorous qualitative analysis. First, there were errors of omission, where a step was not well defined. For example, some students had a Refusal that was not actually a refusal: in some cases, the protagonist had no agency to refuse, and in others, nothing really happened at all. The other category seemed to be errors of identification, where students had what seemed to be elements of the Hero's Journey in the story, but they mislabeled or didn't label them. Indeed, Bartle talks about both error modes in his own posts.
A common thread among the plot outlines is that they emphasized the external properties of the characters. This may have been simply a result of my asking for an outline and not a story, but I suspect it's representative of how the students thought about their stories. I could see this, for example, in how they basically waved their arms at the Road of Trials. For some, it was just one minor encounter, and for others it was "and then some stuff happened." Only one or two explored what the trials might be in any way that resonated with the actual adventure itself, and none expressed explicitly what character changes these might have made on the protagonist. A similar problem showed up in the Woman as Temptress step: almost everyone had the would-be hero pause, remember their family back home who needs them, and then carry on. There was precious little indication of real internal struggle, where a character feels like they have done enough and could just go back and help.
Another common pattern in the students' submissions was that there was some kind of Big Bad who was causing trouble in the mundane world, and the erstwhile hero had to go get the boon that would allow them to defeat the Big Bad. These stories generally then had a "Father" hastily introduced in the Other World, impressed by the prowess or words of the hero, and handing over the macguffin, which the protagonist then brought back to the Mundane World. The character then proceeded to go on another adventure to go track down the Big Bad in his hideout and beat the snot out of him, thereby saving the world. In my feedback, I tried to point out that it's pretty easy to see that the climax of this story is not when the "father" is impressed, but rather, the defeating of the Big Bad. There was one notable exception, which I thought was going in this direction as the would-be hero returns with a magic sword, but the student made this sword symbolic of a dead kingdom: the people rallied around it, and the people overthrew tyranny. That is, the boon empowered the oppressed, while the Hero showed he was Master of Two Worlds. It was a nice twist.
About 30% of the students gender-swapped characters in the story, one of them swapping all the genders available. None, however, explained why they had done this. In my feedback, I tried to get them to consider the implications of their actions: given a format that you're asked to follow, so that you can learn what it is, your first maneuver is to change the format? In retrospect, I could have introduced shuhari here as a conceptual frame. In my video feedback to the class, I suggested that it had to be hubris to think that you could both modify a format and learn the format at the same time. I tried to explain that those who changed the gender did not try putting the Belly of the Whale before the Refusal of the Call, for example, but that it's the same kind of move, like building a ship while you sail. Perhaps not surprisingly, the students who did such gender-swapping also had other significant and gender-irrelevant problems with following the format.
In my feedback to the class, which I gave in a rather lengthy video this morning, I encouraged them to think again over what the Hero's Journey is about: that it's about self-actualization, the Jungian integration of the shadow. It's not really about the externalities as much as it is about becoming the Hero. Recording the video, I was struck again by how disempowered I feel as an educator who cannot see the faces of his students, to talk with them, to interact with them. Last Fall, I remember a particular student who sat in the back, tried to look cool, and wrote brilliantly. Sometimes, I would say something provocative, and he would give me a look that made it clear he was uncomfortable and thinking, and then I knew we had to drill into that point. As I mentioned in the video today, the best thing you can be is wrong, because then you have something new to learn.
Thinking back on this, my first time rolling out the assignment, I am left with a question that sounds like a great research topic: Why did it go the way that it did? More specifically, what is hard about following the template? Are there specific parts of it that students misunderstand? Are there parts that they only understand in retrospect and with feedback? Are there qualitative or quantitative differences between the approaches taken that were successful vs. unsuccessful? I have already posted a follow-up to my students offering to mentor anyone who wants to pursue an Honors Thesis or something similar along these lines.
My mind cannot help but try to piece together the puzzle, and I wonder if it's possible that students struggled with the Koster reading and with the Hero's Journey exercise because they don't know any good stories. If someone plays video games throughout their formative years, and then signs up for a course on game design, of course they will think that these are great stories. The problem is, by and large, they are not great stories: they are trite shorthand for stories that can be spliced into game experiences. Is it possible that the type of stories encountered in games do not actually foster empathy the way great novels and short stories do, given that they are generally all power fantasies? Or is this most easily explained by the trouble students have completing any complicated assignment to specification?
Thanks for reading. I've essentially written off the possibility of getting any real research done this semester, but I am grateful to have the occasional opportunity to explore ideas here. Next time, it will probably involve barbarians.
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