Anti-campbell, Anti-creationist, anti-dumb people.

Here’s the thing – I firmly believe, in all my firmly rooted humility, that Joseph Campbell was a punk. I also firmly believe that well-meaning English teachers that prescribe the Hero’s Journey as the ultimate depressant for any writer are punks. I mean, here you are, learning to create from scratch, and someone with stronger credentials than yours comes along saying, “yeah, sure, that story’s great, but it was done before because a main character had to leave what he knew to overcome an obstacle about which he at some point showed reluctance.” This pisses me off like people who insist on there being a “Christ figure” in every story where someone can be shown to do something nice or sacrifice something, however small. Somehow it makes sense, I’m informed, that the universality of losing something or suffering something as a story mechanic is strengthens the evidence for a bearded bigoted xenophobe that walked around spewing contradictions 2000 years ago…much like his contemporaries, who never quite found their I Ching.

Go ahead and boil your stories down that way, but it’s a half-cooked potato. The boiling down goes further until you get to the real universal trait, which I am tempted to postulate as evidence for my bearded guy’s opinions. Ya see, if you look at evolution the right way, you understand it to be cumulative growth – it’s not hard to see how much easier it is to fight the straw man of “We came from monkeys” than it is to disprove easily identifiable cumulative growth, you silly creationists and ID’ers. Some things persist and are incorporated into life long term, some things are cut away and what you eventually get is something that shows evidence of having “journeyed.”

This goes double for the hero’s supposed journey. You posit an adverse mechanism and the character uses a combination of who he is and what he becomes in the face of it to journey through. Otherwise, the character would succumb and not journey. The hero’s journey is quite literally “survival of the fittest,” which is not to say survival of the strongest. Genetics is ultimately the study of a hero’s journey, where life is the hero and external factors are the villains. Obviously you have to strip away some measure of emotion from what is a chemical process, but if you anthropomorphize in just the right way, and…there ya go, squint your eyes just so…yeah, you see it too?

Video games work the same way. Old systems that worked better than even older systems are replaced by open-path levels and regenerative health systems. Eventually third person becomes the refined beast we see in Gears of War. Stuff that didn’t work gets killed off in the studio – there’s a larger, collective story being written here as the overall cumulative growth of video games, and an individual evolution of singular memes in singular games. By the way, memes are, in essence, the genes of information – individual, easily identifiable pieces of thought-stuff that persist, die off, have love affairs and drinking problems…smaller pieces that follow the same evolutionary processes that we see more overtly in what I would call the “Memetic organism” of video-games-at-large.

Point is, screw Campbell. Don’t get stuck following the formula, and don’t get stuck being a reactionist and trying to only stay outside his lines. If you’re anti-anything you’re not creating, you’re corollating. Just write what you write, because in the end…we’re all just evolving.

The looming economic crisis and it’s impact on games…or, “Crap!!! Oh wait, we’ll be ok.”

Goodness golly gee, the subprime lending crisis is the tip of the risk-managed liquidity market’s stomachache, the titanic of the American leisure market is going to sink against bloated gas prices and a foreclosure plague. All of this because fraud-ridden loan-mongers gave out fake money to people who had no right to take on a pet turtle, let alone a mortgage. And God knows turtles are a joy.

So as a result, everyone I talk to is wringing their hands over the state of the jobs they’re vying for – to be precise, we’re discussing a peculiarly voracious breed of nerd and know-how: The SMU Guildhall student. See, we all want to be making video games…probably because growing up is for neo-cons with MBAs. And woe is us who were anticipating a burgeoning games market with plenty of ridiculous jobs paying congressional salaries. No no, I meant there that we were looking for congressional jobs paying ridiculous salaries…although I may be repeating myself.

But I disagree, what with my fanboy love of P.J. O’Rourke and not a drop of formal economics education to fight back with.

Video games WILL NOT SUFFER the coming recession. Hell…try alcohol and credit lines during the Great Depression for a precedent. People will find leisure activities to spend time and money on regardless of their circumstances, and if you do some simple math it starts to make sense. Take my wacky mother and father-in-law, for example:

They could spend thirty dollars going to Outback Steakhouse and have a…well, a tolerable time once a month. OR they could get two subscriptions to a $15-a-month MMO and pretend to like each other again, pretending to spend quality time doing pretend fun things in a pretend fun world. This approach is exponentially better for both the pocket book and the “relationship” (cough cough). That is, it’s better until someone decides to go off and pull a LeeRoy Jenkins – and you’re close enough to punch them. But hey, you’ve got plenty more chances to have a good time, unlike the couple glaring at each other over why it was necessary to order the blooming effing onion and three wallaby godDa*^&$-Ishould’vemarriedyoursisters. Even Divorce lawyers gotta make money, so what looks ’bout as beautiful as mother nature’s ass hair is just the circle of life.

Back to the point! Video games will do well despite the coming crisis as a cheap, albeit maligned, alternative to the new car you were saving up for, the trip to Venice (beach…you culturally lazy slouch) you’ve been getting that chest-waxing done in anticipation of, or that snuff film you were trying to film. I’d say that Video games’ biggest threat in the coming years will be, inevitably, it’s former allies – drugs and alcohol. Now, I mean, I would NEVER condone using drugs or alcohol to enrich your gaming experience, or discuss how incredible playing Condemned 2 is on mushrooms, or talk about how much fun a room full of drunk wii-bowlers is, or…see, I just point out the trends with these hooligan excuses for America’s future of which I am no willing participant.

Now, I will discuss this in more depth later, but the caveat is that, in my most unhumble of opinions, Microsoft should halt development of the Xbox 1080 or Xbox Tessaract or whatever they decide to call it and immediately work to drop prices for their games to under $40 by trading a small portion of the stores’ profit margin and a smaller portion of their own, trading technological competitiveness and $60 games for immeasurable market penetration and software distribution rates. Upping demand by these methods necessitates more supply, and more supply implies more profit in what I would expect to be a three-to-one sales difference between the two business models. But I’ll go off on cheaper games for bigger paychecks later. For now, just rest assured that if you’re trying to get into the games industry, I honestly can’t see a better time; if you just like playing games, forget Paris but don’t lose any sleep over your console’s future…and finally, if you’re a major publisher, and you know who all three of you are, recognize the chance to dominate the market and spread the rewards around to all the Tim Schafers of the dev community.