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.