You’ve probably heard about George Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, even if only because of Star Wars. Campbell argued that the myths that have survived for thousands of years share a common, evocative pattern: a “monomyth” that speaks to deep human needs.
As a cultural theory, the monomyth’s attracted its share of criticisms, but whether or not it’s correct it’s had an enormous influence on modern pop culture. And in a month that’s seen the (re-)release of classic-style JRPGs like Tales of Graces F and Xenoblade Chronicles, it got me thinking about our pop culture’s central tropes and myths.
Making fun of JRPG convention is one of the safest ways for one section of gamers to feel superior to the other. So if everyone supposedly hates the stuff, why are they still made – and why do so many of us continue to buy them? Is it because of their indifference to others’ mockery?
We’ve all seen our share of genre convention no matter the medium. Self-awareness and metafictional winks at the audience have become staples. These days the ending without the last-second horrific twist, the local deity who isn’t a tyrant, the military both competent and heroic – these are the stories that seem unusual. What was once meta has become routine, and the convention it once served to tweak has been thoroughly eclipsed.
We have deconstructed our original stories extensively in successive waves of disbelief. Plot holes and one-dimensional heroes are regularly skewered; the modern “hero” might well have been called a classical anti-hero simply for his or her doubts and fears. But our reconstruction of our narrative universe has lagged behind our ability to tear things down. Peculiarly, this makes the original story devices we mocked all the more refreshing simply because of their sincerity – constant winking at the camera can easily destroy any sense of verisimilitude, and a story that depends on mocking another to exist only has as much cultural cache as the story it mocks.
So are we seeing a shift away from meta-awareness?
Some of the more popular recent pop culture tales have been seemingly tailored to this desire for straightforward stories. Hunger Games (the film) is a practically black-and-white universe of survival against sadistic tormentors. Mass Effect was a reconstruction of the classic space opera. Harry Potter was the changeling fantasy, a shift from a miserable mundane existence into a higher and brighter world of the supernatural that nonetheless became steadily darker. And then we have games like Uncharted: simple, rousing modern pulp fiction with a phenomenal budget.
And, of course, there are other modern attempts to recapture the old earnest spirit, like the undeservedly-maligned John Carter, that met with less financial success.
None of these stories, mind you, lacked nuance. The characters are well-painted, the stories are tight and smoothly constructed, the themes and visuals evocative. What they lacked, or to be more precise deliberately avoided, was the need to connect to other stories to stand upon their own feet.
So how does this relate to gaming? What are gaming’s primal stories?
“Save the princess!” comes the immediate reply. Maybe a smattering of “kill the aliens/monsters/demons!” And these are, one has to admit, pretty much the most elemental game plot drives – but they’re just drives or motives, not a formal narrative structure. Why do we want to save the princess? Why do the aliens need to die (aside from the fact that they’re shooting at you). What about these simple plots makes them resonate? Is it simply a question of writing convenience?
A great number of plots boil down to catchphrases like “save the girl,” “kill the bad guys,” “find redemption,” “overcome my troubled past.” The issue is that with many of the great works of literature these primeval building blocks are buried beneath layers of technique and refinement, until instead of “save the girl, overcome my troubled past” we think Casablanca.
Games are at an awkward phase in their evolution as a storytelling medium. More than many other forms of art, we have deconstructed our first generation of storytelling, but we’ve been slower than we should have been to build them back up stronger than before, fixed of their flaws. This, more than anything else, is why so many game plots (especially JRPGs who play it totally straight) sometimes seem so childishly indulgent – speaking with all affection for the genre, how many of the original generation of JRPG classics’ writing would stand up to even a young adult novel?
It isn’t a problem of potential or underlying ideas, but one of presentation. And the solution to the problem isn’t necessarily to mock these earnestly-told stories or wink at the audience to show you’re in on the joke. Cynicism isn’t superior to sincerity, but because it makes no pretenses to sincerity to begin with we expect less of a cynical work.
A hundred years from now, people are probably going to remember Casablanca a whole lot more than they do Play it Again Sam.