I explained the story and how it's about a child looking for fire in a world where fire is literally dead. Maggie pointed out that we could be trapping ourselves in a corner because without fire there would be a lot of things that that world can't help. This is because technology may be limited without fire. She also talked briefly about archetypes and how we had some really good ones in our basic story already. She suggested that we look at the work of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung on archetypes.
I've already had a brief look at Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I've also watched a two-part video about it and how in some games you can find the archetypes of Campbell's monomyth (Hero's Journey).
Here's part one and part two.
An article I found argues against the Hero's Journey, stating that "not every story is a Hero's Journey" and that for this reason it is somehow irrelevant and invalid (Hull, 2010). From what I see I think the writer of that article assumes that the Hero's Journey and the existence of archetypes is some kind of formula that's supposed to work for every story. I personally disagree with this notion. While certain structures and archetypes do exist, they're just generalisations and ideas on how stories may or may not work. I don't think they're intended to be formulaic rules that are absolute. They're interesting and they're something to look at, but I don't think you absolutely to have them to get a good story. I mean, if you had to obey a certain archetype and your character has to be exactly like it we'd end up with a lot of the same characters but in different books and under different names. That would be boring and I don't think this is the case with good books. We all love different characters because they are in their own way unique "people" and that's why you can really connect with well-written characters.
I recognise many of the archetypes Campbell touches on, as well as that of Jung, but like I said, they're only generalisations and make it easier to understand how components of a story work together and to quickly understand the basic traits of a character personality. So I don't see a need to really make or change any characters to conform to Campbell's monomyth or a particular archetype.
For today I talked to the group about the differences in how the story is told in our three main inspirations, which I talked about in the previous entry, and we decided where we wanted to be on the spectrum. We want the story to be very open but we don't want it to be like Limbo where there is absolutely no information or appearance of a story until the end. So we decided that we'll keep it open but have an unreliable narrator that gives you just enough information to give the player a starting point/context to make their story in but not enough to fully tell them what the story may be about. This way you still have a sense of a story throughout the game but since details are limited you get varied interpretations as to what's really happening. It will be narrated, similar to how they do it in Bastion, instead of having cutscenes and long bits of text to read. This is to preserve the flow of gameplay and story. Cutscenes and walls of text make experiences feel too disconnected and choppy.
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Bibliography:
Campbell, J. (2009). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. United States: Pantheon Books
Hull, J. (2010). Not Everything Is A Hero's Journey. Retrieved August 6, 2012, from http://storyfanatic.com/articles/story-theory/not-everything-is-a-heros-journey
Penny Arcade. (2012). Season 4, Ep. 20 - The Hero's Journey (Part 1) [Video file]. Retrieved August 6, 2012, from http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/the-heros-journey-part-1
Penny Arcade. (2012). Season 4, Ep. 21 - The Hero's Journey (Part 1) [Video file]. Retrieved August 6, 2012, from http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/the-heros-journey-part-2
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