Mythology, Gamification, and the TV show Community
Lately much of my work has been converging on mythology. This is kind of weird given that I’m a technology writer. But mythology, specifically the way mythic and non-mythic stories are structured, has cropped up in gamification, customer experience design, and even picking where to aim a business model. Before I can move on to those topics, I need an argumentative Lego block that I can plug into future arguments. This is that block.
There’s a reason why James Cameron’s Avatar made a ton of money. People accuse Avatar of having the same plot as Pocahontas, FernGully, Dances With Wolves, The Last Samurai, Titanic and many others, but this isn’t really accurate. Instead, Avatar and the others have the same structure: they’re all about a man who leaves home, discovers a new way of life, changes, and rejects his origins. This is a very old–and very reliable–story structure. In other words, a myth.
Today we think of myths as fairy tales–which is to say we think of them very little, and think very little of them. That’s a shame. Myths are narrative structures that often deliver worthwhile messages: don’t take candy from strangers, help people out when they’re hurt, and don’t ever give man fire. These stories aren’t factual, but in their fiction is truth about the human condition. They’ve survived for thousands of years because they deliver powerful messages competently.
It was in 1949 that English professor Joseph Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces and unified almost all of mythology under one framework, the monomyth. Once you learn about the monomyth, an optional checklist of 17 plot points, you see it everywhere–here’s a quick overview that uses The Matrix as an example. But the monomyth is typically at the core of fantasy stories and most stories aren’t fantastical. If we strip away the fantasy elements, we’re left with a structure that’s about a person doing something new and changing. Dan Harmon, the man behind the outstanding TV comedy Community, has boiled the monomyth down to its core. By examining the plots of countless movies and television shows, Harmon has derived the eight steps that structure a satisfying story. If you watch the show you’ll probably agree that he’s on to something.
These structures are probably the product of something like evolution. Before we had the written word, myths had to be told and retold orally, and were invariably tweaked from generation to generation and teller to teller. Stories with bad changes weren’t retold, and those with good changes were told more. Our minds both crave and create meaning, and these narratives structure events into a causal order that makes sense to us and resonate powerfully–probably because our language and psychology evolved alongside the stories we tell.
Despite their ubiquity, myths are seldom acknowledged and rarely appreciated. But they’ve lept from static media like books and movies into interactive media like video games. Video games are at their core experiences, so it stands to reason that mythic structures have a place in the “consumer experiences” that marketers are now obsessed with designing in search of margin. It’s something vaguely similar to mythology that’s also resulting in the pile of bullshit that’s popularly referred to as “gamification.”
I’ll look at these topics in future blog posts, and probably use this thinking to make fun of Michael Bay.