31
brainstorming & development / Re: [Dreadful Worlds] Brainstorming & Developement
« on: September 25, 2014, 07:23:49 AM »
These are some beautifully put together covers but I'm really, hugely critical of Joseph Campbell and his monomyth. I'm against it because the idea that there's only one story you can tell is really boring! I mean why not have an infinite number of stories which can be appreciated on their own merits instead of the degree to which they live up to this monomyth? In terms of writing games, I think you should give each setting its own special treatment instead of making them modulations of a single story.
There's some good arguments against Campbell's work here:
"The thing about Joseph Campbell that should immediately make you enormously suspicious is that he claims to have identified a fundamental structure to mythology and heroism that establishes a universal vision of human greatness. This is just too sweeping a claim. But that's not actually the biggest problem. The problem is how cack-handed his approach to it is. He provides an appallingly eurocentric view of mythology that manages to argue that all Eastern mythology is descended from Egyptian mythology and that culture flows primarily west-to-east. On top of that, his view of the hero is absurdly patriarchal. Given that he believes in a fundamental structure in human consciousness that creates the monomyth and that the monomyth is overtly male dominated, the necessary conclusion of Campbell's thought is that patriarchy is a fundamental structure in human consciousness, which, frankly, fuck him. (There are points in reasoned debate about literary theory where it is necessary to tell people to go fuck themselves, and most of them involve Joseph Campbell.)
No. Campbell is a crank. A well-read crank, but a crank nevertheless. Basically, he identified one story he liked about death and resurrection and proceeded to find every instance of it he could in world mythology. Having discovered a vast expanse of nails for his newfound hammer he declared that it was a fundamental aspect of human existence, ignoring the fact that there were a thousand other "fundamental stories" that you could find in world mythology and that he'd twisted large amounts of world culture badly out of shape in order to suit his pre-selected conclusion. ... [Campbell] has zero credibility in any of the actual academic fields his "research" intersects with. He's pseudohumanities. Which is an impressive feat, and I'm not sure I can actually think of anyone else who qualifies as that. He is Timecube Man with a Bill Moyers special.
That said, the story he identified does work. It's not a transcendent and fundamental aspect of human experience, but it's a pretty good story, and George Lucas was savvy to nick it for the plot of Star Wars. Unfortunately, because Campbell was a lunatic blowhard who claimed that he'd identified a fundamental aspect of human existence, once Lucas showed that it also made money it became the mandatory structure of any piece of science fiction or fantasy made in Hollywood. I mean, unfortunately, this was the real legacy of Star Wars. Hollywood got suckered by a literary crank and came to believe there's only one way to do a large number of movies. And so we continue to get a formulaic structure applied to all manner of things as though it's the only story in the world. When, in fact, it's frankly gotten boring."
There's some more criticism here and here ('Not Everything is a Hero's Journey').
There's some good arguments against Campbell's work here:
"The thing about Joseph Campbell that should immediately make you enormously suspicious is that he claims to have identified a fundamental structure to mythology and heroism that establishes a universal vision of human greatness. This is just too sweeping a claim. But that's not actually the biggest problem. The problem is how cack-handed his approach to it is. He provides an appallingly eurocentric view of mythology that manages to argue that all Eastern mythology is descended from Egyptian mythology and that culture flows primarily west-to-east. On top of that, his view of the hero is absurdly patriarchal. Given that he believes in a fundamental structure in human consciousness that creates the monomyth and that the monomyth is overtly male dominated, the necessary conclusion of Campbell's thought is that patriarchy is a fundamental structure in human consciousness, which, frankly, fuck him. (There are points in reasoned debate about literary theory where it is necessary to tell people to go fuck themselves, and most of them involve Joseph Campbell.)
No. Campbell is a crank. A well-read crank, but a crank nevertheless. Basically, he identified one story he liked about death and resurrection and proceeded to find every instance of it he could in world mythology. Having discovered a vast expanse of nails for his newfound hammer he declared that it was a fundamental aspect of human existence, ignoring the fact that there were a thousand other "fundamental stories" that you could find in world mythology and that he'd twisted large amounts of world culture badly out of shape in order to suit his pre-selected conclusion. ... [Campbell] has zero credibility in any of the actual academic fields his "research" intersects with. He's pseudohumanities. Which is an impressive feat, and I'm not sure I can actually think of anyone else who qualifies as that. He is Timecube Man with a Bill Moyers special.
That said, the story he identified does work. It's not a transcendent and fundamental aspect of human experience, but it's a pretty good story, and George Lucas was savvy to nick it for the plot of Star Wars. Unfortunately, because Campbell was a lunatic blowhard who claimed that he'd identified a fundamental aspect of human existence, once Lucas showed that it also made money it became the mandatory structure of any piece of science fiction or fantasy made in Hollywood. I mean, unfortunately, this was the real legacy of Star Wars. Hollywood got suckered by a literary crank and came to believe there's only one way to do a large number of movies. And so we continue to get a formulaic structure applied to all manner of things as though it's the only story in the world. When, in fact, it's frankly gotten boring."
There's some more criticism here and here ('Not Everything is a Hero's Journey').