Finding the self in role-playing games: Weaving myth, narrative, and identity

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article discusses the limitations of hero’s journey by Joseph Campbell with reference to traditional storytelling, offering examples from role-playing games (RPGs) as alternative modes of engagement with symbolism and archetypes. The hero’s journey represents the development of the individual to maturity as a result of confrontation with their unconscious shadow side. While this trajectory reflects the human experience, it centers an idealized young male hero who becomes singularly important to saving the world from a villainized monstrous other. Other characters in the story are marginalized and decentered, invalidating other important archetypal characters such as the Heroine, the Mother, the Witch, the Trickster, the Sage, and the Divine. This article will discuss the ways in which analog RPG narratives can offer the general benefits of active, mythic, and ironic imagination. Integrating ethnographic interviews with 4 experts in the field, the article outlines critiques of the hero’s journey and discusses the wide variety of archetypes explorable within these alternative story structures, even in traditional role-playing games (RPGs) such as Dungeons & Dragons. The article will emphasize how players can use these experiences to shape their own narrative identity into more empowering structures of belief and life roadmaps regardless of the type of character they embody.