The Hero's Journey in Player Experiences

The Hero's Journey is a popular and influential storytelling tool, but the version adopted into digital games is a simplified fraction of Joseph Campbell's more dynamic and nuanced original. This thesis adds to the existing literature by examining Campbell's Hero's Journey as a tool for analysing player experiences. Detailed accounts of six participants' experiences playing two critically acclaimed videogames were combined with theories of motivation, affordances, and narrative to analyse and modify Campbell's original Hero's Journey. The result is a more flexible, modular, and phenomenological Ludic Hero's Journey.