 In 1949, Joseph Campbell published a book entitled The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In it, he claims that all stories ever told tend to follow the same general structure, and this permits everything from ancient Greek myths to the plot of Star Wars. This monomyth, as he calls it, is a metaphor for the human being coming to find their true selves, and regardless of the medium it exists in, is a template we inadvertently adhere to, regardless of how different we all may be. It's a powerful idea, suggesting all humans are bound by very similar ideals. We've all heard the steps as well. There is a call to adventure, a crossing of the threshold, a road of trials, a descent into the belly of the whale, uniting with mothers and fathers, an apotheosis, and then a return to the world of the normal, with a boon to aid in the salvation of humanity. It maps an arc of triumph, growth, integration, and heroism with a set of discrete steps, and ensures a story remains relatable to all. The game used here to illustrate the hero's journey is Journey, a game explicitly motivated by Campbell's structure and devised in accordance with its steps. It also uses light forms of interactivity to reinforce certain sections, whether free-flowing freedom in the road of trials, fear in the belly of the whale, or by having a cyclic pattern reminiscent of Eastern motifs of reincarnation, sending you to the start when you finish the game to help others on their journey. However, games don't have to be explicitly motivated by this template to abide by it. The general structure of most games maps onto it. Even an abstract game like Tetris has a plot, as it has an escalating sense of tension through the game mediated by its difficulty. With games, we are not just witnessing someone vicariously embody the ideals of perseverance and heroism. We act out the role for ourselves. We are the hero. If we take The Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time, it has a very clear connection to the mythological structure of all stories. It also blends both Eastern and Western motifs for its foundational mythos, and is every bit as evocative of Campbell's structure as Journey. The subtlety of Ocarina of Time's storytelling extends far beyond its symbolic relevance, though. The game plays with time to explore themes as nuanced as regret, reminiscence, and the loss of innocence. As you travel to versions of the world, both vibrant and mired in decay, space is also used to convey a sense of grandiose adventure, and both diegetic and orchestral cues supplement our movement through space with the appropriate emotion. Much of the game is rooted in classical Shinto beliefs, there is a natural order to things, and there is a subtext of ecological awareness that permeates the entire experience. If stories are fundamentally about moral instruction and the social transmission of ideals, what better way to communicate this than through participation in hardship, challenge, and heroism? The subtext of failure in games also allows them to tell darker stories and generate a sense of catharsis. Reunification in its initial guise was about creating an aesthetic distance between viewer and hardship. In Dark Souls, our sense of triumph and overcoming hardship is unbridled, but it also has a somber subtext about cycles of death, decay, and reincarnation. It marries as gameplay to a fiction equally as melancholy, allowing for player participation in a tragic drama. With a game like Shadow of the Colossus, we see how the hero's journey can be fused with this rhetoric to subvert our conventional expectation for redemption. Other steps towards reintegration are recontextualized, as every beast we fell leads to forces beyond our control consuming our will. We've gone from Odysseus to Moby Dick by way of Heart of Darkness, expressed using the language of games. An early divide in the study of games came in the form of the so-called debate between the narratologists and the ludologists. Broadly speaking, narratologists like Janet Murray and Brenda Laurel view games as an extension of prior storytelling forms, and the ludologists, which count Jesper Yule and Espen Arseth amongst their ranks, suggest games need to be studied as their own medium, with their own internal rules and lineage of play. However, this so-called debate turned out to be mostly illusory. Games are both their own unique medium, as well as an extension of other forms. We can adopt the three-act structures of other mediums, or we can conceive of new ones to accommodate interactivity. We can also borrow other mediums vernaculars, whether it be cinematography, literature, or even music, to tell stories. Stories are not inherently storytelling devices, but they are a powerful new interface for crafting fiction, uniting the lineages of both play and art. In her book, Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray established a new program for what storytelling could be in digital media. Her benchmark was the holodeck of Star Trek fame, where stories could author themselves around the decisions of players. It's an ambitious and perhaps audacious dream, but she also created a clear template for how this would happen. First, she argues that digital stories, games, are procedural. They communicate stories using rules. This term was borrowed by Ian Bogost in his book Persuasive Games, where he argues that games can communicate ideas using rules or mechanics, their procedural rhetoric. For example, in Brothers A Tale of Two Sons, you control two brothers using two analog sticks, a dastard defeat of dexterity, but this is meant to symbolize the brother's conflict. Stories are not only procedural though, they are also interactive, which requires we understand the history of dynamic storytelling. Chris Crawford took this argument and ran with it in his book Uninteractive Storytelling, where he argues for a new understanding of interactivity in games, which he conceptualizes as a conversation between player and game. Stories are being told by both designer and player in a feedback loop. We see the contours of this vision in a game like Detroit Become Human, where player interactivity can alter the course of a story, albeit in scripted and minor ways. We make choices in the game that are incorporated into a web, a web that has its own dramatic impetus. This can perhaps be seen even more clearly in a game like Undertale, whose lower resolution affords more dynamic interactivity in its subversive tale about the nature of violence. This form of storytelling is not as radical as it may seem. In his book, Lee Sheldon outlines three myths of interactive storytelling we have. The first is that video games are the first instance of interactive storytelling. Lee states, Live dramatic performances have always taken into account that extra character, the audience, and adjusted accordingly. The second myth is that games and stories don't mix. Games that encourage active participation in storytelling are as old as games themselves. Children learn through playing games. Finally, storytelling and drama may hold a mirror to reality, but ultimately, it is beholden to its own rules and procedures. This gives us a fascinating primer both about where interactivity is and where it can go in the future. In some sense, the space inside games is a stage of sorts, and in her book, Computers as Theater, Brenda Laurel expands this analogy to suggest that we are not only audience members, viewing passively from afar, but participants in an ongoing drama. What this means is that the elements on stage are narrative props that have storytelling affordances, giving us an understanding of our environmental storytelling. The mise-en-scène works. In games like Gone Home, the elements of the story are laid out like objects on a stage, and we have to uncover an embedded narrative by playing with it. The underwater city of Rapture and Barshock is both a time capsule and stage for a story about the nature of humanity. We see opulence and decadence, but also indulgence, greed, and ambition drafted onto the stage of play, using an art-deco aesthetic. Both architecture and interior design are recognized as important to stories in games, with games as varied as Journey to Mirror's Edge using these tools to invoke different senses of time and space. However, perhaps the most enduring conception of what game stories are is ergodic, a term coined by Espen Arsuth in his book Cybertext. A cybertext is one that has interactivity, a feedback loop, and ergodic refers to stories that involve non-trivial amounts of work. What does this mean exactly? Unlike a more passive piece of literature, ergodic texts, which can be seen in ancient texts like the Ai Qing or even hieroglyphics, require active participation, reconstruction, player effort. He uses this to bridge the divide between ancient forms and interactive narrative texts like Zork and other more contemporary storytelling practices. Conventional literature can be varying degrees of ergodic, whether it be the footnote-laden text Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace or House of Leaves Complex Structure, but this can be seen in interesting ways in games. In her story, we are asked to piece together the events of the narrative by viewing disjointed segments of an overarching tale, navigating through time itself. In Braid, Jonathan Blow was inspired by the structure of invisible cities by Italo Calvino and so he married texts with time-bending mechanics to ask the player to uncover what was being told. In The Witness, Blow expanded on this structure, creating often self-contained spaces that spoke to different philosophies from around the world. The fortress level, for example, explores the duality between human agency and being determined by the environment, and so one side of the island had puzzles where the panels would determine your course through it, whereas the other side would have the environment dictate how you would proceed, an ergodic text. With player interactivity, our conventional understanding of authorship gets challenged. As Miguel Cicard argues in his book, The Ethics of Computer Games, players are actively reconstructing information, bringing their own values into the magic circle, and so authorship becomes distributed. This view even has designers who reinforce this. Clint Hawking argues that games create meaning through their dynamics, and so two players who played this game far cry too differently create different meanings. More Inspector extends this argument, suggesting games are a collaborative art form, and will write designs games that make the player the prime actor, a director if you will, of dynamic stories. Dynamic also extends to multiplayer games. Each multiplayer game tells a story of its own. We are collaborating both with a system as well as others, on a stage instantiated by procedures, suffused with interactivity, requiring ergodic interaction, and ultimately, on the stage of play. With all these elements though, the conventions of traditional storytelling need to be revised, because stories are being told at multiple resolutions. If we take the five C's of storytelling, a character in conflict makes choices that as consequences that lead to change, interactivity alters how stories can be told. A character in a game is not just a passive vehicle, but as explained by Matthias Warch, a combination of both them and us. Games like Metal Gear Solid 2 play with these layers of identity, to craft post-modern metafictional stories, but others play with the dissidence inherent here to form new layers of subversion and complicity. Conflict in games very often takes a violent tone, owing to the prevalence of action verbs, but if we expand our repertoire of mechanics, different forms of conflict can be explored. Choices in games are also very difficult to render interactive, because of the permutation expansion, but as Sikart explains in his book Beyond Choices, if we interface with choice at the fictional level, we can craft ambiguity to get players to examine themselves. Ultimately though, characters making choices only start to have narrative weight once there are consequences, and when there is change, either in the protagonist or in the world itself. If we take the Witcher 3, we as the character can make the decision to romance either Triss or Yennefer, because well, why not? Of course, as many will now know, if you do this, a cutscene plays where both of them reject you in humorous ways. There is a consequence to our choices. This sequence tells its own tragic story. The game has many other instances of dynamic interaction, of consequences both for ourselves and the world, written through a dynamic interplay between player and designer. There is a mathematics to the structure of this story here, something Chris Crawford argues as integral to dynamic stories, and something designers like Ken Levine have talked about as the next revolution in dynamic storytelling. The trick now, of course, will be to scale this type of story up, to tell stories as involved as Oedipus, War and Peace, or Pride and Prejudice, all whilst using the tools of interactive design we've examined thus far. This is just the beginning of this new frontier of storytelling, as we aim to reconcile both the lineage of player and art into a hybrid form that can peer more deeply into who we are, taking us from Campbell's monomyth and Aristotle's tragic catharsis to a version of the holodeck, one where the world itself is a stage and we are all players.