Transmediating Bildung : Video Games as Life Formation Narratives

Introduction

In this article, we are going to examine the theme of Bildung, or life formation, as a transmedial narrative theme and genre, with a specific focus on how it features in video games. Over the past three centuries, the life formation genre has developed from a narrow, print-based, patriarchal, and ultimately nationalist literary phenomenon—the late 18th-century German Bildungsroman—to an extremely malleable transmedia shape-shifter, giving rise to new ways of experiencing life formation that meet the phenomenological needs of contemporary media users and players in particular. We are going to revisit key tenets of life formation narratology insofar as they relate and can be applied to a small but growing corpus of games that emphasize the spiritual and philosophical maturation rather than simply the cognitive-ergodic advancement of the player, and we are going to link these observations to the spatiotemporally mapped trajectory of the symbolical game protagonist who sets out to form his or her character or life vis-à-vis medium-specific simulations of society.

In a first move, we are going to trace the etymology of Bildung insofar as it links to a set of genre- and culture-specific narrative tropes and meanings, beginning with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and evolving over time into an increasingly open, transmedia concept, which has given rise to ever new experimental endeavors on the part of fiction writers and media artists. In a second move, we will use key elements of the theory and practice of life formation to reassess the apparent applicability of J. Campbell’s (2008) monomyth (originally developed for mythical tales) to narrative games, which has been assumed rather uncritically by past video game research. We argue that the monomyth is an oversimplified and fragmented lens through which to look at narrative development in games. In its emphasis on archetypal character roles and physical, object-oriented action taken by the hero (who also tends to be highly gendered), it fails to capture the kind of complexities, diversity, and fluidity of character psychology needed in our contemporary video game landscape—and this includes not only experimental indie games but indeed mainstream titles as well. Furthermore, the monomyth fails to reflect the idea of player development that parallels the hero’s maturation and/or psychological trajectory. Prominent examples of anti-monomythical protagonists include, for example, the post-traumatic stress disorder–affected Captain Martin Walker in Spec Ops: The Line (Yager Development, 2012), whose gradual psychological decline and ethical dilemmas are mirrored in the mechanics behind player choices, thus forcing players into similar traumatic situations and into a learning curve that evokes a strongly critical stance toward the third-person shooter genre. An example of a growing trend toward anti-monomythical, feminist and queer protagonists in the commercial sector is Max Caulfield, the player character (PC) of Dontnod Entertainment’s Life Is Strange (2015). The game uses the mechanics of rewinding time to allow players to undo and rethink decisions and actions taken throughout, which disrupts and subverts the rigorous, linear, seemingly predestined path of the Campbellian hero and, again, inspires a reflective, self-critical, and heuristic-pedagogical stance in the player. In short, we propose that analyzing narrative games that intend to evoke spiritual, self-reflexive, and heuristic contemplation in the player through the lens of life formation can offer scholars a useful, paradigmatically different perspective from the more limited one afforded by the monomyth.

The main part of this study is dedicated to actual game analysis, and to this end, we have chosen to zoom in on three games that address the life formation theme through allegories of space-in-time and all of which share an interest in what we are going to call (drawing on Krzywinska, 2015, p. 28) “coordinating nodes” in relation to life formation. ¹ These nodes are (1) the general character and story pattern, with a specific focus on the question of who undergoes what kind of Bildung and how this development shows an evolution of the protagonist’s subjectivity and insight in relation to self and others; (2) the question of how the Bakhtinian chronotope maps onto the psychological and social development of the protagonist; (3) the question of how Fraiman’s (1993) thematic triad of mastery, mentorship, and choice (MMC) is dealt with through gameplay and ludonarrative design; and finally (4) how these aesthetic, emergent (Aylett, 1999; Clement, 2017; Jenkins, 2004), and ergodic-procedural (Aarseth, 1997; Bogost, 2007) elements create educational parallels between protagonist and player, whereby the player learns more than just the skills needed to master gameplay and instead achieves an advanced form of self-awareness, metacognitive understanding, and/or spiritual and philosophical insight.

From Bildungsroman to Life Formation Narrative

The German concept of Bildung, which came to shape the public understanding of an entire narrative genre in 19th-century Europe and beyond developed from a predominantly religious concept that emphasized the process of God’s formation, or giving form, to both human body and spirit to a secular, humanistic concept in the course of the 18th century. “Instead of being passive recipients of a pre-existent form, individuals now gradually develop their own innate potential through interaction with their environment” (Summerfield & Downward, 2010, p. 2). Especially, under the influence of Herder’s writings, the human mind began to be seen as a naturally evolving, historically conditioned entity. Bildung hence came to be associated with the “development of an innate genetic potential under the influence of a particular geographical and cultural setting” (Summerfield & Downward, 2010, p. 2), with nature providing the “seed” but with human beings taking responsibility for unleashing their potential through interaction with the world. Thomas Carlyle’s translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre as “apprenticeship” further denotes “vocational practice and chronology” (Fraiman, 1993, p. 4), the learning of a trade in a sequence of progressing levels. To Goethe himself, Bildung meant “zealous” self-development toward the objectives individuals find themselves to be “best fitted” for (quoted in Howe, 1930, p. 25), which implies a key move away from divine predestination.

Thus, under the influence of German idealism, Bildung came to be considered “an achievement of the will” (Summerfield & Downward, 2010, p. 2) set against a raw template of talents and potential and implemented through continuous hard work on one’s own development from a novice of life to quasi-life mastery. The underlying ideal of taking responsibility for one’s own advancement in life is of course a highly modern notion, which finds its contemporary ramifications in constructivism, connectivism, social learning theory, and other pedagogic frameworks emphasizing learner autonomy, social context, and object-oriented learning. Yet, of course, in the 19th century, the autonomization of the Bildung concept was also strongly associated with the political ideal of liberating the German people from the feudal system of the Holy Roman Empire and uniting them under a new concept of independent nationhood.

The term Bildungsroman was coined in the early 19th century by German philologist, Karl Morgenstern, denoting the “novel of formation.” As Morgenstern put it in his 1819 lectures on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, the Bildungsroman “portrays the Bildung of the hero in its beginnings and growth to a certain stage of completeness; and also…furthers the reader’s Bildung to a much greater extent than any other” (quoted in Swales, 1978, p. 12). Thus, the reader is inscribed, or coded, into the narrative as an inherently flawed, or incomplete novice, and her Bildung (in the sense of both operational skill and philosophical/spiritual awareness) develops alongside that of the protagonist, as she or he peruses the artifact in question.

We consider this symbolic parallelism of diegetic and extradiegetic apprenticeship a key element of transmedial life formation narratology, which is the theoretical and analytical framework we are adopting in this article. We thus move from the fairly narrowly defined, literary concept of Bildungsroman to a far broader and malleable notion, which does not bear any intrinsically political connotations. Instead, transmedial life formation narratives focus on the cognitive, emotional, spiritual, and/or physical development of the protagonist whose story is experienced by readers, viewers, or players as a symbol of the individual in a specific historical or contemporary, mimetic or fantasy environment, or society. This interplay between protagonist and environment in the maturation process is meant to translate into a formative, pedagogic element for the reader, viewer, or player. In other words, the formation of both protagonist and audience is marked, or foregrounded, in terms of its spiritual, philosophical, and/or metacognitive meanings.

Furthermore, the protagonist in the life formation genre per se shouldn’t be seen in the sense of that of conventional biography, which focuses on a specific, historical or fictional, human being (e.g., Martin Luther King or Max Payne), but rather as a symbol of humanity more broadly, set against the backdrop of a specific sociocultural and historical configuration. Hence, the life formation protagonist operates vis-à-vis the constraints of a particular culture, society, or media ecology and is therefore contextually bound in this symbolism.

In the course of its development, the Bildungsroman has proven to be a “notoriously slippery category” (Bolaki, 2011, p. 10): Especially, since the 19th century, international novelists have shown that it is a form “that can be detached from its initial context and used productively across different historical periods and cultures” (Bolaki, 2011, p. 9). We would take this one step further and argue that the form can be used productively across different media as well (such as film and digital-interactive narratives; see Grigsby, 2007), especially when we emancipate it from its culture- and print-specific origins. The present article starts from this premise and adopts the transmedially more productive and more malleable term “life formation.” This terminological shift requires sensitivity to the medium-specific qualities of games in particular, which have at their core the procedural and therefore emergent, player-specific generation of narrative meaning through the player’s interaction with the game mechanics (Aylett, 1999; Bogost, 2007; Clement, 2017; Jenkins, 2004). At the same time, however, it is important to bear in mind some of the key definition elements of the original Bildung genre, which can be traced across media and have to be adapted to and further developed for the medium-specific qualities of narrative video games, in our case.

The protagonist’s life formation journey confronts them with various—mostly social and societal challenges—and their personalities grow through the errors they make, the (external and internal) corrections that result from them, and the help they receive from various members of society. In relation to this interactional and social component of life formation, Fraiman (1993; cf. Howe, 1930) identifies three key storytelling elements shared by the Bildung genre: the so-called MMC (mastery-mentorship-choice) triad. Bildung to Fraiman “implies not only youth and inexperience, but also (what Wilhelm’s patronym spells out) eventual mastery (Howe, 4). Becoming a master requires guidance,…and mentors are necessary to the student of life” (Fraiman, 1993, p. 5, emphasis in original). Mentors can be anything from friends, family, and formal teachers to false role models and even—as in the case of Wilhelm Meister—members of a Masonic lodge, “a secret society who supervise Wilhelm’s development in an organized, quasi-institutional way” (Fraiman, 1993, p. 5). The element of choice was a radically new one in the Enlightenment Age. It marked a decisive move away from the predestined path of joining one’s father’s guild and toward independent enquiry into one’s own talents and their implementation and cultivation into a consciously selected professional career. Furthermore, the protagonist is shown to choose his own companions “and chronicles his educative wrong choices en route to right ones” (Fraiman, 1993, p. 5). Therefore, professional and social decision-making processes are aligned as intrinsic elements of the protagonist’s Bildung, and it may well be argued that, ideologically, the Bildungsroman as a historical genre “helped to construct the normative, middle-class man whose skills and labor are his own” (Fraiman, 1993, p. 5).

Whereas the first Bildungsromans subscribed to an essentially conservative (and of course male-dominated) world picture, where the hero had to adapt to society and quite willingly did so, in the 19th and 20th centuries, the genre became considerably more subversive, exemplified by the hapless sexual transgressions featured in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The early 20th century increasingly saw a move away from the focus on the conflict between self and society, toward existentialism and an emphasis on the fragmented and often alienated self. Under the philosophical paradigm of postmodernism, in the second half of the 20th century, then, the genre began to foreground suppressed or sidelined narratives of marginalized groups of society, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people (Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit), individuals in postcolonial societies (Chinua Achebe’s Things Falling Apart), immigrants and other ethnic minorities, and the genre also began to address the problematic idea of identity more generally (Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children). More generally, postmodernism added its characteristic cynicism toward stable or fixed subjectivity to the historical development of the life formation genre. It thereby dealt a “serious ideological blow to the relevance of the Bildungsroman, but rather than dispense with the genre altogether, contemporary writers appear intent on redeveloping it for the twenty-first century” (Childs & Fowler, 2006, p. 20).

In line with the idea of genre evolution rather than subversion and dysfunctionalization, Bolaki (2011, p. 9) posits life formation in an “anti-essentialist context” that resists “fixed boundaries and rigid classifications” because “these constraints cannot hold protean and elusive forms that more and more expand their field of play.” Indeed, playing with the form itself is what underscores our own conceptual and analytical framework. Our intention here is to link the genre to two contemporary paradigms: that of transmediation in the sense of developing narrative forms and themes across media, and that of gamification as a form of remediation that “describ[es] the process of adapting a text, activity, genre, mode or style into game form” (Krzywinska, 2015, p. 22) and that adds a key “experiential ‘doing’ element” (Krzywinska, 2015, p. 24). In other words, for any narrative or procedural rhetoric meaning to emerge in a game, players have to make things happen in the game world, by navigating and interacting with various elements of the game world.

The development of transmedial life formation narrative has given rise to entire franchises that speak to audiences of different developmental stages—think of Harry Potter and Twilight. The genre is also increasingly inspiring digital media artists and writers of electronic literature, with perhaps the most widely known born-digital life formation fiction being Kate Pullinger’s Inanimate Alice (which is also an artist’s formation narrative; see Hammond, 2016, pp. 179–180). Our focus here, however, is on video game developers’ response to the transmedia call for new life formation experiments. After all, games as a multimodal, procedural “super-medium” (Fuchs, 2015, p. 7) have the unique potential to let players experience learning directly, through interaction with the game world, and to map developmental trajectories onto exploratory ludonarrative designs. By the same token, games can experiment and engage aesthetically with what may be the humanist essence of life formation. They can accentuate the active role the player takes in the emergence of narrative meaning (Aylett, 1999; Clement, 2017; Jenkins, 2004) and philosophical insight through ergodic interaction (Aarseth, 1997; Bogost, 2007).

Beyond the Monomyth

Video games typically situate the player in a heuristic framework: Learning, or skill development, is coded into the mechanics of games to facilitate progress and help players build the strategic, navigational, and hand-eye coordination skills needed for in-game progress. ² In many narrative games, this extradiegetic development is paralleled with the psychological and/or physical development of the game’s protagonist(s) and their relationships with other characters in the game world. This aspect has given many theorists (e.g., Göbel, Becker, & Feix, 2005; Rowlands, 2016; Sherman, 1997) reason to view games—and specifically adventure games and massively multiplayer online games (MMOs)—through the structuralist, psychoanalytically motivated lens of Joseph Campbell’s (2008) monomyth. The latter represents the idea of a cyclical adventure that follows the universal pattern of the hero’s separation, initiation, and return and essentially breaks down into the predestined hero’s call to action in the ordinary world, his initial refusal and subsequent endowment with specific aids to facilitate his progress, a series of challenges pivoting in a final end battle, the achievement of the ultimate boon, and the subsequent return to normality at a higher level of existence and empowerment.

There is no denying that to an extent the stereotypical elements of video game narrative can be broadly mapped onto the monomyth structure. “Like ritual,” argues folklorist Sharon R. Sherman (1997, p. 251), “the adventure game represents a transitional state which must be overcome”, and the game protagonist’s traversal of the game world is intrinsically embedded in a trajectory toward a goal, such as saving Princess Zelda or Princess Peach (the boon), or indeed the entire world (as in the Final Fantasy series, see Grigsby, 2007, p. 71). The (mostly young and male) protagonist’s teleological endeavor, his progress, and achievements are reflected and driven by the player’s ability and efforts to level up, collect experience points (XP), and improve their game-specific skills (kinetic and cognitive). Similarly, the increasing levels of difficulty are narrativized by ever increasing dangers and ever more threatening monsters and other types of opponents (the “Road of Trials”), until the culmination of the story arc in the final boss fight (which has often been aligned with Campbell’s idea of “Atonement with the Father”).

However, Campbell’s theory applies only patchily to most game narratives: Some elements of the hero’s journey are almost categorically omitted in narrative game design, and the theory has widely been met with criticism for its narrow outlook on gender and differentiation of character roles (note that, following Campbell’s lead in an act of provocation, we have deliberately referred to the monomyth hero in the masculine form). Particularly, striking is the almost inevitable omission or radical abridgment of the return of the hero, which according to J. Campbell (2008) is often hampered and delayed by his initial inability or unwillingness to return and the importance of which is amplified by a quasi-Messianic, life-enhancing mission to “bestow boons on his fellow man” (p. 23). At the same time, the typically rigid, predestined linearity of the monomyth precludes alternative uses of temporality, such as branching options, as well as sandbox-style and exploratory scenarios, and, not least significantly, paratextual re- and transmediations by fan communities.

In our attempt to override the monomyth pattern with the logic of life formation, we aim to emphasize the player’s lusory attitude and ingrained intention to become an apprentice and then master of the game, and the need to see narrative progress and culmination as an extrinsic reward of one’s own strategic abilities as well as the adaptability and developmental capacities of one’s own physical and cognitive skills. Furthermore, the recent increase in alternative, queer, and antiheroic protagonists (e.g., in Spec Ops: The Line and Life Is Strange; see Introduction section) further reflects a need in player audiences to immerse themselves in heuristic, empathetic play experiences that afford key critical learning processes.

Put another way, we would argue that the monomyth as an explanatory model is largely obsolete and somewhat limiting vis-à-vis an increasing number of contemporary ludonarrative designs. Game development has reached a stage of sophistication that calls for alternative narrative models, for models that reflect their disruptive and innovative potential—not only in terms of audiovisual design but in terms of the possibilities for ludonarrative invention, innovation, and diversification (see Krzywinska, 2015, p. 25). To be clear, when we are using elements of Bildungsroman and life formation theory to match these industry trends, we are not meaning to uncritically impose theoretical axioms derived from literary studies onto a medium with very different narrative and phenomenological affordances. Instead, we aim to show that contemporary narrative games require complex, critical frameworks that reflect the increasing psychological depths and developmental processes of their characters; they need to reflect the ways in which protagonists are positioned vis-à-vis society, or rather the game worlds surrounding and challenging them, and they need to evaluate how these challenges and trajectories are aligned with player development that transcends the building of functional skills and reflects, instead, upon formative processes of the human soul. To some extent, we consider the current stage of games development to be at a threshold comparable to that of the novel in the 18th and 19th centuries, which sought to liberate narrative fiction from the delimiting and predictable patterns of folklore, epic, and romance. ³ Among the novel’s and particularly the Bildungsroman’s major achievements were the ability to reflect the complex challenges facing individuals in specific and historically contingent cultures. Similarly, games development has reached a level of technical sophistication that allows for increasingly subtle philosophical and narrative agendas; hence the necessity to move away from overly simplistic and ultimately restrictive explanatory models, which give rise to more exceptions than suitable examples. With this goal in mind, we borrow analytical tools that are key to life formation narrativity and yet malleable enough to merit medium-specific reapplication.

Life Formation and the Bakhtinian Chronotope

A key element of interactive narrativity in video games is the idea of spatial development and exploration. Game worlds are there to be explored in order to create highly personalized player stories, and a lot of games follow a linear narrative trajectory that is mapped onto some kind of physical road, or “course,” as Bakhtin (1937) describes it in his (mostly literary) theory of the chronotope. The exploration of game spaces happens in the player’s own time. Therefore, the fictional chronotope (the idea that fictional space and time are inextricably interlinked) is contingent upon the player’s own customization and adaptation of time to space. These aspects are easily taken for granted, and yet they make narrative video games a chronotopic supermedium. Regardless of the exact semiotic channels used by game designers, whether they are audiovisual, 2-D, 3-D, or purely text-based, narrative experiences in games are grounded in chronotopic personalization and appropriation, as well as the key importance of spatiality for narrative experience more generally.

The three games that we are going to examine in the Passage–Path–Journey section use physical movement through space allegorically to signify spiritual and cognitive development over time. Thus, here the Bakhtinian chronotope, the time–space continuum familiar to us through life formation media, is mapped onto three distinct imaginary worlds, which the player needs to explore for dually embedded maturation: that of the PC(s) and, symbolically, her own.

Games of Adolescence Versus Life Formation Games

There is a lot to be said for applying a broad notion of human growth to the emergent variety of video games that accentuate various aspects and types of apprenticeship and education. For logistical reasons, however, we would like to draw a distinction here between what Grigsby (2007) calls game “narratives of adolescence” and actual life formation games. The former term is more inclusive in that it incorporates both symbolical and idiosyncratic, biographical protagonists, as well as games that do not necessarily foreground the player’s philosophical or spiritual maturation. Let us give a few examples to help explain this differentiation.

A common genre in the real-time strategy sector is the life sim, or raiser game, which puts the player in the position of a nurturer, or parent. In The Princess Maker series (Gainax, 1991–2008), the player raises an adolescent girl to adulthood, managing her calendar of educational activities and buying her gifts that aid her learning process toward a specific career trajectory, which is again chosen by the player. The player’s success is reflected by the outcome of the girl’s educational path, which may vary as drastically as being queen of the kingdom or a prostitute.

Another adolescent game genre is that of the dating sim, which puts players in the position of a (mostly male) teenage student in his quest “to get the girl”:

To this aim, the player must cultivate his virtual Romeo in a way that is attractive to the girl he is wooing, interpret clues to her personality, and reward her with attention in the form of frequent dates and thoughtful gifts. (Grigsby, 2007, p. 81)

The Sims series (Maxis, 2000–2016) simulates entire communities with a plethora of adolescent characters, their schooling, and interactions with peers and adults. Yet again, the game’s main underlying principle is resource management, and there are limited possibilities for human development beyond Maslow's (1943) needs fulfillment: “To master the game, one must master the statistics-driven algorithm that governs the relationships between character needs, aspirations, and the possible actions” (Grigsby, 2007, p. 82), and there is little room for any substantial or prolonged metacognitive or spiritual reflection.

A highly interesting transitional phenomenon between monomyth, game of adolescence, and life formation game is Lionhead Studios' (2004–2014) Fable series. Here, the unnamed male Hero grows from a young boy through a warrior apprentice and finally an adult adventurer. However, his physical and mental development is shaped by decisions made by the player, who may turn the protagonist into an angelic savior figure or an evil demon, or something in between. Hence, the game is a “moral simulator” (Grigsby, 2007, p. 86), whereby player choices have largely predictable consequences. Lead designer Peter Molyneux’s intention with the game was “to show how actions have long term consequences, to get the player thinking about morality as an axis of human development and the trade-offs one has to make to live a good life” (Grigsby, 2007, p. 86). However, even to be a moral role model, Hero has to kill, punch, and perform other acts of violence, which adds to the simplistic, decontextualized social and psychological framework proposed by the game: “The one kind of hero you can’t be in the game is a pacifist” (Grigsby, 2007, p. 87), and there is little room for ambiguity and critical reasoning in relation to the pros and cons of one’s decisions and actions.

The aforementioned games of adolescence are based on data-driven models, which synthesize, functionalize, and essentially simplify what are in fact highly idiosyncratic and complex human characteristics and needs into an economic framework for strategic play. Thus, they do not require players to engage in philosophical musings about characters’ idiosyncratic motivations and actions, or their own spiritual evolution during gameplay. From a computational resource management point of view, these limitations are (or were, at the time of these games’ production) fully understandable. It has therefore been both encouraging and inspiring to see a tendency, over the past decade, to develop and produce games venturing beyond data-driven calculability and into the realm of the philosophical, and proposing narrative models that seek to channel player agency in such a way as to cause players to reflect upon their own spiritual becoming and learning through gameplay.

We would argue that the key analytical components, or “coordinating nodes” (Krzywinska 2015, p. 28), for the study of life formation games are:

Character and story pattern: Here, we have to ask who undergoes what kind(s) of life (trans-)formation and how this development and the events and encounters underlying it show an evolution toward a higher form of spiritual existence and insight.

In the remainder of this article, we are going to apply these concepts in a succinct, comparative ludonarrative analysis.

Passage–Path–Journey

The three games we examine all deal with the theme of human development through titular metaphors of spatial movement or directionality, where the games serve as parables of spiritual and/or metacognitive maturation: Jason Rohrer’s (2007a) Passage, Tale of Tales’ (2009) The Path, and thatgamecompany’s (2012) Journey. In line with the Bakhtinian chronotope, the games highlight movement through life as a walkable space in terms of both a temporal process and a narrow or confined corridor (Passage), physical topography designed for goal-directed linear movement from origin to destination (The Path), and the process and result of travelling long distances (Journey). ⁴ They compellingly demonstrate a variety of ways in which the life formation chronotope might be transmediated through game design and interactive play.

Discussion and Conclusion

As the preceding analyses have shown, the games under discussion in this article go far beyond the predictable and often ill-applied structuralist limitations of the monomyth. Rather than emphasizing the physical, tangible achievements of a gendered hero, who embarks on a road of trials to finally obtain a physical or spiritual reward, to atone with the father and perform a (lengthy) return to his homeland, the games featured in this article focus on heuristic-cognitive and spiritual learning processes that concern the protagonist(s) and the player at a fundamental humanist level. Their focus is on the procedural rather than the circular, on formation rather than closure, and on trials and tribulations as an ongoing goal for self-(trans)formation rather than a means to a heroic and rather unrealistic end. It is therefore not surprising that their titles metaphorically highlight the chronotopically mapped heuristic process through life (or parts thereof), which can manifest in numerous ways: life’s “Passage” may be conceived of as learning through repetition and testing different possible scenarios in life, none of which may ultimately turn out to be the absolute best; “The Path” through risky, experimental territory is conceptualized as periodically recurring throughout adolescence and beyond and symbolizes its own subversion and deviation, as well as the multifarious consequences these deliberate and accidental errors may have; and, finally, life’s “Journey” may be perceived as a subjectively linear, meditative, teleological process that will lead to a higher spiritual existence and transfiguration, provided that we embrace the trials and tribulations life has in store for us, as well as the joys of other people’s company and mentorship.

While Passage lets players experience life’s inevitable sacrifices and commitments as a hyperpixelated, quasi-universal conditio humana, The Path instantiates key stages in female adolescent development and asks players to embrace failure and even trauma for advanced stages of critical thinking and self-awareness. Journey, finally, engages its players in an exercise of ludic mindfulness, the outcome of which is—figuratively and physically—a higher order of existence and spiritual insight: The topographically ascending movement through the game evokes the image Wilhelm Meister’s “Turm” (the Society of the Tower) as well as, of course, various religious images of ascendancy to heaven, which are thus gamified as navigable spaces of spiritual rising and transfiguration.

In terms of commonalities, we might argue that all three games chronotopically stage the journey from paidia to ludus (Caillois, 1961)—from unregulated, naive child’s play to the rule-governed game of life. However, each focuses on different aspects of this developmental process and on the ways in which the procedural, ergodic interaction with individual mechanics might evoke empathy and introspective reflection in the player. Despite or perhaps precisely because of its brevity, elliptical narrativity, and simplicity of design, Passage can be seen to represent the entire story of human mortality, wasted opportunity, and sought-after fulfillment in life, leaving the player to muse upon their own decision-making processes and changing value systems in life. The Path stages episodic female development ex negativo, by exposing the gender-specific challenges and risks facing girls and young women in society and representing failure, pain, and suffering as needless yet nonetheless very real developmental processes that (female-identified) players can no doubt relate to and empathize with. Journey, then, despite having been explicitly called “a retelling of the hero’s journey” (Crecente, 2013), nonetheless falls short of the very physical, tangible achievements characteristically linked to the monomyth and, instead, emphasizes spiritual self-reflection and communality in the player’s trajectory toward selfhood.

Finally, we would like to raise some issues that remain at stake in a life formation paradigm: A key challenge in game design is the treatment of gender diversity and equity, and it is refreshing to see in this context that models have been proposed for dealing with anti-phallocentric developmental questions—as exemplified by The Path, Life Is Strange, and A. Campbell and Wilks’s (2014) immersive 3-D digital fiction, Inkubus. However, the vast majority of extant life formation games follow male-dominated patterns, the most striking example of which can be seen in raiser (nurturer, parent) games like The Princess Maker 2 (Gainax, 1993). Furthermore, even those rare attempts to stage agendered protagonists, such as in Journey, fail in the wake of their intertextual allusions to gender-exclusive Masonic practices. Hence, a lot of work has yet to be done to build life formation games that appeal to more diverse, gender-inclusive, and intersectional audiences.

Another question worth asking is where in the typology of life formation games to situate highly idiosyncratic and partly supernaturally inclined game protagonists like Jodie Holmes in Quantic Dream’s (2013) Beyond: Two Souls, or antiheros such as Jimmy Hopkins in Rockstar’s (2006) Bully. Despite their radically different narrative designs, both games confront players with key questions concerning the challenges and failures of parenting as well as the limitations of collectivized formal education. Hence, even highly fantastic narratives with largely idiosyncratic rather than symbolic heroes (as in Beyond) can foreground life formation reflections in players.

Similarly, many games that do not foreground life formation as such contain elements and scenes allowing players to reflect metacognitively on their becoming. For instance, camps and campfires in Final Fantasy VII act not only as a locale for leveling up and applying inventory items and XP upgrades but also have extraludic narrative implications, such as allusions to conversations or activities the player is not part of, thereby “combin[ing] to encourage the player to experience a sense of growth in terms of the PC, the PC’s relationships with other characters and by extension the player’s relationship with the PC and other characters” (L. Clark, personal communication, May 17, 2016). Similarly, with narrative-literary game scholar, S. Mukherjee (personal communication, May 17, 2016), we could argue that the moral-developmental setup of many AAA games inconspicuously (albeit more eclectically) emulates that of the Bildungsroman:

The Lone Wanderer of Fallout 3 is born in the game and is mentored through the game’s challenges as well as NPCs to make choices and level up to stages of mastery. At the same time, the player is faced with questions of ethics, morality and identity. In Fallout 3, this is often given a rather banal representation via karma points and descriptions in the character’s database. Just as Pip and David Copperfield grow up in the challenging world of Victorian England, the Lone Wanderer does so in the irradiated American post-nuclear war Wasteland.

Finally, a key component of life formation across media is the role of society as a cumulative, ambivalent antagonist, or at least a force to be reckoned with in the protagonist’s development and wavering between adaptation and emancipation. Passage, The Path, and Journey display a complete lack of the kind of densely knit social networks and character relationships that are so typical of the life formation genre, portraying society as a culturally and historically situated organism. One way of looking at this elliptical treatment would be that games as simulations can, in simplified and schematized form, act as substitute locales for real-life or fictional societies. In fact, we might even picture such eclectic topographic features as paths and desert landscapes as partes pro toto, as metonymies of society, or social norms, which we deviate from or learn to navigate and adapt to.

Games pose alternative systems of existence and experience with alternative rules and challenges, the mastery of which may be seen as an alternative, experimental playing field. Mastery, or success, is defined in radically unique ways, in terms of the sole or main focus of gameplay action. Similarly, death can be inscribed with different, equivalent values, either in the sense of permadeath (as in Passage or The Path), as a sine qua non and lesson to be learnt. Alternatively, death can be staged in the sense of rebirth, either as a forgiving motivation for replay and retry, as in Passage, or as a trophy for successful life mastery: In Journey, players receive rebirth (in the sense of Buddhist reincarnation at a higher form of existence) as end-of-game trophy. Either way, as interactive simulations, this research has shown that, even on a complex philosophical and metacognitive level, games can be a suitable medium for experiential player education, self-reflection, and story co-creation, especially to a generation medially nurtured on ludicity and a gamified educational apparatus. We thus propose that the life-formation approach to narrative game analysis forms a useful and productive alternative to the limited structuralist format offered by the folkloristically derived monomyth. Needless to say, the full potential of games as powerful systems for modeling the importance of choice, error, persistence, and mentorship across worlds, lives, and selves is only beginning to manifest, and significant work is yet to be achieved in matters of diversification and egalitarianism.