Bringing interactivity to Campbell’s Hero’s Journey Guylain Delmas, Ronan Champagnat and Michel Augeraud University of La Rochelle Pôle Sciences et Technologies 17042 La Rochelle – France {guylain.delmas | ronan.champagnat | michel.augeraud}@univ-lr.fr Abstract. Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” is a well-known narrative structure mainly used in cinema and literature. This work takes interest in application of this structure as a template for interactive storytelling, especially in the domain of serious games. This paper describes important elements concerning this model and how to adapt it to the needs of interactivity. It results on a new interactive pattern, along with suggestions of application in an adaptative execution architecture. Keywords: Interactive Storytelling, Adaptative execution. 1 Introduction Video games are more and more used as a support for training and education: they immerse the player in a simulated setting, which is being used to reproduce real experiment with an improvement on reducing the costs and the risks of common practice. [Wong, 2007] stated that video games were a more effective tool for education than traditional ways of teaching. Within this context, the improvement of the framework of game is of primary importance, because it encourages the student to pursue the experiment. One of the important improvements is the construction of rich and detailed stories, synchronized on cycles of training. Immersing the player in a story makes sure that he will play it until the end, and thus will provide an additional effort in the training process. However, the restrictive aspect of stories is difficult to conciliate with the freedom of interactive applications. This duality generally carries out to a clash between story and interaction [Juul, 1999]. This divergence lead to different ways of managing the problem: works about scenario design and validation of player’s actions, as presented in [Young, 2004] or [Magerko, 2005], and others based on the concept of emergent narrative, introduced by [Aylett, 1999] and completed by [Szilas, 2003]. To deal with this opposition, we suggested in [Delmas 2007] a system of plot monitoring for interactive games. It generates a story in the course of execution, according to game’s setting, player’s actions, and plot patterns written by game designer. This system includes for now only one basic scenario pattern, which requires evolutions. Literature provided of many work on the stories’ structures, as [Propp, 1968] with the folktales. These models can provide interesting bases to the development of execution patterns for our applications, and most of them were already reviewed as possible tools for interactive storytelling systems [Cavazza, 2006]. Our attention focused on the "Hero’ Journey" from Joseph Campbell [Campbell, 1972]. This model, based on the study of the initiatory tales in mythology, draws the journey of a character taken from his familiar environment and forced in a foreign universe, generally inspired by fantasy. The Hero will have to understand this new universe to succeed over tests which will mark out his quest, then to turn over in his world, reinforced by knowledge thus gained. This diagram (discovery of an unknown environment, training, control, re-use of know how within a familiar framework) is particularly interesting for any application aiming to the acquisition of new knowledge and skills. Moreover, the strong use of this structure in literature and in cinema [Dormans, 2006] offers it a particular echo for the players. However, this structure presents a major drawback: it was designed by studying linear works. It is thus not suited to the needs of interaction. We so need to study its mechanisms and to adapt them to a framework of interactive applications. We will first present the structure and its limits, then we will study the way of exceeding these limits and of adapting the structure to our needs. Thereafter we will present the resulting model, and discuss the prospects so opened.