The "Your Stories Should Have" series attempts to explore fundamental elements of storytelling, with a particular emphasis on how it fits into games (but not exclusively so).

Previous Entries: Nuanced Evil

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An Illustration

Things Fall Apart (affiliate link) is perhaps one of the greatest tragedies ever written. It centers around an Igbo man, Okonkwo, who is simultaneously a heroic epitome of masculinity in his culture and a flawed, troubled figure.

The first edition cover of Things Fall Apart. Image courtesy of Wikimedia.

Okonkwo achieves his status in part by continuously initiating deeper and deeper into a mythos of the masculine self; the Igbo people have their own rules for manhood and Okonkwo not only meets these requirements but also exceeds them.

At every juncture, he pushes himself further and further into a sort of initiatory self destruction; he obliterates his self by continuous subjection to the responsibilities of manhood. He is a champion wrestler, great warrior, and well-respected farmer. He works nonstop and achieves a sort of social apotheosis, rejecting the weakness that his own father showed and becoming the self-made man; an African take on the conventional American dream.

However, things fall apart (as the title of the novel implies), when Okonkwo exceeds his limits. He takes part in the killing of his adopted son–the child is a hostage whose life is forfeit due to the murder of a member of Okonkwo's tribe–even after other men clearly tell him that he should not take part in the execution. Later, when Christian colonialists arrive in Igbo territory, Okonkwo's biological son joins them and is disowned by his father. In rebellion against the colonial government, Okonkwo kills a white man, and ultimately commits suicide so that his tribe can be spared retribution.

An Explanation

Initiation consists of actions or events that serve to mark a passage of the individual into the community. They vary from community to community, but often mark the beginning of adulthood or another life stage.

Each time Okonkwo commits one of his extreme actions, he is trying to reject what he perceives as the worthlessness of his father, whose laziness and indebtedness made him a laughing-stock. These are initiatory acts; his perceived emasculation causes him to repeat both heroic and tragic acts beyond what is expected of him: he is a man who sees himself as a boy.

The heroic individual is distinct from one who has undergone initiation. While the heroic individual is celebrated for their unique aspects, the initiate is celebrated for their conformity to the expectations of a society.

Traditionally, there is a natural balance between these two things. The heroic cycle serves as an inspiration for the rituals that surround initiation. Coming-of-age initiations mark a transition from a state of existing in dependence to having the ability to stand alone in the world, while initiations to join a social group mark the acceptance of a heroic individual as a part of a larger community (a key part of the Hero's Journey is "Confronting the Father", or the hero returning to, forming, or joining society).

Initiation by itself, however, is not heroic. It is something that every person in a society is expected to undergo in one way or another, and while it may involve the transmission of heroic ideals and a demonstration of aptitude, the individual is merely subsumed, rather than accepted, by their society.

Take, for example, baptism in the Christian tradition. It is a ritual that shows a public commitment to the Christian faith, and is initiatory in nature because it is an early step of membership in most churches, which makes it a good example of an initiation rite. In many traditions, it is restricted to individuals who are old enough to make a conscious decision to enter a walk with God, though this definition varies culturally.

There is deep symbolism within the ritual (rebirth in water), but it also carries a practical role in marking the baptized as part of a community.

However, baptism is not in and of itself a heroic act. A particularly great philanthropist, evangelist, or thinker may be considered heroic within the Christian tradition, and they would almost certainly be baptized, but the baptism itself serves as a sort of entry barrier.

This is the role of initiation: it is the threshold that anyone must pass to be a member. Heroes must pass it as they prepare to lead, reform, or protect the society at the end of their cycle, but the average individual is ordinary.

A Reason

Stories in games need initiations if they are to be truly complete. Both as part of a heroic cycle and a part of interesting everyday life, they have major narrative and worldbuilding roles.

• Build Setting

Mechanically speaking, this could be a good way to set up a tutorial in a video game, or build a backstory in a tabletop roleplaying game. This provides a way to keep these experiences coherent without causing problems with immersion.

• Challenge Players

Initiations are marks of competence and adherence to community values. Warframe is an example of a game that has an initiation system in the form of mastery ranks, which characters gradually advance through as they improve their arsenal and complete special challenges.

An unfulfilled initiation lurking on the horizon is a great element in a heroic cycle, and allows characters to have clear motivation. One of the largest challenges in games is figuring out how to tell a story that gets players invested, and this process works well.

• Build Community

One of the largest issues with storytelling in games is figuring out how to have characters come together; it's easy in some cases (e.g. military settings, where characters are mustered to the same unit) but much more difficult in others. While it is certainly possible to have characters with deeply personal connections, these are time-consuming to develop and only really work for individuals and direct connections.

• Focus Coherently

One of the largest problems that occur in otherwise competent storytelling is that it lacks focus: it goes from Point A to Point B by way of Points C, D, and E.

Initiations are a great way of focusing on the character; the most primitive heroic cycle involves an initial initiation, in which the protagonist becomes a man (and the primitive hero is an archetypal masculine figure) at the beginning of the story (or very near it), and then goes to prove his worth for marriage by the end of the story.

Morrowind: A Brief Case Study

In Morrowind, Bethesda Softwork's 2002 open-world RPG, there is a very fluid faction system that depends on completing tasks, and the main story itself involves the protagonist going through a series of trials to prove that they are the Nerevarine, a reincarnation of a historical figure that is prophesied to bring dramatic change to the game world.

Each of the initiations that the character completes causes them to not only change their relationships with individual characters, but also with the factions that they have come into contact with: each has their own reason to ignore, oppose, or accept the player character's claim to be Nerevarine, and varying degrees of skepticism and their own rites required to be accepted as such.

This creates a universe that's compelling and interesting even without a lot of the more modern cinematic storytelling methods: Morrowind doesn't have voice-acted lines, in-engine cutscenes, or thousands of easily accessible mechanics. It just has a series of events that allow the character to transform themselves into what society wants them to be (and complete their own Hero's Journey in the process).

Wrapping Up

Initiation is a key part of life, and it's something that needs to be put into stories for them to make sense. It is, in a rather small sense, a part of the Hero's Journey, but it's also something that non-heroic individuals go through as well.

It permits a storyteller to hit on a lot of different high-points in a character's life and create a guide for coherent storytelling.