In the field of literary criticism and historical inquiry, only one man was brave (or stupid) enough to claim a shared commonality between all of the world's mythologies, and that man was Joseph Campbell. In laying out "the hero's journey," Campbell prescribed a series of events that, in his view, essentially sum up the underlying "monomyth" in every culture. According to Campbell (in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces), the monomyth is thus:
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. (Campbell, 30)
This is just the basic outline; Campbell goes on to illustrate "the hero's journey," a set of steps that every mythical hero takes, from birth on through to the Call to Adventure. Campbell does at least concede, however, that not all myths go through every stage. Some might include all of the stages, and others only a few. But Campbell, and many other critics at the time, believe that all myths share these features not because of happenstance, but because all myths touch on a "deeper human truth."
That's the important, and troubling part about the monomyth: the assumption that all cultures, from England to Japan to Botswana to Peru, share a common idea of what that "deeper human truth" is, and that Joseph Campbell is the man to have figured it out. Campbell's work, like New Criticism, takes on a considerable heft of cultural and gender bias. As with New Criticism, which also had an interest in claiming that a "perfect" work touches on a deeper human truth common to all people in the world, the monomyth mistakes Campbell's short sighted research into the subject of the myth as fact.
Had Campbell bothered to do more research into the subject, he would find that his mythic structure is largely based on Westernized conventions, namely that of the linear progression of time. In the Campbellian view of the myth, the story begins with a character's birth and ends with their "Call to Adventure," as they seek out new quests after the main story of the myth. Yet, even a cursory glance at, say, First Nations storytelling reveals a more cyclical nature of storytelling.
If the structure of Campbell's argument was its only flaw, it could have at least been forgivable. It is in, however, its assumption of cross-cultural continuity where things get murky. Campbell's view of the hero is incredibly gender biased, basically ignoring females and variations in cultural understanding of the role of the hero (or the very existence of a hero figure to begin with).
Campbell's work has been translated into many successful pieces of literature and film, possibly because the monomythic structure does seem like a pretty good structure for a film like Star Wars or a book like The Lord of the Rings (and I'm not here to debate the quality of either, when both are superb). And I'm also not here to argue that versions of the monomyth don't exist when they clearly do in Western cultures. No, the problem is that the monomyth is a fallacy – there's nothing "mono" about it.
Criticizing the monomyth has been done long before this, and I doubt that many academics legitimately consider it a useful means of examining mythology (I had one professor who was in love with the monomyth, but she was a terrible professor and nearly flunked me for disagreeing with her. She was a high school librarian by day and didn't have the firmest grasp on literary criticism, so it was somewhat understandable). The problem as I see it is that videogames are still in their infancy, and seeing as they're rarely made with a literary interpretation in mind (95% of a development staff are programmers and artists first, and storytellers a distant third), the monomyth is seemingly used as a storytelling crutch far too many times. Or if they're not going with the monomyth, a simple anti-hero version of the monomyth is often subbed in.
The number of games following this basic formula are too numerous to count. If the games are being developed by Western developers in an attempt to mimic a form of storytelling from a particular cultural background, fine. The monomyth may be a stereotypical storytelling structure, but at least it's one that falls in line with a particular worldview that is reflected in the people developing the game.
However, I take offense with the notion that a westernized monomythic structure is the only narrative structure worth doing, and I get a little worried when I see developers from other countries (most notably, Japan, as they've basically laid out the video game landscape until very recently) adopting the monomyth without considering its implications – indeed, a Gamasutra article even seems to suggest an automated program for developing the monomythic structure ad infinitum in videogaming. In Japanese gaming, this has resulted in a bit of an identity crisis – how many games from Japan legitimately feature Japanese protagonists? Indeed, a game like The Legend of Zelda is intentionally un-Japanese in its use of a highly westernized setting married to a thorough run through monomythic conventions. This of course raises even thornier questions of intent and the need for high sales in videogaming, but we're still left wondering if we'll ever see a game that bucks the trend of using the monomyth as its primary narrative structure (outside of games that don't use a narrative structure at all or more niche games that aren't as tied to sales).
I'm left wondering if the monomyth is another example of cultural hegemony, almost raising a "chicken or egg scenario": was the monomyth legitimately based on every culture's mythologies, thus ensuring its ubiquity? Or was the development of the monomythic theory and its wide dissemination responsible? I'm obviously leaning toward the latter, as we can see through a globalized world that Western cultural, economic, and societal hegemony is rampant. And that, ultimately, makes me sad, that in a medium as new and exciting as videogaming has the potential to be, that we're still clinging to this awful, out of date and presumptuous theory because we seemingly don't know any better.