Fetch to Final Boss – Classifying Quest Motifs, Functions, and Tale-Types in Western Video Games

Abstract

Folktales have existed for thousands of years. Video games have existed for a few decades, and yet the video game market makes even more money than the century-old worldwide film industry. Despite the existence of a passionate community that encompasses investors, developers, reviewers, consumers, academics, and enthusiasts, systems of archiving and classification for games remain piecemeal and inconsistent. A perplexing challenge for developers and researchers alike, the need for quantifiable organization of video games and the components required to make them grows dramatically alongside the number of new titles released year over year. For developers, the scope of contemporary games has expanded to the point where players reasonably expect one hundred-plus hours of original gameplay, a task that often requires years of work and tens of millions of dollars. For researchers, the abundance of games, coupled with the rapid advancement of technology, means that titles can be forgotten—or even rendered unplayable—a mere decade after release. The rise in popularity of the role-playing game, or RPG, as a genre in the video game industry came with standards for gameplay, character development, and narrative elements tied to quests. These objective-based adventures appear to share similarities with elements found in traditional folktales, with recurrent themes and motifs, not unlike those recorded in the seminal Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index. Originally developed a century ago, the Index identifies prominent narrative elements from folktales, and tracks variants of them over time and across cultures. This allows folklorists, anthropologists, historians, and other researchers to follow the emergence and adaptation of collective narrative elements throughout differing cultures and geographical regions. Due to similarities in structure, it is not unreasonable to hypothesize that a method of classification influenced by the Index might be created to track repeated and iterative elements found in quests in RPGs. However, unlike folktales, many game quests, especially those developed in the West, offer variance to the player in the form of differing gameplay mechanics, character appeasement, and overall outcomes. This element of variability adds an additional dimension to any attempt at categorization, and in order to provide a comprehensive system, these unique needs of developers and researchers must be considered. Therefore, a proof-of-concept “RPG Index,” drawing inspiration from both the ATU Index and the surveyed requirements of contemporary developers tests the hypothesis that there are sufficient similarities between folktales and video game quests to allow for effective categorization.