Tuesday, October 28, 2008

HAM: AKA Historical Archetypes of Myth and Mythology

OK so how about a quick update

Hysterical Archetypes of Mythology - ;)

I was excited about this class because Mythology is pretty cool subject. It does have some interesting content such as Celtic, and Norse mythology with their totally trippy creation myths (I think out of all the creation myths the Cherokee's is by far the weirdest). But overall it seemed like we kinda just blew by the mythology and focused more on the Hero Cycle - which was somewhat formalized by mythological scholar Joseph Campbell and merchandising genius George Lucas (may he and Spielberg never make another movie again for what they did to Indiana Jones - completely unforgivable). We did talk a bit about what made the original star wars movies so different from the prequels, our instructor pointed out that George strayed from Campbell's formula and thus made some lacking films.

So the Hero Cycle has been around a long time, even since the oldest known piece of literature: Gilgamesh, a Mesopotamian myth and about the search for immortality, all the way through Egyptian, Greek, and Indian mythology to today. It can be easily seen in Tolkien's work and more modern books, I read a lot of Dean Koontz he brings his own spin to it. Pretty much every movie I have seen since this class I see the Cycle unfolding, its kinda distracting. So Joseph Campbell didn't really invent the Cycle he just discovered pattern and gave form to it.

So the main things I took away from this class were the Hero Cycle and color symbolism and how they relate to video games, which is... meh - loosely. Color symbolism seems to have a greater impact than the Hero cycle; the cycle is still there its just bit harder to pinpoint in games, but all the great games seem to follow it. So that's about all I have to report, I'll have much more to say about Windows Programming 1 so stay tuned...