Joseph Campbell and the Hero's Journey

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) was one of the most influential and creative mythographers. His most important achievement is no doubt the modeling of a single great story, which he calls the hero's journey. The basic motif is to leave one state of being and find a way to transform the social world into a richer condition. In his foundational work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell (2008) regarded the monomyth as universal across time and cultural spaces. Therefore, he was less interested in cultural differences and contemporary fashions and trends but more in the discovery of the similarities and the common ground of myths as well as real or fictional stories. Although Campbell analyzed the elementary themes of myths and stories worldwide for common ground, he did point out that their expression is different in various sociocultural environments. Though myths resonate with local needs, they are revered by all people on earth, “appearing everywhere in new combinations, while remaining, like the elements of a kaleidoscope, only a few and always the same” (Campbell 2007, 15).

Campbell was deeply influenced by Jung's (1969) conceptualization of the archetype, Zimmer's (1992) mythological Indian studies, and in particular Rank's (1952) psychological approach to myths. His insights also parallel related developments in ritual theory offered by van Gennep (1960) and Turner (1969). Campbell's (1991) ideas were disseminated to a larger, non-academic audience by an interview series with Bill Moyers, which was broadcast one year after his death and published as The Power of Myth. Campbell's influence on popular culture is indisputable, and in fact, it was in the movies that he gained his greatest fame (Vogler 2007). His intellectual influence is readily apparent in the first Star Wars film trilogy (Campbell 1991, 2004). However, his multilayered work has not received enough acknowledgment from the academic community (Rensma 2009). As inspired by Campbell, heroism science emerged over the last decade as an interdisciplinary research field, and he is regarded as its founder (Allison and Goethals 2017).

This chapter will zoom in on the villain-hero dynamic in fictional narratives and its impact on career identity and conceptualizations of moral leadership in business contexts. Illustrated by empirical research, I will describe how hybrid heroes and their journeys can influence career identity via different pathways. Second, I will explore the influence of the hybrid hero on the field of leadership—presenting a more dynamic perspective on leaders in the context of situational and temporal change. A link between heroic leadership and hybrid heroes will be theorized. Can we be the saint-like heroes we often initially aspire to become? A more complex and holistic perception of heroism may broaden our understanding of moral leadership. Moreover, the hybrid hero spectrum could offer people a window into the morally ambiguous parts within themselves, stimulating conscious, critical reflection.

In my chapter, I consciously use the term “hero” to refer to all genders. This is partly because I am not keen on the word “heroine” to specifically refer to female heroes, and also because the traditional male connotation feels outdated. Everyone can be a hero.

Villain-Heroes in Fictional Narratives and Literature

Jeff Lindsay's books featuring Dexter Morgan tell the story of a man with a troubled childhood who grows up to be a hero and a villain at the same time. Early on, his adoptive father realizes that Dexter has psychopathic traits that fit early onset conduct disorder (formerly labeled “psychopathy”) with an insuppressible urge to kill. His father teaches him to at least follow a strict moral code when he kills, and he becomes a dark vigilante. During the day, Dexter works as a blood spatter analyst for the police, yet at night he kills rapists and murderers who are slipping through the cracks of the legal system. This makes him both villain and saint—a morally ambiguous hybrid hero (Amper 2010; Brophy 2010; Van Tourhout 2019).

Eight Views of Animal Crossing

A world of talking animals and haute couture, trade and Japanese tea houses, lovingly tended gardens, seasonal weather and sociability, self-fashioning and construction. A world that offers insights about performance, global audiences, intellectual property, gift giving, contract law and play in virtual environments. A world that affirms creativity and non-violent sociability, in contrast to digital platforms that embody destruction, mayhem, toxic masculinity and a hyper-kinetic ‘kill or be killed’ ethos. A world that has enchanted millions of people across the globe – a validation of the world maker's capability – and has attracted diverse demographics on the basis of personal recommendations rather than extensive advertising. A world that gained scholarly attention as a consequence of uptake by consumers in many parts of the world as a source of comfort and delight during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This book explores that world, the world of Nintendo's Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It offers a transdisciplinary view of a cultural and commercial phenomenon, including a study of law relating to the operation of Animal Crossing and the virtual world's users.

It is written by an Australian academic with an interest in the interaction of commerce, culture, consumption and law. That interaction is on a global and local scale: from billion-dollar sales to the varying experiences of individual players. The transdisciplinary approach means that it is not intended as a textbook for media and game studies scholars or for lawyers concerned with, for example, intellectual property as a focus of global trade disputes and the dynamics of consumer engagement with copyright. Instead, it resembles two of Japan's iconic cultural productions: Hokusai's 1830–1832 Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji and Kurosawa's 1950 Rashomon.

Both Kurosawa and Hokusai offer multiple accounts – different, conflicting and engaging perspectives – of a single landscape or event. They have been emulated by non-Japanese artists, film-makers and authors. The persuasiveness of understanding through different views means that media and communication specialists have come to refer to the ‘Rashomon Effect’ as a shorthand for understanding complexity through a non-linear narrative and conflicting claims regarding truths.

We decided to write this book for two reasons: (1) as far as we are able to determine, little has been written about hybrid heroes and (2) our insights emanate directly from the work we have done. The three of us started our collaboration with a stream of presentations at The Art of Management & Organization Conference in Brighton, United Kingdom, in September 2018. Though we had Skyped and emailed many times, we did not meet in person until the beginning of the event. As we shared a meal in an outdoor courtyard at a restaurant on a back street, our intellectual bond transformed instantly into friendship.

Inge Brokerhof (PhD) is an organizational psychologist, writer, trainer, and researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In her research, she explores how stories influence career identity, future work selves and moral development and she has worked at Harvard Business School and the University of Bath. For her company, stories-@-work, she offers workshops, presentations, and university lectures about change rhetoric, storytelling, organizational psychology, and business ethics. She has also published short stories, poems, and songs.

Stephan Sonnenburg (Dr.) is a professor of branding, creativity, and innovation management at ICN Business School Paris-Nancy-Berlin. Before his academic career, he worked at advertising agencies and founded a management consulting firm focusing on the power of narratives in digital transformation. He is fond of saying that there is nothing as practical as a good theory, and that principle informs much of what we are trying to accomplish here.

Greg Stone is, in a sense, the “odd man out” as he is the only non-academic. He's an independent communications consultant and author. He has written two business books, one focusing on the power of the villain in storytelling, as well as a new mystery novel called Dangerous Inspiration, profiling a collection of artists who run the spectrum from virtue to violence.

In concisely characterising the experience of a virtual world, the authors of the detailed Preserving Virtual Worlds report commented that such a world:

Nintendo designer Ketsuya Eguchi explained that ‘our intent was to create kind of a parallel world, a world that's kind of similar to your own but also different’. Animal Crossing New Horizons is a virtual world because it is a sophisticated simulation: one that has time, space, cause, effect and experience.

The nature of ‘experience’ and ‘the world’ has preoccupied philosophers and theologians for at least two millennia. David Chalmers has recently claimed that ‘virtual’ is ‘real’, just as ‘real’ as experience of the physical world (one made of atoms rather than bits). Posthuman theorist Nick Bostrom asked whether we are ‘sims’ in a virtual world. If the answer to that question – better suited to a book on The Matrix – is in the affirmative, you as the reader are a digital construct reading something generated by another construct. Philip K. Dick more succinctly commented ‘Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away’.

This chapter takes an agnostic approach to deep and perhaps irresolvable questions about reality, the existence or otherwise of the world and the extent to which our perceptions are determined by both language and physical phenomena that in a rationalist culture we deem to be verifiable and thus facts. It instead aims to provide readers who are unfamiliar with Animal Crossing with a sense of what is experienced in playing the game.

Heroes and heroines are everywhere. They figure prominently in many modern popular songs performed by David Bowie, Alesso, and Måns Zelmerlöw, who have all released tunes called “heroes,” and in series and movies revolving around superheroes like The Flash, Arrow, Wonder Woman, and Spiderman, who ultimately save the world or even the entire universe. As far back as Gilgamesh, regarded as the earliest surviving work of great literature, the main character is described as “the most glorious amongst heroes! […] the most eminent among men!” (app. 2000 B.C., see Heidel 1949, 8). That complex epic, written in cuneiform, describes the journey of the king of Uruk, who was part god and part human (Abusch 2001). The universal concept of heroism pervades many cultures and time periods, vide the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Bhagavad Gita, and many biblical stories.

The word “hero” can be broadly defined as “a person admired for achievements and noble qualities” (Merriam Webster 2023). The roots are Latin and Greek and point toward demi-gods or superhumans with transcendent capabilities. For millennia, they have inspired and motivated us, as their stories carry “transrational” knowledge about mores and values, spirituality and wisdom, and their journeys teach us to be more empathetic and to consider new perspectives (Allison and Goethals 2014). When we hear, watch, or read a heroic story, we can experience it through the hero's eyes and achieve a psychological state of euphoria, a feeling of invincibility, and a strong motivation to better ourselves (Algoe and Haidt 2009).

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987), one of the most influential and innovative mythographers of the twentieth century, created a model for the quintessential story, which he called the hero's journey (Campbell 2008). The basic motif is a transformation from one state of being to another in search of the source of life energy. Campbell's foundational work was the starting point for interdisciplinary research focusing on heroes, heroism, and heroic leadership (Drysdale et al. 2014; Allison and Goethals 2014), as well as a strong impetus for postheroic research, which views leadership activities as collective rather than individual (Crevani et al. 2007; Ryömä 2020). Until now, however, heroes or heroic acts have been defined and described in a static way on a journey toward sainthood, enlightenment, strength, and so on.

One enthusiast reviewed the latest iteration of Animal Crossing with the comment that:

Most computer games, just like much movie-going and past practice regarding reading with (and to) family members and friends, are social. Many online combat games involve groups of friends or colleagues taking on the avatars of other people, sometimes physical located in other countries and continents but interacting in a shared virtual space, alongside foes generated by the game software. Although worlds such as New Horizons, GTA and DOTA are virtual, they are an artefact of data centres (aka server farms) located in multiple jurisdictions and thus tied to the legal ‘realspace’ highlighted in Chapter 7. As noted above, that gaming in cyberspace is sometimes exhibited to the world at large through, for example, services such as Twitch.

Animal Crossing offers different facets of ‘social’: a more welcoming, slower and gentler sociability in which friendly interaction with the villagers and with other players is strongly valorised. It is not viscerally tribal, a matter of us versus them or winners and losers. It involves respectful interaction with the villagers (and more broadly with the environment within the virtual world, a matter of social norms reinforced through technical constraints).

Islands have historically been perceived as objects of fascination, locations of romance and adventure, as an ‘allegory of the whole world’ or as ‘the quintessential sites for experimentation’. In real life and online, they may be ‘blank spaces’ in which an owner/occupier develops a culture – landscapes, architecture, values and social practices – that are distinctive, albeit without regard for the values or even life of that space's indigenous inhabitants. They may be edenic or dystopian. They may instead be locations that over time have been remade as reflections of the development of other spaces.

The archipelago of islands in New Horizons represent a cultural stage, shaped both by the hard and soft law discussed in the following chapter and by scope for expression on the part of players, including individuals and corporate entities that are seeking to influence the behaviour of people offline. The cultures evident across the archipelago can accordingly be understood as manifestations of personal autonomy (including performativity of attributes that might otherwise be expressed offline), a Japan-inflected aesthetic and a relief from or reinforcement of the rigours of a global market economy. The stage can also be understood as a subject for academic discontent regarding economic relationships offline, viewing a playscape as an allegory of contemporary capitalism.

Defoe's Island

On a superficial viewing each island – and Animal Crossing islands per se – are potentially blank spaces for inscription through the tastes and engagement of each user, an echo of Daniel Defoe's inf luential 1719 fantasy Robinson Crusoe in which a castaway, a dog, two cats and subservient person of colour remake a deserted island through strenuous effort, ingenuity and good fortune. They are not what Elizabeth Nyman characterised as ‘containers’ from which a player's might want to escape or instead use an opportunity for demonstrating prowess in gaining rewards through killing/disabling hostile characters.

Players enter the game by choosing attributes for their avatar, discussed below, and fictively purchasing the ‘Deserted Island Getaway Package’ from the virtual world's Nook Inc development company. Purchase from a company rather than from a state can be seen as friendlier and less ‘colonial’ than acquiring a licence from a government for occupation and economic development.

In Voltaire's 1759 Candide, the title character after many adventures and tribulations concludes that happiness is a matter of cultivating your garden rather than seeking fortune and glory, an echo of unheeded advice to Roman politician Cicero by his friend Atticus. Candide's erstwhile mentor Dr Pangloss, more generally known for pronouncement that we live in the best of all possible worlds, endorses that sentiment in claiming that ‘when man was put into the garden of Eden, it was with an intent to dress it: and this proves that man was not born to be idle’.

Preceding chapters have suggested that Animal Crossing as a virtual garden and a small virtual world (an archipelago of private islands in cyberspace where there are rules, social interaction, a simulated natural environment and a built environment) rewards those players who in rejecting idleness engage in what might be characterised as cultivation: selection, placement, display, harvesting and enhancement for pleasure or as the basis for greater capability in world making.

The activity of players might instead be characterised as a matter of curation. Critic Jens Hoffmann comments that:

Hoffmann's characterisation offers several perspectives for understanding the game as a source of pleasure and New Horizons as a simulation of an economy: sufficiently real to be engaging but not so real as to generate the inequalities, exploitation, aggression, unhappiness and contestation evident in all real-life economies.

Animal Crossing is a commercial product from a corporation with global scale, intended to provide Nintendo with a superior return on investment, one greater than the returns from savings accounts during periods when Japanese interest (and national growth) rates were very low following the collapse of the property bubble. As preceding paragraphs have suggested, the New Horizons business model is a matter of persuading people to recurrently engage in curation. Buy the game, play the game, pay subscription fees and buy amiibo or other collectables.

All cultural production – whether a matter of manufacturing (artisanal or industrial) or performance – is grounded. It might be attractive to people across the world and across time, whether for innate qualities or because it is recognised as a valued commodity. However, it has a physical and institutional basis: a location within one or more jurisdictions (national and/ or provincial legal systems) with social norms and enforceable rules about activity, irrespective of whether it is perceived as ‘disembodiment’ in a globally networked virtual world. It also has a genealogy – a point of origin, adaptation and reception over time – and may have an aura, perceptions that it is unique or otherwise valuable rather than so omnipresent and so functional as to be unrecognised.

Animal Crossing is a virtual world in which the interaction between live humans and digital characters is online but, like all virtual worlds, the game is tethered to the real world of capital, national/international law and past practice. That world can be considered simply and persuasively as a matter of delight or entertainment, without reference to the scholarship noted in preceding pages of this book. It can however be contextualised by considering its owners – how it came about – and its users and observers, in other words its audiences and critics, theorists or financial analysts who write about it. In understanding Animal Crossing as a large-scale commercial game, an artificial paradise that is a manifestation of corporate decisionmaking rather than a freak of nature, we can start by looking at that world's creator: Nintendo.

That consideration is analogous to exploring paintings, novels, operas and symphonies by looking at the creators (some market oriented, others not; some self-consciously avant-garde, others more conservative), intermediaries and consumers (some of whom, for example, sought visual aids for religious devotion and others, centuries later, engaged in status competition through purchase and gifting to museums or sought to satisfy a deep-seated hunger through amassing objects).

This chapter accordingly considers Animal Crossing as a matter of genealogies and materiality: where the virtual world came from, where does it fit in the spectrum of immersive online games, who are the gamers and why do they play.

In 1996, US provocateur John Perry Barlow, in his 1996 ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, announced

Nicholas Negroponte equally colourfully forecast that the nation state would shortly evaporate like a mothball left in the sun, something at odds with experience in 2022 and recognition that states are useful for provision of welfare, biosecurity, consumer protection, utilities and other purposes. This book began by describing New Horizons in terms of an archipelago of islands within a virtual world. The existence and operation of that world involve a range of law, some embodied within each island (and internalised by players in ways that they might not recognise) and some functioning as a legal framework around the game. That law demonstrates the problematical nature of claims by Barlow and Negroponte, in particular because the players and owners of the game (just like the physical infrastructure enabling the game) are located in terra firma and thus susceptible to enforcement action by nation states or private entities endorse by those states. This chapter offers a high level of some of that law and its implications.

Not so long ago, before the age of Trump, Professor Gautam Mukunda's mentor asked him why so many crazy people run countries (Mukunda 2012). The answer gave rise to a brilliant book called Indispensable. I will have much more to say about that later. In the meantime, we are exploring a new field of research called “heroism science,” a term apparently coined three years after Mukunda's book appeared (Allison 1, 2015). Much of the scholarship in this area has been gloomy. For instance, psychologists Paul Babiak and Robert Hare produced startling statistics about mental illness in the executive suite in their book Snakes in Suits. They found that 3.5 percent of the 200 executives they studied were psychopaths, compared to just 1 percent of the general population (Babiak 2006). As if that statistic weren't scary enough, they argue that psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism form a “dark triad” in the corporate world. Unfortunately, many compromised leaders have ample charisma, which intensifies their impact and perhaps hides their faults (Mukunda 2012).

In this book, we have approached the hero (and her or his journey) from a hybrid perspective, on a spectrum from scoundrel to saint, with a dynamic outlook. We regard heroism not just as a personal characteristic, but as a series of actions in given situations and contexts. This is what makes “hybrid heroism” so fascinating, part of a tradition harking back to the story of Lucifer, the lapsed angel turned avenger. Instead of alternating between good and evil, the hybrid hero moves along a continuum between the extremes.

Storytellers have long understood the vast appeal of these warring opposites. Alfred Hitchcock believed that strong villains made strong movies (Stone 2019). Indeed, rogues and heroes often compose “opposing sides of the same story” (Gölz 2019, 27). In fact, we as audiences can experience fear and pleas-ure simultaneously, a phenomenon known as “co-activation,” which explains the seemingly inexplicable appeal of horror (Stone 2019). Even mass marketer Disney exploits these contradictory sensations: witness the company's public relations campaign in Japan with the slogan “Welcome to the world of delightful villains” (Prusa 2016, 2).