The Seven Basic Plots

The book by Christopher Booker titled The Seven Basic Plots which studies reoccurring stories and fables across different countries, faiths and peoples, and how across great distances and expanses of time, completely different cultures create stories with similar story structures and characters.
The seven plots are as follows:

• Overcoming The Monster
• Rags to Riches
• The Quest
• Voyage and Return
• Comedy
• Tragedy
• Rebirth

My task was to link these basic story threads to different modern video games.


For overcoming the monster I chose Portal as it shows the story of Chell fighting the omni-present GLaDOS while performing multiple, grueling, test chambers before facing her face to face to stop the GLaDOS attempting to kill her when Chell is no longer of use to her.


For rags to riches I thought Grand Theft Auto 5's story of Franklin, in how he arose up from petty theft and gang violence to seek a more successful criminal career in taking part of heists with former professional Micheal Townley. Here it shows once Franklin gets his money and success, he interacts differently to his former colleagues and their views of him change too.


For the quest I chose The Witcher 3. While the game is made up of multiple in depth quests, the main overarching one is of the protagonist Geralt Of Rivia searching the northern realms to find his adopted daughter Ciri when he learns that she is in danger. In order to do this Geralt has to perform numerous tasks and trials in order to track down what Ciri has been doing and where she went.


For voyage and return I thought Mad Max the game would be a suitable if somber choice for this story as you start off the game as Max roaming the wasteland in search for solace in the 'plains of silence' but before he can gets his car, the Interceptor, stolen from him and the game begins with the goal of creating a new vehicle cable of crossing the 'plains of silence'. In this journey Max comes close to recovering his humanity as he helps numerous people in the wasteland only for his work to be undone towards the end by the antagonist Scaborus Scrotus. After taking retribution on Scrotus Max looses his new car but retrieves what is left of his original, leaving him in the same broken state he was at the beginning of the game.


For comedy, I chose Saints Row 4 as it almost prides itself in how self-aware and genre mocking it is. The start of the game, your created character is the president of the United States where you comically make new laws by multiple choice and promptly after the induction there is a huge alien invasion which then enslaves the entire human race by caging them in a comical knock-off of the Matrix where you wake inside a 1950's sitcom. While escaping the sitcom your character gains super powers to fight the aliens and the plot seems to descend into hilarity from there.


For tragedy I chose Halo:Reach where you follow the story of Noble team as they investigate the beginnings of an alien invasion by the Covenant on a human colony called Reach. Most fans knew how this would end as it is well stated that Reach was the last human planet to fall before the Covenant found Earth. The game encompasses the initial fighting, the small victories against an overwhelming force, the suffering and loss and of course the inevitable defeat. It's the continuing loss of team mates that hits the  player hard throughout the campaign.


For rebirth I chose Tales From The Borderlands, in particular Rhys' story, changing from an aspiring, backstabbing, manipulative Hyperion employee who viewed Handsome Jack as a hero, to a sympathetic hero, fighting his power hungry urges to save his friends. Of course this depends entirely on the players choices throughout the story as this can go completely the other way around. Still the majority of players witnessed Rhys realize the error of his and Handsome Jack's ways in order to do good.