Gamasutra Member Blogs: From the Heroine's Journey to the X-Files

[In highlights from Gamasutra's Member Blogs, our bloggers write about diverse topics, such as how Dragon Age 2 follows the Heroine's Journey, what the X-Files tells us about the media's portrayal of games, and more.] Member Blogs can be maintained by any registered Gamasutra user, while invitation-only Expert Blogs -- also highlighted weekly -- are written by selected development professionals. We hope that our blog sections can provide useful and interesting viewpoints on our industry. For more information, check out the official posting guidelines. This Week's Standout Member Blogs Walking the Heroine's journey: How Dragon Age 2 follows an old -- but often overlooked-- storytelling archetype (Lara Crigger) For decades, developers have relied on The Hero's Journey as a template for telling stories in games. But the Hero's Journey, while useful, isn't universal. Lara Crigger asks, "How does Dragon Age 2 break the mold, and are we ready for something different?" What the X-Files tells us about the media's portrayal of games (Scott Juster) Video games in the X-Files?! Scott Juster wants to believe. Failure - I choose you!: The rise of self-enforced hardcore modes (Chris Waldron) Chris Waldron examines the rise of self-enforced hardcore modes and the effects they have on gameplay. Postmortem: Mictlan for Windows Phone 7 (Arturo Nereu) Mictlan is a wall defense game developed by the Mexican independent game studio Phyne Games for Windows Phone 7. In this postmortem, Artur Nereu shares the adventure of game developers in Mexico. 3D animation: A premeditative outlook (Kevin Tufano) 3D animation seems really cool, but if you still consider your hands off experience some ways off, there are lots of ways to prepare with traditional medium, according to Kevin Tufano.