The Ugly Face of the Hero's Journey

Lifelines is a game I’ve been working on for over five years. The fundamental question is simple: how do you actually make a Norwegian video game? I’ve been thinking about this even longer — maybe over ten years. With Lifelines, I feel like I’ve gotten closer than ever. But I haven’t found the answer. This post is about why it’s so hard.

Elling is no hero

Lifelines is a cozy life-sim where you play as the municipality, responsible for running a public housing facility. Your job is to make sure the residents thrive and develop into healthy, independent people who can participate in society. It’s sort of an RPG with very low stakes and very indirect control. A The Sims with slightly deeper characters.

The game is largely based on Elling by Ingvar Ambjørnsen — a Norwegian novel (and film) about a sheltered man who, after his mother’s death, is placed in municipal housing and has to learn how to be an ordinary person. And that’s where the problem starts. Elling is no hero. This is no hero’s story. A classic RPG would be the wrong genre.

We can all agree that building a character from the ground up feels satisfying. A weak character you level up, assign skill points, choose a build, talents, upgrade gear — classic RPG gameplay. The hero’s journey. But the archetypal Norwegian story is something entirely different. We’re more interested in digging into who the protagonist is than in sending them into the dragon’s lair. Identity, not progression. What serves as the first act in the American story — the hero choosing who they are — is the final act in the Norwegian one.

So how do you make a game out of that?

Searching for control

I landed on the life-sim genre as a starting point. The Sims was one of my favorite games growing up, and it felt natural to simulate needs, personality, and daily routines. But one thing I always missed in The Sims was the feeling of dealing with real characters — people with personality, will, and goals in life, not just autonomous dolls.

The central conflict in the design has always been balancing player agency against the game’s fundamental concept. The concept is inherently passive. You observe the characters, try to understand them, arrive at a diagnosis, and your task is to nudge them toward activities that help them grow. Great on paper. But what do you actually do from second to second?

The first prototype was about making a schedule for the characters. You placed activities on a calendar and the characters would carry them out. A massive failure. It quickly became clear that this was too indirect. You didn’t care what the characters did, and you didn’t care what effect the activities had either. Boring to plan, boring to watch.

Then I tried direct control à la The Sims. Click on character, click on furniture, perform activity. This immediately felt better. You suddenly had influence and could identify with the characters. But — just one small problem. This went directly against what I was trying to achieve. You are not Elling. You are the municipality.

Back to the drawing board. What if you could suggest what the character should do? A little nudge. You submit a suggestion, and the character responds by either accepting or refusing based on whether they feel like it or not. Hm… yeah okay, a kind of compromise. It felt one small step closer. A bit more agency, not a complete absence of identity focus. But still not quite there.

The economy that pulls you back

Let’s say you have a simulation you’re happy with. The characters do interesting things based on unique identities. They have needs that get met, skills that get expressed. Then the question becomes: now what? You need some progression, a game economy. What is the player supposed to do — not just moment to moment, but on a mid-level? How do you help the characters develop as people?

The classic answer is: make some skills, some talents. Different activities give you experience points that you spend on skills that unlock new, harder activities, which in turn produce more growth. Eventually you end up with a strong character and you’ve beaten the game.

I built this. Skill trees. XP system. 18 talents. It worked — technically. But it ground against everything the game was trying to be. Suddenly I was building Elling as an RPG character. Suddenly the player was focused on optimizing his build. And there it was again — the hero’s journey showing its ugly face. Character starts weak, player makes him strong. Exactly the narrative I was trying to avoid.

There’s a pattern here. Every system that gives the player control over the character pulls the game in the wrong direction. It happens almost by itself — you add a tool, and suddenly you have an RPG. It’s as if the hero’s journey is the default state of games, and anything else requires active resistance.

Flipping the perspective

Recently, I took the pattern seriously. The problem wasn’t just which systems I gave the player, but the perspective. Skill trees, talents, XP — these are all tools for shaping a character. But if you’re truly the municipality and not Elling, then you don’t shape people. You shape the environment they live in. You set house rules. You arrange interventions. You send people to courses. You hire help. And then you hope it works.

That might sound boring. But picture this: Elling never cooks. He always chooses bread and tea. Grete, on the other hand, makes dinner every day. You as the player notice this pattern and think — he should learn to cook. So you send him to a cooking course. An intervention from the municipality. Afterwards, he can cook. But he doesn’t choose to. Only when he’s hungry enough. And then he does it reluctantly, slowly, without surplus. Over time, he builds mastery. And one day he makes dinner without anyone asking him to.

It’s a small, quiet victory. No fanfare. No level up. Just a man making dinner. You gave him the opportunity. He took it himself.

Maybe that’s the Norwegian game. Maybe not. I honestly don’t know yet.

What I still don’t know

Will this be fun? That’s what the next version of Lifelines will test. I have a simulation that produces interesting behavior, and a model for indirect control that feels right. But “feels right” and “is fun to play” are two very different things.

The open questions are many. What is the concrete gameplay when you “shape the environment”? Is it satisfying enough to watch a character do something for the first time? Can diagnosis — reading a situation correctly — carry an entire game?

The only thing I know for certain is that the conflict is real. Every time I build a system that gives the player power, the game drifts toward the American hero story. And every time I remove power, the engagement disappears. Somewhere in that tension lies the Norwegian game. I just haven’t found it yet.