Mytholudics: Games and Myth

Games create worlds made of many different elements, but also of rules, systems and structures for how we act in them. So how can we make sense of them?

Mytholudics: Games and Myth lays out an approach to understanding games using theories from myth and folklore. Myth is understood not as an object or a kind of story, but as a way of expressing meaning, a way in which we produce a model for understanding the world and things in it. This talk lays out this approach and how it can help you analyse and conceptualise gameworlds. The framework helps to see games and their worlds in the whole. Stories, gameplay, systems, rules, spatial configurations and art styles can all be considered together as contributing to the meaning of the game.

Speaker: Dom Ford, University of Bergen
Registration is available online.

Speaker biography:
Dom Ford is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen, as part of the LEAD AI programme. His current project looks at nonplayer characters in games with AI-generated dialogue, how players respond to the use of this technology and how this use may challenge ideas in the philosophy of fiction like intentionality. He is also an editor for Eludamos. Previously he was a postdoc at the University of Bremen, part of the Media and Religion lab in the ZeMKI Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research, where he was also the managing editor for gamevironments.

His first book, Mytholudics: Games and Myth, proposes a method for analysing games both as conduits of mythologies within society and as mythological structures in themselves. It’s out now and published by De Gruyter.