Dom Ford

University of Bremen | Uni Bremen · ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research

The cities of the ever prevalent neomedieval fantasy roleplaying game are integral to their gameworlds. They act as quest hubs, goals, centres for action and places of safety. Much of the loop of the game revolves around leaving the city to complete quests, then returning to the city again, and repeat. In this paper, I take a closer look at the bou...

The relationship between humankind and technology is fundamental, but also a longstanding source of unease, particularly as that relationship has become ever more intimate and irreversible. In this paper, I connect this age-old anxiety with the age-old figure of the giant, a monster similarly intertwined with ancient questions on the boundaries of...

I examine the prevalent construction of the long-lost yet technologically more highly-advanced society in the Mass Effect trilogy and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. First, I situate this construction within its long history, which finds a common touchstone in the myth of Atlantis. Through the lens of Jacques Derrida's hauntology, I consid...

This dissertation outlines a mythological framework for understanding how games produce meaning. The central question is: how does a mythological approach help to understand the way games make meaning? I first theorise mythology as it applies to games and play. This is expressed through a cycle showing how mythology is embedded into the production...

FromSoftware’s Souls series comprises five separate fictional worlds, and yet is considered a series with a ‘spiritual’ connection. Although the games share the same developer, special attention has been paid, both in popular discourse and in research, to the distinctive character of FromSoftware’s worldbuilding and storytelling. I argue that a myt...

Extended abstract presented at DiGRA 2023 in Seville, Spain.

What is ‘old school’ about Old School RuneScape? In this presentation, I discuss the history of the MMORPG RuneScape and the steps that led to Jagex in 2013 releasing a version of the game from 2007, titled Old School RuneScape, alongside their flagship iteration of the MMO, RuneScape 3. Through a lens of myth, I argue that a communal process of my...

Using the Dark Souls series as an example, I examine how a frame of 'monster of excess' can be used to read giantness in digital games. The monster of excess finds a paradigmatic example in the giant, an age-old mythic figure still prevalent within digital games. Many elements are directly borrowed or translated from other artistic forms such as fi...

Too monstrous to be truly accepted, too human to be entirely and comfortably cast out. The giant has traditionally held a unique position amongst monsters, an "Intimate Stranger" (Cohen, 1999, p. xi) who threatens the boundaries of the categories we impose upon the self, society and culture. In this thesis, I consider what the position of the giant...

In How To Do Things With Videogames, Ian Bogost argues that videogames offer “an experience of the ‘space between points’ that had been reduced or eliminated by the transportation technologies that began with the train” (2011, 49). But when we watch a speedrun of a game such as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo EAD 1998), what we inste...

Civilization V as one of the most successful and definitive works of the 4X videogame genre presents a clear narrative of empire-building that, I will argue, is problematic when set against postcolonial theory. With many studies lauding the series for its educational capacities I argue that with an affective turn to the role of the player, the game...

This dissertation aims to situate moral play under a structure of godhood. This comprise two distinct but intertwining elements: the player-as-god and diegetic gods. The player-as-god is a concept I will outline that describes the player-avatar relationship as a dualistic notion that encompasses the avatar as a distinct, diegetic character, and the...