Dom Ford

Postdoctoral Researcher

About me

I’m a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bremen, part of the Media and Religion lab in the ZeMKI Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research.

My postdoc project focuses on community formation in digital games and I teach media studies, games and design in the ZeMKI’s study programmes. I’m also the managing editor for gamevironments and an editor for Eludamos.

I wrote my PhD at the IT University of Copenhagen’s Center for Digital Play. My dissertation, Mytholudics, proposes a method for analysing games both as conduits of mythologies within society and as mythological structures in themselves. I’ve rewritten this from scratch into a book, Mytholudics: Games and Myth, coming out with De Gruyter in 2025.

Here you’ll find links to all the other relevant internet places you can find me at, all of my publications, games and other projects, and the occasional blog post whenever I feel like writing something here.

Last update: 3 December 2024.

Interests

Myth and games
Digital game communities
Representations of the past
Reality formation in digital society

Education

PhD Game Studies
IT University of Copenhagen
MSc Game Design and Theory, 2019
IT University of Copenhagen
MA English Literary Studies, 2016
University of Exeter
BA (Hons) English, 2015
University of Exeter

Publications

Dom Ford (2024). Approaching FromSoftware's Souls series as myth. Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association, 6(3).

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Dom Ford (2022). Mytholudics: Understanding games as/through myth.

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Dom Ford (2021). The haunting of ancient societies in the Mass Effect trilogy and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Game Studies, 21(4).

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Dom Ford (2020). Giantness and excess in Dark Souls. Proceedings of the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG ‘20).

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Dom Ford (2020). Techno-giants: The giant, the machine and the human. Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere.

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Dom Ford (2019). Beyond the wall: The boundaries of the neomedieval town in singleplayer roleplaying games. Proceedings of the 2019 DiGRA International Conference: Game, Play and the Emerging Ludo-Mix.

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Dom Ford (2016). “eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate”: Affective writing of postcolonial history and education in Civilization V. Game Studies, 16(2).

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Conference talks

Dom Ford (2024). How players talk about disastrous game launches: What went wrong with Cities: Skylines II?.

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Dom Ford (2024). What went wrong with Cities: Skylines II, according to players: A qualitative analysis of player perceptions of a poor digital game launch.

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Dom Ford (2024). Community, alienation and the experience of networks: Maybe the real gamevironment was the friends we didn’t make along the way.

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Dom Ford (2024). A world to escape to? Digital gameworlds as otherworlds.

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Dom Ford (2023). The city, according to city builders: The mythology of city-builder games.

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Dom Ford, Sophie Thorkildsen (2023). The magic prison: Game rules as a tool for dread in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Inscryption. Extended Abstract Proceedings of the 2023 DiGRA International Conference: Limits and Margins of Games.

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Dom Ford (2020). That old school feeling: Processes of mythmaking in Old School RuneScape.

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Dom Ford (2018). Lost futures: In the presence of long-lost civilisations in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

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Dom Ford (2018). Speedrunning: Transgressive play in digital space.

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Blog

Longlisted for Enter Open Access Award 2024

I've been longlisted for the Enter Open Access Award 2024, celebrating researchers furthering the cause of open access publishing.

19 Jun 2024

Call for papers – Special issue on fictional games and fictional game studies

Along with Stefano Gualeni and Riccardo Fassone, I am editing a special issue of Eludamos on fictional games and fictional game studies.

16 Feb 2024

Why The Legend of Zelda Endures

The Legend of Zelda turns 35

21 Feb 2021

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Games

Too Many Crooks

Band together a ragtag team of criminals to start building your own crime syndicate. Start with humble raids on innocent hot dog stands and work your way up to well-organised casinos and banks in this crime management game.

25 May 2018