[Keynote] Mytholudics: Games and myth

Games make meaning both as myth and through myth. Mytholudics is a framework for analysing games in this way. Myth is a term with a storied history. Here, I understand it through Roland Barthes’ assertion that myth is not a thing, an object, or a genre of story, but a way of expressing meaning. This allows us to see how discourse everywhere – not just in narratives – and everywhen – not only in ancient times as something we have ‘moved beyond’ – operates mythically. Mytholudics couples this with Frog’s mythic discourse analysis, a modern folklore approach to laying out more concretely how “integers” of mythic discourse amongst a group come together in a particular time. The result is something which can account for stories, but also more disconnected, dispersed and fragmentary, but no less important, mythic constructions, like singular events, superstitions, taboos, social relations, and so on. “When myths are defined as stories, we may see stories where there are none,” Frog warns (2018, p. 10). Instead, we should see myths as models for understand the world and things in it. Mytholudics adapts mythic discourse analysis for the study of games, taking into account games’ virtuality – that they are neither real nor wholly fictional, but worlds be can act within – nonlinearity – that games are often experienced nonlinearly and nonprescriptively both in terms of space and time – and performativity – that games are played and so approaching them as a static artefact is not enough, we must also approach them as performances. Because gameworlds are emulated worlds, they produce meaning both through myth, in that they inevitably draw on ‘real-world’ myths in their constructions, and as myth, in that they are worlds in themselves with their own internal logics, relations, histories and meanings. In this keynote, I lay out what mytholudics is and how you can use it. I do this through examples of how Victorian and American myths inform and constitute the gameworlds we inhabit.