Interviewed for Ludomythologies project

Exciting things have been happening in the world of games and myth. The project Ludomythologies: Myth and Ideology in Contemporary Video Games, has come out with its report LUDOMITOLOGÍAS. Entrevistas con la comunidad académica sobre juegos y mito, or Ludomythologies: Interviews with the Academic Community on Games and Myth. The report is authored by Víctor Navarro Remesal, Antonio José Planells de la Maza, Beatriz Pérez Zapata, Mateo Terrasa Torres and Alberto Porta, and features short interviews with myself and nine other academics working on games and myth.

The report is in Spanish, which I don’t speak. It’s great to see academic work in non-English languages, and also really cool that people find it worthwhile to translate my words. Nonetheless, since I have the original English words, I thought I might as well put them up here for those of you who also don’t know Spanish.

From: Remesal, V. N., Planells de la Maza, A. J., Pérez Zapata, B., Terrasa Torres, M., & Porta, A. (2026). Entrevistas con la comunidad académica sobre juegos y mitos. Mito e ideología en los videojuegos contemporáneos (LUDOMYTHOLOGIES). https://blocs.tecnocampus.cat/mito-ideologia-videojuegos-contemporaneos/files/2026/07/Informe-comunidades_compressed.pdf (pp. 7–10)

1. What’s your main operational understanding of myth?

The definition I use in my book is “A mythology is a naturalised model for understanding the world. Mythologisation works by framing a set of elements, asserting a natural relation between them, and bringing them out of and behind culture” (2025, p. 61). This is based on a combination of Roland Barthes’ understanding in Mythologies (1972) of myth as a way of expressing meaning rather than a particular kind of thing, and on Frog’s (2022) mythic discourse analysis, in which he understands mythology as a model for understanding the world and things in it.

2. Can you explain the methodology presented in your dissertation / book?

Mytholudics is the titular method of my book. It is based on Frog’s (2022) mythic discourse analysis, which identifies integers of mythic discourse and puts them together in equations. This allows us to show things, relations, superstitions, taboos, stories and more that are mythically important for a particular group of people at a particular time. Mytholudics adapts this method for digital games, paying attention to the fact the gameworlds are in some sense both fully formed worlds that can be inhabited, but also works of fiction that are trying to deliver a message. In mytholudics, the researcher takes the game on its own terms, as an emulated world of its own – games as myth – but also sees them as cultural artefacts produced by particular people at a particular time, influence by their own myths – games through myth. In an article, I consider FromSoftware games, for example, and look at how their worlds operate via certain shared myths to do with fire, desire and godhood, but also how those myths draw from and play with existing ‘real-world’ mythologies.

3. What advantage do you think myths have over narratives and ideology as analytical frames?

In this I’ve been very influenced by Frog’s (2018, p. 10) warning that “when myths are defined as stories, we may see stories where there are none”. He argues that in folklore, many things have salience in society other than stories. Taboos and superstitions, for example, or isolated mythic events, characters and mythologised relationships (such as what being brothers means). These are often understood as stories in such a way that the word ‘story’ means nothing in particular. What it also means, for Frog, is that we presume every significant thing in a society to be part of some larger, yet-uncovered narrative, which may not actually exist.

My understanding of myth can often be taken interchangeably with ideology. In my book, I try to pry the two apart in the following way (pp. 62–63):

The philosopher Slavoj Žižek (2008, pp. 15-16) defines ideology as “not simply a ‘false consciousness’, an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as ‘ideological’–‘ideological’ is a social reality whose very existence implies the nonknowledge of its participants as to its essence”. Ideology in this sense would rhyme strongly with a fully naturalised, broad mythology that constitutes a model for how society operates. Barthes (1972, p. 153) takes a similar view, arguing that we move “from semiology to ideology” when we “connect a mythical schema to a general history, to explain how it corresponds to the interests of a definite society”. Mythology for Barthes is “a part both of semiology inasmuch as it is a formal science, and of ideology inasmuch as it is an historical science: it studies ideas-in-form”.

Barthes never offers a concrete definition of ideology and how it differs from his understanding of mythology, but we can lay it out like this: an ideology is a totalising, naturalised mythology for how society as a whole works. Mythology can then be more granular and modular, and can be a part of ideology. A clear example is the Nazi’s use of Germanic mythologies and folklore in naturalising Nazi ideology and attempting to burnish its credentials as the saviour and champion of “true” Germanic culture in the face of supposed cultural pollution and a “cowed” post-World War Germany (Dorson, 1978). In some ways, then, ideology is a grand outcome of mythologisation. Mythology, by contrast, oscillates between the grand and the small, requiring both close semiotic reading of individual, seemingly inconsequential things and a situating of these things in relation to other things and to the long arc of history.

In this way, I find mythology a more useful analytical frame than either because it is more adaptable to the complex ways in which people actually make sense of the world in practice, rather than needing to shoehorn people’s ways of understanding the world into either stories that don’t necessarily exist, or specific ideologies that the people in question may not actually believe in.

4. According to your analysis, what are the dominant mythemes and myths in contemporary video games, and which ones do you find more interesting?

One of the more surprising (and interesting) things I found in my book was how many sci-fi narratives are thinly veiled fantasy narratives, typically using a ‘hero of prophecy’/’chosen one’ construction. E.g, Assassin’s Creed and Horizon Zero Dawn both ‘sci-fi-ify’ the ‘chosen one’ more typical of fantasy, by turning it into something genetic. They are at pains not to escape the mytheme, but to rationalise it through science. This suggests something powerful about the construction itself that it persists even between epistemic epochs.

There are also interesting tensions between the undesirability of endlessly repeating the ‘only you can save the world’ trope (adjacent of course to the chosen one) (see Jennings, 2022) but with the necessity for most games to have a high degree of agency and control. Games which tackle this tension interestingly are well worth exploring.

4. What way forward do you see in the study of myths and games?

Chiefly, the study of myth in games needs to move away from Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung. These approaches have their merit, but unfortunately the majority of work in that area has simply applied the Hero’s Journey onto random games for seemingly no reason. Fortunately, this move away has begun, with both critiques of Campbell and approaches (such as mytholudics and ludomythologies) that move away from his monomyth. Like game studies, myth is interdisciplinary, and the way forward relies on embracing this and encouraging different and fresh approaches.