Understanding ludic mythology: apotheosis in synthetic worlds

Abstract

Video games have cross-cultural appeal across national, religious and societal boundaries. Myths are ideologically important narratives shared by social collectives. The myths found in video games (ludic myths) are immersive tales generally experienced through play that influence audiences around the world. This thesis examines the intersection between video games and mythology. It enhances our understanding of the ways in which a modern medium reimagines ancient stories, it identifies how ludic myths differs from illudic conceptions of myth and it investigates the relationship between these myths and the players who interact with them. It explores why ludic mythology appears in video games and asks how it affects players.Ludic mythology—defined here as contextually important video game narratives that typically thematise deities, supernatural powers or heroic journeys and the associated mise-en-scene that validates these stories—has only been sporadically researched to date. There is no robust methodology for studying this phenomenon, so this thesis adopts a methodologically polymorphous approach. It adapts and develops the work of influential mythologists and semioticians in the context of salient narratological and ludological theories. Some of the thinkers it engages with include Roland Barthes, Joseph Campbell, Claude Levi-Strauss, Espen Aarseth, Edward Castronova, Natasha Schull, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. The research methods consist of content analysis of mythic video games, textual analysis of supporting material and auto-ethnographic reflections.The first chapter theorises ludic mythology as a complex cultural phenomenon regularly misunderstood or misrepresented in both academic and public discourse. It concludes that it has a prominent role in contemporary popular culture and yet it is not the product of any one genre, gaming culture or ideology. The second chapter evaluates the theoretical and conceptual ideas that underpin ludic mythology. It critiques the notion that synthetic worlds are separate from reality by arguing that video game immersion does not involve the player being psychologically relocated into an unreal space. Instead, it theorises that this process involves a change in the player’s perception of reality to include the content of the synthetic world. This suggests that video game experiences are real experiences and that players can engage with ludic myths in genuinely meaningful ways.The third chapter investigates differences between ludic and illudic mythic narratives. It argues that both have broadly similar content and themes; however, ludic myths should be understood as a distinct phenomenon because they possess qualities peculiar to the video game medium. Video game players work within structures crafted by game designers to co-author mythic narratives with identifiable points of origin that are malleable and capable of rapid change. These stories take place in synthetic environments and explore themes such as deicide that are problematic for illudic mythological traditions. The player’s choices determine the content and structure of these stories, so the chapter introduces a novel conceptual framework for representing interactive mythic narratives called the dendromyth. The fourth chapter analyses the mise-en-scene—particularly the iconography—associated with four mythic video games to argue that it immerses the player in a mythic space, empowers them in the context of that space, encourages them to embody heroic roles and gives them the opportunity and incentive to master the synthetic environment. It suggests that this is the case in both emulative video games that adapt illudic mythological traditions and originative video games that appropriate the iconography of these traditions to create new mythologies.The thesis concludes by theorising that ludic mythology contextualises and validates the player’s elevation to a transcendent position in the game world. The player embodies an empowered mythic character who creatively engages with a mythic narrative in an immersive, real, mythic space. This is conceptualised as an apotheosis in the synthetic world.