Dr. Dom Ford

Vita

Dom Ford has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Religious Studies and Related Didactics and the ZeMKI Center for Media, Communication and Information Research since April 2023.

His current research project focuses on the negotiation between players, game developers and games themselves in the formation of a community around a game. To understand this process, he uses a framework of myth and mythmaking. This framework of myth was developed from his dissertation, which he defended in December 2022 at the IT University of Copenhagen, entitled “Mytholudics: Understanding Games As/Through Myth”. In this dissertation, Dom Ford drew on Roland Barthes’ Mythologies and Folklore Studies to develop Mytholudics, a method for analyzing games through a framework of myths. He also received an MSc in Game Design and Theory from the IT University of Copenhagen in 2019 with the thesis “The Giant in Digital Roleplaying Games”.

Before moving to Denmark, Dom Ford completed a BA (Hons) in English in 2015 and an MA in English Literature in 2016 at the University of Exeter in the UK, where he focused on Arthurian Romance, postcolonialism and digital games.

Most recent publications (Source: ORCID)

• Approaching FromSoftware's Souls games as myth. Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association
  http://dx.doi.org/10.26503/todigra.v6i3.2175
• Community, Alienation and the Experience of Networks. Gamevironments and Theories of Community. . gamevironments. 119–143
  https://journals.suub.uni-bremen.de/index.php/gamevironments/article/view/260
• A world to escape to?. Digital gamesworlds as otherworlds. Digitale Spiele im Wandel: Technologien – Kulturen – Geschichte(n)
  https://domford.net/conference-talk/ford-world-2024/
• Dom Ford and Thorkildsen, Sophie (2023). The magic prison. Game rules as a tool for dread in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Inscryption. 2023 DiGRA International Conference: Limits and Margins of Games. Unpublished
  https://rgdoi.net/10.13140/RG.2.2.32866.71364
• The city, according to city builders. The mythology of city-builder games. CEEGS 2023: Meaning and Making of Games
  https://domford.net/conference-talk/ford-the-city-2023/
• Ford, Dom (2022). Mytholudics. Understanding Games As/Through Myth
  https://domford.net/publication/ford-mytholudics-2022/ford-mytholudics-2022.pdf
• The Haunting of Ancient Societies in the Mass Effect Trilogy and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Game Studies
  http://gamestudies.org/2104/articles/dom_ford
• Giantness and Excess in Dark Souls. International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG '20). New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery
  https://doi.org/10.1145/3402942.3402966
• Techno-giants. The giant, the machine and the human. 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere
  http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/techno-giants-the-giant-the-machine-and-the-human/
• That old school feeling. Processes of mythmaking in Old School RuneScape. History of Games Conference 2020
  https://youtu.be/FtKy3gfXC1o

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5545-602X