A world to escape to: Gameworlds as otherworlds in datafied society

Dom Ford, University of Bremen

Games and media researchers have long argued that we tear down conceptual barriers between distinction like the ‘real’ world and the gameworld, and for good reason. However, it is important to consider why those distinctions were made in the first place, and what they might offer us conceptually. I do not argue that such distinctions are theoretically defensible, but that there’s a reason why they are difficult to dispense with. I propose that we can better understand gameworlds and their role in our lives and in society through the concept of otherworlding (Frog, 2020), the building of a world defined against and separated from ordinary life. I argue that otherworlding can be usefully applied to gameworlds and the communities that inhabit them. I then turn to notions of datafication and alienation, arguing that an increasingly datafied world feels more and more alienating, but digital gameworlds can offer an ironic escape from this, because games and game communities (when made and maintained well) inject a fundamentally datafied existence with meaning, rather than taking a meaningful analogue life and reducing it into data used only for profit and extraction.

Dom Ford is a postdoctoral researcher at the ZeMKI Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research at the University of Bremen, Germany. He is a part of the Media and Religions lab headed by Kerstin Radde-Antweiler, and his current project focuses on digital game communities and how they are formed, negotiated and maintained through collective mythmaking. He defended his PhD at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, in late 2022, titled Mytholudics: Understanding Games As/Through Myth. Dom has a book contract with De Gruyter for Mytholudics: Games and Myth, expected to be published in 2025.