Video Games are Mythology

So, the basics of this channel is the fact that our popular culture is our contemporary mythology. This idea underlies every analysis and every reason for every study. When we look at monsters like the Pale Man or the Babadook, it’s because these are inherently important elements of our cultural stories, telling us something important about what we find scary or what we find worth protecting. I get into the more general topic of pop culture as mythology in a previous video.

We’ve talked, as you may have already seen, or are just learning, about pop culture as mythology more generally. We talked about how the concept of popular culture can function as something inherently important, and how even something made for the purposes of making money can still be something someone finds meaning in. Today, I want to focus in on particular medium of pop culture to explore this further: video games. Today, we’re going to talk about how video games are contemporary mythology, and what that means when someone like me comes in to study them following this idea.

Lets start with a quick summary of the topics covered in our previous pop culture mythology video. If you want something more in depth than this, you know where to go. We explored the concept of mythology itself, and how myth is a meaningful narraive, one which an individual or a community uses to define themselves by, or to understand themselves better, or to better realise their place in the world.

So, let’s talk about the Legend of Zelda series. I did research into the Zelda series during my Masters. Side note, I’d love to return to the topic, but that’s a much longer discussion for a very different day. But anyway, during this research I spent a lot of time talking to people who love Zelda about why they love Zelda. I heard all sorts of different stories. I heard from someone who used the triforce to help guide them to make decisions in their life. I heard from someone who connected to an uncle, long passed, through his copious scribbled notes on the gamebook for the first Zelda game. I heard from someone who always cherishes the memories of playing the game while their sister played the recorder to the tune of the various songs.

Each of these stories have something important at the core of them: the games they are talking about have cemented them to something far beyond the game. They gave them something to use to understand the best ways to navigate a confusing and troubling world. They gave them a way to connect to family members who have passed. They gave them a connection to family members, and an avenue through which they will always remember and solidify their relationship to family members still living.

These are stories which connect us to something else. The strings of life which weave us together with other people or other places are formed best through stories, and these stories of video games make up these strings, tying us to our communities.

This is what I mean when I talk about video games as mythology. They not only tell us stories, but they form stories we then share and use. They are narratives which connect us and give us meaning in our lives. This meaning isn’t necessarily literal understandings of the world, like which gods created the world or what happened historically in the past, but more metaphorical meaning, or meaning thorugh active sharing with others.

This is all well and good, but what does this mean for actually studying these narratives? Sure, we can talk about what the game script says, or what locations the characters have to go to. But if a game is more than just its script, then how do we study more than just the script?

This is where some useful terms from structural anthropology come into play. Claude Levi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology, once described an inherent difference between the written myth, or oral recitation of the myth, and the ritual which accompanies the myth. He described the written myth as the explicit myth, and the ritual as the implicit. For Levi-Strauss, always a true linguist, always saw the explicit myth, the actual words themselves, as much more important than the implicit. However, other anthropologists have since altered this, and seen these two elements as much more even, or even flipped in importance depending on the community studied.

Jonathan Miles-Watson took this a step further, writing about Shimla in India. He wrote about how the implicit myth carries much more than just ritual, but also a lot of other elements of myth. Most notably for Miles-Watson, it was the connecting threads he found embodied the implicit myth. It was the way we connect to the landscape around us through the stories, and our own stories about the stories, which gives us this solidified connection.

For video games, I think these are very useful tools to think with. We can take these different considerations of various forms of mythology and apply them to the complicated interweaving of video games. Because video games are so much more than their script. They are also a script that keeps you from continuing if you’re not very good at the ritual playing of the story. Imagine if someone wasn’t allowed to continue telling their story about Loki because they just weren’t very good at reciting it?

So let’s think about the actual scripted narrative, the things the developers have coded and written into the game, as the explicit myth. This is the thing we can point at. The stuff I’m playing on the screen while you watch this. This is all the explicit myth (well, in a way, but we’ll talk about that). In contrast, we have the implicit myth of the act of playing. This is the way I, personally, play a game. Or maybe how I connect to the game. It’s the thought of an uncle while playing, as well as the choices made through the course of playing the game.

But these are not strict categories without overlap. As I mentioned, the clips playing over this video are a combination of both of these at once. Yes, they are the scripted game, the elements presented to us by developers. But they are also in the act of being played. There is an implicit mythology there.

Quick note: when I say “choices”, I don’t just mean the obvious things like dialogue trees, or games where your choices can affect the way the game unfolds. I also mean small things, like the way one plays. What weapon do you prefer in Elden Ring? How do you play? What elements do you carry with you? Do you prefer throwing Molotov Cocktails in Bloodbourne? These are all choices, just as much as dialogue options are choices.

So how does this work in practice, I hear you asking? Well, that’s obviously going to depend on the game, as well as on the person playing. But if we were to study a game, say like the Legend of Zelda, we would do our best to, at first, separate these two elements. While there is overlap, and these two forms of mythology are occurring simultaneously, to make our lives easier we should think of them separately at least at first.

So for the explicit myth, we would think about the game’s story, like if it was presented on a wiki. What are the steps that happen? What’s the resolution? Where do the various scenes take place? Think of it like it’s a book or a traditional myth in this step.

The next step is to think about how someone plays these games. We can do a wee bit of auto-ethnography here: when you play the game, what did it feel like? Were there any points you were scared, or you laughed out loud, or you cried? Where were you the most tense? What did it feel like to finally beat a boss you were struggling with for ages? While auto-ethnography is not everything, and should always be diluted with the stories of other people, it’s always a nice place to start.

And then we bring in other people. Talk to other people playing the game. What did they think about it? How did they feel about all those emotional bits you felt? But always leave room for the connecting threads. What else is happening outside of the game play experience that is affecting our players?

I know this video was a little more technical than other ones, but I thought it was improtant and was playing on my mind a little to reinforce some of these ideas. We could, theoretically, do similar things for all our pop culture myths. For example, the comments I get on some of my videos are wonderful implicit mythology stories people explain about their connection to the story, and the way the story further connects them to others. We are all just giant bags of mythology that are simply wrapped up in flesh.

Who knows, maybe we can think about how you connect to the videos as well. Maybe each video essay I make is, in essence, its own little myth, forming its own little strings that people can grab onto and tie to whatever they feel connection to. But that’s thinking very highly of myself and my videos. But it’s always a nice thing to think about.