A Lift Home (S1:E4) for Dr. Dom Ford

Studio portrait of a man with brown hair seated and looking directly at the camera, hands clasped in his lap. He wears a beige blazer over a dark green textured sweater and a light blue button-down shirt, with a silver wristwatch visible. The background features a gray panel flanked by warm orange curtains.

A Lift Home is back and ready to take off, soon! In the next episode (S1:E4), live on July 8, 2026, we will take premium passenger Dr. Dom Ford from Dublin (EIDW) to Bergen (ENBR). The departure time will be 7 pm (Central European Time) and the estimated flight time will be around 2-2.5 hours. We may go live earlier, so you can watch our pilot configure the plane (ca. 6.30 pm).

Watch the Stream

You are cordially invited to watch the stream here below or you can visit our Twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/gamestudiesinthesky.

Inflight Menu: Myth, Lore, and the Worlds of FromSoftware

Dom Ford has co-edited a book called Scholar’s Codex: Academia Explores the Games of FromSoftware (Tune & Fairweather, 2026), together with Stefano Gualeni, Nele Van de Mosselaer, and Daniel Vella. The volume brings together scholars from around the world. They explore the themes, lore, and world-building of titles such as Bloodborne, Dark Souls, Elden Ring, and Sekiro, approaching these games the way the games themselves invite exploration: through close attention to individual items and their famously cryptic descriptions. During the flight, we will have time to talk about what it means to read a legendary weapon or a gathering bonfire as a carrier of meaning, and why missing items, cut content, and fan speculation so often become part of a game’s canon.

Dom also contributed a chapter on Bramd, an item from Demon’s Souls, using it as a way into questions of cut content, folkloric storytelling, and canon formation.

This editorial project builds on Dom’s longer-standing research on myth in games, developed in his earlier book Mytholudics: Games and Myth (De Gruyter, 2025), which sets out an approach to understanding games through theories of myth and folklore, treating myth not as a fixed object but as an ongoing process of meaning-making. We will ask Dom what drew him to myth and folklore as tools for game analysis, how this thinking carried over from an academic monograph into a book aimed at a wider audience of players, and what FromSoftware’s notoriously oblique storytelling reveals about how meaning gets constructed and shared in digital worlds.

Ford, D., Gualeni, S., Van de Mosselaer, N., & Vella, D. (Eds.) (2026): Scholar’s Codex: Academia Explores the Games of FromSoftware. Tune & Fairweather.

Ford, Dom (2025): Mytholudics: Games and Myth. De Gruyter Oldenbourg. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111341743

Book cover of 'Mytholudics: Games and Myth' by Dom Ford, published by De Gruyter Oldenbourg in the 'Video Games and the Humanities' series. A magenta and purple cover features an ornamental dragon-like motif overlaid on a faded Renaissance-style illustration of two figures, with a teal wave pattern along the bottom edge.

The Premium Passenger

Dom Ford (PhD) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Digital Narrative, University of Bergen. His research centers on reality formation: how we create, inhabit, and share realities within digital culture, particularly through digital games.

He received his PhD in 2022 from the Center for Digital Play at the IT University of Copenhagen, where he developed a framework for understanding game meaning-making through myth and folklore. This dissertation became the basis for his book Mytholudics: Games and Myth (De Gruyter, 2025).

Before coming to Bergen he worked at ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research, University of Bremen (2023–2025), researching how digital game communities are formed, maintained, and negotiated between players, developers, and the games themselves.

He is co-editor, with Stefano Gualeni, Nele Van de Mosselaer, and Daniel Vella, of Scholar’s Codex: Academia Explores the Games of FromSoftware (Tune & Fairweather, 2026).

The Pilot

Sebastian Möring has been a game studies scholar for many years. Since October 2023 he has been a Professor of Game Design at Macromedia University of Applied Sciences | Campus Berlin. Apart from teaching and research, he enjoys experimenting with formats combining games and science communication.

The Format

A Lift Home is a streaming format by the channel @GameStudiesInTheSky. The general idea is to virtually fly a game studies expert from a place where the last episode ended to the place where this expert lives or works. The idle time during a flight leaves a lot of space to speak about the expert’s work. The first episode of A Lift Home took place on the channel of our friends over at ScreenWalks on May 24, 2023. With our premium passenger Dr. Ida Jørgensen, we flew from Berlin (Germany) to Copenhagen (Denmark) and had a chat about the topic of simulation. After that we flew with Dr. Agata Waszkiewicz from Copenhagen to Lublin (Poland), where we talked about food in games. Most recently, with Dr. Joleen Blom, we flew from Lublin to Helsinki (Finland), from where our plane was moved to Dublin (Ireland), and discussed video game characters in transmedia storytelling. Check out the previous episodes: