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Dom Ford

Position

Postdoctoral fellow

Affiliation

  • Center for Digital Narrative

Short info

Dom Ford is a digital games and culture researcher. What connects all his work is reality formation: how do we create, inhabit and share realities within digital culture and particularly using digital games? Before coming to Bergen, he has worked in Bremen and Copenhagen.
Research

Dom Ford's project (2025–2028) at the Center for Digital Narrative focuses LLM-powered nonplayer character dialogue in digital games. First, from the perspective of players: how do they understand and respond to this emerging technology? Second, from the perspective of the philosophy of fiction: what challenges do AI NPCs bring to long-established theories regarding intentionality, agency and interactivity in digital narratives?

(2023–2025) at the at the looked at digital game communities and how they are formed, maintained and negotiated between the players, the developers and the games themselves.

Before that, he wrote his PhD (2019–2022) at the at the . For this he developed a framework for understanding how games make meaning based on myth and folklore, considering gameworlds to be 'otherworlds' whose construction tells us a great deal about how the developers view society. This dissertation was rewritten and reworked into a book, , published by De Gruyter in 2025.