Welcome! I'm Victoria Mummelthei

environmental humanist and game data analyst at Freie Universität Berlin

I’m interested in what stories games tell about environments—especially oceans and submerged worlds—and the bodies within.

Research Areas

environmental imagination

How media – especially games – imagine oceans, flooding worlds, underwater environments, ruins, and ecosystems – and how bodies, non-human life, and strange ecologies blur into these landscapes.

games as data

Using large-scale game data – ownership, tags, genres, and coded samples – to trace patterns across thousands of titles rather than relying on a handful of case studies.

Recent Publications

Speculation, by the Tag: A Virtual Census of Political Futures, Alternate Histories, and Catastrophic Worlds in Commercial Games, 2015-2025 (proposal submitted)

Faster than society gathers wisdom: Video games and/as speculative Fiction (McFarland, Studies in Gaming Series); editor: Marc A. Ouellette, Old Dominion University • 2028

retrofuturism/speculative futurism in games (planned)

Oxford Handbook of Historical Game Studies (still needs to be approved by Oxford University Press) • 2028

The HP Body: On the Hull-Life of the Quantified Combatant (accepted by the editors, forthcoming)

Sublte Body Horror: An Anthology About Having a Body (North Meridian Press) • 2027

On the Game Ocean and Its Time (accepted by the editors,forthcoming)

Advancing an Understanding of Temporality in Play and Games (edited among others by Emma Kostopolus) • 2026

On Cyberpunk Games and the Mythic Work of the Screen (forthcoming)

Proceedings from the Mythological Game Studies Conference, online, 22–23 Mai, 2025 (DeGruyter) • 2027