Welcome! I'm Victoria Mummelthei
undisciplined explorer at Freie Universität Berlin
I’m drawn to stories that move across media and to environments that feel more than just background. My research often begins with games, but it also reaches into film, photography, and environmental thought – especially around water, submerged worlds, visual atmosphere, and the blue in everything.
Research Areas
water and oceanic worlds
How games and other media imagine oceans, flooding worlds, and underwater environments, and how these stories shape environmental imagination.
environmental storytelling
How landscapes, ruins, and ecosystems tell stories in games, film, and literature.
stories across media
How narratives travel between games, film, literature, and visual culture, and how meaning changes across media.
virtual photography
Photography inside virtual worlds as both a creative practice and a research method.
bodies, horror, and strange ecologies
Moments where bodies, environments, and non-human life blur together in virtual worlds.
images, colour, and visual atmospheres
How colour, light, and visual aesthetics shape how we experience environments across media.
Recent Publications
The Incidental Shore: Beaches, Edges, and World-Feeling in Open-World Games (forthcoming)
M/C Journal, issue beach, edited by Claire Ramos, Jo Coghlan, Lisa Hackett, and Huw Nolan • 2027
The Body That Will Not Stay Dead: Resurrection, Routine, and Subtle Horror in Hades (forthcoming)
Sublte Body Horror: An Anthology About Having a Body (North Meridian Press) • 2027
Pre-Post-Myth: How Cyberpunk Games Were Never Post-Human At All (forthcoming)
Proceedings from the Mythological Game Studies Conference, online, 22–23 Mai, 2025 (DeGruyter) • 2027
Blood and Bile: Perspectives from the humanities, art and gaming culture on Blasphemous (forthcoming)
Open access anthology, Berlin Universities Publishing • 2027
On Stone-Singing and the Fantasy of Gentle Extraction in The Rings of Power (forthcoming)
Proceedings from the Tolkien Society Seminar 2025: Arda’s Entangled Bodies and Environments (Luna Press Publishing) • 2026
Hypersea Horror: Offshore Extractivism, Wet Ontology, and Lovecraftian Echoes in Still Wakes the Deep (forthcoming)
Lovecraft: An Evolving Mythos. A Companion (Peter Lang) • 2026
Flourishing in Decay: The Queer Ecological Hybridity of Miquella’s Haligtree in Elden Ring (forthcoming)
Ecocritical Perspectives on Literature and Other Media (Lexington Books) • 2026
Tragbare Sterblichkeit: Techwear, Verfall und Persistenz in Death Stranding (forthcoming)
Kostüm und Kostümierung: von theatralen, sozialen und technologischen Dimensionen des Rollentauschs (edited by Loredana Mingione, Selina Seibel) • 2026
Drifting in Deep Time: Oceanic Temporality and the Playable Sublime in Underwater Games (forthcoming)
Advancing an Understanding of Temporality in Play and Games (edited among others by Emma Kostopolus) • 2026
Zwischen Körper, Klang und Kraft: Der Thu’um als soma-akustische Resonanz in Skyrim (forthcoming)
„I used to be an adventurer like you …“ Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf The Elder Scrolls • 2026
Alles ist Form, nichts ist Essenz – Elden Rings queeres Spiel mit (Un-)Geschlechtlichkeiten,
"Could this be a dog?” Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf Elden Ring und Shadow of the Erdtree • 2026
Unveiled in Ashes: Hellblade and the Revelatory Collapse of the Self
Gaming the Apocalypse: collected articles • 2025
Bildet Banden! Eine syndikalistische Perspektive auf die akademische Celebritykultur
Reputation ohne Paywall? Wissenschaftliches Publizieren im digitalen Wandel (open access, Melusina Press) • 2025
Die fotografische Landschaft in digitalen Spielen am Beispiel von Far Cry 5 (Ubisoft, 2018)
Countryside(s). Fotografische Konstruktionen des Ländlichen (Waxmann Verlag) • 2025
The Sea and the Beloved. A Corpus-Linguistic Study of Frequencies, Keywords, and Topics in the Poetry of the Syrian Writer Nizar Qabbani (1923-1998)
dissertation @ refubium Freie Universität Berlin • 2021