Publications

The Incidental Shore: Beaches, Edges, and World-Feeling in Open-World Games (forthcoming)

Authors: Victoria Mummelthei

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)

Authors: Victoria Mummelthei

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

After a few hundred deaths in Hades, dying stops feeling strange. Zagreus dissolves and reforms so often that the player gradually stops noticing the body that keeps failing. This essay lingers with that quiet shift and asks what kind of embodiment remains when death becomes routine.

Pre-Post-Myth: How Cyberpunk Games Were Never Post-Human At All (forthcoming)

Authors: Victoria Mummelthei

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

Cyberpunk worlds promise futures where humanity has moved beyond itself. Yet their artificial gods, digital afterlives, and machine philosophies keep circling back to much older stories about transcendence and meaning. This essay follows that pattern and asks why even our most post-human futures still seem unable to imagine life without myth.

Blood and Bile: Perspectives from the humanities, art and gaming culture on Blasphemous (forthcoming)

Authors: edited by Jonas Müller-Laackman & Victoria Mummelthei

Open access anthology, Berlin Universities Publishing • 2027

On Stone-Singing and the Fantasy of Gentle Extraction in The Rings of Power (forthcoming)

Authors: Victoria Mummelthei

Proceedings from the Tolkien Society Seminar 2025: Arda’s Entangled Bodies and Environments (Luna Press Publishing) • 2026

In The Rings of Power, dwarves describe mining as “stone-singing”: listening to the mountain so that it yields its ore willingly. The phrase turns extraction into something that sounds almost like care. This essay lingers with that strange promise and asks what it reveals about the stories we tell in order to live with the taking of the earth.

Hypersea Horror: Offshore Extractivism, Wet Ontology, and Lovecraftian Echoes in Still Wakes the Deep (forthcoming)

Authors: Victoria Mummelthei

Lovecraft: An Evolving Mythos. A Companion (Peter Lang) • 2026

Still Wakes the Deep places cosmic horror on an offshore oil platform, where rusting infrastructure and ancient forces begin to blur together. The rig becomes a strange threshold: neither land nor sea, neither stable industry nor pure abyss. This essay follows that uneasy setting and asks what happens when Lovecraftian dread collides with the material realities of extractivism and oceanic environments.

Flourishing in Decay: The Queer Ecological Hybridity of Miquella’s Haligtree in Elden Ring (forthcoming)

Authors: Victoria Mummelthei

Ecocritical Perspectives on Literature and Other Media (Lexington Books) • 2026

Miquella’s Haligtree looks, by every measure of the Golden Order, like a failure: incomplete, contaminated, slowly rotting from within. Yet the beings who gather there treat this damaged place as sanctuary rather than ruin. This essay lingers with that paradox and asks what kinds of kinship and flourishing become possible in spaces that survive precisely through decay.

Tragbare Sterblichkeit: Techwear, Verfall und Persistenz in Death Stranding (forthcoming)

Authors: Victoria Mummelthei

Kostüm und Kostümierung: von theatralen, sozialen und technologischen Dimensionen des Rollentauschs (edited by Loredana Mingione, Selina Seibel) • 2026

After a long session of Death Stranding, the body carries a strange residue: shoulders tense, as if the weight on Sam’s back had briefly become my own. The game’s wearable technologies promise enhancement, yet constantly display their own decay—boots wear down, batteries drain, equipment ages in the rain. This essay follows that visibility of breakdown and asks what it means to live with technologies that do not hide our fragility but move with it.

Drifting in Deep Time: Oceanic Temporality and the Playable Sublime in Underwater Games (forthcoming)

Authors: Victoria Mummelthei

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

Underwater games such as Abzû and Subnautica do something unusual: they turn the ocean into a medium of time rather than simply a setting. Drifting through these worlds, duration seems to behave differently—slowing, stretching, or pressing itself into breath and depth. This essay follows a series of fragments to ask what happens when players do not merely observe deep time but briefly inhabit it.

Zwischen Körper, Klang und Kraft: Der Thu’um als soma-akustische Resonanz in Skyrim (forthcoming)

Authors: Victoria Mummelthei

„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,

Authors: Jonas Müller-Laackman; Victoria Mummelthei

"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

Authors: Victoria Mummelthei

Gaming the Apocalypse: collected articles • 2025

I play Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice and find myself thinking of apocalypse—not as ending but as unveiling. This paper doesn’t analyse Senua’s journey so much as travel alongside it, tracing paths where perception fractures into revelation. What emerges is less argument than exploration—following intuitions through territories where psychosis functions as methodology, where dissolution becomes a way of knowing rather than its failure. Through overlapping fragments examining body, voice, time, abjection, posthuman, memory, and revelation, I trace how Senua’s psychology materializes across multiple registers of apocalyptic experience. What if apocalyptic being—existence constituted through continuous encounter with its own unmaking—offers not breakdown but breakthrough? What becomes visible when familiar structures collapse? I have no answers, only this strange new hunger for questions that conventional coherence in (post-)apocalyptic games cannot contain.

Bildet Banden! Eine syndikalistische Perspektive auf die akademische Celebritykultur

Authors: c:hum

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)

Authors: Victoria Mummelthei

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)

Authors: Victoria Mummelthei

dissertation @ refubium Freie Universität Berlin • 2021