REHUEL NIKOLAI SORIANO (CENTRAL LUZON STATE UNIVERSITY)

MYTH AND IDEOLOGY IN DIGITAL WORLDS: PLAYER CHARACTERS AS DISCOURSE ARTIFACTS : LINGUISTICS, DISCOURSE ANALYSIS, AND RELATED AREAS

This study explores the phenomenon of the Player Character within a curated selection of role-playing video games in English, analyzing its underlying aesthetic, psychological, and sociocultural features. Specifically, it investigates how archetypal structures are embedded within discourse, explores how these structures are used to convey specific ideologies, examines how archetypal images characterize the Player Character, and identifies its distinct features that are not present in traditional literary texts. The specimen text is composed of four characters from four role-playing games in English. As a limitation, this study operationally defines the Player Character as the main controllable protagonist of the narrative and the study’s object of analysis, excluding supporting characters. Furthermore, the study’s framework is based on Critical Discourse Analysis, which is an approach to understanding how language, discourse, and communication reflect power structures, inequalities, and ideological influences in society. The results suggest that these new mythological units, while containing universal recurring structures, are somewhat idiosyncratic and culturally specific. These parallelisms manifest on the psychological level of discourse, while structural differences emerge within the sociocultural discourse. This points to the conclusion that the universality or relativity of a certain text depends on the level of analysis, and is pragmatically determined.

Nikolai has dedicated much of his career to the study of world myths. He serves as a faculty member at Central Luzon State University, Philippines, where he imparts knowledge through courses on Mythology. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in English Language and Literature at Ateneo de Manila University.