Red Stage Entertainment

Playable Folklore: Digital Games and the Representation of Folklore and Cultural Heritage

This paper examines how digital games represent folklore and cultural heritage, arguing that the translation of living, variable cultural processes into codified, rule-based systems introduces structural and ethical tensions.

• Translating living, variable folklore into codified, rule-based game systems creates structural and ethical tensions, chiefly that tradition becomes stabilised as 'heritage' when it is managed or staged for external consumption.
• The paper proposes 'playable folklore' as a lens that treats games not as display cases for heritage but as cultural systems in which traditions are selected, stabilised, transformed, and contested.
• Its theoretical framework rests on four concepts: cultural presence, folk mechanics, digital folklore, and mnemonic hegemony.