Tropico

4X Gamer as Myth: Understanding Through Player Mythologies

This paper argues that digital games can be analysed as textual systems whose constituent signs are continually renegotiated through player interaction, while the broader cultural "mythologies" surrounding those signs persist and shape how they are read.

• Digital games can be analysed as ergodic textual systems whose signs are continually renegotiated through player interaction, while surrounding cultural 'mythologies' persist and shape how those signs are read.
• The study grounds its framework in Espen Aarseth's cybertext, Ian Bogost's unit-operational criticism, and Roland Barthes's semiotics, extending Barthesian myth to the 'gamer' identity and sub-mythologies such as the 'true gamer'.
• The 4x strategy genre is the central case, examining how signs like hexagonal tiles, beakers, and heater-shields carry specific meanings for 4x players that may be opaque to others.