Meaning and narrative in game culture within the context of digital folklore

In the 21st century, with the digital environment, human beings have entered into an instant socio-cultural interaction in a way they have never experienced before. Following the periods of oral and written culture, due to hypertexts, many forms of narrative have emerged in the digital environment. In addition, narratives in the digital environment are also performed as cultural products in which the oral culture tradition is lived. While cultural products in the digital environment affect the socio-cultural life of users in daily life, they also fulfill the functions of cultural transmission as a meaningful communication form in which traditional products are kept alive. In this environment where both traditional and new forms of oral culture elements are kept alive, it is important to reveal the dimensions and meanings of performance theory and text-oriented folklore theories that focus on text, texture and context, in terms of folklore, by putting them to test. In this respect, digital games are one of the cultural products that include a narrative with different communication elements in a digital environment with very wide boundaries. Digital games are one of the foremost products that allows folklore to live in the digital environment, with their unique structures which present different communication elements together, where cultural and social experience is experienced instantly with curious groups, both establishing their own oral culture environments and keeping the oral culture tradition alive, supporting and visualizing it with written forms. Digital games also incorporate various types of folk knowledge and pioneer new types of it. Many contextual changes that occurred in the process of traditional game culture to digital games also make it necessary to analyze these products in terms of folklore. Ultimately, this study aims to analyze digital games, which have an interdisciplinary position, in terms of intertextuality, interdiscursivity and intercontextuality in general aspects of the discipline of folklore, using the three-dimensional performance analysis method, which is modeled on the performance event analysis method of performance theory and includes text-centered theories in the process. In this respect, the performance of digital games in the cultural environment will be evaluated as a whole in terms of game, player, narrative and context, and its relationship with folklore in terms of meaning will be revealed.