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Playing at Religion Encoding/decoding Religion in Videogames Lars de Wildt

FACULTEIT SOCIALE WETENSCHAPPEN

Playing at Religion: Encoding/decoding religion in videogames Lars de WILDT Proefschrift aangeboden tot het verkrijgen van de graad van Doctor in de Sociale Wetenschappen

Promotor: Prof. Dr. Stef Aupers Onderzoekseenheid: Instituut voor Mediastudies

2019

FACULTEIT SOCIALE WETENSCHAPPEN

Playing at Religion: Encoding/decoding religion in videogames Lars de WILDT Proefschrift aangeboden tot het verkrijgen van de graad van Doctor in de Sociale Wetenschappen Nr. 401 2020 Samenstelling van de examencommissie:

Prof. Dr. Trui Steen (voorzitter) Prof. Dr. Stef Aupers (promotor) Prof. Dr. Thomas Apperley [Tampere University, FI]] Prof. Dr. Dick Houtman [KU Leuven] Prof. Dr. Joost Raessens [Utrecht University, NL] Prof. Dr. Bieke Zaman [KU Leuven]

De verantwoordelijkheid voor de ingenomen standpunten berust alleen bij de auteur.

Gepubliceerd door: Faculteit Sociale Wetenschappen

-

Institute for Media Studies, KU Leuven, Parkstraat 45

bus 3603- 3000 Leuven, België.

© 2020 by the author.

Niets uit deze uitgave mag worden verveelvoudigd zonder voorafgaande schriftelijke toestemming van de auteur / No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author.

D/2020/8978/8

Acknowledgements Good acknowledgements are about 200 words long. Thank the gods, first of all, because without them this thesis would just be about videogames. Thanks videogames, for raising me (and thanks family for letting them). Thanks Stef, for being not just a friend, but a supervisor too. Thanks Bieke and Dick for shepherding these wandering concepts and chapters. Special thanks for a very well-timed blood orange in my final week pre-submission. Thanks Joost, for very flattering feedback on my thesis, and for calling Stef to tell him I’m a good candidate for this job, when I forgot to tell you I put you down as a reference. Thanks Tom for teaching me the academic meta-game, and for inviting me to Melbourne. Merci Carl et LUDOV de m’inviter à Montréal. Many thanks to our administrative personnel, especially Ingrid, Paulina and Kristien, for keeping the department and programme running. Thanks academic peers and game industry figures who became friends (Dooley, Ea & Milan, Emil, Gerald, Joleen, Licho, Michelle, Osama, Pieter, Robbie, Roxanne, Tomasz, etc.). Thanks friends (dzięki Ka, Jan, Marie, Johan, Linh, Thomas, Elia, Wieger, Cindy, Laura, Suna, Jaron, Kamile, Eus, etc.), and all the food delivery websites that have supported me (you know who you are, see you Saturday). Special thanks to Wieger for design and typesetting. Thanks Cara, Nico, Rita and Lucy for your support.

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Abstract Young people in the West are more likely to encounter religion in videogames than in places of worship like churches, mosques or temples. This dissertation departs from observations by enthusiastic theologians who find religion everywhere in videogames – the largest cultural industry in the world. However, if religions are beliefs in supernatural substances given meaning to, culturally, through objects and social functions; then what is really religious about games? Playing at Religion takes an encoding/decoding approach to the appearance of religion in games by asking: “So what?” In other words, “What does the appearance of religion in games actually mean to the people making and playing them?” Chapter 1 reviews the literature on secularization, leading to the question of how religion’s mediatization changes it, and for whom. Chapter 2 contains notes on methodology. Divided into three parts, the empirical chapters concern developers, games, and players respectively.

Part I on Encoding opens with Chapter 3, arguing on the basis of ethnography and 22 interviews with developers of Assassin’s Creed that commercial interests drive a corporation to create a nostalgic ‘Marketable Religion’ that commodifies belief by reducing it to an acceptable version for the largest possible audience. Chapter 4 argues on the basis of 35 interviews with independent developers that, despite the promise of their independence, religious and irreligious ‘indies’ alike similarly cannot escape a standardized, inherited conventions of religion in game design that are divorced from their own beliefs, and are as commodified as they are Eurocentric in the resulting use of religion in game design.

Part II on the Games themselves contains Chapters 5 and 6: two content analyses of two genres – fantasy and the post-apocalypse – that show the extent of how games historicize and combine religious cultural heritages into ‘Eclectic Religion’ or even apply it in new ways, by using divine metaphors to deify ‘Awe-ful Technologies’ such as AI and the atom bomb.

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Part III on Decoding opens with Chapter 7, analyzing on the basis of 100 online forum discussions how games prompt players to discuss the meanings and meaninglessness of religion in videogames among themselves in a ‘Pop Theology,’ based on their personal religious beliefs. Chapter 8 further analyses the experiences of 20 such interviewed players to understand how ‘Playing the Other’ in videogames enables them to try on and drop others’ religious beliefs and identities as they wish.

The dissertation concludes that developers, games and players engage in a playing ‘at’ religion which reduces religions as sources of ultimate meaning to commodified, mediatized simulacra which allow for a ‘ludic epistemology.’ In doing so, games inspire us to play at religion like children play soldier or house: a rethinking of religious worldviews as no longer a question of belief or disbelief in ultimate truths; but as something to be tried on, compared and discarded. Thus mediatized, millions of players globally have all the possible beliefs in the world available to them, playing at religion with the push of a button.

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Table of Contents Acknowledgements 7 Abstract 8 Table of Contents 10 Table of Figures 12 Table of Tables 14 Chapter 1. Introduction 1.1. Seminal Daddies of Secularization 1.2. Privatization and Religious Change rather than Religious Decline 1.3. Defining Religion 1.4. Religion and Games 1.5. Encoding/Game/Decoding 1.6. Outline of thesis

Chapter 2. Methodology 2.1. Discipline / fields 2.2. What this is not 2.3. Approach 2.4. Methods 2.5. Data

Part I. Encoding

“Which choices lead game-makers to use religion in their videogames?”

Chapter 3. Religion is History: 3.1. Introduction 3.2. Ubisoft’s Religious Franchise 3.3. Methodology 3.4. Branding Religion 3.5. Marketable Religion 3.6. Conclusion: Branded Belonging

Chapter 4. Indie Dependence: 4.1. Introduction

10

17 20 26 30 32 39 42

47 47 50 53 55 58

63 65 65 65 66 69 77 82

87 87

4.2. Encoding Religious Worldviews 4.3. Methodology 4.4. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell 4.5. Conclusion: Religious values become commodified signs

Part II. Content

“In what ways and which contexts is religion represented in videogames?”

Chapter 5. Eclectic Religion: 5.1. Introduction 5.2. Cultural Heritage and Religion 5.3. Methodology 5.4. Remixed Mediations 5.5. Conclusion: Sacralizing the Fictional, Fictionalizing the Sacred

Chapter 6. Religion Beyond History: 6.1. Introduction 6.2. Religion in Games: History, Fantasy and Future 6.3. Post-Apocalyptic Religion 6.4. Conclusion: Awe-ful Technologies

Part III. Decoding

“How do players make sense of and relate to religion in videogames?”

Chapter 7. Pop Theology: 7.1. Introduction and Research Problem 7.2. Discussing Religious Games in the Public Sphere 7.3. Methodology 7.4. Discussing Religion in Digital Games 7.5. Conclusion: Pop Theology

Chapter 8. Playing the Other: 8.1. Introduction 8.2. Games’ Fascination with the Religious 8.3. Studying the Religious Other in Games 8.4. Methodology 8.5. The Affordances of Digital Role-Play 8.6. Conclusion: Now You’re Playing with Ultimate Meaning

88 90 92 106

111 113 113 114 119 122 130

137 137 138 143 158

167 169 169 170 172 174 188

193 193 194 195 198 199 209

11

Part IV. Conclusion

215

Chapter 9. Conclusion: Dei in Machina?

9.1. Which choices lead game-makers to use religion in their videogames?

9.2. In what ways and which contexts is religion represented in videogames?

9.3. How do players make sense of, and relate to these representations?

9.4. Implications: Four religious changes 9.5. Ludic Epistemologies: From Belief to Play (Concluding the Conclusion)

217 217 218 219 220 228

Bibliography 235 List of Publications 276 Nederlandse Samenvatting 280

Table of Figures Figure 1.

Around each part of developing a yearly AC release, Marketing provides the base, the Brand guarantees a consistent, recognizable ‘flavour,’ and Editorial’s approval tops the game off for release.

Figure 2. The character Cosmos in Christopher Yabsley’s Dungeon League is typical for a ‘holy Paladin,’ drawn from a “palette” of genre conventions.

Figure 3. Results in the Unity Asset Store for ‘religio*’ are mostly Christian.

Figure 4. Ifrit on their throne in Final Fantasy XV, resembling traditional depictionsof Lucifer in Hell.

Figure 5. Recurring characters Biggs (left) and Wedge (right) in Final Fantasy XV, dressed in German World War 2 and 1 costumes respectively..

Figure 6. (left) Ifrit as introduced in Final Fantasy III for the Nintendo Entertainment System, original sprite by Square Co., Ltd. (1990), taken from theuser-made “Fandom wiki.”

Figure 7. (right) Ifrit in action in Final Fantasy IV, re-named Jinn for the SNES release.

12

73

97 104 113

122

124 124

Figure 8.

A friendly Ifrit depicted in Arghan Div Brings the Chest of Armor to Hamza produced between 1562 and 1577 by an unknown artist, housed in theBrooklyn Museum’s Asian Art collection.

Opaque watercolor and gold on cotton, 79.1cm by 63.3cm.

Figure 9. Gino de Bini’s depiction of Lucifer for the cover of poet Mario Rapisardi’s Lucifero (1887).

Figure 10. The Satanic Temple in Salem’s representation (left) of Baphomet on the throne, by artist Luciana Nedelea; and Tom Ellis as the eponymous Lucifer in promotional material for Netflix.

Figure 11. An eclectic collage of FF’s depictions of (left to right) Odin (FFVIII), Minerva (Crisis Core), Bennu (FFXV), Shiva (FFX), and Leviathan (Dissidia NT), not always recognizably like depictions in their own culturally inherited traditions.

Figure 12. The community Shin Megami Tensei Fandom website lists the game’s Demons (creatures that are encountered and can be enlisted to aid the player/protagonist) by mythology. The scrollbar at the edge of the screen indicates how elaborate the list of subcategories is.

Figure 13. An encounter with fan-favourite monster Mara in Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux.

Figure 14. Confessor Cromwell preaching and praying next to the atom bomb in Fallout 3.

Figure 15. Megaton’s map (Fallout Wikia n.d.).

Figure 16. Harold, The One Who Grows, Gives and Guides,’ talking to the player in Fallout 3.

Figure 17. Atom’s place of worship, next to an irradiated water crater, in the Glowing Sea of Fallout 4.

Figure 18. The scroll that guides believers to Atom’s “HOLY word:” the periodic table (see Figure 19).

Figure 19. The Periodic Table that serves as the holy text of the Church of the Children of Atom.

Figure 20. The MoThEr aids player of Fallout 4 in their quest to become a member of the Church of the Children of Atom.

125 127

128

129

131 132 146 147 148 149 150 151 151

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Figure 21. Aloy tries to explain to a matriarch that All-Mother is actually a door.

Figure 22. Aloy in front of an activated “All-Mother” – a glorified, but artificially intelligent door lock.

Figure 23. GAIA and her subsystems named after Greek gods and goddesses, and one Roman goddess.

Figure 24. A hologram explains to Aloy and the player how cradle facilities (ELEUTHIA) work.

Figure 25. A hologram explains the educational APOLLO archive.

Figure 26. Aloy as a child with her “Focus” (the little triangular device above her ear).

Figure 27. Excerpt from the GameFAQs forum.

Figure 28. Excerpt from two users Debating Link’s religiosity on IGN.com.

Figure 29. The ‘Book of Magic’ item from The Legend of Zelda, called “Bible” [バイブル] in the Japanese original.

Figure 30. A depiction of Link praying before a crucifix and the Virgin Mary, from an official Japanese ‘Player’s Guide’ (Nintendo, 1992, p.151).

155 155 157 157 158 161 176 182 183 184

Table of Tables Table 1.

Table 2.

Table 3.

Table 4.

Table 5.

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List of informant and participants (ordering based on the International Game Developers’ Association’s “Game Crediting Guidelines” [IGDA, 2014]).

The main Assassin’s Creed [AC] games as per November 2019, with abbreviations used.

List of indie developer respondents, with their past and current companies and religious positions.

An overview of the most important AIs and their primary mythological origins (Horizon Zero Dawn Wikia n.d.; Smith, 1872; Grimal, 1996).

Final ranking of forums, and results of searching for discussions on games and religion.

68 69 91

159 173

Table 6.

Table 7.

Table 8.

List of participants (anonymized).

Game series by number of appearances in unique threads (20072017).

Four Religious Changes.

175 177 220

Chapter 1. Introduction During field work at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, I spent most of the week explaining my research to game designers. With over 28,000 of them attending GDC that year, there was a lot of explaining to do. The most common question was not why I study what they make: most game developers are acutely aware that their industry is the biggest and most interesting cultural industry in the world.

Rather, the most common question is always: “What does religion have to do with videogames anyway?”

The question struck me most immediately one time, not because the developer in question was so surprised, but because that genuine shock came from a developer that had been working with Ubisoft in Montréal for years. This is surprising, because Ubisoft makes the Assassin’s Creed series, some of which this developer had worked on. Assassin’s Creed is a game drenched in religion: it is about a faction of historically Muslim, now secular ‘Assassins,’ who fight the historically Catholic, now corporate Templars. Both are in search of the Biblical ‘Apple of Eden’ throughout history, in a Dan Brown-like litany of rituals, revelations and religious symbology. Few game series engage so centrally with the role of religious practice, mystery and heritage in global human history; yet this developer just had not thought of that.

It suggested to me three things. First, that religion has appeared so centrally in videogames over the past four decades, that it becomes unsurprising, barely to be registered by the very people who make and play them. Secondly, that the way some developers use religious rituals, signs or stories in the part of a game they work on, is so far divorced from their origin in religious practice and belief that it no longer strikes them as religious at all – just a convention of the genre, perhaps, or such a minute detail (a texture, a building, a piece of music worked on for months) that it loses its religious context until an outsider steps in. Thirdly, that the way in which videogames such as Assassin’s Creed, or World of Warcraft, or Zelda depict religion – whether historical or fantastical – is in such a way that it neither offends, surprises, or is necessarily even noticed by most, no matter how strong or absent audiences’ personal religious beliefs are.

17

Chapter 1. Introduction

At the same time, as players ourselves, my friends and I were growing up playing as Priests (Thomas), Druids (Johan), Shamans (Jan) and holy Paladins (Lars).

We gained our quests from gods, to slay demons or find sacred artefacts. None of this was odd to us, despite growing up in the Netherlands: one of the most secular countries in the world (Dentsu, 2006; WIN/GIA, 2015; Zuckerman, 2006). We were playing at religion, just as children play at being soldiers, at being a doctor, running a shop (‘playing shop’) or having a family (‘playing house’). In all those cases, we pretend to be in imaginary situations precisely because they are so different from our daily lives. For many of the people I have studied, as well as the people I have presented my findings to, playing at religion is about as far removed from our daily lives as playing at war. Parts and versions of this text have been presented in Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, the Netherlands, and other countries. These are some of the most secular countries in the world, with large percentages of the population reporting that they are “not a religious person” or are “convinced atheists” (WIN/GIA, 2015; Dentsu, 2006; Zuckerman, 2006). Notably, the percentage among academics and other highly educated people is even higher (Johnson, 1997; Sherkat, 2008). As a consequence, the inverse of the question above haunts me academically as well, from reception to presentation and over conference drinks – just as it haunts this text: What do videogames have to do with religion, anyway?

Surely, not only developers, players and academics; but also the reader of this dissertation should be wondering the same thing. Religion is treated in all the circles I frequent professionally and privately as an obscure, almost ridiculous and old-fashioned thing. Yet, or perhaps because of that, religions of all kinds are staples in videogames. They have served as an inspiration and a setting for games across decades, platforms and genres: and it sells. 2019’s best-selling Game of the Year was Sekiro, a game filled to the brim with Buddhist references and Shinto rituals. 2018’s Game of the Year award God of War’s ancient Greek protagonist moving to a Norse mythological setting. 2017’s top seller, The Legend of Zelda, is from a game series made

by Nintendo since 1986, whose churches, temples and Jesus-like hero is heavily based on its Japanese designers’ fascination with the magic and symbology of an exotic and mysterious faraway religion: Catholicism.

18

Playing at Religion

Examples abound. Indeed it is more likely for ‘young’ people in the 21st century (the average age of players in the U.S. is 34 [ESA, 2018]) to encounter religion in videogames than they would in church or anywhere else. This may sound simply provocative, but it is true that 2.2 to 2.5 billion players globally (>28.5%) and 338 out of 512 million EU citizens (66%) spend about 6 hours per week on average in-game (Limelight, 2018; Newzoo, 2017; WePC, 2019); whereas weekly church attendance for adults under 40 years of age is 36% globally, 28% in the US, 16% in Canada and 10% in Europe, and declining (Pew, 2018). Put colloquially, for many adults, especially welleducated Western-Europeans below 40 like me, church is a thing we see on a screen – where the magic is real – instead of on Sunday.

Yet, this is as much a thesis about religion as it is a thesis about videogames, and I want to stress the importance of both; and aim to contribute to fields studying either.

Nonetheless, whether I meet scholars of religion or of videogames, they will ask me one of the two questions above: what does religion have to do with videogames? What do videogames have to do with religion, anyway? Still, when I ask fellow researchers what games they have enjoyed in the past, invariably one comes by that is deeply immersed in religious meaning or history: Assassin’s Creed, Civilization, Halo, Destiny, Skyrim, Final Fantasy, Fallout, and so on.

Why are videogames, the biggest cultural industry on the globe (ERA, 2018; ESA, 2018), so often invested in religious heritage? More specifically, this thesis will ask: • • • •

Which choices lead game-makers to use religion in their videogames?

In what ways and which contexts is religion represented in videogames?

How do players make sense of, and relate to these representations? and How does this change religion?

19

Chapter 1. Introduction

The following literature review will start out, first, with a general overview of the role of religion and its predicted decline by early social scientists; arguing that most classical theories on secularization frame religion as historically un-modern.

Secondly, I treat important critiques of such straightforward secularization theses, namely that religion has instead been changing into privatized and mediatized forms.

Thirdly, I will argue that play and games have been studied as particular forms of such privatized and mediatized religion, in which the problems have been a functionalist bias (equating play with ritual) and a substantialist bias (locating signs of the sacred in games) without considering what meanings are attached to games by those who make and play them – let alone whether those are religious at all. Fourth, and as a consequence, I argue that to find out what the presence of religion in videogames means – and why it is there – we need to look at the encoding, texts, and decoding of religion in videogames, leading to a re-iteration of the research questions above (and an outline for how this thesis answers them).

1.1. Seminal Daddies of Secularization In the past 150 years, few topics have been so central to the social sciences as religion and its decline in the West. If Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim can be seen as the “founding fathers” of sociology (e.g., Connell, 1997; Boudon, Cherkaoui & Alexander, 1997; Baehr, 2017), then the discipline started out with a dominant view on religion’s role in society as distinctly un-modern – and bound to disappear or change soon.

These fathers’ seminal discourses in themselves can take on the teleological tone of religious prophecy. Comte’s view on religion is mostly epistemological, arguing that the “human mind,” and societies in general move through three consecutive and mutually exclusive modes of thinking, of which religious thought is the most primitive, and he presents this as a natural law:

20

Playing at Religion

“This law consists in that each of our principle conceptions, each branch of our knowing, passes successively through three different theoretical states: the theological or fictive state; the metaphysical or abstract state; the scientific or positive, state […] the third one is humanity’s fixed and definitive state.” (Comte, 1822a, p. 61, emphasis added)1 Marx, from a historical perspective, insisted that traditional power relations including religious institutions would inevitably be profaned, as industrial capitalism and its dialectic consequences overhaul socio-economic structures: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind” (Marx, 1848a, p. 10).2 Durkheim, in his early work (specifically: his Ph.D. dissertation), still argued that from a societal perspective “the sphere of religion” in society “is continually diminishing,” a collective process of regression which “did not begin at any precise moment in history, but one can follow the phases of its development from the very origins of social evolution. It is therefore bound up with the basic conditions for the development of societies and thus demonstrates that there is a constantly decreasing “Cette loi consiste en ce que chacune de nos conceptions principales, chaque branche de nos connaissances, passe successivement par trois états théoriques différents: l’état théologique, ou fictif; l’état métaphysique, ou abstrait; l’état scientifique, ou positif […] la troisième, [est] son état fixe et définitif ” (Comte, 1822b, p. 61).

1

“Alle festen eingerosteten Verhältnisse mit ihrem Gefolge von altehrwürdigen Vorstellungen und Anschauungen werden aufgelöst, alle neugebildeten veralten, ehe sie verknöchern können. Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft, alles Heilige wird entweiht, und die Menschen sind endlich gezwungen, ihre Lebensstellung, ihre gegenseitigen Beziehungen mit nüchternen Augen anzusehen.”

(Marx, 1848b, p. 5).

2

21

Chapter 1. Introduction

number of beliefs and collective sentiments that are both sufficiently collective and strong enough to assume a religious character.” (1893a, p.

120)3 Max Weber, by contrast, speaks about modernism as increasingly disenchanted, but he emphasizes (Protestant) religion’s role in bringing about modern disenchanted thinking. Weber argues that the early “scientific worker, influenced (indirectly) by Protestantism and Puritanism, conceived to be his task: to show the path to God” [1919a, p. 142]). However, he reads his contemporary society in 1917 as increasingly disenchanted, to which Protestant-influenced science is ironically a “motive force” (p.

139). This disenchantment of the (Western) world [Entzauberung der Welt] is a linear “progress” or “process of disenchantment” (ibid.), an “increasing intellectualization and rationalization” which “means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed.

Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualization means.” (ibid.)4 “En un mot, non seulement le domaine de la religion ne s’accroît pas en même temps que celui de la vie temporelle et dans la même mesure, mais il va de plus en plus en se rétrécissant. Cette régression n’a pas commencé à tel ou tel moment de l’histoire; mais on peut en suivre les phases depuis les origines de l’évolution sociale. Elle est donc liée aux conditions fondamentales du développement des sociétés, et elle témoigne ainsi qu’il y a un nombre toujours moindre de croyances et de sentiments collectifs qui sont et assez collectifs et assez forts pour prendre un caractère religieux.” (Durkheim, 1893b, p. 144).

3

“Die zunehmende Intellektualisierung und Rationalisierung bedeutet also nicht eine zunehmende allgemeine Kenntnis der Lebensbedingungen, unter denen man steht. Sondern sie bedeutet etwas anderes: das Wissen davon oder den Glauben daran: daß man, wenn man nur wollte, es jederzeit erfahren könnte, daß es also prinzipiell keine geheimnisvollen unberechenbare Mächte gebe, die da hineinspielen, daß man vielmehr alle Dinge – im Prinzip – durch Berechnen beherrschen könne. Das aber bedeutet: die Entzauberung der Welt. Nicht mehr, wie der Wilde, für den es solche Mächte gab, muß man zu magischen Mitteln greifen, um die Geister zu beherrschen oder zu erbitten. Sondern technische Mittel und Berechnung leisten das. Dies vor allem bedeutet die Intellektualisierung als solche.” (Weber, 1919b, pp. 86-87).

4

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Playing at Religion

Rationalization thus presents a double bind for Weber’s view of modernity: in principal, more is presented as technically knowable; but at the same time “science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’” (p. 143).

In all four thinkers, whether epistemologically, historically, societally, or regrettably, the coming of modernity presents an irreversible loss of certainty in religious beliefs and institutions: a process that sociologist of religion Peter Berger somewhat reductionistically summarizes as “the idea […] that the relation between modernity and religion is inverse—the more of the former, the less of the latter” (2005, p. 336). This idea, which Berger dates to at least Durkheim and Weber, has its roots in some earlier evolutionist thinkers: Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Culture argued that “primitive” societies use religion to explain things around them (1871); James George Frazer’s Golden Bough describes (mostly from his armchair) non-modern subjects and their beliefs as irrational, primitive and savage (1890). The notoriously religion-critical atheist Frazer projects a general disdain for, presumably, anyone who believes anything (and who hasn’t studied the Classics at Oxbridge), when he writes on the simultaneous existence of two paradoxical beliefs: “inconsistency need not have prevented our rude forefathers from embracing both [beliefs] at the same time with an equal fervour of conviction; for like the great majority of mankind the savage is above being hidebound by the trammels of a pedantic logic” (p. 1655) Lucien Lévy-Bruhl similarly wrote about the “primitive mind” in Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910 [the mental functions of inferior societies], published in English as How Natives Think [1926]), and in La mentalité primitive (1922; Primitive Mentality, [trans., 1923]).

Without wanting to reduce the thinkers above to any kind of agreement, secularization in general arises out of the 19th century as a teleological consequence of modernity: an inevitable historical process through which religion straightforwardly vanishes as pre-logical primitive societies evolve into the logical, rational minds of modernity. Modern societies no longer need religion. The end. Incidentally, 23

Chapter 1. Introduction

contemporary statistics do show a decrease in church attendance, baptism and other institutional religious rituals over the course of the 20th century, especially in the case of Western youngsters (cf. Dobbelaere & Voye, 2000; Funk & Smith, 2012; Pew, 2019). The resulting argument is that either religions’ social and cultural significance is diminishing as a whole (Wilson, 1966; Wallis & Bruce, 1992; Bruce, 2002; Norris & Inglehart 2004) or that institutional religion is retreating from the public sphere (Dobbelaere, 1987; 1999; cf. Habermas, 2008).

1.1.1. The Sacralization of Secularization Theory However, to come back to Berger’s statement: more recent theories of secularization have come to problematize linear processes of religious decline. Late in his career, Berger looks back on the secularization debate, stating that: “Since its inception, presumably to be dated in the classical period of Durkheim and Weber, the sociology of religion has been fascinated by the phenomenon of secularization. This term, of course, has been endlessly debated, modified and occasionally repudiated. But for most purposes it can be defined quite simply as a process in which religion diminishes in importance both in society and in the consciousness of individuals. And most sociologists looking at this phenomenon have shared the view that secularization is the direct result of modernization. Put simply, the idea has been that the relation between modernity and religion is inverse—the more of the former, the less of the latter.” (Berger, 2005, p. 336, emphasis original) This view was shared to the point that Jeffrey Hadden calls classical secularization theory for this reason “sacralized” (1987, p. 594). However, roughly a century after Durkheim and Weber, “the theory seemed less and less capable of making sense of the empirical evidence from different parts of the world” (Berger, p. 337). For one, it is seen as demographically skewed (Kaufmann, Goujon & Skirbekk, 2012; Kaufmann, 2008; Thomas, 2007), focusing first of all too much on the West (Swatos & Christiano, 1999), and its traditional Christian conceptions of theology (Luckmann, 1967; Heelas, 1996).

Secondly, and as a consequence, it denies both the resurgence of Christianity in North24

Playing at Religion

America, Latin America and Africa through the unexpected popularity of Pentecostal and other forms of Evangelical Protestantism (Berger, 2005; Meyer, 2004); as well as the resurgence of Islam in global demographics and the public sphere (Berger, 2005; Habermas, 2008; Thomas, 2007). Indeed, Europe here seems the only “big exception” of continued religious decline (Berger, 2005; cf. Berger, Davie & Fokas, 2008; Brown & Woodhead, 2016; Davie, 2002).

Beside its disagreement with empirical data, old-fashioned secularization theory (‘an increase of modernity means a decrease of religion’) is also theoretically criticized.

Again harkening back to the legacy of secularization’s roots in early sociology, Gerhard Lenski argues that “sociology […] from its inception was committed to the positivist view that religion in the modern world is merely a survival from man’s primitive past, and doomed to disappear in an era of science and general enlightenment.

From the positivist standpoint, religion is, basically, institutionalized ignorance and superstition” (1961 p. 3). Stark and Bainbridge extend this genealogy of secularization to the Enlightenment inheritance of all the social sciences, stating that “at least since the Enlightenment, most Western intellectuals have anticipated the death of religion. […] The most illustrious figures in sociology, anthropology, and psychology have unanimously expressed confidence that their children, or surely their grandchildren, would live to see the dawn of a new era in which […] the infantile illusions of religion would be outgrown (1985, p. 1).

When Hadden calls secularization theory “sacralized” (1987, p. 594), then, he does so because he judges it to be “an ideological preference rather than a systematic theory” (p. 587). Specifically, secularization theory is “a product of the social and cultural milieu from which it emerged […] fit[ting] well the evolutionary model of modernization,” while “beneath the theoretical statement is a silent prescriptive assertion that this [religious decline] is good” (p. 607). Bryan Wilson similarly accuses the classic forms of secularization theory of normativity (Wilson, 1985), and David Martin calls them “partly for the aesthetic satisfactions […] and partly as a psychological boost to the movements with which they are associated” (Martin, 1965, p. 176). All of this leads to Karel Dobbelaere arguing that, at the very least, it became 25

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“clear that the concept of secularization is now being used in sociology in different ways” (1981, p. 8).

1.2. Privatization and Religious Change rather than Religious Decline So which ways of thinking about secularization have emerged instead of the normative prediction that religion will inevitably decline? The three ways – there are always three – in which secularization has been used according to Dobbelaere are referring to either “decline in church involvement, laicization of societal institutions, or to religious changes” (ibid.). The first one is statistically straightforward: increasingly fewer (young) individuals are baptized, attend the services of churches, mosques, synagogues, and so on (Archbishops’Council, 2013; Brenner, 2016; Hooghe et al.

2006); nor do they identify with any institutionalized belonging (Pew, 2018). Secondly, religion might indeed be receding from the public and political sphere (laïcité); but that often (thirdly) seems to have resulted into religion moving to less institutional, more privatized contexts (Shiner, 1967; Parsons, 1977; Dobbelaere 1981; Tschannen, 1991; Gorski & Altinordu, 2008). As Olivier Tschannen argues (1991), many of the most influential works on secularization have been theories of privatization, including Bellah’s Religious Evolution (1964), and Berger’s Sacred Canopy (1967) – in both cases a pluralization of religious organizations leads to religion as a choice for individuals to privately make; and there is a consequent collapse of shared ultimate meaning or a unified value system based on religion. Steve Bruce, in one of the latest defences of privatization-secularization, God is Dead, concludes that: “individualism, diversity and egalitarianism in the context of liberal democracy undermine the authority of religious beliefs […] religion diminishes in social significance, becomes increasingly privatized, and loses personal salience except where it finds work to do other than relating individuals to the supernatural” (Bruce, 2002, p. 30) Indeed, scholars such as Bruce have drawn on surveys to show that the importance Westerners place on religion in the form of gods, churches and (Christian) doctrines is waning in countries like England and those like it (Bruce 1995, 2001, 2002; Bruce and Glendinning, 2003; Field, 2001; Voas and Bruce, 2004; Voas and Crockett, 2005).

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This might be true, but only when myopically looking at existing historically institutionalized forms of religiosity (Clark, 2012; Shiner, 1967): churches, rituals and what Grace Davie calls “belonging” to classical religious organizations (1990; 1994).

Others have argued instead that religion has just changed in ways that secularization theorists had previously not been able to predict, measure or define properly (e.g., Shiner, 1967). In Davie’s example, surveys suggest that Europeans and Brits believe in God, hell, heaven and so on, but just do not attend church or see themselves as belonging to an organized religion (1990; 1994). Whereas Davie looked for traditional religious concepts outside of institutional religion, Thomas Luckmann argues that there are other wholly non-traditional religious beliefs and practices emerging. Even if institutionalized church religion may be in decline (particularly in the West), Luckmann argued that it made way for a more privatized “invisible religion” (1967, p.

103). That is, religion and spirituality appear privately through bricolage (Luckmann, 1967; 1979), an autonomously constructed ‘picking and choosing’ of religious elements, or what has variously been called “do-it-yourself-religion” (Baerveldt, 1996), “pick-and mix religion” (Hamilton, 2000), “religious consumption à la carte” (Possamai, 2003) or a “spiritual supermarket” (Lyon, 2000; cf. Aupers & Houtman, 2006). These individually customized forms of religion are typically theorized as a shift from ‘religion’ to ‘spirituality,’ often identifying the latter with “New Age” and conceiving it as “post-Christian,” “alternative” or “holistic” (e.g., Heelas & Woodhead, 2005; Houtman & Aupers, 2007; Partridge, 2004).

1.2.1. Religious Change and Mediatization Religious change into privatized bricolage aside, religious themes are also surprisingly prevalent in popular culture. Religious media (and the material mediatization of religious experience) prove to be an enduring form of religious tradition changed into entertainment. Christopher Partridge observes a “re-enchantment of the West” through film, television and popular music, designating such pop-cultural influences as George Harrison and Buffy the Vampire Slayer as popularizing spirituality, the occult and other alternatives to institutionalized religion: a “return to a form of magical culture” through popular media (2004, 40). Indeed, just as popular music of the 1970s introduced tropes from oriental spirituality, so did television in the late 1990s introduce a preoccupation with the occult and alternative religions such 27

Chapter 1. Introduction

as Wicca, continuing well into the 21st century. Examples by Partridge are hit series such as Charmed, True Blood or Vampire Diaries. We may see the same kind of use of what Partridge calls ‘occulture’ in the popular books and films of Dan Brown, or the Assassin’s Creed videogames – the latter of which came out at the top of Dan Brown’s rising popularity. Both engage in speculative fictions that suggest more is going on beneath the surface of our own societies’ history, by using the mystery of the Catholic church to unearth all types of plots and conspiracies in Jerusalem, the Vatican and old French churches that reveal the magical, mysterious secrets of Opus Dei or the Templars. Lynn Schofield Clark documented ethnographically how teens deal with such interweaving of the supernatural and religion in fiction (2005), and found that teens’ engagement with series like Angel, Buffy or The X‐Files leads them often to reconsider their religious stance against (or sometimes back in line with) organized religion, while speculating about the place of magic and the supernatural in their own belief systems (ibid.).

From a production perspective, fiction author and cunning linguist J.R.R. Tolkien writes on the need for fairy tales, describing his desire to insert “enchantment” back into modern societies through fiction in order to distract from modern, disenchanted daily life (Tolkien, 1939, p. 49). Religion scholar Patrick Curry argues that Tolkien’s and others fantasy writers’ magical, pre-modern, religious worlds answer to “the ‘war’ against mystery and magic by modernity [which] urgently requires a re-enchantment of the world” (1998, p. 19). He adds that Tolkien’s combination of Christianity, neopaganism and liberal humanism, “[t]aken together, they comprise the whole implicit project of his literary mythology, and a remedy for pathological modernity in a nutshell: namely, the resacralization (or re-enchantment) of experienced and living nature, including human nature” (Curry, 1998, pp. 28-29, emphasis original).

Material religion scholar David Morgan goes as far as to argue that media consumption and religious experience are, in many ways, structurally similar if not fundamentally intertwined. According to Morgan:

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“Religion has come to be widely understood as embodied practices that cultivate relations among people, places, and non-human forces—nature, spirits, ancestors, saints, gods—resulting in communities and sensibilities that shape those who participate. […]

By the same token, media have come to be understood as technologies of sensation, as embodied forms of participation in extended communities joined in imagination, feeling, taste, affinity, and affect” (Morgan, 2013, p. 347) In his review of both of these definitions, by ‘widely understood’ he refers first of all to a tradition of research on religion which “departs from an older framework in which religions were defined as systems of ideas to which believers assented” (ibid.; Hoover, 2006; Lopez, 1998; Lynch, 2007, 2012; Orsi, 2005; Zito, 2008; qtd. in Morgan, 2013, p.

347). Secondly, he refers by media communities to the kind of shared community of meanings that Jenkins describes as “participatory culture” (2006), Stolow describes as “a body of readers (and embodied readers)” (2005), and Meyer described as the “sensational form” (2006), of “religious media, acts, imaginations and bodily sensations in the context of a religious tradition or group” (Meyer, 2012, p. 26).

In recent years, these authors have increasingly studied the mediated and material side of religion, meaning that the role of “things,” objects, rituals and media – books, films, games – have been re-appreciated in a “material turn” in studying religion (Meyer & Houtman, 2012; see also Arweck & Keenan, 2006; Chidester, 2000; Houtman & Meyer, 2012; Meyer, 2012). Concretely, belief as merely “an interior spiritualized religiosity” is critiqued as reductive (Meyer & Houtman, 2012; p. 3): a concept of religion that traces its roots to a modern Protestant bias which views religion as sets of rules and an immaterial relation to a superior being (Engelke, 2012; Keane, 2007; Meyer & Houtman, 2012; Pels, 2012; Wharton, 2014). According to authors of material religion, this “assumes a normative requirement that the private interior of individual subjectivity is the proper location for modern religiosity,” which is odd: after all, the material ‘things’ of religion – headscarves, mosques, crucifices – are the site of discussion about the role of religion in the post-secular, seeing as those are “felt to erode the supposed neutrality of the public sphere” (Meyer & Houtman, 2012, p. 2; cf. Moors, 2012). The fear of religious objects and rituals as a threat to secular public 29

Chapter 1. Introduction

space goes hand in hand with the religious function of such material things: to mediate humans’ relationships to their religious communities and their Gods. Hence, authors such as Houtman, Meyer and Morgan set out to study “the material coordinates or forms of religious practice” (Morgan, 2010, p. 6).

What this recent “re-materialization” of religious studies brings to the table is a clear idea of the central role of media in such functions and practices. Meyer and others argue that mediation and mediatization have always been central to religious practice (2006; de Vries & Weber, 2001; Morgan, 1999; Stolow, 2005): “Take for example the Catholic icon: though carved from wood, painted, and set up – thus obviously ‘human made’ –, to the believing beholder (and possibly its maker) it appears as an embodiment of a sacred presence that can be experienced by contemplative gaze, prayer, or a kiss.

In this perspective, the transcendental is not a selfrevealing entity, but, on the contrary, always ‘affected’ or ‘formed’ by mediation processes, in that media and practices of mediation invoke the transcendental via particular sensational forms.” (Meyer, 2006, pp. 13-14) In our contemporary times, not much changes except for the choice of media.

Bollywood films give Hindu communities the same kind of sensational experience of the sacred that the Passion of the Christ did for many Catholics and Pentecostals alike (Dwyer, 2006; Klaver, 2012; Morgan, 2004). Similarly, television is seen by many Pentecostals as the most appropriate medium to spread faith (Birman 2006; De Witte 2003; Hackett 1998), royal portraits are central to Thai Buddhist practices (Morris, 2000), and the list goes on with pictures (Meyer, 2010; Morgan, 1993), lithographs (Pinney, 2004), and let’s not forget: holy books such as the Bible and Qur’an.

1.3. Defining Religion For the purpose of this dissertation, then, the way I use ‘religion’ is above all as a cultural construction, mediated to the believer through objects (such as crucifixes) and actions (such as prayer). To define how I will use ‘religion’ throughout the next 200 pages, religions are ‘beliefs in a supernatural substance mediated by objects and 30

Playing at Religion

actions, given meaning to collectively.’ The definition is three-fold: epistemological, ontological and social. First, that the epistemological attitude typical for religion is one of belief, i.e., to hold something true without needing proof, or to directly observe it.

Secondly, what is (ontologically) to be believed in, is a supernatural substance, such as a god, gods, a ’force,’ or ‘something’ (i.e., “ietsism” [Elliott, 2017]). So far, this definition is a substantialist concept of religion as a “belief in spiritual beings” (Tylor, 1903, p. 424), a mysterious power or force (Marett, 1914), the superhuman (Spiro, 1966) or any superempirical, transcendent reality to which the empirical is subordinated in significance (Robertson, 1970). According to Markus A. Davidsen, the benefit of such a definition is that it “contains no reference to the forms (e.g. the presence of a canon) and functions (e.g. securing or disrupting social cohesion)” that are commonly associated with institutional religions such as Christianity (2013, pp. 388389). Furthermore, Davidsen regards it as particularly suitable for the identification of religion in unexpected places – in his case, Tolkien’s literature (ibid.) – in my case: videogames.

Thirdly, belief takes shape socially. As material-religion thinkers show, much of how people talk about and act on religion is social. When they study religious sensations they study religious cultures and the way in which objects mediate supernatural substances to them. e.g., As Meyer argues “we need to recognize the phenomenological reality of religious experience as grounded in bodily sensations […] as social scientists we have to come to terms with the mediated nature of experiences that are claimed to be immediate and authentic by their beholders, and authorized as such by the religious traditions of which they form part.” (Meyer, 2006, p. 16) What does it mean for religious experiences to be “authorized […] by the religious traditions of which [their believing beholders] form part” (ibid.)? By contrast to someone who grew up in a Christian or Hindu community, something like a crucifix or a lithograph of Kāli will prompt no sensation in someone who does not know of and believe in what those objects mediate for someone who does. Religious belief in a supernatural is, then, above all imbued with meaning collectively: through cultural 31

Chapter 1. Introduction

objects and actions. To be clear, even when individuals assemble privatized religions, such ‘pick-and-mixed’-religious individuals are bound by cultural objects; whether they are the self-help shelves of spiritual and mindfulness books (e.g., Besecke, 2005); or even the literature of Tolkien, for the tiniest groups of Elven worshippers to base their beliefs on (e.g., Davidsen, 2013).

Only when communities together form religions around collective beliefs and act on them, can social scientists observe religious ‘functions.’ Theories of religious functions focus on what religion does (Hamilton 1995, p. 17), by emphasizing the primacy of actions in addition to beliefs, in “uniting followers into a single moral community” (ibid.). According to functionalists, religion is a “system of beliefs and practices by means of which a group of people struggles with the ultimate problems of human life” (Yinger, 1970, p. 7). By contrast to communities with ‘just’ those functions (such as group solidarity, shared identity and moral views, etc.), such as football fans, religions combine beliefs and practices to struggle with ‘the ultimate problems of human life.’ Furthermore, only when religious people do things to express their belief, such as pray to an altar, dance around a totem, or even just talk about their beliefs to me, can we (etically) observe there to be religion. This has methodological consequences, which I will elaborate on in the appropriate chapter (2), the most important of which is that I am above all concerned with religions’ cultural dimensions: I am not interested in whether or which gods are (‘really’) there; but in how people experience belief and what role media objects – games, specifically – have in their experiences.

1.4. Religion and Games Regardless of whether people engage with religion in media to accompany their preexisting religious beliefs, to be confronted with other traditions’ beliefs or to wholly assemble new religions from media (cf. Davidsen, 2013), one thing is clear. Consumers distil meaning from mediatized, often explicitly fictional worlds, with the sensational form of videogames being increasingly prevalent in “people[‘s] choos[ing] realities that are experienced as real, meaningful and enchanting” (Aupers 2007, 267), even when these experience appear initially in contradiction to their ‘own’ religious beliefs. For example, Stef Aupers, on the subject of fantasy videogames, argues that by presenting a fantasy world full of gods and religion, they offer up on one hand a “secular division 32

Playing at Religion

between fact and fiction” by reserving magic and mystery to the fictional (2007, p. 250), while on the other hand offering temporary “realistic online worlds” that are eagerly chosen by consumers who “increasingly choose [such] realities that are experienced as real, meaningful and enchanting” (ibid., p. 267). Partridge shows audiences playing with worldviews in which witches are part of the everyday (2004); Stewart Hoover interviews believers that play around with “Buddhist stuff ” and “Hindu stuff,” which despite their Christian backgrounds they “negotiate media material into their spiritual and religious lives, [in ways where] playfulness rather than deliberation is the best description” (2006, p. 145). In such uses, “media are a playful context in that they seem to provide a relatively “low-stakes” place to explore. (ibid., p. 150).

In these cases, playing with religion – even or especially when not taken seriously – precedes meaning and belief. The importance of play in contemporary anthropological studies on ritual echoes this. Tanya Luhrmann observed that people entering witches’ covens in the late 1980s started by playing at being a witch. Stepping at first jokingly or playfully into the role of a magical or enchanted character proved central to crossing the border between the profane and the sacred world: “magic involves and encourages the imaginative identification in which the practitioner ‘plays at’ being a ritual magician or a witch” (1991, p. 333). After a while of playing at being witch acolytes, they became ‘real’ believing witches through what Luhrmann calls “interpretive drift – the slow, often unacknowledged shift in someone’s manner of interpreting events as they become involved with a particular activity” (p. 312). In doing so, she effectively argues that belief follows actions, rather than the other way around. Luhrmann stresses that while “one needs a concept of belief ” it is “optimistic to think that people have an ordered set of beliefs” with which they come to certain actions, rituals, communities and materials; and “it is hubris – and bad ethnography – to assume that people act first and foremost because they are motivated by belief ” (1991, pp. 309-310). Instead, they engage in “serious play” through ritual – an oxymoron in which they paradoxically “perform spells which they talk about as effective, joke about them as ineffective, and give several interpretations of their ends” (p. 309).

These witches “argue for a belief as a means to legitimize, and even to understand – to rationalize – the practice” (p. 310). Luhrmann is not alone: this reading of “play” and “role-playing” is at the heart of many works on witch communities and magic rituals (cf. Adler, 1987; Berger, 1999; Copier, 2005).

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Durkheim, too, on the basis of his ethnographical work with the indigenous Australian Warumungu, after witnessing the celebration of the snake Wollunqua, describes two things. First, that the Warumungu’s ritual actions leave behind the impression of two distinct worlds: “how would experiences like these not leave [a person] with the conviction that two heterogeneous and incommensurable worlds exist in fact? In one world he languidly carries on his daily life; the other is one that he cannot enter without abruptly entering into relations with extraordinary powers that excite him to the point of frenzy. The first is the profane world and the second, the world of sacred things.

It is in these effervescent social milieux, and indeed from that very effervescence, that the religious idea seems to have been born.” (1912, p.

220) Later, when Durkheim articulates how religion rests on experience, he stresses such rituals’ playfulness, i.e., their recreative lack of direct purpose: “What is true of practices is true of beliefs. The state of effervescence in which the assembled faithful find themselves is translated outwardly by exuberant motions that are not easily subordinated to ends that are defined too strictly. They escape, partly without destination, displaying themselves merely for the sake of displaying themselves, and taking pleasure in what amount to games. […] Therefore, we risk misunderstandings when, to explain rites, we believe an exact purpose and raison d’être must be assigned to each movement. Some serve no purpose; they merely satisfy the worshippers’ need to act, move, and gesticulate. The worshippers are seen jumping, whirling, dancing, shouting, and singing, and they are not always able to assign a meaning to this turbulence.

Thus, religion would not be religion if there was no place in it for free combinations of thought and action, for games, for art, for all that refreshes a spirit worn down by all that is overburdening in day-to-day

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labor.” (1912, p. 385)5 Both of these ideas, that play creates a separate world and of play preceding belief, are staples of writing on religion in games. Studying World of Warcraft players who take up spiritual and religious identities on role-play servers, Stef Aupers and Julian Schaap argue that “role-playing is constitutive for genuine, out-of-the-ordinary experiences and motivates ontological transformations” (Aupers & Schaap, 2015, p. 199), in the same way that Johan Huizinga stated that “the disguised or masked individual” not only “plays” the part, “he is another being” (1938a, p. 13; cf. Bartle 2004). Ryan Hornbeck adds that while playing World of Warcraft, players indeed reported the identification with their avatars as directly related to their ‘soul,’ prompting Hornbeck to theorize their experiences as “spiritual” and akin to “collective effervescence” (2012) – i.e., the type of group excitement over shared rituals that Durkheim describes as the origin of religion (Durkheim, 1912).

26 years after Durkheim’s work, Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga made the argument that play, much like Durkheim’s effervescence creates a separated time and space. Whereas Durkheim describes the “conviction that two heterogeneous and incommensurable worlds exist,” namely the profane and the sacred (1912, p. 220), Huizinga imbues the “consecrated spot” of play with the same potential, a “spot” often reduced by subsequent scholars to the metaphor of the “magic circle” (Consalvo, 2009; Juul, 2008; Salen & Zimmerman, 2004), but in full: “More striking than its temporal delimitation is the spatial delimitation of play. Each game moves within its play space, which either materially or imagined, on purpose or as a matter of course is demarcated beforehand.

Just as there is formally no distinction between a game and a sacred act, that is to say, that the sacred act occurs in the same way as a game; so also the sacred place is formally indistinguishable from a play space.

Although I have no specific interest in quantitative arguments here, and would not pretend this to be convincing of itself, it may simply be interesting to know that the words play and game occur far more often (154 times) than the word effervescence ever does (34 times), in Karen Fields’ translation of Durkheim’s Forms.

5

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The arena, the card-table, the magical circle, the temple, the theatre, the movie screen, the court of justice: they are all, in form and function, play spaces. That is to say, they are all hallowed ground, secluded, enclosed, sanctified terrain; in which special rules are valid. They are temporary worlds within the everyday, for the completion of finite acts.” (Huizinga, 1938a, p. 10)6 Huizinga neither differentiates between the “game and a sacred act” nor between “the sacred place [and] a play space” because of their ability to create a separate “hallowed […] sanctified” temporary world apart from the profane (ibid.).

1.4.1. Functionalist bias We see the same functionalist equation – of play as a ritual act, making games into temporary worlds apart from the profane – in Roger Caillois, who studied Durkheim (Henricks, 2010),7 and argued that “all play presupposes the temporary acceptance […] of a closed, conventional, and, in certain respects, imaginary universe” (1961, p.

19); Brian Sutton-Smith, in The Ambiguity of Play, calls religion and play similar, but “in effect rivals for the promotion of such altered states of consciousness” of becoming “lost in the experience and thus transcend[ing] everyday cares and concerns” (2009, p. 67), stressing later that while “religion and play are contrasted in western society as sacred versus profane; in many societies some forms of contestive and festive play have been received as sacred and as obligatory on ceremonial occasions” (SuttonSmith, 2009, p. 85; and see empirically, e.g., Anthony, 2014); finally, Victor Turner also “Treffender nog dan zijn tijdelijke begrenzing is de plaatselijke begrenzing van het spel. Elk spel beweegt zich binnen zijn speelruimte, die hetzij stoffelijk of denkbeeldig, opzettelijk of als van zelf sprekend van te voren is afgebakend. Gelijk er formeel geen onderscheid is tusschen een spel en een gewijde handeling, dat wil zeggen, dat de heilige handeling zich in dezelfde vormen als een spel voltrekt, zoo is ook de gewijde plek formeel van een speelruimte niet te onderscheiden. De arena, de speeltafel, de toovercirkel, de tempel, het tooneel, het filmscherm, de vierschaar, het zijn alle, naar vorm en functie, speelruimten, d.w.z. gebannen grond, afgezonderde omheinde, geheiligde terreinen, waarbinnen bijzondere eigen regels geldig zijn. het zijn tijdelijke werelden binnen de gewone, ter volvoering van een gesloten handeling” (Huizinga, 1938b, p. 10).

6

It may surprise game scholars that Caillois was a sociologist of religion, whose Man, Play and Games (1961), originates in an addendum to his earlier Man and the Sacred (1939 [2001]).

7

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compares play to entering a “liminal zone” (Turner, 1982), and others alike argue that in such spaces “serious” issues of everyday life, culture and politics are transgressed, reversed and re-negotiated (e.g. Geertz, 1972; van Bohemen, et al. 2014).

Many modern scholars of videogames and religion opportunistically perpetuate this tradition. That is: they continue to do mostly functionalist research into play, which takes ritual actions and play as unambiguously similar; or they do not take into account the experience of players – by either projecting it onto hypothetical players or by simply asking nobody other than themselves. The approach taken by Rachel Wagner in her approach to videogames is, much like Huizinga and Caillois’ approaches, that of a functionalist analysis: videogames are to her functionally like rituals, in that they are rule-bound and lead to moral communities and transcendent experiences (Huizinga, 1938; Caillois, 1961; Wagner, 2012). Oliver Steffen sets out to find “the basic structural elements of games that generate religiously or spiritually relevant experiences in players” and then quantify them (2014; p. 215), in a way that is possibly even more detached from player experience, including his own. Steffen promises to “examine the concrete phenomena of the above-mentioned religious experience, orientation, and disposition of actions in terms of their psychic effects (god mood) and ludological structure (god mode)” (p. 217), and scores those categories – making one game score exactly 13 points on objective-sounding categories like “meditation” and “flow” (pp.

226-230). Research like Wagner’s, Steffen’s and others’ suggests – in ways I am sceptical of – that the specific ways in which games offer up temporary rules and identities function to provide players with accompanying beliefs and, for one category of researcher, offer up ‘religious experience’ even to non-believers. Theologian Rachel Wagner is one of those who argues for the same conceptual overlap of ritual/games as Huizinga, Caillois and others. Wagner goes so far as to claim that religious rituals and videogames are functionally similar in their intrinsic attempt at creating an order aside from the “vicissitudes of contemporary life” in which “practitioners give themselves over to a predetermined set of rules that shape a world view and offer a system of order and structure that is comforting for its very predictability” (2014, 193), providing clear objectives and a unified purpose. The difference, she argues – much like SuttonSmith did (2009, p. 85) – is merely that religion claims to create this order universally, whereas games do so within a delimited time and space.

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In the abovementioned study by Aupers & Schaap, players did indeed report that they “play out their ‘better selves’, ‘magical selves’ or ‘higher potentials’ that cannot be expressed in everyday life,” (2015; p. 200). The theoretical background for games as a way to separate activities within a “magic circle” (Salen & Zimmerman, 2003) from the profane everyday is related to two mechanisms: the adoption of a temporary identity within the context of play; and the delineation of play by ‘magic rituals’ that distinguish the rules of play from the rules of everyday life. Theologian Robert Geraci, for instance, argues that playing a clearly defined role within the cosmological conflict and quest structure of games like World of Warcraft “provid[es] many of their users with the products of traditional religious institutions: communities, ethical systems, sources of meaning and purposive action, and feelings of transcendence” (2014, 75) that completes the attempt, for now, of conceiving “the entire universe as being humanly significant” (Berger 1967, 28). Indeed, whether play is taken as unstructured ‘make-belief ’ (e.g., playing ‘house’ or playing a wizard) or within a more defined ruleset (e.g., playing football), those in play engage in different behaviour than when outside of that game. Games’ rules make them a temporary world where different behaviour is expected. Plainly put, attempting to steal a ball from someone’s feet via a violent tackle is all right within a game of football, but considered odd were I to go out on the street to do the same thing right now. Causing injury doing so will lead to a relatively small penalty on the field; but possibly a criminal conviction on the streets of Leuven.

1.4.2. Substantialist bias As a growing number of authors have noted that religion takes a prominent place in videogames, their analyses of play as ‘functionally’ similar to religion have allowed a second bias to sneak in. Theirs is that by extension to play functioning like religious practice, games present supernatural substance. Academics from theologians to sociologists have picked up on this presence of religion in games, noting it in edited volumes (Detweiler, 2010; Campbell & Grieve 2014), methodology handbooks (Šisler et al., 2017), dissertations (Perreault, 2015; Steffen, 2017), and a large number of journal articles extensively studying and contextualizing games’ reliance on religious tropes. Sociologists, theologians and religious scholars identify religious beliefs and entities in games, finding Judaism (Masso & Abrams, 2014; Gottlieb, 2015), Islam (Šisler, 2008), Hinduism (e.g., Zeiler, 2014; O’Donnell, 2015) or “god” (e.g., Bosman 2019; Leibovitz, 2013).

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A large part of this research on religion in videogames, then, is occupied by the ‘enthusiastic scholar’ of media and religion. Without wanting to trivialize their work, these are the enthusiastic theologians, religious scholars and sociologists of religion who find reference to religious tradition in the unexpected place of (secular) popular culture and ascribe a supernatural substance to the presence of religious signs and functions, without looking critically at how these are consumed, or produced. Their project is predominantly indexical: it points out a presence of religious signs – images of gods; depictions of rituals; religious objects and so on – in 21st century mainstream culture and too often rests on its laurels, as if to say ‘here is religion. We have found it.

Checkmate atheists’ – to paraphrase common internet parlance. This enthusiasm for pointing out religion is apparent, for instance, when sociologist of religion William Bainbridge plays World of Warcraft and, “for many hundreds of hours, frequently encountering religious symbolism,” states that this “newest secular technology returns us to the origins of religion” (2013, p. 1-3).

Liel Leibovitz in God in the Machine (Videogames as Spirtual Pursuit) slides from the functionalist argument that “playing games calls on the same faculties as does shuffling into shul early on Friday afternoon or rising to church on a Sunday morning” (2013, p. x), into the substantialist claim that “the reason may very well be that video games, their bad reputation be damned, are a godly medium” (ibid., p. xi). More radically, theologian Frank Bosman delivers more than one book-length catalogue of Christianity’s appearance in videogames (2018; 2019), concluding that videogames are loci theologici, i.e.: “a locus theologicus, in my view at least, involves a cultural object – like for example a song, film or dance performance – in which God reveals Himself to us as Creator, Savior and Whole-Maker and in which this divine revelational act is reflected on in one way or another […] videogames [are such] loci theologici, as ‘finding places’ of faith and theology, of reflection and criticism about the hidden God of our Western world” (2019, p. 251-52).

1.5. Encoding/Game/Decoding This all may well be so, and the enthusiastic theologian has a right (perhaps a duty) to find gods in games. But it is one thing to observe that religion continues to make its appearance in popular culture; and another thing to ask who in the videogame industry 39

Chapter 1. Introduction

uses religious signs and why; how and which religion is represented in those signs; and whether and in which ways it is meaningful to those who play them. The attitudes and considerations of whomever produces and consumes religious signs in popular culture say something about how we treat religion in our cultures and economies; and those producers and consumers are often not theologians or religious scholars, who are too invested in their own readings to critically ask whether those signs are actually religious.

It is without doubt important to look at videogames critically (including by theologians), in order to observe what is and is not represented. But there are two problems with this, which it is worth to reiterate. One is a functionalist bias: if play functions like ritual, or even religion, who is to say that makes it religion? A lot of things ‘function’ like religion! For instance, Geraci describes World of Warcraft guilds as “virtually sacred” because games like it “provid[e] many of their users with the products of traditional religious institutions: communities, ethical systems, sources of meaning and purposive action, and feelings of transcendence” (2014, 13-14). Described in this way, the Leuven Anarchist Group would claim to do the same. Ajax, a popular football club in the Netherlands, does the same. Stella Artois does many of those. Are the Leuven anarchists, football club Ajax and beer brand Stella Artois religions, religious, or sources of religious experience? Probably not in any theoretically meaningful way, if it is without belief in a supernatural. A second problem is a substantialist bias, which confuses the signs of videogames with the substances of supernatural entities. By taking the gods or beliefs in videogames seriously as religious substances, enthusiastic scholars skip the question of belief; when believing is done by people – and people believe differently.

In the case of both problems, the solution is to do empirical, sociological research; especially since believing, belonging, making games and playing them are done by people. Do game developers make their games to function religiously and to convey beliefs? Some indeed might. Do game players experience games religiously, and do they come to believe? Some indeed might. But we barely know in which ways this happens, and how different developers and players make, play and understand all of this differently from each other. Indeed, it is a staple in communication and media research that communicative acts do not exist in isolation: there is at least one 40

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sender and one receiver. As Stuart Hall argued in 1980, the way that senders “encode” something and the receiver “decodes” it can be wildly different. Hall’s model of communication regards the three phases of (mediated) communication separately as such: 1. the act of encoding a message by a sender (which involves all kinds of intentions and considerations – such as its persuasive intent or whether or not and to whom it will sell); 2. the text of the message itself, such as a videogame or other media object (which is distributed, and has all kinds of latent meanings in it, whether intended by the sender or not); and 3. the decoding of that message or media object by consumers (who might from their own convictions, interests, [mis]understandings and societal positions understand the sent message as entirely different from each other, and from the original intentions and considerations by the sender).

A working class consumer of a soap series, for instance, may decode it differently than an upper-middle class consumer: Ien Ang found out that viewers of Dallas identified with different characters and plot points based on their class (1985, p. 105), and gender (p. 117).

Similarly, a Muslim gamer might look at the game Hanuman: Boy Warrior differently than a Hindu gamer would. And a Hindu developer would likely either make a different game than Under Siege [‫]راصحلا تحت‬, or possibly make it with different intentions. Furthermore, games are not just understood: they are actively played. Other authors who have used Hall’s framework for videogame analysis have stressed that videogames add “configurative” functions such as players’ affordance to make choices, walk around, subvert or break the game, and so on (Raessens, 2005; Apperley, 2010a; de Wildt, 2014a; Shaw, 2017). Raessens adds that some players may even come to produce (or modify) games themselves, based on their literacy of games’ codes, conventions and meanings, thereby adding another round of encoding to the economy (2005).

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Chapter 1. Introduction

For these reasons, to research the cultural production, representation and consumption of religion together is the only way to find out comprehensively what religious functions and meanings are offered up in videogames. That is why this dissertation employs a media studies approach to religion in videogames. That means that as much attention is given to how games represent religion (just as one might read a text); as to who produces, why and in which conditions; and who consumes it, why and in which ways it is meaningful to them. As such, I ask: • Which choices lead game-makers to use religion in their videogames?

• In what ways and which contexts is religion represented in videogames?

• How do players make sense of, and relate to these representations?

Based on my answers to these questions, I will return to the question of ‘what does religion have to do with videogames anyway?’ Or more specifically, in the conclusion I will ask: • How should we theorize the appearance of religion in the biggest cultural industry of the (supposedly) secularized West, and what kind of religious change does this entail?

1.6. Outline of thesis As a consequence, the thesis is divided into three empirical sections: encoding (videogame production); content (videogame representation); and decoding (videogame consumption). After this introduction and the methodology, six empirical chapters provide answers to the sub-questions listed above.

Chapters 3 and 4 on ‘encoding’ deal with the production of religion in videogames.

Chapter 3 is based on field work and 22 interviews at the main office of Ubisoft in Montréal (the biggest game studio in the world) in order to find out how religion is used in AAA videogames. By looking at one corporate case study, this chapter outlines the choices by which revolving teams of around 1,000 employees end up producing a specific representation of religion in one game series: Assassin’s Creed. Who decides to put religion into popular best-selling videogames? How does an amorphous team of 42

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creative directors, historians, writers, designers and others decide on what hundreds of programmers, narrative designers and others end up making a small part of? And why do Assassin’s Creed games come to incorporate religion in the way they do? Especially when it has been prefaced since 2007 by the disclaimer that “[t]his work of fiction was designed, developed and produced by a multicultural team of various religious faiths and beliefs.”

Chapter 4 contrasts this study of AAA design with a study of 35 individual independent (‘indie’) designers from different religious backgrounds, each of whom self-reportedly deals with religion in their games. Indie games (as both a genre and a production context) are presented as original, diverse, and often autobiographical: how does that translate to religious representation? Do indie developers represent their own religious positions, how do or do they not do so, and why (not)? By looking at the popular indie phenomenon, this chapter both reduces its scope to singular game designers, while also broadening its scope outside of the hegemonic AAA videogame industry and into designers hubs throughout the Western world, including the Netherlands, Belgium, North-America and Australia.

In Part II on ‘content,’ chapters 5 and 6 present two content analyses. By analysing two types of games in which religion plays a central role, I look at the signs offered by these encyclopaedic, participatory ‘texts’ themselves, separate from both the intentions of developers and the interpretations of players. Thus, chapter 5 analyzes fantasy videogames as a typical site of representing religion. It takes the Final Fantasy series as a primary case study, and as typical for what I call ‘Eclectic Religion:’ the combination of mythologies and active religious traditions along with more recent fictional traditions.

What are the consequences of placing these forms of cultural heritage alongside each other, as equally true and interchangeable? This chapter looks at the ‘fantasy’ genre as a pre-text of placing religion outside of history, despite there being contemporary religious practices of people doing exactly that: combining religious traditions into ‘multiple religious belongings.’

Chapter 6 looks into the future instead, through an analysis of post-apocalyptic science fiction. How do games such as the Fallout series and Horizon: Zero Dawn imagine human life, societies and religion after the erasure of contemporary society’s 43

Chapter 1. Introduction

existing structures? By choosing two games indicative of the genre, chapter 6 explores the concept of the apocalypse – a distinctly religious concept – to analyse how games form their own modern eschatologies. In what ways does the context of collapsed societies and lost institutions nonetheless lead to representing worship and divinity?

Specifically, this chapter analyses the way in which those very technologies that caused the apocalypse (the atom bomb, artificial intelligence), end up being revered as divine in these fictional worlds.

In Part III on ‘decoding,’ chapters 7 and 8 deal with the way in which players ‘decode,’ or make sense of the games they play. Chapter 7 analyses player communities at large by looking into the five most popular gaming forums as a way into gaming subculture. How do these ‘gamers’ speak about religion, and how do they deal with both their divergent religious backgrounds as well as their different interpretations of religion’s role in the games they play? These debates prove particularly interesting in the context of theories suggesting there is a retreat of religion from the public sphere.

Instead, the chapter proposes four ideal-typical positions from which players end up debating religion, faith and god in a ‘Pop Theology,’ prompted by the games they play.

Chapter 8, finally, further delves into the individual relationships of players with games and religion. Based on interviews with agnostics, atheists, Hindus, Christians, Muslims and others, this chapter asks how players on a personal level use games to explore the identities and worlds of those who believe differently. By ‘playing the Other,’ they may gain access to other faiths and worldviews, but what does that do to their own beliefs and belongings? And how does that relate to existing conceptions of religion and absolute meaning?

Throughout these six empirical chapters, a broad range of processes is laid out through which religion is produced, appears in, and is understood in videogames. In the conclusion, I will relate the alienated disenchantment of religious production back to the engaged re-enchantment performed by players and player communities in their varied use of the commodified signs of religion offered up by the games themselves. Finally, I will consider what implications this has for religious change, in order to propose my own theory on the role of developers, games and consumers in playing ‘at’ religion through 21st century videogames.

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Chapter 2. Methodology This dissertation is based on qualitative analysis of various types of data. While the specific method(ologie)s of each empirical chapter will be elaborated there, this section will briefly delineate five general methodological considerations: • Which disciplines and fields I situate this work in and how (cultural sociology, the sociology of religion, media studies); • what this dissertation is not (theological, deductive, quantitative, representative, effects research, nuanced); • which approach was taken as a consequence (to formulate a grounded theory, ‘sensitized’ by an encoding/decoding framework); • what methods were used concretely and why (interviews, content analyses, some ethnography); • what data those resulted in.

2.1. Discipline / fields This dissertation is positioned on the cross-section of three disciplines: cultural sociology, the sociology of religion, and media studies. This matters only as a starting point to make sense of what I am trying to do in the dissertation. Readers from across the communication sciences, religious studies, game studies and other related fields should hopefully be able to make sense of and engage with it.

By calling this dissertation cultural-sociological, I mean that I study culture as collective meaning: as a socially shared system of meaning-making between individuals.

In this project, I try to bring what Jeffrey Alexander calls the “cultural structures that regulate society into the light of the mind” (2003; p. 3-4), by understanding them from the individual level up. Cultural sociologists usually refer to Weber’s Verstehen as a 47

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specific method of ‘understanding’ such structures and individuals, by which they mean “the understanding of subjective meaning of social action” (Herva, 1988, p. 151).

David Inglis, referring directly to Herva, adds that there is “a need for us [cultural sociologists] to avoid misconceiving of what the famous Verstehen method of studying action involves. It seeks to reconstruct not the empirical motives of particular individuals; it is not an empirical psychology of action – but rather the interpretation of the broader meaning of actions that happened among particular types of people at particular times and places. It concerns less what a particular Puritan thought and did and more the cultural universe within which such a person’s thinking and activities took place and made sense. It therefore involves idealtypical reconstructions of particular worldviews, common to certain types of individuals, including cultural producers.”

(Inglis, 2016, p. 33) To clarify, an ‘Ideal-typical reconstruction’ for Weber is “not a description of reality but it aims to give unambiguous means of expression to such a description” (Weber, 1904, p. 90), such as, say, the idea of a ‘Ph.D. candidate’ as someone who writes a dissertation, when in reality that person is more complex: they may have (once had) hobbies, sleep, and friends beside their writing a dissertation, but the ideal-type nonetheless serves analytically to delineate, categorize and distinguish parts of empirical reality; even though individual people will be more ambiguous and complex combinations of ideal-typical ‘Ph.D. candidates’ and other categories (such as ‘teachers,’ ‘gamers,’ ‘readers,’ or ‘people with healthy relationships’). An ideal-type, consequently, to Weber “is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct (Gedankenbild). In its conceptual purity, this mental construct (Gedankenbild) cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality.” (Weber, 1904, p. 90-91) 48

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In the broadest theoretical sense, I approach cultural and social meaning as a social constructivist and a symbolic interactionist. Although there are surely differences between the two positions (such as individuals’ amount of agency to create meaning), for this dissertation it means roughly that I take knowledge to be socially constructed rather than individually: people, in other words, create shared symbolic worlds through social interactions and their resulting actions (Blumer, 1969; Denzin, 2008; Mead, 1934). These shared symbolic worlds are nonetheless taken for granted as commonsensical and objective (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Eberle, 2016).

Finally, the reason I start my methodology with cultural sociology is because I do not treat it as a sub-discipline of the social sciences, and more generally following Dick Houtman and Peter Achterberg, not as just another “specialization (besides political sociology, sociology of religion, sociology of work and organization, sociology of crime and deviance, (etc.) in an already overly fragmented discipline, but rather as a general and substantially non-specialized sociology. Its principal ambition should be to demonstrate to non-cultural sociologists, and indeed to researchers in disciplines beyond sociology and the social sciences, that taking culture more seriously yields increases in explanatory potential.” (2016, p. 226) As a consequence, I position this cultural-sociological dissertation within the specialization of the sociology of religion.

By calling this dissertation a sociology of religion, I mean that it specializes in, and follows up on the literature on religion as studied in the social sciences – which has been a central specialization from the social sciences’ inception. For more on what that entails and how this dissertation’s research design results from that, see the literature overview. Generally, the sociology of religion researches and theorizes how human societies and/or individuals experience and practice religion. As such, I have defined religion in the introduction as beliefs in a supernatural substance mediated by objects and actions, given meaning to collectively.

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By calling this dissertation part of media studies, I mean that field of cultural studies within communication studies that focuses on media – such as literature, television, film, videogames, and so on. Much in line with my approach to religion, I consider media (following David Morgan, as elaborated on in the literature) as objects that mediate values and worldviews through their practical use by individuals, who often gather into communities to reconstruct those values and worldviews together.

Specifically, media objects are objects in the world (whether printed, 3D-printed, downloaded, broadcast, streamed or otherwise) that are made in certain material conditions by collectives of producers (variously engaged in different parts of producing that media object – e.g., its script, its funding, its acting, its distribution, and so on) and then understood by communities of consumers: all of these people’s personal understandings of what that media object is or means may be widely divergent. In other words something is encoded, transmitted via a medium (text or otherwise), and decoded; more about which below under my approaches. I specifically focus on the medium of videogames (and its related academic field of game studies), here, because of the medium’s sheer dominance in popular culture as the largest cultural industry; because of popular games’ apparent dependence on religious content; and because of the theoretical relations between play and religion set out in the literature overview.

That being said, within these disciplines and fields I want to be an opportunistic omnivore: to use theory and concepts as they are fit to explain what I am studying; but always to check them against the backdrop of cultural-sociological Verstehen, within the sociological tradition of studying religion, and in engagement with the current debates of the fields of media studies, game studies and (broadly) communication sciences. Hence, I might use political-economical, neo-marxist, postcolonialist or other theories where they may clarify empirical findings, but the aim is always to approach them from the disciplinary perspectives set out above.

2.2. What this is not However, delineation is as much about what something is as about what something is not. There are many things that this dissertation is not, and that I am not interested in doing (here). It is not theological, it is not trying to establish an objective ontology of gods or games, it is not deductively aiming at quantifiable or generalizable norms based on 50

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representatively sampled data, it is not effects research, and it is not necessarily nuanced.

By calling this non-theological and non-ontological, I mean that I am primarily interested in how individuals culturally make sense of religion and videogames. Much of this follows from my alignment with cultural sociology, as described above. This as opposed to theologians, who study religion from the inside, and are disciplinarily invested in what god is in their tradition. For the same reason of my alignment with cultural sociology, this is also not an ontological project in which I argue for what gods or games are in any universal sense. Instead, I have asked my participants what either of those mean for them, and taken them seriously when they explained – no matter how different their experiences and convictions were from each other’s and my own. The literature on religion in games was constantly compared to my participants’ experiences, which were sometimes in accordance, and more often in contrast to the way the literature on religion, media and play theorizes those concepts – my empirical chapters and conclusion will elaborate especially on these contrasts. Furthermore, what religion is to my interviewees necessarily has some ontological implications for what religion is in videogames, and I will reflect on those implications in my conclusion.

A brief note on not doing videogames ontology: I am steering clear, as much as possible, from discussions on what videogames are – whether they are predominantly rules or narratives; whether they are art; combinations of media; continuations of or breaks with pre-digital games, and so on. That is a whole other project, and many such projects have been started: I will leave them to it (see, e.g., Aarseth, 1997; 2001; Apperley, 2006; Bogost, 2007; 2008; Carr, et al. 2006; Crogan, 2004; King & Krzywinska, 2006; Murray 1997; 2005; Pearce, 2005; Raessens, 2005; See Apperley, 2019 and Aarseth, 2019 for a critique on lending importance to game studies’ ontological debates) – for the same reason I refer by ‘games’ mostly to ‘videogames’ unless explicitly stated (i.e., as opposed to children’s games, drinking games, board games, table top, and so on), preferring the latter over similar terms such as ‘computer games,’ ‘digital games,’ ‘video games’ with a space, and so on.

By calling this not a deductive project that is also not aiming at generalizable, quantified norms based on representatively sampled data, I mean that it is an inductive project that aims at understanding culture through theoretical selection of individuals, even when they may represent a margin outside of the norm. The aim is to arrive at 51

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a cultural-sociological theorization of religion’s appearance in videogames in light of religious change through understanding (Verstehen) producers, games and consumers’ thinking and actions;8 but I cannot definitively say whether what I find is true for (or exhaustively theorizes the experiences of) all game-makers, games and players.

Perhaps, and intuitively I highly doubt this, 78 interview participants and thousands of online discussants are the only ones in the world who think and feel what they say they do in this dissertation – and that they would do so apart from any kind of collective culture. A deductive confirmation of those thoughts, feelings, discourses (and resulting theories) presented in this dissertation could be interesting – although I doubt its necessity. Either way it is not part of this dissertation.

Similarly I do not present media ‘effects:’ I am in search of developers’ considerations and the working of their industry (encoding); the varied contents and interpretive possibilities that games offer (content); and players’ meaning-making in interacting with those games (decoding), without looking at any general, quantifiable, statistically representative attitude changes as a consequence: that, too, might be interesting but it is not part of this dissertation.

This dissertation is also not nuanced. Without wanting to take on the harsh language of those who have written on these matters, most notably Kieran Healy’s Fuck Nuance paper (2017), in this dissertation I follow Healy’s conviction that “nuance inhibits the abstraction on which good theory depends” (ibid., p. 121). Healy’s description of abstraction and its role in productive theory is very similar to how Weber, Herva and Inglis describe ideal-types: “Abstraction means throwing away detail, getting rid of particulars.

We begin with a variety of different things or events—objects, people, countries—and by ignoring how they differ, we produce some abstract concept like ‘furniture,’ ‘honor killing,’ ‘social-democratic welfare state,’ If understanding sounds vague I mean, again, Verstehen, i.e., “the interpretation of the broader meaning of actions that happened among particular types of people [in] the cultural universe within which such a person’s thinking and activities took place and made sense. It therefore involves idealtypical reconstructions of particular worldviews, common to certain types of individuals, including cultural producers” (Inglis, 2016, p. 33).

8

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or ‘white privilege.’” (Healy, 2017, p. 121) ‘Good theory,’ cites Healy, does not need to “represent or correspond to a distinctive kind of object” (Rosen, 2014, qtd. in Healy, 2017, p. 121), just like Weber described the “conceptual purity” of theoretical, analytical constructs above “not be found empirically anywhere in reality” (Weber, 1904, p. 90), but good theory nonetheless. Good theory is original, productive, and interesting: it explains something in a new way that opens it up to further thinking. What makes a theory good like that is different each time, and according to Healy “depends on whether the insight it expresses is a real one, and that is a matter of discovery” (Healy, 2017, p. 122). What good theory is not has been more clearly described. Healy describes not-good theory as nuanced: as not ‘accounting for,’ ‘addressing’ or ‘dealing with’ nuances that are certainly interesting but are not productive and relevant within the current project. For instance, this dissertation will not (fully) account for game industry working conditions, nor address gender representation in games, nor deal with the role of postcolonialism on Hindu gamers playing Western games – although all of those are relevant to religion in videogames: just not to the research questions I have posed, nor to the way in which I have theorized my answers.

Others have also articulated productively what theory is not. Robert Sutton and Barry Staw propose that references, data, variables, diagrams and hypotheses cannot stand in for good theory (1995). Instead, the theories of referenced literature should be reproduced, then built on or problematized. Data should be analysed to produce an argument, not stand for itself as somehow ‘fact.’ Variables do not explain why something is as it appears. Diagrams make claims about how something works but give no account for why it is so. Hypotheses can only be a result of theory (to be deductively tested), saying what should happen, but they are not theory in themselves and do not propose to explain why things happen.

2.3. Approach By contrast, my aim in this dissertation is to formulate a ‘good’ (original, productive, and interesting) and grounded theory as an answer to my research questions. This theory is sensitized by the existing literature on religion and videogames; and structured by an encoding/decoding framework.

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By taking a grounded theory approach I mean that I privilege the experiences of people above existing theories or findings in the literature. It is a simple choice with far reaching consequences: grounded theory is inductive and capable of overturning preexisting notions of how academics think the world works. This is important because people are weird: they contradict themselves and each other, and worse yet, they read about themselves. This problem of “double hermeneutics” is crucial to the social sciences (Giddens, 1984). Unlike molecules and other non-sentient things that the physical sciences study; the players and developers in my field read about themselves and reflect on it. Continuously asking people about their experiences is the best way to deal with that (or observing their behaviour, or other methods of finding out what they do and think and feel). That also necessitates a “constant comparison” between what has been written about people, and what I observe in those people, while I find out and try to understand them – their experiences, their feelings, their thoughts, their discourse, their societies, their culture (Charmaz, 2006; Glaser & Strauss, 1965; 1967).

Nonetheless, grounded theorists in practice do acknowledge previous literature: they use the theory therein as “sensitizing concepts” (Blumer, 1954; Bowen, 2006; Charmaz, 2003): knowing what others have written about religion, games, and related things aids me in understanding the field, and keeps me from repeating what others have shown before – in other words to create original, interesting and productive theory that adds something to the knowledge we have about religion and media in 21st century Western culture. To this end, I have tried to be as much as possible an alien to my participants: to pretend to know or have read nothing about what they do, in order to gain as much knowledge about them without influencing it with my own.

(Of course I have read about them, and I am even a person myself. One who grew up a Catholic and playing videogames, no less; but this is only helpful after they get to speak).

However, by using a Encoding/Decoding framework, I do structure this thesis according to Stuart Hall’s model of communication, as described in the literature section above. Doing so means selecting for interview participants who make games, to find out why and in which conditions games are made (encoded) – whether by single game developers or by companies employing hundreds of developers, most of which work on small parts of a game under market-informed management teams and 54

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publishers. It also means selecting for interview participants with different religious backgrounds who play games, to find out how they understand and play (decode) videogames differently from other players; and differently from how their developers intended them. Between those steps, it is meaningful to pay critical attention to what the games themselves offer, but only in addition to the encoding and decoding done by developers and players; from the perspective of one player and analyst who is theoretically informed as someone who studies media and culture.

By using this framework to structure my dissertation it may seem like I took an existing premise into the field from the start, counter to previous paragraph on grounded theory above. This is not entirely true, but it did quickly become apparent through constant comparison that some elements of Stuart Hall’s theory were relevant and helpful to understand the field. Firstly, players (which I researched first) had mutually exclusive readings of games, often based on their own religious and otherwise intersectional positions. Secondly, developers attached different meanings, and different reasons to the inclusion of religion in games. Thirdly, there was a basic mismatch between how players, developers and academics (in their rich, disciplined and well-informed readings of game content) understood the presence and functions of religion within games. This suggests that there is some kind of broader repository or possibility space for meaning in them that each of those groups and those within those groups make their own meanings out of. Fourth, the mismatch between these three stages of mediation contributed to understanding together the separate material, functional and substantial ways in which religion was changed through this particular mediation by videogames, that a focus on just one or two of the three could not have established. I will elaborate on this in the conclusion.

2.4. Methods To concretely act on these approaches, the predominant method I use is taking semistructured interviews, and some supplementary methods (qualitative content analysis, ethnography).

I used semi-structured interviews to access the personal experiences of theoretically selected individuals: because they worked on a popular game series that 55

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uses religion in a way that is commercially successful (Chapter 3); because they make independent games as religious (or explicitly irreligious) individuals (Chapter 4); and because they played with games differently based on their own religious beliefs (Chapters 7, 8). While I will not pretend that interviews grant access to personal experiences ‘directly,’ I gain access to individuals’ thoughts, life stories and feelings through what they tell me about them, i.e., mediated through language and culture. The assumption here is that while we in the social sciences may never know whether our participants are lying when they talk to us (or fill in surveys, and so on), there is meaning in how they speak about themselves. More radically, social meaning especially through language and similar symbols is the only meaning out there: if meaning is socially constructed in the way that Weber, social constructivists and symbolic interactionists suggest, there is no sense in trying to look beyond (or behind, or below, or wherever) what my participants are putting into language in social settings. What I, they, or you think and feel might not even exist at all until it is communicated in some kind of way – how would I know? Regardless, within the scope of this dissertation there is no way of knowing and no point in writing about such unmediated, uncommunicated knowledge.

I have tried to make this ‘social setting’ of the interview as informal as possible: informed consent was verbal, rather than a ‘contract’ to be signed; and the place of the interview was always as much as possible up to the interviewee. A lot of interviews were done in the participants’ favourite coffee place, on Skype or wherever they were most comfortable. While this is still a less natural setting as, e.g., ethnographies of office spaces or developer conferences, or players’ own discourse among each other on forums (see below), interviews allow for active probing. That is, particularly in a semi-structured interview (where the questions and their sequence are not set in stone), participants can be prompted to elaborate terms, to talk about their feelings; or even to bring up new topics that the researcher did not realize were relevant. Interviews (once transcribed) were coded roughly in three steps: open coding in which expressions by interviewees were inductively labelled according to emic topics, similarities and etic (‘sensitized’) concepts.

Axial coding in which those codes were grouped and combined into (sub)categories; and selective coding in which the final analysis is organized in a more deductive fashion – often necessitating some additional interviews for clarification, etc. (Aupers, Schaap & de Wildt, 2018; Flick, 2006; Strauss & Corbin, 1998). Throughout this process, data collection was on-going, with constant comparison between existing theory, emerging 56

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theory, existing data and new data.

Content analysis of forums, in the fifth chapter, underwent a similar process of coding and analysis, except that the conversations on those forums were among players themselves. Their conversations in their own ‘natural’ setting provided the basis for not only how they talk about videogames amongst themselves, but also which games they talk about. However, it did prompt a need to contact some of the thousands of players in those conversations in order to ask them further about what they said by interviewing them.

Ethnography in this dissertation served mostly as a background and as a way into the field before proceeding with interviews. Importantly however, it did contribute to a background understanding of how developers talk, act, get together; what they drink (a lot of alcohol, apparently); what they are stressed about (precariousness, mostly); and so on. I consider all of this, and my notes, a valuable contextualization of the interviews.

Ethnographical insights will appear throughout, but apart from some conferences and professionally oriented writing elsewhere (de Wildt & Butt, 2018; de Wildt, 2016), my ethnography and participant observation did not find a central way into any of the empirical chapters of my dissertation. The times and places of each ethnography, and what they contributed to the research will be elaborated under the data section.

I also performed content analyses of several videogames. My way of performing this method would in the Humanities be called a “close reading” or a formal analysis of videogames (Leitch, 2009; Culler, 2011). Similar to books, film and other intensively analysed cultural ‘texts,’ this includes a repeated re-reading of the artefact, aided by annotation and supporting research on paratexts (reviews, promotional material) and intertexts (what other texts are referred to). Typically, close readings elaborate on or compare a small few excerpts from the artefact (a stanza of a poem, a scene, a shot) that are shown as indicative for the development of a theme or any internal frictions – much like interview citations are used to stand in for ideal-typical analyses of interviewed participants. In the case of videogames, playing them ‘closely’ becomes a notably different exercise than close-reading a book in two ways. First: they often require a lot more time to play and re-play than it takes to read and re-read a book (e.g., Rettberg, 2008). Popular games such as Final Fantasy 15 take an average of 53 hours and 55 57

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minutes; whereas most people would read all three of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books in 26 hours.9 Second: players take active rolls in the fiction, participating through choices and exploration and so on (Aarseth, 1997; Raessens, 2005), best captured by elaborate and anecdotal first-person accounts of playing the game, called “phenomenological” by Brendan Keogh (2013; 2014), or “auto-ethnographical” by Celia Pearce, T.L. Taylor and others (Pearce 2006; Taylor, 2006; cf. Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce & Taylor, 2012). To this end, I rely primarily in all of my content analyses on formal, unambiguous content in games: their visual, narrative, mechanical (and so on) representations that exist in the same way for everyone playing them; and less on anecdotes, flukes, or bugs that may be interesting but may have only been available to me. I will supplement this where needed by documentation within (e.g., digital encyclopediae, Monster Manuals), around (manuals, walkthroughs, promotional material) and about (player-made wikipediae, reviews) the game.

2.5. Data These methods resulted in the following data.

A total of N=78 interviews were used. 23 interviews were with mostly nonanonymized Ubisoft employees and one informant; 35 mostly non-anonymized interviews with independent developers, 100 player discussions online and 20 player interviews selected from those. Interviews averaged 1 hour and 16 minutes (Ubisoft employees), 1h8m (independent developers) and 1h25 (anonymous players) respectively, and the forum discussions span 2315 pages of pdf. Elaborated selection criteria and tables (including religion, parents’ religion, age, and so on) are presented in the empirical chapters where relevant. Anonymity was the default option for players, but developers were offered and often preferred to be non-anonymous. This option was included for two reasons: first, they consider themselves public figures whose personality is a fundamental part of both their religiosity and their art practice as (indie) game developers. Secondly, it made sense, in a market so saturated and huge, to base my analysis and arguments on well-known or even famous names where possible, such as Patrice Désilets, Jean Guesdon, Rami Ismail, Shane Liesegang SJ, and so on.

Data are averages, collected June 4th 2019, from 1780 players’ self-reporting on howlongtobeat.com, and calculations on howlongtoreadthis.com (which is based on reading speed and word count), respectively.

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I deemed this preferable to presenting them as anonymous hobbyists or workers, and so to risk erasing the long careers of those interviewees, speaking from their vast experience and expertise. The forum discussions were anonymized where necessary, i.e., barely: players posted anonymously on public forums, according to the terms and conditions for that forum’s publication of their posts – as such informed consent was not deemed necessary nor possible (cf. Mo and Coulson, 2008; Bourgonjon, et al., 2015). Most players I interviewed were recruited based on their activity on forums, by contacting them directly and through calls for interview participants, posted on the five most popular gaming forums online (see Tables 5, 6).

The ethnographies were performed primarily in three places over three years, with supplementary events and participation where possible. First, from June to October 2017 I was among and interviewed the independent developer communities of Melbourne and Sydney, Australia, funded by the Junior Mobility programme: at hubs/ organizations such as the Melbourne Arcade, IGDA Sydney’s Beer & Pixels, Free Play, Contours, Bar SK, and so on. It also resulted in 19 of the formal interviews. Second, during an intense two week period of participatory observation as an ‘IGDA Scholar’ from 14 to 28 March 2018, I followed a group of promising young game developers and industry protégés (and somehow also got the same funding), at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, organized by IGDA’s Scholarship programme. This gave me access to the biggest, central event in the game industry (>28,000 developers from big companies to independent developers), a personal mentor – not so much for my budding game design career, but certainly for my personal network and later access to Ubisoft – as well as the Scholarship programme’s visits and off-the-record access to game studios, all of which furthermore resulted in 10 additional formal interviews.

Third, from June to October 2019 I was at and around the Ubisoft offices in Mile End, Montréal in Canada, with the aid of Université de Montréal. Additionally, I visited gaming festivals, events and design hubs that are part of Belgian and Dutch developer communities including the House of Indie, Brotaru, the Dutch Game Garden, and the Games4Diversity (religion & game) jams; in Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent, Leuven, Amsterdam, Utrecht and, somewhat unusually, the Dominican monastery in Zwolle.

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Some games will come up more frequently as case studies. In particular, Final Fantasy and Assassin’s Creed came up inductively as the two series that were most relevant for players. Chapter 7 (specifically, Table 7 and the accompanying analysis), will elaborate on this. Because players were studied first – despite the relevant chapters appearing at the end of this dissertation – these two series come up most frequently.

Post-apocalyptic games are introduced in Chapter 6 as a counter-case to Assassin’s Creed and Final Fantasy, in which I analyse Horizon: Zero Dawn and Fallout 3 as indicative of that genre, to look at how religion appears when it is not framed as historical or fantastical. Background familiarity with other game titles was deemed necessary for other chapters throughout the dissertation (see Aarseth, 2003; Lammes, 2007); including the games made by the indie developers I interviewed; and all further recurring titles in discussions and interviews, such as BioShock, Dragon Age, Zelda, and The Elder Scrolls. By ‘great familiarity’ I mean having played through one of, preferably all of the available core titles in a series at least once, from start to finish (where possible) – this was mostly achieved in the past, which saved me a lot of time.

Each empirical chapter will elaborate what specific data, selection criteria and method(ology) were relevant to that analysis. Informed consent was obtained in every case where applicable. The project and its methods were approved of by the Social and Societal Ethics Committee (SMEC) at KU Leuven.

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Part I. Encoding “Which choices lead game-makers to use religion in their videogames?”

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Chapter 3. Religion is History: Developing Nostalgic Belonging in Assassin’s Creed 3.1. Introduction 95 million players have waged fictional Holy War against the Templars, playing as Muslim Assassins or their various modern-day equivalents. As noted literature, it is increasingly to be expected that this relatively young audience is mostly secular. Yet Ubisoft Montréal’s Assassin’s Creed series [AC] is one of the best-selling games of the recent decade, even though its premise and settings are religious through and through.

Ubisoft is not a religious organization: its Montréal studio is the biggest game studio in the world, and they are driven (presumably) by profit, not ideology.

So who decides, how and why to make religious content for a 21st century audience? To answer these questions, this chapter is based on 22 expert interviews with a mix of famous and anonymous game designers involved in the start and continuation of the AC franchise since 2007. The analysis reveals among ‘whom’ decision-making is distributed in the cultural industries, how that leads to certain worldviews and aesthetics being represented and why Ubisoft’s version of “marketable religion” comes to be produced for a global audience.

3.2. Ubisoft’s Religious Franchise If modernism and technological calculation lead to a disenchantment of the world, as sociologists like Marx and Weber suggest, it is surprising to see the videogame industry rely so heavily on religion. Why, in other words, does one of the most advanced technological industries in the world sell magical worlds full of gods and religious organizations to millions of secular(izing) players? Research on videogames and religion has indeed observed that it is odd to have religious tropes appear so dominantly in games like World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy or Zelda (Bainbridge, 2013; Campbell & Grieve, 2014; Perreault, 2012). However, one recurring example rises above these, both in the literature as well as for players and online communities themselves, based on previous research (de Wildt & Aupers, 2019a; de Wildt & Aupers, 2019b): Ubisoft’s 65

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Assassin’s Creed. Souvik Mukherjee writes that “Ubisoft’s understanding of the religious differences is important in shaping the players’ attitude to the game” (2016, p. 393), while theologian Frank Bosman goes so far as to claim that “in the Assassin’s Creed game series, developer Ubisoft reinterprets traditional Christian mythology” (2016a, p. 63). Reza Sattarzadeh Nowbari adds that “in spite of the game developers’ assertion of having had a culturally divergent group for producing the game and the lack of any sort of dogmatism,” a reference to the game’s opening disclaimer,10 “it could be argued that the game is full of messages referring to the very present day and deciphering these messages can lead to a better understanding of this game” (2012, p. 207).

What such readings have in common, firstly, is that ‘developer Ubisoft’ is personified into a monolithic entity with underlying intentions. And secondly, that these intentions can be deciphered or understood, leading to a better understanding of the game. But who is this monolithic developer, and how – as indeed Nowbari suggests – can knowing Ubisoft and the choices and cultural backgrounds that led to the AC series aid in understanding how religion ends up in a 21st century industry? While previous research has looked into how religion is represented in games (Bosman 2015; de Wildt, et al., 2018; Wiemker & Wysocki, 2014); and what players do with religion in games (de Wildt & Aupers, 2019a; Schaap & Aupers, 2017); researchers have rarely asked the question why game developers choose to use religion in their games, and how they come to make such decisions.

In other words, while people have looked at ‘texts’ (or games) and their “decoding” by players, they have seldom looked at their “encoding” (Hall, 1980). This chapter, by contrast, asks the question ‘who decides to put religion into popular bestselling videogames? How are these decisions made and why?’

3.3. Methodology To answer these questions, I conducted fieldwork in Montréal, consisting predominantly Since the first game in 2007, the first screen displays a disclaimer reading “Inspired by historical events and characters. This work of fiction was designed, developed and produced by a multicultural team of various religious faiths and beliefs.” Starting with Syndicate in 2015, an addition reads “various beliefs, sexual orientations and gender identities.”

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of two types of interviews, all with workers at Ubisoft’s Montréal studio, the lead studio for AC (with the exception of Syndicate and Odyssey). First, various workers from all different branches of game development (programmers, game designers, level designers, etc.) were interviewed anonymously. These anonymous participants were sought out to compare their experiences (shared from the safety of anonymity) with named interviewees’ accounts. Second, expert-interviews were conducted with a key informant in the industry, and 16 named participants: various creative directors, writers, directors and lead designers. The reason they are not anonymous is threefold: first, their name attests to their central importance and authority in the process of making these games, and thus the value of their insights. Secondly, it is difficult to keep directors and lead designers anonymous: they are by definition famed game developers at the top of their career, directing hundreds of workers over multiple years. As such, their names are credited at the end of games; as they are in the table of participants below (Table 1).

In total, 56 developers were approached across the spectrum of producers, creative directors, writers, game designers, level and mission designers, programmers, artists, animators, audio engineers, quality assurance, marketing and so on. In the end, 22 semi-structured interviews were conducted (39%), with 51% non-responders and 7% who declined. Participants are of various genders, races, beliefs and sexualities – as indeed the ‘disclaimer’ announces – although the majority of participants was male, white and agnostic if not vocally atheist. Many of those who wanted to remain anonymous and those who declined cited job vulnerability, and most were women, of religious minorities, or (junior) workers on recent games; the reasons for these, in a male-dominated industry (IGDA, 2018), are likely understandable but outside of the scope of this dissertation.

Interviews were semi-structured, conducted around Ubisoft’s main offices in Montréal, and conducted predominantly in English – with parts in French and Dutch, quotes translated where so. The interviews happened and were analyzed as further elaborated in the methodology above; and were conducted in the context of a 4-month ethnography in Montréal’s Mile End with much off the record field work in and around the offices of Ubisoft and the companies of ex-workers (notably Bethesda, Electronic Arts, Panache, Red Barrels, Reflector, Thunder Lotus, Typhoon, 67

68

Head of Brand, Creative Director, Producer

2 Jean Guesdon

Creative Director

Brand Historian

Brand Content Manager, Production

Brand, Production, Marketing

Writer

Writer, Level Design Director, Mission Director

Writer

Level Design Director

Game Director, Mission Director, Lead Level design

Level Design Director

Lead Game Designer

Lead Mission Designer, Level Designer

Level Designer, Game Designer

Level Designer, Mission Designer Mission Designer

Mission Designer

Gameplay / AI Programmer

Concept Artist

Quality Control, Production

4 Alex Hutchinson

5 Maxime Durand

6 Aymar Azaizia

7 Anon-brand

8 Russell Lees

9 Mustapha Mahrach

10 Anon-writer

11 David Chateauneuf

12 Gaelec Simard

13 Nicolas Guérin

14 Steven Masters

15 Anon-level1

16 Gregory Belacel

17 Anon-level2

18 Maxime Ciccotti

19 Anon-mission

20 Anon-tech

21 Gilles Beloeil

22 Maxime Faucher

3 Alexandre Amancio Creative Director, Writer, Artist

Original Creator, Creative Director

1 Patrice Desilets

Role(s)

Informant

Name

0 Osama Dorias

Games

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

AC1

Table 1. List of informant and participants (ordering based on the International Game Developers’ Association’s “Game Crediting Guidelines” [IGDA, 2014]). ✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

AC2

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

Broth.

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

Rev.

✓

✓

✓

AC4

✓

✓

Rogue

✓

✓

✓ ✓

One game (anonymized).

One game (anonymized).

Three games (anonymized).

Five games (anonymized).

✓

✓

Four games (anonymized).

✓

Seven games (anonymized).

✓

✓

✓

✓

AC3

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

Unity

Other Ubisoft games; general Montréal industry insider; key informant.

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

Syn.

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

Origins Odyssey

Chapter 3. Religion is History

Playing at Religion

and Warner Bros. Montréal), Siboire, the Waverley, and all along the Boulevard SaintLaurent. Secondly, I was given access to some internal documents, most notably various versions of what has been called the ‘Brand Bible,’ under conditions that they be quoted but not reproduced. Finally, these methods are supported by a study of the primary texts, including the main games (Table 2), and their accompanying paraludic materials including manuals, texts, player-made wikis, documentaries, making-of videos, short films, comic books and post-mortems of the development process. All data were gathered under informed consent, as well as Non-Disclosure Agreement contracts where preferred.

Setting

Period

Title

Abbreviation

Release

Third Crusade

1191 AD

Assassin’s Creed

AC1

2007

1476-1499 AD

Assassin’s Creed II

AC2

2009

1499-1507 AD

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood

Broth.

2010

1511-1512 AD

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations

Rev.

2011

1754-1783 AD

Assassin’s Creed III

AC3

2012

1715-1722 AD

AC IV: Black Flag

AC4

2013

1752-1776 AD

Assassin’s Creed Rogue

Rogue

French Revolution

1776-1800 AD

Assassin’s Creed Unity

Unity

Victorian era

1868 AD

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate

Syn.

2015

Ptolemaic Egypt

49-43 BC

Assassin’s Creed Origins

Origins

2017

Peloponnesian War

431-404 BC

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey

Odyssey

2018

Italian Renaissance

Colonial era

2014

Table 2. The main Assassin’s Creed [AC] games as per November 2019, with abbreviations used.

3.4. Branding Religion The AC series is known to 95 million players and numerous academics (e.g,. Bosman, 2016a; El Nasr, et al., 2008; Mukherjee, 2016; Nowbari, 2012) as a game steeped in religion. Briefly put, its titular protagonists are the “Assassins,” a historical secret society that was introduced in the first game as an Islamic order that fights the Templar crusaders trying to take over the Holy Land. Each of the following games stages a different religious or (later, increasingly) political conflict – to the background of which the mystery of ‘those who came before’ is revealed: a society of gods like 69

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Minerva, Jupiter and Juno to whom the Assassin-Templar conflict can be traced back to the creation of the first humans, Adam and Eve, whose powerful ‘Apple of Eden’ is the main object over which the two factions fight throughout human history.

From the outset, it became clear that a large number of people are involved in making and continuing this trans-historical story of religious conflict. Hundreds to thousands of people work on a single game for years – over 4600 people were credited on 2018’s Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. How does that work and who decides to put religion in a product like that? As Nicolas Guérin puts it “it’s a big machine. For every AAA game, specifically at Ubisoft, teams are very big. We’re talking about teams of more than 600 people in one studio, and then you have many other studios amounting to around a thousand people working on a thing, which is massive. Plus many levels of approval and political complications around decision-making and all that stuff. It’s not you know, that the process is simple like ‘we think of this,’ and we do it. That’s not how it works. But there was a general direction by Patrice way back when.” (Guérin) Others, too, kept referring back to one specific figure: Patrice Désilets, often along with lead writer Corey May. About the iconic ‘Leap of Faith’ AC1’s original level director David Châteauneuf said “the Leap of Faith really carries the signature of Patrice.”

Gregory Belacel, a junior game designer also on AC1, specifies “so I came up with the towers, Steven Masters did the combat, Pat Plourde led ‘presentation,’ but the Animus and things like that, everything was Patrice’s idea.” This includes the religious focus of the premise, described by Guérin as “very much Patrice, that concept of religion […] and AC1 took a touchy subject! It took Muslim characters fighting Christian characters, which was bold. It was kind of a stance that Patrice wanted to take on things.” Jean Guesdon emphasizes that “Patrice will tell you, he is the ‘father of Assassin’s Creed’” – making Guesdon, modestly put, its adoptive father.

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3.4.1. The Father of Assassin’s Creed When asked, Patrice Désilets confirms his role as originator: “I am the father of Assassin’s Creed” – albeit quickly followed by a core team of like-minded developers.

“Sure, it’s eventually everybody. But the core, the flash [of the original idea]11 was me.

Corey was writing the two other Princes so Corey was not even on the team. Jade was still working at EA. And so I was there!” Specifically, “It was on the corner of Saint-Joseph and Chambord. In the little house there, a little apartment on the first floor where I was asked. ‘Okay, yeah, you have to come up with a Prince of Persia game.’ And I’m like what the fuck do I do I just finished one. What do I what do I do? And I came up with Assassin’s Creed!” (Désilets) Désilets’ concept was a product of several things, including “gut feeling,” “Zeitgeist” and some direction by marketing: “in December [2003] I met with Sebastian Puel who […] was a marketing guy for Sands of Time and he said ‘oh fantasy doesn’t work really well these days. The next big thing is going to be historical.’” Reading up on the subject, what was supposed to be a sequel to the Prince of Persia franchise, became a game about the historical (and current) religious society of the Nizari Ismaili as described in “a little book from the J’ai Lu-collection, a book about secret societies. Inside there was a bunch of them, but the first one was the myth of the Old Man of the Mountain and it was like a 10-page summary of the hashashin” (Désilets).

The concept was developed alongside a personal crisis of faith, fueled by doing research for the game about the hashashin: “I turned thirty – this crisis of like ‘What is life, what am I doing, what is the purpose of all this? And then, it totally disappeared while making Assassin’s Creed, and I’m like: ‘No! Fundamentally I do not believe! […]

What really pissed me off was the church! I really had a problem with church.”

More common in Québécois French than in English, “j’ai eu un flash” is idiomatic for a sudden realization, a flash of genius.

11

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I always loved the supernatural story of Jesus when I was a kid, when you watched Jésus de Nazareth [film], it’s beautiful and it’s like it’s magical.

There’s magic tricks which are called miracles.

But then I figured out it’s also historical. And then I started to read and because I did Assassin’s Creed and the Crusade theme… It’s really about the dogma. Assassin’s Creed is about dogma. It’s against dogma. […] when I found out about the assassins’ motto, their creed, from the books I read about the hashashin and the Ismaili: that’s what they still believe now.

That ‘Nothing is True and Everything is Permitted’ and that’s basically...

How, I live my life now, too!”

This almost militant sentiment against institutionalized church religion was broadly shared by the team. Growing up in the same culture and time period, the initial core team – Désilets, Corey May, Alex Drouin, Philippe Morin, David Châteauneuf, Claude Langlais, Nicolas Cantin, etc. – “Except for Corey, roughly put we’re all French Canadian with the same background, born into a catholic family; then suddenly that culture and faith just disappeared […] of those people nobody would say they’re religious. So we were all in the same boat” (Désilets). They are all children of their parents’ révolution tranquille, making them Québec’s first generation to choose, for instance, between ‘religion’ (formerly a mandatory course) or ‘morality’ in school, while the province shed its Catholic identity and church influence on the state.

The goal is not to give a complete taxonomy of what cultural influences ended up in Assassin’s Creed through Désilets (“Zeitgeist,” “the culture in Montréal around the time,” “the Lost tv-series,” “the Da Vinci Code,” among other things). However, the fitting conclusion so far is that far from a monolithic corporate black box, the original vision of Assassin’s Creed stems from a single identifiable person with very specific (even hyper-local) experiences with and ideas about religion.

3.4.2. The Marketing-Brand-Editorial Burger What started as a specific idea by an identifiable person, however, shaped up to be a successful game, and then a franchise – and this necessitated changes to the 72

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Figure 1. Around each part of developing a yearly AC release, Marketing provides the base, the Brand guarantees a consistent, recognizable ‘flavour,’ and Editorial’s approval tops the game off for release. (Based on illustration by Siripattana Sangduen/Shutterstock.com, edited by Wieger Jonker).

“controversial topic” of the Crusade, especially in what was still the Bush-era, “hence the disclaimer of the first game” (Guérin). The disclaimer, “that was Jade [Raymond]’s concern a lot, she was afraid of the pressure of the corporation, [because of her] being the producer. To be careful with the subject matter and make sure that nobody gets pissed off, a corporation will do that it’s normal, they’re on the market!” (Désilets).

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Assassin’s Creed had to become a brand that is “fun for everybody,” because “the thing about religion is that when you’re representing a character’s belief, you try to do it in the correct way. But it’s a videogame, so we know it’s worldwide, there are a lot of people that will play it, and we don’t want the game to just talk to some people and not others. We want to get through to the majority and it’s a difficult exercise, because we also want to be true to the historical era: what those people, those characters believed in at their time period.” (Mahrach) As the franchise was codified into a reproducible, continued formula – it counts 21 games, 4 movies, 9 novels, 12 comics, and other media as of writing – Désilets parted from the project shortly after AC2. While the second game still involved some controversy (as Steven Masters put it, “AC2 is in the Renaissance, so of course we’re going to end up punching the Pope”), the franchise was later cleaned up to be ‘fun for everybody.’

After AC2 in 2009, different Creative Directors – traditionally the lead figure responsible for what is made by hundreds of developers on a game – take on iterations of the franchise simultaneously, so that in the 10 years after, 19 more games were released. I was able to interview all the Creative Directors ever to work on Assassin’s Creed in Montréal, and got a portrait of a heavily safe-guarded creative process, which participants and I came to call the ‘marketing-brand-editorial’ burger. Around each part of developing a yearly AC release (from game design and writing to all the satellite studios making assets in China, etc.), there are three teams that work on all the games. Marketing provides the base of what players expect from a setting (say, ‘focus groups tell us that Vikings will be popular this year, and they want Nordic gods’); the Brand team protects consistency across the series (its signature ‘flavour’ if you will); and Editorial’s approval tops each game off to appeal to the broadest possible market (Figure 1).

The main architect of the AC Brand’s codification into a coherent and reproducible formula was Jean Guesdon, who started as production coordinator late in AC1’s development, and ended up building the ‘Brand team’ that codified the AC 74

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formula, replacing Désilets’ vision with a ‘Brand Bible.’ As Désilets explains, “I got one last meeting with Ubi. It was at my place. Jean [Guesdon], Corey [May] and myself. And we established all the rules, all the big dadada. And then I left a month and a half after that.” (Patrice) The big “dadada,” in Guesdon’s words came down to a set of tools and rules to make sure every media product, especially the games, are held together as consistently ‘on Brand.’

“My role on the brand team was to actually explain what AC was about, the rules that needed to be followed by others. When we started to do novels, comic books short movies et cetera., I theorized and made some communication tools to explain the limitations. […] For example on our positioning in terms of belief and spirituality, the fact that we don’t want to take sides. Trying to portray both sides as grey. So there is theoretically no good nor bad. There are two different things and they fight for what they think is good for human society. This kind of stuff.” (Guesdon) This new “positioning in terms of belief and spirituality” is a vital change from Désilets’ original anti-dogmatic view on religion, in which the original game’s Templar crusaders represent an institutionalized Christian status quo that wants to deceive and control the population, or what an anonymous member of the Brand Team (for almost 10 years) called the Templars’ “opium for the masses” (Anon-Brand).

Secondly, Marketing provides the base of each new Assassin’s Creed game: based on focus groups and feedback, Creative Directors are given a setting, story outline and one or two new game mechanics to introduce. Alexandre Amancio reconstructs what it means to direct an AC game within this new structure, in which “they had already started Unity […] they knew it was the French Revolution and they knew it was in Paris. And that’s about it, and that there was going to be co-op. […] so it was like a big jigsaw puzzle, that was my job, trying to figure it out…” (Amancio). In most cases, Marketing already has a list of themes – either from previous pitches, or market research – and goes from there: 75

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Guesdon: A setting like Egypt is very loaded with expectations, when it comes to Gods et cetera., in terms of pop culture and entertainment, and so we know that some players come to the game with this kind of expectations. So, how do we provide them with experiences like that?

Interviewer: How do you know out what players expect?

Guesdon: Well, we have a marketing team that look at... How is Egypt in entertainment? And so we just look at global things and you quite soon realize that it’s fantasized a lot. […] You have some focus groups and [ask] people about Egypt as a setting for an Assassin’s Creed game.”

Developers from across franchise – from Brand team, core team (including directors), to junior developers – echoed that informed by Marketing’s conclusions on “what is people’s perception of a period,” then “that’s the game they have to make” [AnonBrand]).

Finally, the process is topped off by Editorial, “a team of five people who defend the franchise atmosphere” (Ciccotti). This small group of people “at the very top has more influence over [representation of] worldview than anyone else” (Lees), and the way this is done defines – rather than any personal ideology or faith – how (and why) religion or anything else is represented in a certain way. Editorial was variously described as “staying away from controversy” (Anon-level2), “not stepping on toes” (Azaïzia), “and making sure it doesn’t offend anyone” (Simard). In the end, “business makes the call” (Azaïzia), and they do so from Paris where Ubisoft was started as a family company by the Guillemot brothers in 1986. In Creative Director Alex Hutchinson’s words: “If Yves [Guillemot] came down and said from France, ‘you’re absolutely cutting the hood…’ Well, he owns the company so that’s, we’re cutting the hood. […] We do greenlight meetings in Paris where you have to present the characters and to present the story and the executives will weigh in.

So Serge Hascoet, who is the CCO of the company has overruled settings in the past that certain people wanted and just said he doesn’t find them 76

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interesting, but that’s his prerogative.”

Hence, ‘Editorial’ in Paris has the final say, often erring on the side of safety.

The whole process, from Marketing, to core team (led by a Creative Director and their producer), to the eventual product of nearly thousand employees spread across the main studio (usually Montréal) and its satellites across the world, is kept in check in its various stages by Editorial. Throughout this ‘stage-gate’ process, Editorial are thus the final arbiter in a process that “defers to the market and the largest possible audience” (Masters), in order to check whether Marketing, Brand team, and the individual game’s developers are producing something that sells.

3.5. Marketable Religion Within the Brand-Marketing-Editorial sandwich, creative work on individual AC games has clear parameters. Writer Russell Lees ascribes the resulting religion-foreveryone to marketing logic, stating that “working with religion on a scale for a world audience means you can’t write anybody off ” (Lees). It is from this process of calculated inclusiveness that AC’s marketable representation of religion arises as twofold: nostalgic and perennialist.

3.5.1. Nostalgic Mystery of History “5. Pivotal moments in Human History are the basis of our Franchise. Assassin’s Creed will always take a revisionist approach on real events. We’ll use historical gaps to create our story.”

– “10 Commandments,” Assassin’s Creed Brand Bible 1.0, 2010, p.7 AC’s marketable religion is nostalgic: placing religion in history, and inviting 21st century (secular) players into its mystery. At its core, AC uses historical periods to create new games within its franchise. The idea is to “make something out of the dark corners of history, from an occultist point of view, which is linked to the whole conspiracy between the Templars and the Assassins but from a historical perspective” (Guérin). When asked why religious conflict has mostly been central to these dark corners of history, many echoed Brand historian Maxime Durand’s explanation that 77

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religion “was [not only] the thematic at the beginning of the creation of the game, but also it’s been part of very important human history for the last thousands of years and it’s been very, very important” (Durand).

Beside the sheer quantity of historical struggles and settings to work with, what is effective about religion? What ‘works’ for game developers? Religious elements are recognizable to large amounts of people: the Biblical Apple of Eden became the “story MacGuffin” because “the Apple of Eden speaks to people. People are familiar with it” (Belacel), and it was put in a place that lead level director David Châteauneuf described enthusiastically as “a secret place, a mystic place that doesn’t exist, [we based it on] Petra, we wanted it to be like Al Khaeznek but under Solomon’s Temple – it’s a known location, and most people would know about Solomon.” Religious elements are furthermore “mystical,” to the point that “religion gives ‘oomph’ to something simple.

Gravitas!” (Guérin), it offers “mystery locations” (Simard), and “people are easily hooked by its magic […] its symbolism resonates with modern societies” (Guesdon), or in the more writerly words of Russell Lees: “religious settings have dramatic, inherently interesting, visually sumptuous qualities.”

When describing a scene in Unity, in which the Assassins’ initiation ritual takes place in a more secular time (the French Revolution), creative director Amancio explains how and why they stuck to religious aesthetics:“the aesthetics of candles, of stone, of hoods… these are universal things that have existed for a long time. So they have a certain—they radiate a certain sense of awe and mystery. […] So we played on that. That there’s something to be said about the flickering orange light, right, it speaks to something that’s inside us all. That’s very, very ancient right?” (Amancio) Quintessentially, by offering religion through the “historical tourism” of AC (Russell), religion becomes something more recognizable to everyone – no matter where they are from – because it is ancient and mysterious for a 21st century audience: “from the old world, something very cryptic – old religions like Catholicism have their own mystique” (Anon-level2). By using “history as a playground” (Masters), AC offers a nostalgic way for everyone to relate back to the “awe and mystery” of religion that several developers (including Désilets, Russell, and Guérin) each compared to Dan Brown’s work: 78

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“the Da Vinci Code, It’s the same thing. It’s like religion has that power of being mystical at the same time as a source of inspiration, to many people. It wields that occult power. Dan Brown’s success is because it’s so easy twisting hidden meaning into religion in history, and people love to have that feeling that ‘ooh we’re playing with something big, something important’” (Guérin) 3.5.2. Sci-Fi Perennialism “7. Assassin’s Creed is based on Technology – Nothing is Magical.

Everything has a plausible technological explanation.”

– “10 Commandments,” Assassin’s Creed Brand Bible 1.0, 2010, p.7 AC’s marketable religion is furthermore perennial: it connects religion across cultures and periods to one underlying abstract struggle that continues into players’ own world, now and here. While AC1’s initial Third Crusade conflict is between the Knights Templars and the Hashashin in the Holy Land, 1191 AD; AC2 is about the Borgia papal authorities and the secular Assassins in Renaissance Italy. Unity places those factions on two sides of the French Revolution; and Origins takes place 2000 years before the Crusades, centering on the ‘Hidden Ones’ versus the ‘Order of the Ancients;’ and so on. As the anonymous Brand team-member explains:“pivotal historical moments are often driven by religion, it’s an important part of human history, but wherever the Templars are it’s just that they’re located in a place of power – they’re not always Christian, they just occupy the current status quo. And in other periods they will be called different things… the Order of the Ancients, Abstergo, et cetera” (Anon-brand) Whether religious or, in some periods, secular, AC’s struggle is perennial: ‘order’ versus ‘freedom,’ ‘status quo’—‘resistance;’ and thus relevant across places and periods, and accessible to players from all cultures. The “perennial perspective,” as popularized

by Aldous Huxley in 1945, suggests that underneath the differences between religious beliefs, vocabularies and rituals of different cultures and periods, there is a universal underlying mystery. In the case of AC, the franchise presents a pan-historical and global conflict of which “the historical context shapes which form the conflict takes” (Amancio). Central to this fascination is a universal mystery, relatable to anyone, in 79

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Anon-level2’s: “old religions like Catholicism have their own mystique: using it for a game is so perfect, whether it is a Gregorian chant, something Byzantine or Indian, players everywhere will go ‘oh this is mystical, something fantastic’.”

This search for the underlying mysteries of history is at the core of the franchise, and it is an approach that Guérin in his interview called “a cabbalistic approach of finding hidden meaning in religion across history, creating this sort of tertiary reading of things.” Guesdon similarly compared the brand’s strategy to “tapping into this rampant culture of religious symbolism, of esotericism,” calling it “…the conspiracy theory of religions: people can dive into it, put themselves into it, can invest, can build it themselves. That’s the beauty of esotery. You just give them some dots to connect, and people will create the links […] the franchise became super strong because we managed transmedia, so you can consume games on its own but every single creation is also a dot [within the whole franchise], and people, players, readers, watchers who consume several games, films and so on make the connections [and] they feel smart about it, saying ‘Holy Shit. I understand so much now!’” (Guesdon) AC’s mystery presents itself to players deliberately through the ‘present day’ which runs through the franchises’ different media. Because of this, fans can only put together this narrative by buying each game, film, novel and comic, to find out the truth behind a secret, divine race manipulating our historical struggles: the Isu – whose names (Jupiter, Minerva, Juno) hint at their perceived divinity by early societies.

What fans find out as the franchise goes on, and as they combine their knowledge via online forums and self-made encyclopediæ, is that these early gods are actually a very scientifically advanced society, passing down their technology through history.

Hence, Adam and Eve were just the first version of the Isu’s creation (humanity, made to be enslaved). The Turin Shroud is a ‘nanotech matter regenerator’ that can heal the owner, once owned by Jesus, and by Jason and the Argonauts who called it the Golden Fleece. The Apple of Eden was a neurotransmitting mind-control device which, in the words of one character in AC1, “turned staves into snakes. Parted and closed the Red 80

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Sea. Eris used it to start the Trojan War; and with it, a poor carpenter turned water into wine.”

Thus, AC’s perennialist esotericism translates all the mysteries of historical religions into the 21st century vocabulary of science. In the ‘present day,’ the players of AC come to find out that all religious mystery is actually technology. The Brand Bible states that “There is no magic in the Assassin’s Creed universe. Clarke’s third law says it best: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,’” or as the Brand Bible’s author explains “we always made it like the First Civilization [Isu] lived for real, they left artefacts that are actual tools […] people are very easily hooked by these kind of features and devices” (Guesdon). According to Wouter Hanegraaff ’s book on “esotericism in the mirror of secular thought,” such tales “of ancient civilizations which were superior to ours both in spiritual and in technological knowledge, belong to the stock-in-trade of western occultism.” (1996, 309). The “single most influential source” for this, and a seminal figure to New Age thought, was Edgar Cayce who became popular with stories of the past lives of his patients – much like the premise of AC’s Animus – on the basis of whose accounts “Cayce describes a tradition of ‘perennial wisdom’ that is passed on from Atlantis to Egypt, and from Egypt to the ‘great initiate’ Jesus” (Hanegraaff 1996, 309).

The AC franchise taps into this same desire to make sense of disparate religious mysteries. Furthermore, it does so by leveraging players’ need to unravel these mysteries by unfolding the explanation over the course of 21 games, 4 movies, 9 novels, 12 comics, and other media. This marketable religion is, first, made nostalgic by putting it safely in historically appropriate periods; second, made perennial by tying all periods together through a universal mystical truth; and third, made present by bringing it into 21st century scientific vocabulary. As a result, the franchise itself gets an esoteric structure, that is, it depends on the disparate connection of occult or secret knowledge (historical correspondences, syncretism between traditions, symbolic images) from mystical and historical sources alike (Faivre & Needleman, 1993; Hanegraaff, 1996; Hammer, 2001).

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Or, in Guesdon’s words on AC: “when I was in charge of the brand, we needed to minimize the risk of inconsistencies and maximize the opportunities for connections, links, echoes from one creation to another. So that people start from something which is known, but they think they’re clever, more clever than the rest of humanity and they will understand what is behind everything. This is esotérie. […] it is a balance to find a sweet spot of what is known, what is not known --And in this gray zone people will engage. Yeah, and I think this is why AC succeeded at some point.”

3.6. Conclusion: Branded Belonging Mircea Eliade wrote about a surge in “unheard-of popularity” of esoteric magazine Planète in 1960s France, leading to his explanation of what makes esotericism attractive – if only for popular consumption (1976). Eliade argues that it was an antidote to the existentialism of the era, and describes the magazine as a mix of popular science, occultism, astrology, science fiction, spiritual techniques, and “more than that. It tacitly pretends to reveal innumerable vital secrets-of our universe, of the Second World War, of lost civilizations, of Hitler’s obsession with astrology, and so on” (p. 9).

This “holistic outlook which coupled science with esotericism […] presented a living, fascinating and mysterious cosmos in which human life again became meaningful” calling its readers to “unravel the other, enigmatic universes revealed by the occultists and gnostics” (p. 10).

Just as Planète succeeded by giving people disparate connections between history, mystery and religion in a time of existentialist disillusion; so Assassin’s Creed manages to sell a marketable form of religion that inserts meaning and mystery into history for a post-secular audience – in the tradition of Planète as much as the Da Vinci Code. What makes AC unique is that it involves players in doing so: not just a magazine, book or film, the structure of the transmedial franchise itself is esoteric. That is, fans need to pull together all the hints or ‘dots’ from its many games, novels, and other media to reveal the explanations that AC promises. In the process, AC shows a blueprint of what marketable religion looks like to the broadest possible 21st century audience.

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Who puts religion in videogames? In the case of Assassin’s Creed, the work of one designer (and a sympathetic culture around him) evolved from a culturally and generationally specific rejection of religious dogma. With the games’ success, however, the way in which religion was treated in the game became marketable.

How? Under corporate leadership, codified and checked by the brandmarketing-editorial sandwich, the marketable religion of the franchise was made to be inclusive and ‘fun for everybody’ – specifically, for a global audience of 95 million, good for 140 million sales between 2007 and 2019 (Ubisoft, 2019).

Why? It creates belonging for everyone, everywhere, without the burden of believing. By presenting religion first as belonging in history through nostalgia; second, as belonging to everyone through perennialism; and third as not needing belief through scientific vocabulary. Assassin’s Creed’s nostalgia, perennialism and sci-fi vocabulary together create a branded belonging for everyone, without belief for anyone. To further qualify the brand’s slogan: “Nothing is exclusively True. Everything is inclusively Permitted.”

This syncretism of historical traditions, perennial mystery and scientific vocabulary is accomplished in the same way as in esoteric (and occult) traditions.

That is, it depends on connecting not only various traditions through the promise of underlying mystery (perennialism), but it also brings magic into the realm of science and technology. This has major implications for, for instance, Weber and other modernists’ dichotomy between magic and “technical means and calculations” (1919a). While it is clear that others have earlier observed and theorized the collapse of magic and science through technology in, e.g., Neopaganism (Hanegraaff, 1996; Aupers, 2010), New Age religion (Aupers & Houtman, 2006; Heelas 1996, Hammer, 2001), and virtual worlds (Aupers, 2007; Turner 2010); this chapter adds an empirical perspective on ‘Why’ and ‘How’ those in charge of production come to do so. Beyond vague notions of the ‘atmosphere’ and ‘oomph’ of religion – although important – to draw people in, it is the structure of esotericism itself that draws consumers to connect ideas offered to them over multiple products.

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Theoretically, what this means is that Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed is emblematic of two things. First, it reproduces an idea of religious decline: that religion is something of the past. This is accomplished, as argued above, by bringing religion into the present only as misconceptions of past societies – and legitimizing it in the present only through the use of pseudo-scientific discourse. This transposing of historical religions into the ‘rationalized’ present allows Ubisoft to place the most irreligious and religiously diverse audiences alike into the same disenchanted version of history.

Secondly, what marketable religion does is commodify a religious tradition. I am aware that commodification is a notoriously underdefined, overdetermined buzzword of Marxist cultural and political theory. At its root, however, “commodification” is a process by which something without economic value (culture, or in this case, religion), is assigned a use value and made exchangeable or interchangeable: i.e., made into a commodity (Marx, 1904, pp. 19-21). More simply, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls a commodity “anything intended for exchange” (2005, p. 35), adding that it is not necessarily (e.g., when bartering) with “reference to money [but] with maximum feasible reduction of social, cultural, political or personal transaction costs” (ibid.). In all exchanges of commodity, from barter to capitalist exchanges, the commonality is in “the object-centred, relatively impersonal, asocial nature” of the exchange (ibid.).

By reducing such ‘marketable religion’ to an esoteric amalgamate that is supposed to include everyone, and be uncontroversial to the largest possible audience of buyers – in other words, commodifying religion – the individual religious traditions are thus reduced to commodities. And apparently: religion sells.

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Chapter 4. Indie Dependence: Diversity and Religious Conventions 4.1. Introduction In the previous chapter, I looked at one big company to see how and why religion is used to make commercially successful videogames. Outside of this ‘AAA’ context, indie developers make games alone or in small teams: the “art-house” equivalent within a billion dollar videogame industry (Warr, 2014). The discourse surrounding indies stresses originality, diversity and autobiography. Game designer and author Anna Anthropy’s Rise of the Videogame Zinesters first articulated this discourse that developers: “outside of the mainstream have revealed much more [about ourselves].

They have shown us a new perspective through their unconventionality, their creativity. […] real diversity, a plethora of voices and experiences, and a new avenue for human beings to tell their stories and connect with other human beings.” (2012, n.p.)

If indie developers tell “their stories,” this allows me to empirically study how they put their identities into games. In the context of this dissertation, it is valuable to look at the role of religious identity in independent (individual) game development, in contrast to AAA development. Particularly since religion and irreligion (whether Christian, Hindu, Muslim, atheist, agnostic, and so on)12 are defining parts of our histories and identities (Berger, 1967; Lorenz, 2008). Do independent game developers represent their own (ir)religious backgrounds in their games, and how and why do they (not) do so? To answer this question, I selected 35 indies to interview, from Australia, NorthAmerica and Europe.

With irreligious, I mean atheism, agnosticism and other kinds of rejection of or indifference to religious traditions. For this dissertation, ‘religious position’ includes irreligion.

12

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4.2. Encoding Religious Worldviews While researchers have surveyed the religious affiliations of independent developers (Piasecki, 2016), their racial identities and attitudes (Srauy 2019), and their gender representation in light of their economic independence (Lima, 2018); there is little insight into how religion is encoded into games by those who make them. More so, most studies on religion in games, as observed in the introduction (Chapter 1), are gamebased interpretations. These are valuable in themselves, to assess the prominence of religion in games and to analysing its manifestation in rich empirical detail. However, text-based analyses cannot draw any conclusions on the meanings of religion encoded into cultural production, let alone any remaining cultural significance in the context of secularization in modern societies. On the one hand, we therefore need consumptioncentred studies on the way players decode and assign meaning to religion in games (e.g., Geraci, 2014; de Wildt & Aupers, 2017; 2019a; 2019b; Chapters 7, 8). On the other hand, we need production-centred studies on how and why developers encode and use religion in games at all. After all, we cannot say anything about the remaining meaning of religion in games, without studying why religion occurs in 21st century cultural industries at all – especially when assuming that the game industry is not just out to convert us all. From a broader theoretical perspective, to research cultural production is to research which worldviews media-objects originate in, and thus shed light on how and why certain forms of (religious) representation end up in our popular culture when others do not.

4.2.1. The Rhetoric of Indie: Original, Diverse, Personal To find out whether, how, why and whose religion finds its way into videogames, there is a practical and a theoretical reason for looking at independent developers.

Practically speaking, since indies work alone or in small teams, researching one person’s religious background in direct relation to their work potentially tells me more about how religious representation finds its way from beliefs to games. There is a pervasive rhetoric in academia that hails indie games as original, diverse and personal. Paolo Ruffino calls this the “discourse of emancipation” around indies:

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“In this view, [their] unique vision of game design is brought into the video game, making it a direct expression of personal, individual feelings and thoughts. […] something strictly personal, and this therefore blurs the boundaries between the game designer’s work and home lives.” (2012, p.

113-115) In academic literature, being ‘indie’ is first of all understood as producing an original counterpoint to mainstream games. Their “smaller games with smaller budgets and smaller audiences,” are hence “more experimental or bizarre” (Anthropy, 2012), “establish[ing] their own cultural norms and practices” (Young, 2018, p. 6). Secondly, indies are presented as culturally diverse, operating outside of dominant-hegemonic culture. They “diversify the industry away from testosterone-blasted aggression” (Kline, et al., 2003), representing “a greater diversity of voices in the production of culture” (Martin & Deuze, 2009). Existing research covers gender (Harvey & Fisher, 2015; Lima, 2018), sexuality (Shaw, 2009; Stone, 2018), race (Passmore, et al., 2017), able-bodiedness (Jones, 2016; Stone, 2018), and other marginalized identities (e.g., De Smale, et al., 2017; Šisler, 2008; Sterczweski, 2016). Thirdly, indie games are hailed as personal, even autobiographical “games based on people’s real life experiences” such as That Dragon, Cancer, a game by a Christian family sharing their crisis of faith when their new-born son is diagnosed with terminal cancer (Parkin, 2017). Thus combined, the “lone developer myth” portrays “the auteur in full control of the creative process, a rare genius driven to realize an artistic vision, unadulterated by focus group feedback, market pressures, and other such commercial concerns shared by bean-counting AAA publishers” (Sinclair 2019, n.p.)

Indies, in short, are hailed as opening the medium of videogames to a broad and progressive intersectionofages,races,genders,sexualitiesandworldviews;incontrasttothe“impersonal creations by teams of forty-five artists and fifteen programmers” (Anthropy 2012).

Among those intersectional identities, religion – like sex, gender, sexuality, race and so on – defines many people’s lives. Studying the way indies channel their individual worldviews into their work, gives me access both to how explicit worldviews and traditions find their way into the medium; as well as what represents the AAA standard of religious 89

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representation by contrast. More broadly, it gives me insight into how and why religion finds its way into game development, before ascribing all kinds of cultural and religious significance to them as the ‘enthusiastic scholar’ of media and religion does. For these reasons, this chapter studies the proposed originality, diversity and autobiographicality of indie games using indies’ (ir)religious identities as a clear and identifiable case of their worldview. By probing indies’ encoding of their religious and cultural backgrounds into videogames, this chapter answers the following questions: Do independent game developers represent their own (ir)religious backgrounds in their games, and how and why do they (not) do so?

4.3. Methodology To answer these questions, I sought out independent game developers who selfreportedly dealt with their own (ir)religious background in their videogames. Indies were interviewed during field research in Melbourne, Montréal, the Low Countries – three indie ‘hubs’ – and at the Game Developers’ Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. These areas were relevant to the theoretical premise of this thesis: the supposed secularization of the West, in contrast to the dependence of many videogames on religious representation.

Of the 40 developers interviewed, N=35 were selected as relevant for the current study (Table 3). The criteria were, firstly, to have worked as an indie game developer.

Secondly, to have self-reportedly dealt with their (ir)religious background in their work, whatever that may mean to them. Interviews covered what this did indeed mean for them; whether and how their religious background was apparent in their work; why they chose to deal with this in the way they did; and for which reasons they included or excluded certain aspects of their religiosity from their work. Whenever possible, explicit design choices and projects (sometimes in the phase of early design documents) were used to talk more concretely about their choices. Importantly, most of the interviews were non-anonymous, so as to talk about concrete choices. All being offered the choice, four out of 35 decided to remain anonymous. These (semi-structured) interviews were subsequently coded inductively according to a qualitative, constant comparative/ grounded theory approach (Aupers, Schaap & de Wildt, 2018; Flick, 2006; Strauss & Corbin, 1998), as elaborated in the methodology at the start of this dissertation.

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1 2

Name Nicholas Lamb Anonymous

Company/-ies (games) Games4Diversity Religion jam Civ-like focused on religious systems Tale of Tales (Vanitas, The Graveyard, Cathedral in the Clouds) Copenhagen Game Collective (Pray Pray Absolution)

3

Michaël Samyn

4

Sabine Harrer

5 6

Anonymous Richard Bartle

7

Chris Bateman

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Rami Ismail Chad Toprak Chris Austen Damon Wade Noah Barden Jared Hahn Ricardo Barkley Christopher Yabsley

MUD i.a., bitComposer (Kult/Heretic Kingdoms: The Inquisition; Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms); Grindstone (Hellmut: The Badass From Hell) Vlambeer Doki Doki, Salut!, The Whistler; Freeplay The Contractor Untitled student game (Swinburne) Untitled student game (Swinburne) Stitch Up, Intra Untitled student game (Swinburne) Dungeon League

16

Rhett Loban

Torres Strait Virtual Reality

17

Jennifer Scheurle

18

Lee Shang Lun

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Yosha Noesjirwan Farah Khalaf Matt Taylor Dave Lloyd Barney Cumming Mark Morrison Thomas Gordon Nawaf Bahadur Cuauhtemoc Moreno Rasheed Abuiedeh Anonymous Collette Quach Anonymous

32

Mernan Behri

33 34

Moustafa Chamli Denver Coulson

35

Osama Dorias

Opaque Space (Earthlight); Flat Earth Games Body of Play, Midas, Sokobond, The Whistler, Impasse Projection: First Light Petra VR, Melbourne Arcade FreeFall Games Powerhoof (Crawl) Powerhoof (Crawl) Call of Cthulhu, De Blob Unnamed game Riverbond, Critterbox Amberial Dreams Liyla and the Shadows of War Team Nahual (Juanito el Nahualito)

Religious Position Atheist Agnostic Catholic-raised agnostic Catholic-raised agnostic Pentecostal Christian Atheist Christian/ Zen Buddhist/ Discordianism/ Christian Muslim (Sunni) Muslim (Sunni) Catholic-raised agnostic Agnostic Agnostic Jehova’s Witness Christian (Catholic) Atheist Torres Strait Islander tradition; [rest redacted] Germanic Pagan Christian (Presbyterian) Muslim (Sunni) Muslim (Sunni) Christian (Baptist) Ex-Catholic Atheist Ex-Anglican Christian (Baptist) Muslim (Sunni) Christian (Catholic) Muslim (Sunni) Ex-Muslim Irreligious Muslim (Sunni)

Freelance Game designer and Concept Muslim (Sunni) artist; Toei Animation Al Akhira Muslim (Sunni) Devil’s Bluff, Our Own Storm Christian (Baptist) Magic Pants (indie), Warner Brothers Muslim (Sunni) Montreal (TBA)

Table 3. List of indie developer respondents, with their past and current companies and religious positions.

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4.4. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Moving into indie communities, religion immediately appeared to be a sensitive subject. Developers’ religious backgrounds and beliefs were often taboo, despite how central they were to religious developers’ lives. More so than in a big AAA company like Ubisoft, despite their sometimes limited workers’ protection, it was apparently a bigger risk to talk about one’s religious conviction as an independent developer than as a contract worker at a game company. First of all, when talking about religious identity and representation in indie development, there was a clear divide between irreligious developers – who assumed most of their peers were similarly unaffiliated and uninterested – and religious developers, who were constantly aware of the controversiality of their beliefs. Asked whether religion was something openly talked about among indies, one atheist developer answered: “I don’t think so. I think if someone’s religious they honestly don’t bring it up. It’s just not the culture. I can’t say it’s a taboo and… Especially in the games development community I couldn’t imagine someone being criticized by other game developers for being religious but it’s not something that’s often talked about” (Christopher) Most irreligious developers (agnostic, atheist, etc.) responded in similar ways: while asking for snowball recommendations on who to interview, those developers could rarely think of religious developers working on games. By contrast, every religious developers – across Christians, Muslims, Jehovah’s witnesses, and so on – knew about others in the indie community, from the smallest communities of Belgian developers to the bustling hive of over 28,000 developers at 2018’s Game Developers Conference [GDC]. One two-person interview with the developers from Powerhoof turned revelatory when, after years working together, one of them realized his coworker was raised a Christian. They explained: David: My family is still Christian and stuff… But I generally keep it very quiet. It’s just never come up or that I know others are aware Interviewer: Is it taboo or something?

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D: Yeah Barney: yeah…

D: yeah it definitely is!

You should in church say you’re proud of things and stuff but in game design…

B: …it’ll be like ‘did you know David’s Christian?’ and it’s like ‘Holy shiiit!’

D: yeah like so in [big AAA company] that was weird. But the percentage of people that are Christian they would never say it at work.

It’s almost like with sexuality, like even though people are homosexual or whatever it would just be… ‘Oh it’s just not worth to talk about’ I: Really?

D: Even if you feel fine being Christian and when I was I’d be really …

It makes people in games uncomfortable. So you’re coming into work at a videogames company and you decide: that’s where you talk about videogames and that’s how you relate to people.

I: Is this a technology industry or a game industry taboo?

B: Definitely games. Dungeons & Dragons and videogames have been kind of demonized by the church in various ways so it feels a bit like ‘Aaahh… The church is against videogames!’ so they see this as an antagonistic thing.

4.4.1. Religious Reluctance In line with such ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ mores, many religious developers preferred to not be too forward about their religious identity, both within the indie community as well 93

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as in their games. Some exceptions to this pervasive social taboo were noted, however.

Primarily, there were the explicit calls for inclusivity within indie communities after 2014’s ‘GamerGate’ phenomenon – in which a movement of online reactionaries harassed female, queer and other minority game developers. Çağdaş Toprak, who usually goes by Chad, explains about his name and faith: Chad: Pre-2014, my external image never really reflected my ‘other’ cultural and religious background. My religious background was something I tried not to overly reveal. But now I find myself tweeting about Holy days and all that sort of stuff more publicly.

Interviewer: What changed in 2014?

Chad: I don’t know … one thing that comes into mind is like… Gamergate! […] The indie community isn’t all that big so a lot of people who kind of knew each other just got sucked in. What happened after that was a lot of effort that put into place safer space policies and inclusivity policies […] So I think because of that I slowly started to say ‘hey, actually this is something that also needs to be spoken about. Letting people know that there are Muslim developers in Western game development.

While Chad felt safer, others mentioned Twitter as exactly the thing to fear.

Twitter is seen as a very important extended social sphere for indie designers: a place to promote projects, to network and to engage with players; but also a place where indies are vulnerable to backlash. Farah Khalaf, shares that, while: “Twitter has been actually superimportant for me in terms of meeting different people and keeping in touch [and] also being able to express points of views and having them shared widely […] Developers can’t really talk about religion openly, or their personal beliefs. [yeah why is that?] I’m not sure actually. Maybe they don’t want any backlash from their social circles? [You mean…? Within developer circles?] Yeah.”

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Surveys across the industry supports these fears of openness about religion, even in light of the increased calls for diversity that the indie community is known for.

The Digital Australia Report 2018 measures concern over diversity in the industry as favouring gender (66%), age (65%), race (59%), national (58%) and language diversity (58%), far above religious diversity at 40% in terms of the “need for more diversity in games” (Brand, Todhunter & Jervis 2017, p. 27).

Christian developer Lee Shang Lun gave insight into why so many religious developers are reluctant to explicitly engage with their beliefs in their games: “when I want to put my authentic self into a game, whether it’s Christian or other, suddenly I’m grappling with the enormity, that undepictability of something that is my totality of life. How could I possibly do that?

Whereas I feel much safer making these silly experiences that pretend to be much larger than they are.”

While Christianity is a “large part of [his] life” and “whenever I get the opportunity to talk about Jesus, I talk about it,” the only part of Shang Lun’s life that isn’t pervaded by religion is his job in videogames. He explains: “…Maybe I’m just working up to it? I’m trying constantly to figure out what role if any explicitly Christian themes or evangelistic intent should be present in my work. In my art… [Deep sigh] uhh… But… Games it turns out are hard to make… [I’m] kind of circling around to find it and express it.”

Others echoed this sentiment: videogame culture, industry and development circles are just not ready for diverse religious representation. Muslim developer Rami Ismail adds: “The point of cultural identity is very often that religion is seen as something else than nationality or race or gender or sexuality. But for a lot of people it is an equally huge part of what they are. […] The exceptions in videogames are interesting because the sheer backlash, the anger for 95

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what is seen as forcing religious diversity on people is seen as imposing.

It’s seen as forcing it on people because… we are just not that used to religion in games. Religion is allowed as a background, preferably of the bad guys, but there are rarely openly religious ‘good guys’ because it is a taboo” 4.4.2. Standardized Signs “Religion is just there, and it’s just a palette to be used to me. [It] is a norm in the context of an RPG and it’s a way to just instantly create a character that has special powers.” (Christopher) When asked how designers did use religious representation in their games, a common reaction was that religion is acceptable to use in game design: just not your own. And yet, religion is omnipresent in games. So which representations are acceptable? According to my respondents it is acceptable to tap into already existing religious conventions and repertoires that players already know from other games. For instance, Christopher Yabsley of Dungeon League explains why healers in Role-Playing Games are “usually” priests, accompanied by holy paladins, monks and other conventional classes of the genre. Specifically, we talked about the design choices surrounding Cosmos (Figure 2), a character designed “quite narrowly I guess in reference to Paladins. Because he’s kind of like a cross [between a] Paladin and a Cleric …I think [in terms of direct influences] that would be World of Warcraft plus Diablo 2’s Paladin plus Paladins in Dungeons & Dragons.”

For indie developers, it is convenient to use a conventional repository of (religious) signs, because it communicates a lot about the game without needing to explain anything explicitly. According to Christopher and others who made similar design choices, “the supernatural is such a norm in the context of an RPG that it’s a way to just instantly create a character.” Specifically, in the case of Dungeon League’s Paladin character, conforming to these long-established conventions or “tropes” allows designers “to infer a lot of knowledge to the player at a glance,”

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Figure 2. The character Cosmos in Christopher Yabsley’s Dungeon League is typical for a ‘holy Paladin,’ drawn from a “palette” of genre conventions.

“so I use tropes such as the healing Paladin to instantly convey a lot of mechanics about my game. Now when someone looks at Cosmos they look at him for one second and they have a good idea of what sort of role and how he’s gonna play and stuff like that and that’s why I play with the tropes as well and use them like that.” (Christopher) Other game designers similarly referred to such conventions as “tropes” (Sabine), “icons” (Barney), an inherited “language” of game design (Cuauhtemoc), or “conventions that help with player communication,” so that “if there’s someone who heals you it’ll get like a cross symbol because that means ‘it’s a healer’” (David). Why? 97

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Such conventions “have been reproduced so much it’s now become a language” such as “having a red team versus a blue team,” having a “priest be the healer,” and assuming players will run “from left to right in a platformer” (Cuauhtemoc). According to Mexican-Catholic designer Cuauhtemoc Moreno, this conventional “language” of game design is predominantly a practical way to communicate between developers and players. By now: “the concept of a Priest has become such a clear representation and now everyone associates a Priest with healing, that now it’s just an easy symbol of the game vocabulary. I don’t think it even says anything particular about the creators. Just, it’s a super-easy tool to represent something.

There’s a priest there, it’s a healer. It’s like calling levels ‘levels’ or your points a ‘score,’ and that kind of thing. It’s a basic building block for the language for better or worse” (Cuauhtemoc) These choices are mostly practical, and neither conscious decisions nor related to developers’ own religious beliefs and backgrounds. Cuauhtemoc, as a Catholicraised Mexican “do[es]n’t think it even says anything particular about the creators;” whereas for atheist Christopher “it’s just something you call on […] it’s just a palette, I don’t have any feelings about it either way I just like it.” For Chris Austen, his choice to include a priest class, a high priestess, a paladin, a church and several “holy” items in his game The Contractor “just made sense.” He stated “I just rolled with it, it just came natural […] I wanted a melee class, I wanted a mage class, so I needed a priest class, I just built on that.”

Such ‘naturalness’ encourages developers to make their design decisions based on existing conventions for pragmatic reasons. Standardized signs that have already been established make the most immediate sense to players and developers. Developers talk about these conventions as self-evident. In this example, religious contexts can simply just be “where the healing comes from:” “if you get an RPG and one of the characters isn’t religious I’d be very surprised. Down to the very basic core mechanics of RPGs include a priest as healer in a fundamental role. Every RPG game is more or less gonna 98

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have a healer, and that role and background is usually given a religious context because that’s where the healing comes from.” (Christopher) Indeed, Christopher says, religious tropes “seem pretty standard [in] just everything I come across.” Taking out religion may be problematic. As Cuauhtemoc states: “if you make a game where you change a convention, like run from right to left [instead of left-to-right] it has to be about that, the entire game will have to be about that, it’s a language of the medium now.” A radical departure from convention has to be core to the game’s experience to make sense lest it not confuse. Indeed, this goes as much for basic conventions such as left-right walking and red teams versus blue teams, as it goes for specifically religious conventions. In addition to examples of priest and paladin classes, participants named the church as a safe place, mana as a unit of magic, and so on as significant tropes.

In summary, rather than tapping into their own (religious) beliefs, independent developers reproduce religious ‘tropes,’ ‘icons’ or ‘signs’ that are part and parcel of the cultural repertoire of the game industry. This makes sense for pragmatic reasons of ‘usability’ and ‘instant communication’ to players.

4.4.3. Western Worship From what traditions do these standardized signs come, however? A common explanation when asked where developers got the conventions they adhere to, is their own gaming history. For David and Barney and many others, it is “hard to pinpoint the source of – it was just all the games we played when we were young.” They mention Dungeons & Dragons which is “full of deities” and all the games it inspired; as well as Heretic, Quake and Doom, because games like that “all just had the dark kind of creepiness of religious symbology.” It is the overall use of Christian iconography in games such as these that creates a particular “atmosphere” they consider important in games. For Christopher, too, “it’s just my background of growing up with Dungeons & Dragons and Diablo and stuff like that; I like these tropes and the worlds that they can offer.” The origins of religious representational conventions are almost uncontestedly located within Anglophone geek culture of the late 1970s, early ‘80s. Chris Bateman, looking back on decades of work stresses both “just how influential Tolkien’s novels 99

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have been in developing the narrative lineages of table-top games and videogames” and subsequently “that videogames largely descend from Dungeons & Dragons.” Dungeons & Dragons’ first edition resembled Tolkien’s races and Middle-Earth in many ways. It became a “mash-up world” (Bateman), or one in which “it’s almost just like you’ve got all the monsters ever in the world” combined together (Barney). More colloquially, David describes this repository of cultural heritage, folklore, pulp fiction and fantasy as “just massive nerds with fantasy novels, Dungeons & Dragons and so on.”

Game design is thus rooted in a Western tradition of looking at religion, and indie developers seem often more incentivized to stick to those traditions than AAA companies with all their up-to-date market research and advertising budgets. As Chad Toprak, Farah Khalaf, Rami Ismail, Lee Shang Lun and others specified: the conservative, market-conform audience to stick to is one of “primarily white” and “secular” or “atheist men.” Rami points to the difference in classic representations of the Christian “Priest who is always a healer or manipulator that converts enemies” versus the exotic “wild Shaman,” as one example through which game culture’s Eurocentric perspective becomes apparent: “Shamans are much more aggressive, which says a lot about how we look at shamanism. Shamans are not healers. Shamans make volcanoes erupt and cause earthquakes, you will never see a Priest do that. So in these cases you see a strong preference for Christian culture in game culture. A Paladin in game culture, also, is always a healer ‘slash’ warrior. Always dressed in white, always a hero of light. Believe me, if games originated from the Arabic world, Paladins would be one of the most dangerous bad guys to encounter, depicted as bloody monsters – because they are literally crusaders.” (Rami) Similarly, Nawaf Bahadur recounted how his friends and he were confused, growing up in Saudi-Arabia, about the ‘obviousness’ of churches as a safe and sacred place in videogames: “they usually have you go to a church to revive your characters, and the person who does it is a pastor. And for a lot of people it doesn’t really make real-world sense, such as for a Muslims like me, growing up in the 100

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Middle-East, it doesn’t seem self-evident at all. In Saudi-Arabia we don’t have any churches. So for me going to a church and healing my character sounds weird. It’s like ‘yeah you’re telling me to go to that building?’ …

We just didn’t get it growing up– but for many people here it has become in games a symbol, the church, for healing, in games.

So in level design using those symbols does help, even without the cultural background for it to really make sense.”

When game developers grew up only being offered Western, Christian traditional signs, it makes sense to reproduce this tradition as they enter the industry.

Specifically, this tradition represents religion divorced from faith and church: as magical, as instrumental, and as equal to fantasy and folklore. Shang Lun stresses that in his experience this now-default “game culture which we celebrate all the time […] is largely secular. It largely assumes the player is secular. It certainly does not frame religion as a ‘real’ thing.” Furthermore, it uses religion instrumentally: “you pray to gods to get health […] almost always it’s transactional – which is very much not how I conceptualize my faith” (Shang Lun). Religion is elsewhere instrumentalized as ‘window dressing’ since videogames use religious representation to “explain away” game mechanics and add atmosphere, “in the way that magic is used in a lot of fantasy stuff, a quick way to layer on to explain certain types of effects” (David). Adding to this, Barney insists that “not being very religious [myself] I find it very fascinating in terms of like just atmosphere! If you want to give something atmosphere, the elements of drama and magic are really strong in religion and ritual and all that stuff.”

Just as easily as it is used as a tool to explain away things and add atmosphere, this predominantly Christian heritage is stripped of its sacrality by setting it alongside the mundane and the magical. There is a long tradition of what Richard Bartle called “making religions mundane.” Making the first MMO in 1978, he: “put in temples and churches, chapels and crypts and such because I wanted familiar settings that I could do magic in. […] I put them in to make them be mundane. It was just about regarding religion as another form of magic. To make religion just look like any other kind of fantasy.”

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This set the tone for a decades-long tradition of representing religion as instrumental and mundane. Game development started out as hobby projects in university dorm rooms and attics – much like Anthropy’s ‘Zinesters,’ albeit decidedly white, male and North-American or European. However, the culture that has resulted from this has become universal. Regardless of whether developers are atheist, Muslim or Christian, from North-America, Europe or elsewhere, this tradition of representing religion is the global default. In the words of David, straying away from European-Christian traditions “just feels weird:” “We tend to shy away from Australian stuff, because it feels sort of weird?

So we usually sort of default to being more American? Or English? If we’d use specific Australian or Aboriginal mythology, that would seem like we’re making a very very bold statement about that’s what this game is about! Whereas if we borrowed from English folklore it’s like ‘oh that’s just normal’ English mythology, I can just throw those symbols around and not feel bad!” (David) 4.4.4. Economic Expectations In relation to such concerns of weirdness or incomprehensibility, independent developers stressed the economic risks of depicting religion differently. Illustrative is Sabine Harrer – a game scholar and game-maker with the Copenhagen Game Collective, who made Pray, Pray, Absolution, in which players sign the cross competitively (in a mockery of what Sabine perceived as her childhood Catholicism’s holier-than-thou performativity): “It is very hard to make a game. So most developers go for a version of game development that makes them stay alive… to survive. To be able to make games as art like Pray, Pray, Absolution is a luxury; to make a game that also is on the market is very risky, to get into any kind of criticism of religion.” (Sabine) Contrasting the economic independence stressed in the literature, most indies are so dependent on the market that their livelihoods are at stake – again, more so than 102

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contracted workers at a company like Ubisoft. This encourages them to re-use tropes as well as literal assets through the Unreal and Unity asset stores (e.g., Keogh, 2018, p. 13). Sabine reasons that the economic necessity for indies to re-use assets such as churches and priests “contributes to this constant repetition of themes and tropes and mechanics.”

Indeed, the Unity asset store tends to gravitate toward reproductions of the same, often European and North-American, signs of all sorts – from flora, fauna, to objects. Searching Unity’s Asset Store for religion reflects this cultural-geographical bias, too: most of the assets on offer are Christian (Figure 3). The “Authentic Sacred Church Music” pack comes with the following explanation: “Are you creating a game in a religious setting or a game where the player might enter into a church or cathedral at some point?” (emphasis original) A ‘religious setting’ on Unity’s asset store is largely synonymous with Catholic Christianity: beside the sacred music pack, there are sculptures of angels and saints; various crucifixes; a Virgin Mary; graveyards of Christian tombstones with complimentary stone cathedral; Gothic Churches; a vintage Bible; and, for those who scroll down, a few non-Christian and vaguely non-Western results, such as the “African” culture sculpture pack. Why re-use conventions at all? Minimizing risks and their financial consequences motivates designers to conform to an economy of Christian conventions.

Within this cultural tradition and economy of game design, re-framing religion otherwise becomes a risky design choice. Bartle insists that “you can’t make a game that you want everyone to play if you pitch up with a particular worldview about a particular religion.” Bateman agrees that “in a game targeting the US, which almost all games do […] the betrayal of religion becomes a market concern.” Contrarily, when working on Kult: Heretic Kingdoms with small studio 3D People, Bateman decided on a setting that inverted many Fantasy clichés of religion. The game, whose tagline reads “God is dead and religion is heresy,” involves an Inquisition aiming to annihilate religion. Nonetheless, 103

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Figure 3. Results in the Unity Asset Store for ‘religio*’ are mostly Christian.

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“I don’t know how successful I was at getting that across to players, to be honest. I went to a conference in Atlanta and met someone who had played the game. He was Christian and felt it’d be very off-putting to Christian players. I probably failed on that front. I’m still quite pleased to have had a go at it at all, because anywhere else in the market, on a highend development budget, it could never have been made at all. There is just no way.” (Chris) While small profits – or even not-for-profit art practice – thus potentially allow game makers to deviate from established representations of religion, there is a pervasive consciousness of the economic risks involved. Lee Shang Lun attested that indies typically “ensure that the final product isn’t going to be too far out from what our established conception of a good game is. Because such a gamble is not feasibly taken on,” experimental game design is only possible on the basis of previous commercial success.

While Shang Lun’s past successes have granted him some financial security to be able to experiment, there are still audience considerations that cause him not to make games on overtly religious topics. One such concept, Emma, was cancelled halfway through: Interviewer: Which of your games would you say engage more explicitly with your religious background?

Lee Shang Lun: Um no... None... Uh—there’s unmade games that I’ve made where I’ve tried to represent my religious experience… They’ve all kind of not been very interesting to most audiences.

I: Why have they not been made? I think one of them might be Emma.

From the ABC episode that you didn’t end up making…

LSL: Well I got half-way through and then kind of just gave up. Because… [long silence] it… didn’t feel like… the kind of thing that was going to be [sighs] useful to anyone maybe?

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Developers that did gain financial security often got there by not challenging convention. A successful indie developer and practicing Muslim, Rami Ismail of Vlambeer fame, hopes the future grants “more space for games that use religion well, that do give another perspective on the world because until now it has pretty much always been so that games with such a perspective, like Under Ash that Syrian game… They have absolutely no chance financially, because the market is too Western” (Rami) 4.5. Conclusion: Religious values become commodified signs For now, there is little such space for deviation. I started this chapter with the question Do independent game developers represent their own (ir)religious backgrounds in their games, and how and why do they (not) do so?

Do they? Those I interviewed overwhelmingly do not, due to taboos and fears.

For atheists, gaming was seen as a distinctly irreligious culture; whereas religious developers expressed a deeply rooted idea that gaming is not (yet) a place for their religiosity, despite its pervasion of every other part of their life. How do they come to represent religion instead? They use religion instrumentally, through standardized signs often based on conventions typically embedded in Western-Christian gamedesign traditions.

Theoretically, this instrumental use of religion is again, and somewhat surprisingly, best understood as a commodification of religious tradition. Just as in the previous chapter, I refer by “commodification” to a process of “maximum feasible reduction of social, cultural, political or personal transaction costs” to make something exchangeable (Appadurai, 2005, p. 35). In the case of my analysis, the personal and meaningful religious values of indie developers are turned into commodified signs by just such a process. Historically, religious values are communicated through ritual, collective experience and material culture, which in religious communities serve to do what sociologist of religion Peter Berger calls “constructing a common world 106

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within which all of social life receives ultimate meaning, binding on everybody” (1967, p. 134). However, by putting a social taboo on personal religious expression in the (indie) videogame market; and by standardizing, restricting and making exchangeable – in other words: commodifying – their religious values, they are thus reduced to commodified signs.

It is perhaps underwhelming to the reader (and unexpected to this researcher himself), that I must draw a similar conclusion here as in the previous chapter, but it is the appropriate conceptualization. Furthermore, it is productive for two reasons which help me flesh out the theorization of how religion is encoded in videogames in a way that is complementary to the analysis of Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series in chapter 3. In the first place, the reason it is productive is because it is a surprising result: rather than a big, commercial, market-driven enterprise (for whom making things ‘marketable’ and commodifying them is par for the course), the indie developer is presented in the literature as an independent figure, able to stray from conventions. This was, in fact, the very reason to ask this question: how does the encoding of religion in videogames occur outside of the AAA market. Despite the literature hailing indies as exemplary for diversity, inclusivity, authenticity and originality in the game industry; the analysis shows that they, too, are in fact dependent on established convention for various reasons. These reasons (social taboo, standardization, eurocentrism, and economic precarity) make even independent game design a difficult and unprofitable environment for expressing religious identity. Secondly, it shows that despite diversity of religious and cultural backgrounds, they all draw from the same (WesternChristian) game-design traditions. Feminist philosopher bell hooks argues that this is always the case for cultural commodification, because cultural expressions (such as religious traditions and values) are sold to a dominant culture by “eating the other,” i.e., by bringing the cultural Other – the shaman, the Muslim – into the palatable world of hegemony (1992: 31).

The ‘ultimate meaning’ of religion is thus first made taboo, and then instrumentalized in its commodified form: standardized, westernized, and finally exchangeable as a (safe, palatable) investment. How can this be understood? On the one hand, Brendan Keogh rightfully asserts that indies’ ideal-typical “tension with Triple-A development” means indies not only oppose AAA, but are also “entangled 107

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in the narratives and values of the Triple-A industry” (Keogh, 2015: 156). Indeed, it appears hard – even for indies – to escape the gravitational pull and standard of the global ‘culture industry’ of games. Indeed, their precarity seems to motivate them more so to be conservative than salaried workers in a AAA context. Given the finding that there is a tendency toward similar and standardized forms of representing religion, I recognize the process of what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno once called “sameness” [Ähnlichkeit] (1944: 94): a process of standardization in cultural industries, regardless of the beliefs and intentions of the workers within that industry.

They describe “sameness” as a process by which cultural industries are driven to monotonously commodify ideas, driven on the one hand by taboos on non-hegemonic groups and ideas – in Horkheimer and Adorno’s time and text “cozy liberalism and Jewish intellectualism” (p. 96), of “eating the other” (hooks, 1992). On the other hand, this “insatiable uniformity” is positively driven by a maximization of profit, achieved by appealing to the widest possible audience, by which “words change from substantial carriers of meaning to signs devoid of qualities” (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1944: 133).

What Horkheimer & Adorno argue about signs in text, film and radio, appears to be true for independent 21st century game development as well. Without wanting to support their further argument that cultural industries – through their supposed entanglement with other industries and political power – manipulate mass society into passivity; I am interested in the ‘sameness’ of indies. That is, the commodification of religious values as a reduction from “substantial carriers of meaning” (ibid.), or even “ultimate meaning” (Berger, 1967: 134), to exchangeable signs devoid of those qualities. Churches become places to regain Health Points, Clerics become merely a specific type of fighter, and so on. In this, my analysis provides cultural-sociological and empirical support for Horkheimer and Adorno’s concept of sameness – across at least one AAA example (Assassin’s Creed in the previous chapter), and a broad selection of indies. Indeed, we can see similar observations elsewhere, namely a process of standardization under global-capitalist “transnational cultural fields” (Kuipers, 2011: 555; Kline et al., 2003), especially with indies working under economic precarity (Lima, 2018; Srauy, 2019).

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My analysis of how indies deal with religion has broader theoretical implications. First of all, the instrumental perspective that characterizes the designer choices explored in this chapter nuances the interpretations of religious scholars (e.g., Bainbridge, 2013; Bosman, 2019), who are celebrating the “spiritual significance” of religion in games and popular culture as a whole (cf. Partridge, 2004). Instead, ultimate values of religion are reduced to conventional and commodified signs. On a more general note, this chapter shows the relevance of Horkheimer and Adorno’s concept of ‘sameness’ still dominating the culture industry and, particularly, gives qualitative empirical support for how precisely such conformity emerges through different steps of commodification. It is for following chapters, below, to further analyse whether and how games present these standardized signs (Chapters 5 and 6), and how players decode those (Chapters 7 and 8). As for encoding religion in indie games: indies just need to make a living.

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Part II. Content “In what ways and which contexts is religion represented in videogames?”

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Chapter 5. Eclectic Religion:10 Religious Cultural Heritage in Fantasy Games

Figure 4. Ifrit on their throne in Final Fantasy XV, resembling traditional depictions of Lucifer in Hell, produced by Square Enix (2016), taken from in-game screenshot.

5.1. Introduction Final Fantasy XV, the latest in a long-running series of Japanese Role-Playing games, opens ostensibly with a representation of Lucifer in Hell (Figure 4). Instead, it is revealed to be Ifrit, a long-running character based on the ‘infernal’ djinn of Arabic folklore. Later in the same game, players may seek Lakshmi; summon Bahamut; hear Christian choir music; encounter Leviathan, Shiva, Bennu; and so on, alongside the 30-year old series’ own lore of Tonberries, Malboroes and Chocobos. For a Hindu This chapter is an adapted version of a published article: de Wildt, L., Aupers, S. (2020). Eclectic Religion: The flattening of religious cultural heritage in videogames. International Journal Of Heritage Studies. doi: 10.1080/13527258.2020.1746920.

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goddess of wealth, a pre-Islamic Arabic dragon, Christian hymns, a Judaic sea monster, a Hindu Trinity god, and an Egyptian mythological bird to all appear alongside each other and among a repository of Japanese monsters: that is eclectic to say the least.

These are traditions of cultural heritage that have been imbued with sacred meaning for millennia. More importantly, they have been mostly kept apart: the generations of people who have prayed to Lakshmi have historically seldom been the same people who have sung Christian hymns in Sunday Mass.

This chapter focuses on religious cultural heritage specifically, although it will show that the lines between religion, mythology, folklore and contemporary fiction are difficult to delineate. At the same time, it shows cultural heritage to be a part of religion, as much as religion is a core part of cultural heritage. Any modern atheist or agnostic who ‘fights the good fight,’ ‘goes the extra mile’ or ‘rises and shines,’ engages with the religious cultural heritage of the King James Bible and its many common idioms. So too does a player of videogames engage in numerous combined traditions of religious cultural heritage, through games such as Final Fantasy, God of War, Zelda or Assassin’s Creed – and there are many of those players: about 2.5 billion of them engage in these products of Earth’s biggest cultural industry, out-earning the film and music industries combined (WePC 2019).

By performing a formalist analysis of the Final Fantasy series [FF] leading up to Final Fantasy XV [FFXV] as a case study for such videogames, this chapter asks which religious cultural heritages are represented, how such religious cultural heritage is mediated in the context of a videogame, and what implications this has for the way in which these games treat the intangible heritage of religious belief, belonging and practice.

5.2. Cultural Heritage and Religion This chapter studies intangible cultural heritage (UNESCO 2003; Ahmad 2006; Vecco 2010), particularly focusing on those narrative and visual expressions of religious cultural heritage that are historically reproduced in mediated (e.g., textual, visual) representations. Specifically, the chapter studies the appearance in videogames of three different but related forms of intangible cultural heritage: religious iconography, 114

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mythology or folklore, and modern/contemporary lore.

While the materials and method section below will go further into why videogames like FF are an important site of inquiry, this literature overview will first establish what I mean by cultural heritage and its relation to religion; why representation and mediation are at the core of religious practice; and how such traditions of representation have been divided into a ‘world religions paradigm,’ in which the dominant assumption in the West is that we pick one religious tradition to the exclusion of others.

5.2.1. Representation and Mediation of Religion Much of what we regard as religious is caught up in the objects we use and the values we assign to them: religions’ crucifixes, robes and prayer beads, its divine depictions, its magnificent temples and mosques and churches and synagogues. Religion in many ways is heritage, especially in what remains of it in the Western world. Church attendance and active worship have been continuously in decline (e.g., Hooghe, Quintelier, and Reeskens 2006; Archbishops’ Council 2013; WIN/GIA 2015), and more so among young and educated people (Johnson 1997; Sherkat 2008; Pew 2018). At the same time, much of what is on UNESCO’s list of cultural heritage to be protected was made for religious functions and purposes. Over 35% of UNESCO’s cultural heritage list consists of temples, churches, monasteries, abbeys, mosques and so on (UNESCO 2019). In other words, we decreasingly believe in gods, belong to religious communities or practice their rituals; but we love their buildings so much that we spend money to make sure they are protected, just so we can visit them as tourists.

So, too, it is with religions’ intangible cultural heritage. Intangible cultural heritage, according to UNESCO’s 2003 convention to protect it, has been defined as “the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith – that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognise as part of their cultural heritage” (UNESCO 2003, 2). This includes such religious heritage as the songs people sing in church, their divinities, dresses and dances, their rituals of marriage, birth, death or coming of age, and the stories they tell each other about themselves and their gods across generations.

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As other scholars have noted, such religious cultural heritage survives even in “postsecular” times (Habermas 2008), and particularly in the popular stories we tell in media and through media texts: the books that we read, the music we listen to, the television we watch and the games we play (e.g., Partridge 2004; Besecke 2005; Clark 2005; Aupers 2012). As noted in the introduction however, many studies of religion in games, while game-immanent (i.e., studying games, rather than players or developers), remain indexical: they descriptively point out that there is religion. Certainly, if such indexical projects establish one thing, it is that there is a lot of religious cultural heritage to point to. Yet there is a problem when such academic projects are mostly indexical.

By pointing out the presence of religious cultural heritage, religion comes to stand in as merely representation. However, cultural heritage, as established, always consists of more than just representation, but also the practices, knowledge, objects and spaces associated with communities and groups whose shared heritage binds them (Ahmad 2006; Unesco, 2003; Vecco 2010).

The theoretical tradition of ‘material religion’ is one specific anthropological/ sociological approach to religion that highlights this importance of “things,” such as objects, rituals and media (Meyer & Houtman, 2012; see also Arweck & Keenan, 2006; Chidester, 2000; Houtman & Meyer, 2012; Meyer, 2012). This “material turn” in studying religion recognizes that religious objects are to religious individuals and communities not just representations but that they are fundamentally mediations of divine experience. Such mediations can be quite literal. To repeat a citation of Birgit Meyer from the introduction: “Take for example the Catholic icon: though carved from wood, painted, and set up – thus obviously ‘human made’ – to the believing beholder (and possibly its maker) it appears as an embodiment of a sacred presence that can be experienced by contemplative gaze, prayer, or a kiss.

In this perspective, the transcendental is not a selfrevealing entity, but, on the contrary, always ‘affected’ or ‘formed’ by mediation processes, in that media and practices of mediation invoke the transcendental via particular sensational forms.” (Meyer, 2006, pp. 13-14) Indeed, Meyer and others argue that such mediations have always been central to 116

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religious practice (2006; de Vries & Weber, 2001; Morgan, 1999; Stolow, 2005); just as Bollywood, televangelism, icons, lithographs and so on do to this day (e.g., Dwyer, 2006; Pinney, 2004; Meyer 2010).

These are claimed not just to be representations: the Passion of the Christ literally and embodiedly (materially) mediates the sensation of the sacred divine (Klaver, 2012; Morgan, 2004). What a study of religious cultural heritage thus needs to do in an object, is to look beyond the indexical (‘here is a religious icon in a game’) and connect the icon, deity or ritual (etc.) that is represented back to its religious function. By focusing on rituals, objects and the functions and practices of religion, ‘material religion’ rejects a “modern Protestant bias” that “the private interior of individual subjectivity is the proper location for modern religiosity” which views religion as belief in a superior being governed by sets of rules (Meyer & Houtman, 2012; Pels, 2012; Wharton, 2014).

Instead, materialist conceptions of religion focus on the outward objects, rituals and depictions that mediate religiosity, in other words on the cultural heritage of religion.

Looking beyond the indexicality of representation, I ask what mediating function the cultural object has inherited, and how does its appearance in a videogame affect such mediation – e.g., when Leviathan is presented next to Shiva.

5.2.2. World Religions paradigm A second problem arises. How can Leviathan exist next to Shiva? If the first problem is looking at how religious cultural heritage mediates a sacred experience, the second problem is that the functions inherited by these icons are contradictory – Leviathan as a prophetic sea monster from the Book of Job (and others), and Shiva as The Destroyer (or Transformer) of worlds. Both may be feared, surely, but can they exist together?

This question is central to what Paul Hedges calls the “world religions paradigm” of religion (2017). This dominant paradigm, according to Hedges holds that ‘religions are understood to be bounded territories of belonging’ to one of a list of institutionalised, separate ‘world religions’ such as Islam or Zoroastrianism which are “clearly separated and demarcated,” and belonging to them “is understood to be primarily about believing in a set of principles” (Hedges 2017, 53). Much like material religion scholars, Hedges questions a dominant “Western Protestant bias” 117

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that understands religion exclusively in modern, Western terms as institutionalised and clearly demarcated (mutually exclusive) tradition of rules and beliefs (ibid.; see also Smith 1962; Fitzgerald 2000; Masuzawa 2005). In other words: that to believe in Leviathan means that Shiva does not exist, and vice versa.

The “world religions paradigm” (Hedges 2017) in which religions are considered mutually exclusive, then, is typically a modern and Western construction suggesting that belonging to multiple traditions is a thing of the past – only applicable to Ancient Greek, Roman, Babylonian and other travellers taking gods from foreign lands and incorporating them into their own tradition (e.g., Weber 1922; Noegel 2010). This, however, is a problematic perspective. As various scholars including Hedges have observed, “multiple religious belonging” is alive and well. People still combine various traditions “without any particular tradition being completely embraced, or perhaps even without an awareness of the traditional origins of those beliefs, values and practices” (van der Braak and Kalsky 2017), especially in China and other parts of Asia (Cornille 2010; Oostveen 2017). That this is a European (or more properly Abrahamic) idea underlines that the mutual exclusivity of the World Religion Paradigm is not just a historical, but also a cultural-geographical exception. Indeed, institutionalised religion as a concept seems rooted in European and Middle-Eastern cultures. It is a staple in world religious studies that the concept of religion is applied and imported to other parts of the world from a European colonialist template (e.g., Fitzgerald 2000; King and Hedges 2014). Even Shinto, the ‘indigenous religion’ of Japan is essentially a highly syncretic tradition grounded in animistic ideas, Buddhism, Taoist notions, Confucianist worldviews and Christian beliefs and traditions (Fiadotau 2017; Navarro Remesal 2017). It is frequently argued that Shinto only retroactively came to conform to the Western ‘world religion paradigm’ by codifying and institutionalizing Japan’s disparate ritual practices and beliefs (e.g., Pilgrim and Ellwood 1985; Josephson 2012), in what Jason Ānanda Josephson describes as the post-war “invention of religion in Japan” (2012). Japanese religion remains, in practice, exemplary for a more ‘flat,’ nonhierarchical and syncretistic perspective. Indeed, religion is represented in Japanese popular culture as inherently playful – transgressing boundaries between the sacred and the profane; manga heroes and religious saints and, ultimately, combining elements from different religious traditions (Occhi 2012; Hutchinson 2019; cf. Walter 2014).

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5.3. Methodology It for these reasons that FF as a Japanese game series, serves as a fitting case study. In FF, more than elsewhere, we find a juxtaposition of different religious traditions, icons and rituals. If, indeed, religious belief, function and practice are primarily mediated activities rather than representations; and if a protestant bias has focused too much on the former (belief) due to a eurocentric and historically specific concept of religion; then we need to look at religious cultural heritage as a mediation, and preferably in a non-Western context. As such I ask • which (religious) cultural heritage is mediated?

• More theoretically, how is such religious cultural heritage mediated in the context of a videogame? And • what implications does this have for the way these games treat the intangible heritage of religious belief, belonging and practice?

Specifically operationalized as a case study: which religious cultural heritage does Final Fantasy use, how does it do so, and what implications does this have for how it treats religious traditions as cultural heritages mediating faith in the divine?

To study this, I take a “game-immanent approach” to studying the game (RaddeAntweiler, Waltemathe and Zeiler 2014; Heidbrink, Knoll and Wysocki 2015), meaning I focus on the game itself rather than its players – research into which, elsewhere, should be taken as complementary to each other (Aupers, Schaap and de Wildt 2018).

The specific case of FF was selected for two reasons. First, an extensive discourse analysis of 100 forum-threads on five different gaming forums selected the FF series as coming up most in public discussions on religion among gamers – the relevant process and analysis are detailed in a publication by the authors available elsewhere (de Wildt and Aupers 2019). The conclusion was that the game (more than any other series) prompts players to talk about religion, and that such games’ fantastical or historically distant settings allow players to identify with religious positions other than their own (de Wildt and Aupers 2018). Second, FF is exemplary of what I am trying to study: 119

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as noted above, it is a non-Western game produced in Japan that typically combines lore from nearly all parts of the world (Occhi 2012; Hutchinson 2019). Furthermore, FF is one of the longest running series and has become indicative of a genre (the JRPG, or Japanese Role-Playing Game). To be clear, other examples abound (e.g., Shin Megami Tensei [cf. Salvador 2015], Xenogears/-saga/-blade), including Western games that similarly combine different religious traditions (Assassin’s Creed [de Wildt 2019], SMITE [e.g., Heidbrink, Knoll and Wysocki 2015], God of War [e.g., Conway 2019]); but FF as a case study provides us with a particularly rich and influential example.

In this context, videogames in general are treated as procedural, ergodic and encyclopedic artefacts, with a specific focus on the virtual worlds in which cultural heritage (tangible and intangible) is incorporated. Such virtual worlds are elsewhere theorised as rich “gamevironments” (Radde-Antweiler, Waltemathe and Zeiler 2014; Šisler, Radde-Antweiler and Zeiler 2017). By “procedural” I mean that games, much like rituals (Wagner 2012), consists of sets of rules with a rhetoric (Bogost 2007); by “ergodic” I mean that players navigate these rules through non-trivial efforts such as choices and strategical decisions, in ways that books and most other media do not afford (Aarseth 1997). Most importantly, by calling games “encyclopedic” (Murray 1997), I mean that these gameworlds draw on a large database of possible situations, surroundings, characters and monsters, that are required to fill sprawling, freely traversable worlds (over 2000 km² by current estimates [Nelva 2015]), demanded by the market’s standard for long playtimes (53 hours to complete on average (HowLongToBeat.com 2019), and made possible by modern computing and large hard disks – currently 155 gigabytes for the PC version, largely due to its huge selection of deities, monsters, surroundings and other animated cultural heritage. By comparison: the Lord of the Rings books take a combined 26 hours to read, and the movie trilogy on BluRay can be downloaded at about 12 gigabytes. The FF series itself consists of 15 main iterations, 32 spin-off titles and 6 films since its inception in 1987. The series is made in Japan by the Square Corporation, now Square Enix, and was originally based on Dungeons & Dragons (Huber 2009; Parish 2013), itself an amalgam of religious, folkloric and fantasy traditions.

The data used in this chapter consist of the entries in the FF series and the material around it such as manuals and other paratexts. In my analysis I will employ as much as possible a formalist, game-immanent approach: meaning that I will highlight 120

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the formal audio-visual, ludic, narrative and other content of the game and its paratexts that is available to everyone who plays the games and are as little as possible dependent on personal experience – by sticking to what is in the game, rather than personal interpretation. Notwithstanding this ambition to provide a value-free analysis, I am of course aware of the Western frame of reference that inevitably informs my analysis and interpretation. That does not mean that it is only or even primarily meaningful in a Japanese cultural context: it is a Japanese game that takes (and appropriates) much of its source material from European traditions, and most of its players – most recently about five million out of FFXV’s first six million sales (Duwell 2017; Sherman 2017) – come to the game from outside of Japan. Ultimately, Western scholars studying a Japanese games in a Western context, are entangled in a situation of “double [or, in this case, even triple] hermeneutics” so typical for the humanities and social sciences (Giddens 1984).

FF games are fundamentally set in a-historical, a-specific non-places. The first FF in 1987 was still influenced by Dungeons & Dragons, leading its designer Akitoshi Kawazu to state “there are certain [design choices] when it comes to a Dungeons & Dragons type of environment, a western role-playing experience […] Up until that point, Japanese RPGs were ignoring all of that” (Parish 2013, n.p.). Hence it was initially set in a typical Western fantastical, medievalist setting; while the first game also already included futuristic designs (such as the hardest enemy being a robotic ‘Warmech’). The FF games are so unhinged from a specific place and time that there is additionally a fundamental separation between the times and places of each sequential game: with some exceptions, each new FF has its own spatiotemporal setting. Every instalment mixes futuristic, medieval, high-fantasy, cyberpunk and/or steampunk aesthetics.

FFXV for instance, takes place in a feudal world featuring high-fantasy castles, while its rival region has a magically realist Venetian style; and the surrounding world is a contemporary ‘Americana’ in which the protagonists drive around in a 2006 Audi R8 – which can be futuristically converted into a flying car toward the game’s end. At the same time the games are shot through with Japanese and other Eastern aesthetics while taking in these disparate occidental influences. Two recurring characters, Biggs and Wedge, although never the same person but performing the same functions, pop up in FFXV with cockney accents, but dressed as World War 2 and WW1 German soldiers, respectively (Figure 5).

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This chapter focuses on FF as an example of this a-historical non-locatable amalgam of cultural heritage, and will later expand its scope by comparison to other games and series such as Shin Megami Tensei. FF and FFXV function here as a focus to delineate the analysis, indicative of a broader cultural tendency so that I can empirically ground and think through this tendency’s implications for religion, mediation and cultural heritage.

Figure 5. Recurring characters Biggs (left) and Wedge (right) in Final Fantasy XV, dressed in German World War 2 and 1 costumes respectively, produced by Square Enix (2016), taken from in-game screenshot.

5.4. Remixed Mediations The analysis below answers the three research questions posed above. First, by focusing on a single example (the mediation of Ifrit in FF leading up to their Luciferian form in FFXV), asking which religious cultural heritage is mediated. Secondly, I ask how such cultural heritage is mediated in games, by broadening the scope to how religious and folkloric cultural heritage appears alongside contemporary fiction in JRPGs such as FF. Thirdly, I consider what the implications are for religious mediation in 21st century popular culture via videogames, by connecting my results back to theory on religious practice, belief and belonging.

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5.4.1. Which religious cultural heritage is mediated?

What we see, first of all, through examples such as Ifrit, is that there is a continuous reconfiguring of a single inherited cultural icon. Ifrit is typical for FF and its genre’s long tradition of playfully appropriating religious tradition. Although I will briefly set out additional examples, it is productive to look at one example more elaborately.

First introduced in 1990, Ifrit appeared as a ‘summoned’ demon in Final Fantasy III in the shape of a horned yellow (Figure 6), blue or green Infernal creature. Since then, Ifrit has become a staple as either a boss to defeat, a demon to summon for help or both: always depicted with horns, claws and a simple loin cloth or kilt. In their appearance in Final Fantasy IV, for instance, Ifrit is called down by players to damage all opponents through their signature spell ‘Hellfire’ (Figure 7). Revealingly for Ifrit’s cultural heritage, the Super Nintendo release named them Jinn, later to be re-named Ifrit in consecutive re-releases of the same game. In that game, summons such as Ifrit/ Jinn are called ‘eidolons’ (Greek for ‘phantom’ or ‘idol,’ and the root of Latin ‘Idolum’).

An ‘Eidolon Library’ holds details for each, stating for Ifrit: “Ifrit, the Infernal... Spouting flames hot and hungry enough to consume all they touch, he shows his foes no mercy.”

Oscillating over 26 years between demonic and beast-like, the ‘Infernal’ idol Ifrit’s most recent form in 2016’s FFXV takes their most humanoid form to date, seated on a skulladorned throne surrounded by flames and nonchalantly resting their claws beneath their horns (Figure 4, above).

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Figure 6. (left) Ifrit as introduced in Final Fantasy III for the Nintendo Entertainment System, original sprite by Square Co., Ltd. (1990), taken from the user-made “Fandom wiki” under CC-BY-SA license.

Figure 7. (right) Ifrit in action in Final Fantasy IV, re-named Jinn for the SNES release by Square Co., Ltd. (1991), taken from in-game screenshot.

Thus FF’s Ifrit draws from at least two religious sources of cultural heritage: pre-Islamic Arabic folklore, and Abrahamic theo-mythology. In Arabic folklore, Ifrit [‫ ]تيرافع‬are types of Jinn [‫نج‬, the root of supernatural genies in English]. It has since at least the 9th century been presented by Islam sources as predominantly an evil spirit due to its infernal origins (Rees, 2013, p. 91), Ottoman descriptions of fiery appearance and flaming breath (Adil, 2012), its categorisation as a shaitan [‫]ناطيش‬ (Hughes, 1995), and due to Islamic descriptions of an Ifrit interrupting the prophet Muhammed’s prayers (Lebling, 2010, p. 141). However, many stories and depictions retell stories of helpful Ifrit, much like FF’s dual depictions of Ifrit as monster and helper. An unknown artist’s depiction of an Ifrit called Arghan Div in the Brooklyn museum shows an Ifrit returning a sunken chest of armor to Hamza – no less than the uncle of the Islamic prophet Muhammed (Figure 8).

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Figure 8. A friendly Ifrit depicted in Arghan Div Brings the Chest of Armor to Hamza produced between 1562 and 1577 by an unknown artist, housed in the Brooklyn Museum’s Asian Art collection. Opaque watercolor and gold on cotton, 79.1cm by 63.3cm. Image uploaded by the Brooklyn Museum under CC-PD-Mark license.

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At the same time FFXV connects the shaitan categorisation of Ifrit to its Abrahamic interpretative end: Hebrew Šāṭān [‫]ןָטָׂש‬, meaning an adversary or accuser, which in the King James Bible became the primary English word, together with Lucifer, for the Christian Devil that tempts believers into sinning, and who rules over Hell (Hoffmann, 2012; Kohler, 2006). ‘Lucifer’ comes from the Latin name for Venus, the morning star whose movements have been associated with a fall from the heavens, which has in turn led the King James Bible to apply the metaphor to the Devil/Satan.

The introductory image of a horned Ifrit casually seated on their throne surrounded by skulls and fire carries a visual reference to common depictions of Lucifer. There are commonalities with, for instance, Alessandro Vellutello’s Lucifer, illustrations to Dante’s Divina Comedia by William Blake, Gino de Bini’s illustration for Rapisardi’s Lucifero (Figure 9); or contemporary images of the goat-like Baphomet on the throne as popularized by the Church of Satan and actor Tom Ellis as the eponymous Lucifer popularized by Fox and Netflix (Figure 10).

Hence, when I ask which religious cultural heritage is depicted, the answer is: all of them combined. First of all, in the case of Ifrit we see that this one Japanese cultural product layers two kinds of cultural heritage unto Ifrit: the pre-Islamic Arabic beastlike Jinn and the Abrahamic (i.e., Judaic/Christian/Islamic/etc.) ‘infernal’ Lucifer. It draws together two disparate traditions associatively, and without compunction about the paradigmatic distinction between the two traditions of religious cultural heritage, nor their communities, beliefs and practices. Second of all, Ifrit is no exception. The same can be said for FF’s depictions of Odin, Minerva, Bennu, Shiva, Leviathan and many others (Figure 11).

5.4.2. How is such cultural heritage mediated?

Thus, FF blends various cultural heritages without necessarily reproducing them faithfully. Additionally, these characters are more than singular signs, meaningful only within their own tradition of religious or folkloric cultural heritage. They are, secondly, juxtaposed eclectically: widely different and seemingly incompatible cultural heritage exists and interacts within the same fictional world as each other and the characters controlled by the player. Furthermore, these disparate traditions are combined without 126

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Figure 9. Gino de Bini’s depiction of Lucifer for the cover of poet Mario Rapisardi’s Lucifero (1887), reproduced under CC-PD-Art license.

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Figure 10. The Satanic Temple in Salem’s representation (left) of Baphomet on the throne, by artist Luciana Nedelea; and Tom Ellis as the eponymous Lucifer in promotional material for Netflix. Permission personally granted by artist, respectively reproduced promotional material for non-commercial purposes.

regard to whether these are historically existing, folkloric, institutionalized religious, or (contemporarily) fictitious sources.

The example from FF should be clear: I have already pointed manifold to the combination of Germanic/Nordic, Greco-Roman and other cultural heritage coexisting. For another example of how extensive such eclectic juxtaposition may present itself, let us look to a fan-made list of monsters appearing in Shin Megami Tensei – much like in FF (Figure 12). It shows that the game draws freely from historical mythologies that are Abrahamic, Australian, Balinese, Celtic, Chinese, Haitian, Japanese, Occult, Mayan, Scottish, Slavic, Zoroastrian and so on, alongside H.P. Lovecraft’s literary mythos (Cthulhu, Azathoth), historical figures (Cleopatra, ‘Führer,’ Longinus), miscellaneous modern fiction (Carmen from the eponymous opera, Milady of the Three Musketeers, Zorro), and the game’s own inventions, such as mascot Jack Frost and fan-favourite Mara – a tentacled phallus on wheels (Figure 13).

Showing practiced, i.e., actively worshipped divinities from “world religions” (Hindu, Christian, etc.); together with historical and folkloric (Arabic, Egyptian, 128

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Roman, Greek); and ostensibly fictional (Lovecraftian, Tolkienesque, house lore) deities collapses the sacrality of several religious traditions seen as mutually exclusive in a “world religion paradigm” (Hedges 2017). Instead, games like these show all religious figures (worshipped or not) and fictional creatures as equally sacred and existent, diegetically. In games, “gods just exist” (Schaap & Aupers 2017): there is no doubt as to their epistemological status, even if this is in contradiction to the established communities who worship them outside of these games.

Figure 11. An eclectic collage of FF’s depictions of (left to right) Odin (FFVIII), Minerva (Crisis Core), Bennu (FFXV), Shiva (FFX), and Leviathan (Dissidia NT), not always recognizably like depictions in their own culturally inherited traditions. Based on in-game screenshots.

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The answer to how such cultural heritage is mediated and changed through videogames is that videogames such as Final Fantasy, through their encyclopedic need to take from a large variety of traditions, flatten theologies into a non-hierarchical database of anything from the history-based and world religious to the folkloric and contemporary popular-fictitious. In other words: the phallic wheelbarrow Mara is just as real and sacred as the Hindu Destroyer-Transformer god Shiva. This may be deeply unsettling to those who worship Shiva, but at the same time it raises questions on the ontological distinctions between historically worshipped gods and (recent) fictional deities (de Wildt and Aupers 2017). Religion scholar Markus Davidsen calls this distinction “history-based” versus “fiction-based,” finding that there are indeed actively worshipped fiction-based deities with religious believers, communities and practices (2013), some of which – unlike Mara – are actively worshipped. Examples of this blurring boundary between institutionalised religious worship and contemporary fiction are manifold, including the Church of Jediism (Possamai 2003); various Tolkien religions such as the Elf Queen’s Daughters (Davidsen 2012). Arguably Scientology, too, shows that the boundaries between institutionalised faith and popular media are difficult to distinguish: a church claiming 4.4 million adherents each year, whose tenets are based on the works of science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard.

5.5. Conclusion: Sacralizing the Fictional, Fictionalizing the Sacred The analysis of FF demonstrates both a fictionalisation of the sacred, and a sacralisation of fiction. What are the implications of this mediation of multiple religious traditions presented together eclectically, and as equal in (ontological, epistemological, cultural) status to contemporary fiction? Firstly, that the “world religion paradigm” crumbles, in which only one institutionalised tradition of belief and belonging can be adhered to at the same time. Secondly, that it replaces this paradigm with one of “multiple religious belonging,” in which, again, “beliefs, values and practices from various traditions are combined without any particular tradition being completely embraced, or perhaps even without an awareness of the traditional origins of those beliefs, values and practices” (van der Braak and Kalsky 2017). FF and its kin present worlds in which various traditions eclectically belong and interact – without necessarily the burden of belief (Davie 1990).

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Figure 12. The community-led Shin Megami Tensei Fandom website lists the game’s Demons (creatures that are encountered and can be enlisted to aid the player/protagonist) by mythology. The scrollbar at the edge of the screen indicates how elaborate the list of sub-categories is 131

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Figure 13. An encounter with fan-favourite monster Mara in Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux for the Nintendo 3DS, taken from in-game screenshot.

That these videogames – although popular globally – hail from Japan is no surprise. As noted, religious syncretism and multiple religious belonging are more common in Asia and deeply rooted in Japanese history and (popular) culture (Fiadotau 2017; Navarro Remesal 2017). Even Japan”s Shinto religion itself is arguably a collection of disparate beliefs and practices (Pilgrim and Ellwood 1985; Josephson 2012), whereas the positioning of a monopoly of truth within one (codified, institutionalised, delineated) religion is arguably a Western, mostly Abrahamic invention (Cornille 2010; Oostveen 2017). This, however, makes the introduction and popularity of Japanese games such as FF in a Western context even more interesting. Being by and large enculturated in a Western “world religions paradigm” (Hedges 2017) the question is what these games do for Western audiences. Instead of presenting religions as institutionalised and mutually exclusive, games like FF create a fantasy world in which various religious cultural heritages come to life alongside each other, outside of a world religion paradigm. FF”s diegesis thus enacts a thought experiment: what if all gods and superhuman entities are equal? Cthulhu, Cain, Abel, Ame no Uzume, Lucifer, Ifrit, Shiva, and so on.

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What does it mean for an artefact to show religious plurality where different religious assumptions are playfully presented in coalition and opposition? In sociologist of religion Peter Berger”s words on the consequences of globalist modernity and cultural pluralism for religion: “The pluralistic situation multiplies the number of plausibility structures competing with each other. Ipso facto, it relativizes their religious contents. More specifically, the religious contents are ‘de-objectivated,’ that is, deprived of their status as taken-for-granted, objective reality in consciousness. They become subjectivized.”

(Berger, 1967, pp. 151-152, emphasis added) By showing that multiple religious cultural heritages – their stories, their gods, their truths and beliefs – can co-exist eclectically, games like FF relativize and de-objectivate religious contents.

I argue that this juxtaposition of various religious, folkloric and fictional cultural traditions of intangible heritage is not alien to embodied religious practices.

In line with sociological and anthropological observations of recent years, I conclude that these games’ ‘eclectic religiosity’ echoes seldom-recognized, uninstitionalized but globally occuring religious practices of multiple religious belonging. When videogame series such as Final Fantasy and Shin Megami Tensei interchangeably represent multiple religious traditions alongside each other, they present players with an a-historical time, and an a-specific place in which cultural heritage is uprooted, and in which various traditions eclectically belong and interact, without having to believe. This flattened hierarchy of truth claims collapses the sacrality of several religious traditions seen as mutually exclusive from a “world religion paradigm” perspective (Hedges, 2017); and instead presents all religious figures (worshipped or not) and fictional creatures as equally sacred, diegetically.

By ‘remixing’ various religious traditions eclectically, videogames can confront us with the fictional and artefactual origins of traditions – no matter how sacred.

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which here is merely mediatized. What I mean by mediatized, here, as opposed to mediated, is that these signs (nor the games that present them) do not function as objects mediating the sacred to the profane – unless they were already familiar to a believing player beforehand. Instead, these games present religious signs that exist only within their own, mediatized context: as interchangeable, eclectic, remixed versions of their original (sacred or fictional) inspirations. By presenting the divine as interchangeable, videogames flatten theologies across fiction-based and history-based; practiced and non-practiced religions. Although this might be seen to commodify and trivialize divine traditions and practices, they essentially revert the use of religious cultural heritage to a cultural attitude toward religion that lies outside of European/ Middle-Eastern conceptions of religion; and predates the Abrahamic (monotheistic) World Religion Paradigm which monopolizes truth values of certain traditions to the exclusion of others; and serves to present them as objective.

This, I conclude, shows the vital role that (digital) cultural heritage plays in enacting theories on religious pluralism, especially when it represents alternatives to idealized, monolithic and singular religious traditions of ‘ultimate meaning,’ in which one tradition is taken as the complete and only answer to human meaning-making (Berger, 1969). Secondly, I conclude that these games’ ‘eclectic religiosity’ represents a much less fantastical and idealized representation of religious cultural heritage. One that is, rather, representative of much of the world’s religious practice of historical mergers and assimilations of intangible cultural heritage; that is explainable only through pluralism as a specific understanding of the post-secular in modern, digital and global societies. In such a use of cultural heritage, religion is neither final, nor fantasy.

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Chapter 6. Religion Beyond History: Deified Technology in Post-Apocalyptic Games14 Aloy: “Why are the lands beyond Nora territory called ‘tainted’?”

Teersa: “Is it not obvious? Our land is sacred. We live in sight of the one Goddess, All-Mother—source of all that lives. Beyond her sight lies a vast fallen land, spiritually tainted. That is why it is against tribal law to leave. But this blessing will protect you.”

(Horizon: Zero Dawn dialogue)

6.1. Introduction One caveat to analyses of fantastical and faux-medievalist settings such as the Final Fantasy series, is that it propagates a nostalgia in which religion and the existence of sacred beings are a romanticized part of the past. Not always are game worlds and the religious characters and the narratives they display fantastical, however. This chapter considers the theoretically opposing case of the ‘post-apocalyptic’ game genre. How is such a deeply religious concept – the end of the world most closely associated with the eponymous New Testament book – made into a genre for entertainment, and what place does religion have within the post-apocalyptic worlds portrayed?

Prompted by previous theorizations of religion in fictional media, I propose that in order to understand the way religion is treated in videogames beyond fantasy, we must turn to ‘science fiction-based’ religion, a category of religious representation that falls beyond the scopes of history- and fiction-based religion. That is, while ample academic scholarship reflects on games’ representation of Biblical, Islamic and other historical religions, as well as on the fictional religions of Skyrim or Tolkien that are based on the fantasy genre, there is little attention given to a new kind of religiosity This chapter is an adapted version of a published article: de Wildt, L., Aupers, S., Krassen, C., & Coanda, I. (2018). ‘Things Greater than Thou’: Post-Apocalyptic Religion in Games. ts, 9 (6), Art.No. 169, 1-20. doi: 10.3390/rel9060169.

14

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around technology, specifically in its dystopian, sometimes fearful guise (cf. Geraci 2012). Given the explorative nature of this chapter, I focus on game texts as source material, before looking at their players or developers: a game-immanent approach rather than an actor-centered one (Heidbrink et al. 2014; Zeiler 2018; Aupers, Schaap & de Wildt, 2018; cf. de Wildt & Aupers 2019a). By highlighting Fallout 3 and Horizon: Zero Dawn as two typical, theoretically relevant case studies from the past 10 years,15 this chapter will explore whether and how religion is represented in a world where society and humanity have been nearly, if not completely erased. In short, I ask: How do videogames present religion in the post-apocalypse and, particularly, how is religion positioned vis-à-vis future technologies in the game world?

6.2. Religion in Games: History, Fantasy and Future Overall, the research on religion in games is concerned with recognizing religious beliefs in games: how religious beliefs occur; how ‘superempirical’ gods (and other entities) and their followers are represented; and how religious elements and narratives are incorporated in interactive worlds. In other words, ‘religion in games’ research studies the occurrence of religion in the narrative or representative content of games—or the “narratological” layer of games, for lack of a better term (cf. Aarseth 2001; Frasca 2003; Murray 2005; cf. de Wildt 2014; e.g., Bosman, 2016b). Examples abound. Scholars such as Vit Šisler employ cultural approaches to religion in order to identify how the Islamic faith and its followers have been represented differently in Western and Middle Eastern games (Šisler 2006, 2008, 2009); whereas Masso and Abrams have done the same for Judaism (Masso and Abrams 2014). Other research has focused more directly on how narratives from world religions are incorporated and changed by game designers, such as Robert W. Guyker’s analysis of Journey’s use of shamanistic tropes recurring throughout pre-modern and non-Western religions (Guyker 2014); and Bosman and Poorthuis’ tracing of the occurrence and adaptations of Lilith and the Nephilim (Judeo-Christian mythological characters) throughout Judaic, Christian, Islamic and occult literature as well as various games, each considered equally (Bosman and Poorthuis 2015).

15

The conclusion to this chapter will furthermore point to relevant examples beyond the two cases.

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While these research examples and their case studies draw on what Davidsen calls “history-based” religion, or conventional world religions that “claim to refer to events that have taken place in the actual world” such as the Christian Gospels (Davidsen 2013, p. 386), most games rely instead on fictional religions. I use the term “fictionbased” here as opposed to “history-based,” where the latter refers to long-standing religious practices such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and the other big world religions. The conceptualization of “fiction-based” and the contrast with history-based religions springs from the sociological literature on contemporary religious practices around modern fiction, such as Tolkien-based religions, Jediism, Matrixism and so on (Davidsen 2013; cf. Possamai 2005). Although this distinction is empirically and theoretically problematic from some societal perspectives, such as those that regard the Bible as potentially fiction just as much as other fiction is potentially sacred (cf. de Wildt & Aupers, 2017), the distinction is helpful as an analytical construct. That is, it allows us to differentiate between established traditions vis-à-vis those religions that were made up for a modern fictional work, without diminishing how meaningful either can be – although comparing them does, here as in the last chapter, raise the question of what differences remain when they are juxtaposed.

6.2.1. Fantasy Fiction-Based Religion: A Strong Bias Fiction-based religion is a staple in videogames and provides frequent narrative background and ludic contexts to make games meaningful for players. Research by Tanya Krzywinska, for example, shows through a combination of ethnography and content analysis that the different fictional religious traditions in World of Warcraft— invented belief systems ranging from the monotheistic “Church of the Holy Light” to the kinds of totemic and animistic nature worship organized around fictional deities— provide invaluable drama and cosmological conflict through the beliefs of nonplayable characters and the narrative backgrounds of players’ characters (Krzywinska 2006). More radically, Markus Wiemker and Jan Wysocki argue that ‘god’ games— where players take the position of the omniscient, powerful God of a society—draw from a wide array of cultural influences to shape their own alternative belief systems based on game-specific own morals, miracles and divine manifestations (Wiemker and Wysocki 2014).

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However, as these and other case studies show, much work about in-game religion that is not grounded in established, history-based religions, is about fictionbased religion in games, particularly biased towards the fantasy genre (e.g., Aupers 2007; Bainbridge 2013; Copier 2005; Fine 1983; Gregory 2014; etc.). In his essay “On Fairy Stories,” the ‘Father of Fantasy’ J.R.R. Tolkien argues that there is a fundamental human need to imagine alternative fantasy worlds. In this essay, as much as through his own fictional work, Tolkien expresses a need for fiction to “enchant” us, to grant us recovery, escape and consolation from our daily lives (Tolkien 1939; cf. Curry 1999). Fantasy fiction-based religion in media texts—films, series and games—may be considered a product of the romantic imagination. Born from the work of Tolkien, fantasy can be categorized as “deeply nostalgic […] an emotionally empowering nostalgia” (Curry 2005, p. 126) or an “archaic nostalgia” (Jameson 1975, p. 161) for a world that is infused with spiritual values, meaning, magic and enchantment. Indeed: the imaginary past in which fantasy fiction-based religion is set, presupposes the omnipresence of religion, magic, and beliefs in spiritual forces in nature. Alongside historical religions, fantasy thus also presents religious worlds as something romantically and nostalgically associated with rural, pseudo-medieval and magical pasts. Myth-making furthermore, became in studies of computer games a matter of doing and theorizing technical design. Much like some of the developers interviewed in Chapter 4, Sherry Turkle once argued that “the personal computer movement of the 1970s and early 1980s was deeply immersed in Tolkien and translated his fantasy worlds into hugely popular (and enduring) role-playing games” (2002, p. 18) 6.2.2. Science Fiction-Based Religion: A Blind Spot However, a focus on fantasy blinkers other unacknowledged genres that constitute fiction-based religion in games. As opposed to fantasy fiction, science fiction narratives present futuristic universes devoid of religious meaning. Indeed: tapping into current trends and extrapolating these to the future, sci-fi worlds seem to be dominated by scientific reasoning instead of faith and technological practices, methods and artefacts instead of magic. More than anything else, science fiction would seem to exemplify the “disenchantment of the world” (Weber [1919] 1948). To paraphrase Max Weber:

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“One need no longer have recourse to magical means to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculation perform the service” (Weber [1919] 1948, p. 139).

Such (evolutionary) arguments about rationalism, science, and technology as an “irreligious power” (Ibid., p. 142), are deeply institutionalized in the social sciences, and may account for the fact that debates on fiction-based religion generally show a bias towards the fantasy genre and a blind spot for the sci-fi genre.

Notwithstanding countless recent studies showing that the dichotomy science/technology versus religion is theoretically and empirically problematic (e.g., Latour 2012; Noble [1997] 1999; Davis 1998), particularly since the cultural logic of modernization spawns its own religions, spiritualities and magical re-enchantments (Aupers and Houtman 2010), there are ample indications that the science fiction genre is infused with religion, myth and magic. Much of the golden age of sci-fi between the 1930s and the 1970s was utopian, informed by a typical modern belief in scientific progress, space exploration and technological control over nature; if religion was mentioned, it was generally depicted as an outdated, irrational uncivilized worldview (Bleiler 1990; Fitting 2010). The genre of cyberpunk—allegedly pioneered by Philip K. Dick in the 1970s (Davis 1998), and developed by Vernor Vinge, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson in the 1980s and 1990s (Cavallaro 2000), I argue, exemplifies an important shift in which science fiction opens up to religion, magic and enchantment.

More fundamentally I propose that science fiction-based religions indicate a radical and unacknowledged ontological shift in the perspective on religion: religious, spiritual or occult phenomena are no longer located in nature (as in history- or fantasy-based religion), but in a man-made technological world.

What, then, was the role of the cyberpunk genre in the formation of science fiction-based religion? It is already a mainstay in literature that cyberpunk both reflected emergent technologies in the 1980s—information and communication technology, virtual reality, Artificial Intelligence—and influenced it (Dery 1996). The key element is virtual reality. Inspired by observations in an arcade hall and predating the World Wide Web, William Gibson dubbed the term ‘cyberspace’ in his novel 141

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Neuromancer (1981) to signify a digital space opened up by connected computers or, rather: “a tailored hallucination” promising the “bodiless exultation of cyberspace” to its consumers. Alternatively called “the Other plane” (by Vernor Vinge in 1981) and “the metaVerse” (by Neal Stephenson in 1993), the man-made ontology of cyberspace became the pinnacle of the religious imagination in cyberpunk and beyond. As an immaterial space beyond time and place, it was considered in the 1990s as “metaphysical space” (Heim 1993), “new Jerusalem” (Benedikt 1992, p. 14) and a “paradise where we will be angels” (Stenger 1992, p. 52). As one of the protagonists in Gibson’s later novel Mona Lisa Overdrive speculated about the omnipresence and opacity of cyberspace: “Is the Matrix God?” This religious imaginary is not restricted to the ontology of cyberspace. At the heart of the cyberpunk narratives, there is the assumption that our human lifeworld, including our virtual environment, is totally permeated with autonomous technologies to the extent that people can no longer make valid distinctions between reality and fantasy; humans and AI; technology and magic. “Cyberpunk,” Cavallaro argues in this respect, “charts an ambivalent mythopoeia in which new forms of life are seen to emerge from technology and, at the same time, the digital universe is permeated by mysticism and occultism” (Cavallaro 2000, pp. 53–54). Characters in cyberpunk novels constantly encounter creatures and entities that may be either artificially intelligent or spiritual. Case, the protagonist of Gibson’s Neuromancer, for instance meets ‘Flatliner’—a deceased hacker haunting cyberspace—and his digitally reincarnated girlfriend Linda. Gibson’s second novel, Count Zero, introduces the Loa—voodoo-gods that appear, send messages and disappear again. Are they Gods or malicious programmes? Indeed: in Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash, artificial intelligences are ‘speaking in tongues’—instigating religious viruses amongst the passive population.

This hovering between technology and spirituality—or more specifically the framing of powerful and opaque technologies as themselves religious or enchanting— is a key feature of cyberpunk novels in the 1980s and 1990s. This science fictionbased religion has gone mainstream ever since. Hollywood blockbusters—from The Lawnmower Man (1993), ExistenZ (1999), The Matrix (2000) to Transcendence (2014), increasingly feature the message that, while nature may be under the control of humans, “technology is God” (Dinello 2005).

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6.3. Post-Apocalyptic Religion Science fiction-based religion, then, from cyberpunk novels to Hollywood blockbusters, seems to indicate an ontological turn from the sacred situated in nature to the sacred situated in technology. Notwithstanding the ‘disenchantment of the world,’ omnipotent and opaque technology invokes religious imaginary that is by and large unacknowledged in the literature. This brings me to my case-studies. If the cyberpunk of the 20th-century dealt with 20th-century concerns of ‘virtual reality’ and computer viruses in a religious-spiritual way, how does the science fiction of the 21st century deal with 21st-century concerns about technology? This chapter selects two case studies featuring a post-apocalyptic world: the 1950s ‘atompunk’ setting of Fallout 3 and the faux-prehistorical ‘stonepunk’ of Horizon Zero Dawn. The analysis is guided by the question: How do videogames present religion in the post-apocalypse and, particularly, how is religion positioned vis-à-vis future technologies in the game world?

The question is motivated by two concerns, based on the theoretical framework above. First of all, science fiction-based religion places the sacred in an often dystopian future, rather than in a fantastical or historical past. Secondly, science fiction-based religion places the sacred into the technological, rather than the (super)natural. As a consequence, these dystopian futures are often motivated by a fear of the potential of technology. In line with this, post-apocalyptic games such as Fallout and Horizon invariably show a world destroyed by man-made technological disaster. Fallout 3, released by Bethesda in 2007 to great acclaim, shows a world destroyed by the atomic bomb, filled with robots still running (over 200 years after being manufactured) on atomic energy, but with only small pockets of humans left to inhabit the earth alongside them. Horizon: Zero Dawn takes place 1000 years after the invention of ‘Biomatter Conversion’—the ability for machines to infinitely reproduce and fuel themselves by consuming grass, humans and other animals—causes the apocalypse, in which small tribes populate an earth dominated by self-reproducing robots and rare wildlife. Both games revolve around humans, including the player, coping with the dominance of these technological inventions in a world where humans face near-extinction.

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6.3.1. Fallout 3: “Why Do You Worship the Bomb?”

Confessor Cromwell: “The Church of the Children of Atom is based on the idea that each single atomic mass in all of creation contains within it an entire universe. When that atomic mass is split, a single universe divides and becomes two—thus signifying the single greatest act of Atom’s creation.

Occasionally, a divine event occurs and trillions upon trillions of new universes are created. The last such event took place here, 200 years ago.

Where most of the lost children of Atom see that event as simple war and devastation, we see creation and unification in Atom’s Glow.”

Lone Wanderer [Player-character]: Why do you worship the bomb?

Confessor Cromwell: “Those who were called to Atom during the Great Division were very fortunate. They were permitted to aid in the process of Atom’s creation. We seek the same, both in symbol and in fact and the ’bomb,’ as you call it, represents Atom’s capacity for creation. We kneel before it and ask that Atom call us to aid him. We pray that out of our meager bodies, he will create new life.”

(Fallout 3 dialogue)

The year is 2277 AD. Exactly 200 years ago, the United Nations were dissolved, China occupied Alaska and the USA have annexed Canada. The year 2077 brings about a worldwide nuclear war that destroys most of the important human settlements around the world. The Fallout series is staged in an alternative historical timeline after the fallout of a nuclear war between China and the USA. The sociocultural context surrounding this war is that of a society that has kept the culturally conservative aesthetic of the 1950s but developed different technology with the help of its newly found nuclear energy supply. The envisioned world places uranium at the centre of societal change, as the most important human resource and the main reason for a full-scale global conflict.

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In this context, the game assigns two key figures as symbols of the world’s technological advancement: artificial intelligence (especially robots) and the atomic bomb. The Fallout games develop these technological artefacts and weave them into their main storylines, where they come to take completely different positions in society. While both robotic developments and missiles are created with the help of nuclear power, the rocket symbol attains a more sacralized position in this society’s post-apocalyptic development. This is typified in the emergence of the “Church of the Children of Atom.” Their worship of atomic energy is not ostensibly a religion rooted in a long tradition, but is fundamentally part of a traumatizing contemporary reality: an undetonated warhead in a world destroyed by atomic bombs.

Nuclear power, deified as Atom, is worshipped to have destructive and metamorphic, cleansing properties: “We must suffer to truly feel Atom’s embrace, to lay broken before Him, and feel the gentle wash of the Glow.” While the pre-existing, pre-apocalyptic religions are practically extinct, the Church of the Children of Atom is a post-war religious cult that worships ‘Atom’ as their singular divine agent, which is omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent. Atom is everywhere, knows everything, and has the power to affect the properties of different bodies in the world. As the game’s loading screen—which acts as a type of narrator, normally dispensing gameplay tips and lore from an extra-diegetic, objective perspective—occasionally explains: “The Church of the Children of Atom believe the war of 2077 was actually a great holy event perpetuated by their god, Atom.”

Starting with Fallout 3, the player is introduced to Church of the Children of Atom in Megaton—not coincidentally also the name for an explosive measurement unit. The town, which is likely one of the first that players encounter (cf. Bainbridge 2016), is host to an undetonated atom bomb, discovered by survivors in the wasteland of what was formerly Washington, D.C. Megaton was built around the bomb, which the inhabitants came to fear, respect and eventually worship (Figure 14). The centrality of this religion to Megaton can most literally be seen through its map location, at the center of the settlement (Figure 15). Town and Church are effectively led by Confessor Cromwell, who can be seen in Figure 14 preaching Atom’s power to all who can hear:

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“Give your bodies to Atom, my friends. Release yourself to his power, feel his Glow and be Divided.

Yea, your suffering shall exist no longer; it shall be washed away in Atom’s Glow, burned from you in the fire of his brilliance.

Come forth and drink the water of the glow. For this ancient weapon of war is our salvation, it is the very symbol of Atom’s glory. Let it serve as a reminder of the division that has occurred in the past.”

Here, Atom is said to come and divide our cells, ending our earthly suffering. Atom is present anywhere, from the “infinite worlds” inside our every cell, to the huge radiation storms, powerful ecological consequences of the nuclear fallout that plagues the wasteland. Thus, the Church was created and fortified in Megaton where its first settlers took shelter in the crater in the 23rd century—and it has spread across the United States since then, as the appearance of the Church attests to in various places in Fallout 4, which takes place barely 10 years later.

Figure 14. Confessor Cromwell preaching and praying next to the atom bomb in Fallout 3.

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Figure 15. Megaton’s map (Fallout Wikia n.d.).

Fallout 3 presents a world in which the near-complete destruction of human civilization means that most scientific and traditional institutions have disappeared. After the apocalypse, the raw power of nuclear energy can only be understood as phenomenal.

Additionally, the disappearance of any necessary knowledge of nuclear power— most appliances from before the apocalypse still work—makes it into a magical, incomprehensible power. Its destructive potential can only be imagined, while its altering effect on mutated humans and animals can still be seen. While the Church of the Children of Atom deifies this potential, Fallout 3 contrasts it with another religious institution, that of a more romantic spiritual cult, the Treeminders. The Treeminders are a community in Oasis—an immediate visual opposite to Megaton: verdant, sprawling and multi-levelled. It can only be accessed through an arduous and hidden mountain path. There, rather than a loudly preaching Confessor Cromwell at the center of Megaton, stands a soft-spoken Tree Father Birch, who guards the entrance and invites the player inside. The two religions even act as symmetrical gameplay options, in that the player has the option to fully destroy either town (cf. Bosman, 2017a), Oasis and Megaton, to violently erase the worship of these antithetic gods (destruction vs. creation).

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As opposed to Atom, the Treeminders deify nature, embodied in the shape of ‘The Great One,’ a talking tree. The Great One—or as he’s also called The Lord, Him, The One Who Grows, Gives, and Guides, and The Talking Tree, or simply Harold – is the product of a retrovirus exposure that was supposed to create resistance to radiation but instead created mutated humans. The retrovirus’ effect on Harold is that a tree started growing out of him until he became one with it (Figure 16).

Figure 16. ‘Harold, The One Who Grows, Gives and Guides,’ talking to the player in Fallout 3.

Harold, however, has no pretensions of being a god and is not happy with the cult’s veneration of him. His mutations gave birth to the entire forest of Oasis, an achievement considered a miracle in the destitute Wasteland. On a ludic level, the player can decide to let the tree die (a wish expressed by Harold as well) and completely destroy the last kernels of this spiritual and romantic cult; or instead to let him selflessly live to create new forests. Whereas nature was killed by the atom bomb (the god of the Children of Atom), the initial retrovirus that was supposed to make humans resistant to Atom’s radiation fights back through Harold.

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In the more recent Fallout 4, the Church of the Children of Atom is now present in a totally irradiated environment, The Glowing Sea (Figure 17). Upon meeting the leader of the cult’s base in the Glowing Sea, players may ask “Holy Ground? Atom?

What’s going on here?” The explanation is that “Atom reached out and touched this world, bringing his Glow to us. It remains to this day, a reminder of his promise.

Infinite worlds through division.” The survival of the cult in the normally instantly fatal environment is rationalized as being a supernatural gift: “That is Atom’s unique gift to us, the true believers.

He has brought us here to this place, a place that cannot harm us, so that we may worship him. So that we may spread his word to others.

That is our calling. To deliver Atom’s message to a world that does not wish to hear it. To show Atom’s power to all.”

Figure 17. Atom’s place of worship, next to an irradiated water crater, in the Glowing Sea of Fallout 4.

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In the Far Harbor DLC, players can join the church after completing a quest that resembles an initiation ritual, to seek the “Sacred ELEMENTS, guide to Atom’s HOLY word” (Figure 18), which turns out to be the Periodic Table (Figure 19). Upon doing so, players meet The Mother of the Fog, the Children’s spirit leader sent from Atom to guide them. The MoThEr (Figure 20) spirit is the figure shrouded in mist (atomic glow) who passes down Atom’s will and guides the player to the periodic table, their Bible.

Figure 18. The scroll that guides believers to Atom’s “HOLY word:” the periodic table (see Figure 19).

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Figure 19. The Periodic Table that serves as the holy text of the Church of the Children of Atom.

Figure 20. The MoThEr aids player of Fallout 4 in their quest to become a member of the Church of the Children of Atom.

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In all, the Fallout games imagine a world destroyed by nuclear war in which previous institutions, religious and otherwise, have been destroyed. In this context, one of the first settlements the player of Fallout 3 encounters is Megaton, where one religious group is central. This group, the Church of the Children of Atom, worships Atom: a masculine, incomprehensibly opaque deification of atomic power. Atom is presented as omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent and is worshipped by building a religion around an undetonated nuclear bomb (in Fallout 3) and later by expanding church sites to irradiated lands (Fallout 4). In its reverence of atomic power, exemplified through the glorification of the periodic table, ideas of division and theories of atoms found “within” everything, the Church presents a parody of a contemporary ‘science—religion’ divide in popular culture. Even its direct contrast, the religion of the Treeminders, which opposes the Children of Atom thematically (revering nature instead of science), should be seen as a way of dealing with the consequences of manmade nuclear fall-out through religious metaphors. Both, importantly, appear possible only against the background of the total erasure of previous historical religious institutions.

6.3.2. Horizon: Zero Dawn, “Mother Nature as an AI and the Ultimate Killer App” Elisabeth Sobeck: “What if we could give life—a future? What if we could build a kind of seed, from which, on a dead planet, life could blossom anew? This is the aim—the hope–of Project: Zero Dawn: to create a super-intelligent, fully-automated terraforming system—and bring life back from lifelessness. What would such a system require? At its core, it would need a true AI. Fully capable of making the trillions of decisions necessary to reconstitute the biosphere. An immortal guardian, devoted to the re-flourishing of life. We call it GAIA. Mother Nature as an AI.” (Horizon: Zero Dawn monologue) Another recent game that explores technology through several religious metaphors is Horizon: Zero Dawn. The storyline of Horizon revolves around a post-apocalyptic world set in the 31st century, wherein human life as we know it has gone extinct.

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uncontrollable, got corrupted, and went completely haywire thereby consuming biomass and destroying all life on earth in the process.

In a last attempt to save the earth, a small group of programmers, scientists and scholars developed an independent AI system called GAIA that is tasked with recreating a sustainable earth and biosphere. GAIA consists of several subsystems with names such as HADES, ARTEMIS, DEMETER, and so on, each with their own function to rebuild (human) life on earth in the future. The diegetic setting for the 31st century, however, is a world dominated and ruled by overdeveloped machines that are on top of the food chain and that become increasingly dangerous and destructive.

Humans, on the other hand, find themselves somewhere at the bottom of the food chain. Once more they live in what appear to be ‘pre-historic’ tribes where they try to survive as hunters and gatherers. In this setting, the player controls and leads a young woman named Aloy through the game world to protect her tribe against hostile tribes and to unravel the truth about a long lost civilization, called the Old Ones – to be equated with current, contemporary American civilization (the game takes place more specifically around Colorado Springs).

Not only the living conditions of humans are reduced to pre-historic manners and lifestyles, some of the tribes also rely on rather primitive forms of religion. The religion of Aloy’s tribe, which frames much of the game from beginning to end, is one of matriarchal monotheism centered around technology and AI. Unbeknownst to the fictional characters due to a total loss of knowledge regarding technology, what they are glorifying as a Goddess was once human-made. The tribe in question, the Nora, are controlled by matriarchs; whereas the primary antagonists make up a predominantly male, militaristic cult called the Eclipse, who fittingly worship a subsystem called HADES. The Nora worship what they consider to be a goddess, namely “All-Mother.” In the mission ‘Mother’s Heart,’ however, it immediately becomes clear for the player and Aloy that All-Mother is nothing more than a huge mechanical door controlled by an AI that ‘speaks’ with a female-like computer-generated voice (Figures 21 and 22). To many modern players, the All-Mother immediately reminds them of our contemporary voice interfaces: not much more than a door-guarding version of Apple’s Siri or 153

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Amazon’s Alexa. The door is hidden deep within a mountain that is considered to be sacred ground and is therefore forbidden territory for all Nora except the matriarchs.

Although Aloy understands at first glance that the goddess is a door, the matriarch accompanying her is convinced that the door is divine and cannot comprehend, nor is willing to believe, that her goddess is human-made.

The same counts for the Eclipse cult, who worship the main antagonist of the game: a metal devil called “HADES” that communicates with a male-like computergenerated voice. In the mission ‘Deep Secrets of the Earth’ it is called “the ultimate killer app” by its maker as HADES’ original function was to reset the earth in case GAIA’s attempts of creating a new sustainable world resulted in failure: “HADES takes the biosphere back to 0, square one, a clean slate. […] It is extinction on demand, death on speed dial.” In the mission ‘To Curse the Darkness’ it is revealed that the Eclipse believe HADES is a god and, therefore, they execute his commands. These encompass the (re) assembly and the repair of killer machines; as well as the assassination of Aloy, making HADES the prime antagonist. In doing so, his cult-followers believe that HADES will eventually help the Eclipse in controlling and commanding the dangerous machines roaming the wildlands so they can use these machines to conquer the world. They do not realize that HADES controls and uses them with the goal of causing another apocalypse that will destroy humanity once and for all—including the Eclipse cult themselves.

Both the All-Mother and HADES, then, are confused for wise, utopian agents, even though their goals are clear and their algorithms do not encompass more than that.

HADES is the “extinction failsafe protocol” for GAIA, the head AI charged with repopulation; the All-Mother is the Nora’s name for GAIA’s digital door-guard.

Machines and extremely intelligent AI have thus become so incomprehensible for 31st-century humans that they are considered to be gods and goddesses and are worshipped with utter devotion.

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Figure 21. Aloy tries to explain to a matriarch that All-Mother is actually a door.

Figure 22. Aloy in front of an activated “All-Mother” – a glorified, but artificially intelligent door lock.

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The metaphor of gods and goddesses for AI and machines is taken one step further as the player discovers more of Horizon’s plot. As mentioned in the first paragraph, the previous civilization (Old Ones) realized that humanity would go extinct and, in one last attempt to save the earth and some form of life in the future, they created GAIA: “A super intelligent, fully-automated terraforming system. […] [a] true AI. Fully capable of making the trillions of decisions necessary to reconstitute the biosphere. An immortal guardian, devoted to the reflourishing of life. We call it GAIA. Mother Nature as an AI.” The religious metaphor already comes to the fore in the names given to GAIA’s subsystems, all based on the names of ancient Greek gods and goddesses (Figure 23; Table 4): APOLLO, DEMETER, POSEIDON, and so on. Additionally, it is evident in their functions. For instance, in the mission ‘The Heart of the Nora’ the player and Aloy discover that after the apocalypse, humanity was recreated by one of GAIA’s subsystems and machines in cradle facilities called ELEUTHIA, after the Greek goddess of childbirth and midwifery. In these facilities the genetic codes of the Old Ones are preserved and used to breed new human beings. The machines are programmed in such a way that they can nurture these new humans into fully-grown adults that are able to procreate themselves and the facilities are equipped with anything needed to sustain these new human beings ranging from food, toys, and even an internal educational system called APOLLO that was supposed to teach humans everything about the extinct civilization (Figures 24 and 25).

Yet, AI and machines are not only capable of assembling human beings and recreating the biosphere. Even before the apocalypse, the AI of machines was developed enough to learn how to make themselves more powerful and how to “procreate.” As these systems were developed without a backdoor in their programming, the Old Ones called destruction upon themselves as they could not stop the machines from reproducing, and feeding on bio-matter from plants to animals to humans. This process continues after the apocalypse. As a result, so-called “machine cradles” are scattered throughout Horizon’s game environment. These machine cradles function as factories wherein new machines are assembled and programmed. In this way, the survival of the murderous machine population is guaranteed.

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Figure 23. GAIA and her subsystems named after Greek gods and goddesses, and one Roman goddess.

Figure 24. A hologram explains to Aloy and the player how cradle facilities (ELEUTHIA) work.

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Figure 25. A hologram explains the educational APOLLO archive.

technological knowledge to understand these inventions—resorting to worship their power in ignorance.

6.4. Conclusion: Awe-ful Technologies The fictional worlds of both Fallout and Horizon show similar imaginations of how to deal with technology: through metaphors of divinity. In the Fallout series, the Church of the Children of Atom substantially deifies the Atomic bomb, personifying it as a masculine god that is incomprehensible, everywhere, all-knowing and all-powerful.

This “ancient weapon of war is our salvation,” and shall usher in a time through the “fire of his brilliance”—playing on both meanings of brilliance as intelligent and glowing— in which you may “release yourself to his power, feel his Glow and be Divided.”

Rather than just being one possible imagination of religion in the post-apocalypse, the Children of Atom show a deeply familiar way for human societies to deal with the incomprehensible, omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent nature of ‘Atom.’ This conception of Atom by the Church as such echoes many divine descriptions in the 158

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Description

Mythology

AETHER

AETHER is the subfunction of GAIA dedicated to detoxifying the Earth’s ravaged atmosphere.

Personification of the upper sky.

APOLLO

APOLLO is the subfunction dedicated to the archival of human history and culture, and the education of new generations of humans born in Cradle facilities.

Greek god of the sun and light, music, truth and prophecy, healing, poetry.

ARTEMIS

ARTEMIS is the subfunction dedicated to the creation and reintroduction of animal life onto a newly-terraformed Earth.

Greek goddess of the hunt, wild animals, wilderness, childbirth, virginity and protector of young girls.

DEMETER

DEMETER is the subfunction dedicated to the replanting of the Earth from cryopreserved seed stocks.

Greek goddess of the harvest and agriculture

ELEUTHIA

ELEUTHIA is the subfunction dedicated to the cloning and raising of humans from genetic stock at specially designed and prepared Cradle facilities scattered across the Earth.

Greek goddess of childbirth and midwifery.

GAIA

GAIA is the main A.I. overseeing repopulation of the earth. GAIA and her subordinate functions are tasked with re-terraforming the Earth back to its pre-apocalyptic state.

Personification of the Earth.

HADES

HADES is the “extinction failsafe protocol”— the last resort for GAIA, which would allow it to destroy and reset the terraforming process when an undesirable outcome is detected.

Greek god of the dead, of the Underworld, darkness, the Earth, fertility, riches, mortality, afterlife and metal.

HEPHAESTUS

HEPHAESTUS is the subfunction dedicated to the construction of underground Cauldron facilities that would build the machines needed to complete the terraforming project.

Greek god of blacksmiths, metalworking, carpenters, craftsmen, artisans, sculptors, metallurgy, fire, and volcanoes.

MINERVA

MINERVA is the subfunction dedicated to the construction of massive communications arrays to broadcast the deactivation codes to the berserk apocalyptic robots.

Roman goddess of wisdom and strategic warfare.

POSEIDON

POSEIDON is the subfunction dedicated to detoxifying the Earth’s poisoned seas and oceans.

Greek god of the Sea and other waters; of earthquakes; and of horses.

Table 4. An overview of the most important AIs and their primary mythological origins (Horizon Zero Dawn Wikia n.d.; Smith, 1872; Grimal, 1996).

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Thus, machines and AI are not only incomprehensible and destructive, but also more powerful, productive, and creative than humans. The old civilization could not save itself from the machine-apocalypse and had to rely on AI, subsystems, and machines to safeguard the existence of a possible future humanity and to recreate life on earth.

In the same way, humans in the 31st century are only able to exist because they were created by machines in special cradles facilities controlled by a powerful, overarching AI system and subsystems. In that sense, humans no longer dominate and control life, AI and the machines they once created and developed, but it is AI and machines that are in the position to sustain or destroy the biosphere and life in general.

Finally, although some humans like Aloy come to use technological objects by accident, most people in the world of Horizon have fundamentally come to fear technology. By contrast, the name Aloy itself echoes an alloy, any combination of two metal materials—just as the player controls the cyborg combination of Aloy’s body and the technological projections of the ‘focus.’ A Focus is a small augmented reality device that Aloy finds at the beginning of the game, which can provide wearers with a multi-purpose 3D neural interface and communication possibilities (Figure 26).

These small devices were developed by the Old Ones to simplify interactions between humans, and with machines, technology. They react to the voice and gestures of the person using the device—much like a fictionalized Google Glass. In one of the first playable parts of the game, Aloy finds a Focus in the ruins of what once used to be a workplace or bunker of the Old Ones. This little device is then used by Aloy and the player to discover relevant and interesting objects in the game environment, to scan documents and holograms left by the Old Ones, and to distinguish between friends and foes. However, as these ruins are considered to be cursed by the Nora, the little device is also seen as something dangerous. On the other hand, among the Eclipse, the Focuses have a divine connotation as these are given to them by HADES and the devices allow them to communicate with each other, as well as directly with HADES. Horizon: Zero Dawn thus portrays a post-apocalyptic world in which technology, machines, and AI are worshipped and feared by human tribes for two main reasons. On the one hand, AI, machines and technology are more intelligent, developed, creative, and powerful than humans. On the other hand, AI, machines, and technology are opaque and incomprehensible: humans lack the historical and 160

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Bible such as Psalm 145:17, describing the god of Abrahamic traditions as “righteous in all his ways, and faithful in all he does.” It additionally mirrors the Biblical God’s supposed omnipresence (Psalm 139:7–10; Jeremiah 23:24; 1)—“Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain You, how much less this house which I have built” (Kings 8:27)—his omniscience—“His understanding is infinite” (Psalm 147:5) and he “knows all things” (1 Jn.3:18–20)—and his omnipotence (Rev.19:6; Eph.3:20): “He is wise in heart and mighty in strength, who has defied Him without harm? It is God who removes the mountains, they know not how, when He overturns them in His anger; who shakes the earth out of its place, And its pillars tremble; who commands the sun not to shine, and sets a seal upon the stars; who alone stretches out the heavens and tramples down the waves of the sea; who makes the Bear, Orion and the Pleiades, and the chambers of the south; who does great things, unfathomable, and wondrous works without number.” (Job 9:4–10)

Figure 26. Aloy as a child with her “Focus” (the little triangular device above her ear).

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How similar in strength and scope is the discourse on Atom?

“Behold! He’s coming with the clouds! And every eye shall be blind with his glory! Every ear shall be stricken deaf to hear the thunder of his voice!

Each of us shall give birth to a billion stars formed from the mass of our wretched and filthy bodies.”

Even when contrasting the Church of the Children of Atom to their Treeminders counterpart, religion plays a large role in making sense of the post-apocalypse for both. That is, whereas the Treeminders form a church based on nature instead of science—worshipping a forest, rather than the periodic table—and on creation instead of destruction; both religions are ways of coping with man-made disaster, and the atomic power that led to the barren post-apocalyptic wasteland of Fallout. More importantly, both are specifically new, uniquely technology-driven ways of coping with the apocalypse that are enabled only after the erasure of pre-existing institutions and traditions of worship after the fallout.

In Horizon: Zero Dawn, too, we see a similar situation. The Nora and Eclipse both worship and follow leftover, pre-apocalyptic inventions of Artificial Intelligence because they are incomprehensible to their primitive societies. They seem wise, but the game provides little reason for why the Nora and Eclipse started following them.

Similarly to Fallout, these technological innovations are presented to post-apocalyptic humans as incomprehensible, destructive and creative, powerful and productive; all of which seem to lead to no other choice within these fictional worlds than to worship them. The machines of Horizon: Zero Dawn, much like Atom and the Treeminders’ deified Harold, were both misunderstood but nonetheless seen as creators and controllers of life: incomprehensible, omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent.

I argue that these games show religious faith and worship applied not to historical, mythological gods or the natural world, but to the very technological innovations that brought on the apocalypse. Fallout and Horizon are far from the only games to employ metaphors of divinity in order to make sense of the destructive and awe-some power of technologies. Indeed, similar patterns can be found in a variety of 162

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post-apocalyptic games, from NEO Scavenger’s Church of the Blue Frog, Fallen Earth’s tech-obsessed religion, Metro 2033’s cults and churches, Final Fantasy X’s Yevon religion, the Destiny series’ Traveller and its prophet the Speaker, NieR: Automata’s devoutly religious “Machines,” led by Adam and Eve. Such post-apocalyptic games, I argue, exemplify the under-acknowledged alternative of “science fiction-based religion” next to the well-documented and commercially well-represented traditions of history-based and fantasy (fiction-)based religion. As opposed to those traditions’ nostalgic framing of religion, science fiction-based religion has been represented since the 1980s as a way of making sense of technologies and their implications for humans.

That is, technology is consequently framed as an opaque force with god-like powers— whether it is cyberspace, the matrix, the atomic bomb or self-reproducing artificial intelligence—these are ‘things greater than thou.’

The religious imagery about such powerful technologies, this chapter demonstrated, is perceived as highly ambivalent. They are potentially destructive and constructive; frightening and fascinating; divine and demonic. In the analysis of what he calls “posthuman technologies” in contemporary science fiction, Daniel Dinello (2005) argues that this ambivalence is key. On the one hand, AI, biotech, VR or nanotechnology promise humans “techno-heaven”—engineered salvation from the biological body and even an “immortal mind” (Noble [1997] 1999). On the other hand, it may bring us ‘techno-hell’—computers taking over and, ultimately, bringing about an apocalypse: the ‘Singularity’ (Kurzweil, 2005), the “rapture of the nerds” (Popper, 2012) or “apocalyptic AI’ (Geraci, 2012). From the academic perspective of religious studies and the sociology of religion, this ambivalence may be the core of the religious sentiment underpinning science fiction-based religion (Aupers, 2009; Aupers, et al. 2008). In The Threshold of Religion (Marett, [1909] 1914), Robert Marett explained the birth of ‘nature religion’ by the fact that ‘primitives’ found themselves confronted with a natural environment they could neither understand nor control their natural environment; they therefore experienced it as an overpowering, mysterious force (‘mana’) that invoked the basic religious emotion of ‘awe,’ a combination of fascination and fear: “of all English words awe is, I think, the one that expresses the basic religious feeling most nearly” (ibid., p. 13).

The theologian Rudolf Otto in turn depicted the ‘holy’ as the Other—motivating a sense of ‘fascinans’ and ‘tremendum’ (1917). Nowhere does this trembling awe and 163

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fascinated devotion—for Atom, for Artificial Intelligence—come together as obvious as in the genre of Fallout and Horizon. Not nature, but technology now seems to be the pinnacle of religious sentiments of ‘awe’.

In conclusion, then, these two games typify a science fiction-based religiosity that reveres technology of the future—omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent technologies that invoke religious feelings of fear and fascination. Science fiction, however, feeds on science faction: these texts about an apocalyptic world governed by technologies comment on, speculate about and make sense of emergent technologies in contemporary society—atomic bombs, AI and VR. More than that, they reproduce some of the dreams and nightmares formulated by technological pioneers in Silicon Valley—such as those of ‘posthumanists’ like robotics specialist Hans Moravec (1988) or futurist Ray Kurzweil (2005), theorizing about AIs as ‘mind children,’ ‘uploading consciousness’ or the ‘singularity.’ By playing apocalyptic games about machines on machines, players inhabit digital worlds that imagine ways to deal with the superhumanly powerful and intelligent technologies that will surround us, or already do.

The God metaphor, so it seems, plays an essential role in this imagination.

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Part III. Decoding “How do players make sense of and relate to religion in videogames?”

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Chapter 7. Pop Theology: Discourses on Religion in Videogame Forums16 7.1. Introduction and Research Problem As the previous chapters have shown, videogames draw on a variety of religious traditions to present appealing worlds and rituals for players to interact with. In chapter 3, Ubisoft’s historical action-adventure game Assassin’s Creed drew on Christian, Muslim and other inspirations to tell of Templars and Shi’ite hashashins coveting the Apple of Eden. Chapters 4 and 5 showed how fantastical pseudo-medieval and postapocalyptic futurist games alike used religion. Similarly, first-person shooter BioShock: Infinite notoriously had players baptised to enter a hyper-Christian theocratic ‘city in the sky.’ Religion is used in strategy games such as Civilization; it drives fundamentalists in military games like Call of Duty; and it serves as a source of magic, quests and items in fantasy games like Skyrim and Dragon Age: Inquisition. Videogames draw on a variety of fictional and historical religious traditions, as shown by games such as Age of Mythology, Ōkami, Prince of Persia, Zelda: Breath of the Wild and countless others with their roots in Greek, Egyptian, Norse, Chinese, Shinto, Zoroastrian and other theo-mythologies, including those made up for the games themselves.

But what do players do with such signs, offered up to this huge audience by a cultural industry churning out games? The omnipresence of religions in games is particularly surprising from the sociological perspective of religious privatization – the assumption that the social significance of churched religion is in decline in most Western countries (e.g., Bruce, 2002). Outside of the churches, millions of young players engage with religion through games instead, on a daily basis. Moreover, they gather online in large numbers to discuss what those games mean, to them personally and as a community. They do so on internet forums such as Reddit (243.6 million users), IGN (1.2 million) and more selective forums such as NeoGAF (151 thousand), which have monthlong waiting lists and are visited by journalists and game developers alongside fans.

This chapter is an adapted version of a published article: de Wildt, L., & Aupers, S. (2019). Pop Theology: Forum Discussions on Religion in Videogames.

Information Communication & Society, 1-19. doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2019.1577476.

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In this chapter I therefore study how gamers discuss in-game religious content on online forums and what it means to them, in the context of a secularizing society, asking: • Which videogames provoke discussions of religion in game culture’s online forums?

• How do players with various (ir)religious17 worldviews discuss religion in videogames?

• What implications does this have for theories of religious social significance and privatization?

7.2. Discussing Religious Games in the Public Sphere As covered more elaborately in the introduction, Thomas Luckmann argued half a century ago that religion, rather than disappear, had become “invisible,” by retreating into the “private sphere” (1967, p. 103). As Kelly Besecke convincingly argues, “Luckmann’s characterization of contemporary religion as privatized is pivotal in the sociology of religion; it has been picked up by just about everyone and challenged by almost no one” (2005, p. 186). However, Besecke problematizes this uncritical following of Luckmann by pointing out the publicly visible role of ‘privatized’ ‘invisible’ religion in American media. Looking at media and communication as indicative for the public sphere of a society, she observes that bookshops are full of magazines and publications offering popular Christian insights, stories about miracles and angels, spiritual self-help, enlightenment and mindfulness. Consequently, Besecke asserts that outside of the institutional-individual divide underlying secularization’s privatization theories, there is a “communicative” lens, through which it is clear that “Americans are talking with each other about religious meaning,” in books, lectures and songs (2005, p. 181). A few years earlier, three weeks after the events of September 11, 2001, Jürgen Habermas similarly observed that Western news media and politics are once again undeniably and forcibly pre-occupied with religion in “post-secular” society (Habermas & Reemtsma, 2001; Habermas, 2006). While Besecke and Habermas have very different approaches to the role of religion in society, both stress the importance With irreligious, I mean to refer to any person who identifies as atheist, agnostic, ignostic, or otherwise rejecting or indifferent to established religious traditions.

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of religion’s media presence as being in direct contradiction with religion’s ‘exit’ from the public sphere.

Academically, analyses of religion in games take place mostly divorced from analyses of religion’s place in the public sphere such as Habermas’ and Besecke’s.

Motivated by these vivid, yet by and large unrelated debates in academia, I aim to study the way players reflect on and debate in-game religion. Such an explorative analysis of the social significance of in-game religion, I argue, calls for an approach studying games’ players as co-constituting a game culture. Empirically, scholars have predominantly either analyzed religious representation in games (e.g., Bosman, 2015; O’Donnell, 2015), singular or non-player communities (Lindsey, 2015; Piasecki, 2016), or, less commonly, individual players dealing with such religious representations (e.g., Schaap & Aupers, 2017; de Wildt & Aupers, 2019a). When cultures of players are studied, research often selectively focuses on small groups such as guilds (Geraci, 2014), or specific religious organizations (Luft, 2014; Zeiler, 2014).

This central focus on either games, game-specific communities or individually interviewed players conveys a blind spot for the broader communal, social and cultural context of gaming forums. Theoretically, such methodological choices blinker the implications for the social significance of religion and its role in the public sphere.

In order to empirically explore religion in public debates – particularly the way people talk about, reflect on and make sense of religion in and through media – this chapter takes game culture as one such site for debates that are prompted by media use. As any culture, the subculture of gamers provides a “sociocultural context [that] shapes and influences individual activity and meaning making through socialization and enculturation” (Steinkuehler, 2006, p. 98; Nasir, 2005). Game culture transcends single games, particularly through players’ collective engagement on forums. These forums, I argue, are the most ‘ideal-typical habitat’ of game communities where game culture is fully expressed: here players openly discuss games’ meanings and what it means specifically to be a “gamer” (Steinkuehler, 2006; Shaw, 2010b; Braithwaite, 2014).

In short: to know how the game community relates to religion in games, this chapter studies the discussions of that topic on game-related forums. In doing so, the chapter’s guiding research questions are: 171

Chapter 7. Pop Theology:

• Which videogames provoke discussions of religion in game culture’s online forums?

• How do players with various (ir)religious worldviews discuss religion in videogames?

• What implications does this have for theories of religious social significance and privatization?

7.3. Methodology Since this chapter addresses the debates and discourses on in-game religion, and the different individual and collective meanings these may have for players, I selected and analyzed two sources in two phases of the study: first, I analyzed the debates on religion in games of N=100 discussion ‘threads’ (between 3 and 576 posts each) on the five most popular videogame forums. The threads were collected in 2017, dating from 2007 to 2017. Secondly, a number of forum users were theoretically selected for additional semi-structured in-depth interviews (N=20).

The forum discussions were selected for topical relevance (i.e., containing discussions about religion in games, on popular gaming forums). The selection process itself, however, involved five sequential steps to keep the body of data manageable for ‘inductive content analysis’ (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005). First, page-ranking service Alexa was consulted to rank gaming websites based on traffic data. This is explicitly a research design focusing on gaming forums: I want to know how players of videogames talk about religion, not how users on religion forums talk about videogames. Second, unarchived, inactive forums were excluded (e.g., PC Gamer, Gamesradar, VG247); and those focusing on single games (e.g., Leagueoflegends.com, Minecraftforum.net). This prevents self-selection of religiously-themed games – to instead find out which games afford religious discussions on open forums. Third, because Alexa’s rankings are based on web traffic for the entire website, each website was re-ranked for traffic only to their forums (e.g., ‘www.neogaf.com/forum/’ and ‘forums.penny-arcade.com’ instead of the full domain) using three other metrics: MozRank, MozPA and Google’s PageRank.

Table 5 gives the resulting top-five forums selected for data collection, and the amount of relevant discussions found on each – to be elaborated below.

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Fourth, threads were gathered on these forums through a Google search from an anonymized “research browser” to minimize the influence of previous search activity (Digital Methods Initiative, 2016). Data was collected by prefixing the google string with the operator ‘site:’ and using Google’s stemming, so that search terms include inflections and affixes (so that “religion” returns “religious,” “religion,” “religiously,” etc.). The resulting search string entered for each forum was: site:[sitedomain] games religion OR spiritual OR belief OR christianity OR islam OR muslim OR hindu The discussions found mention religion, spirituality or belief in the context of games; and/or mention one of the three major world religions (Christianity, Islam and URL

Alexa

MozRank

MozPA

GooglePR

Results

1

www.reddit.com

34

7.25

95.45

8

3,110,000

2

www.ign.com/boards/

325

6.52

80.83

6

5,850

3

www.gamefaqs.com/boards

497

6.44

55.65

5

17,800

4

www.gamespot.com/forums/

746

4.17

55.53

6

15,400

5

www.neogaf.com/forum/

2,099

6.59

61.55

5

7,110

Table 5. Final ranking of forums, and results of searching for discussions on games and religion.

Hinduism) or their followers. Additional religious positions (e.g., agnostic, pagan) were observed not to affect search results – despite being well-represented within discussions.

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A total of 3,156,160 search results were returned (Table 5), of which the first twenty threads were selected from each forum in order to keep qualitative analysis manageable. In line with the established practices of Grounded Theory and, particularly, inductive content analysis (cf. Hsieh & Shannon, 2005), the resulting 100 threads were analyzed and coded on commonalities and differences in the discourse, i.e. themes discussed, the position players express vis-à-vis religious in-game content, and so on. This “constant comparative method” (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) resulted in an empirically grounded typology. The full dataset was archived in 2315 pages of PDF and is publicly available.18 Informed consent was not deemed necessary up to this point: players posted anonymously on public forums, according to the terms and conditions for that forum’s publication of their posts (cf. Mo and Coulson, 2008; Bourgonjon, et al., 2015).

The second phase of the research and method consisted of interviewing a selection of players to further develop, complement and ground the analysis, i.e. the typology that was inductively developed in the content analysis. Forum users were “theoretically selected” on the basis of religious diversity, their perspective on games’ content, or their role in a discussion; either of which prompted more questions and required more data, as recognized during data collection and in accordance with a constant comparative approach (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Holton, 2008; Aupers, et al., 2018). Of the 38 users contacted for interviews, 20 participants responded and were interviewed (see Table 6). The interviews served to gather insight into the motivations, beliefs and social positions behind online posts; into how they think about and assign meaning to (religious) games in their lives; and how their religious positions are related to this. In other words: to further question the biographies, motivations and identities behind these users’ forum posts.

7.4. Discussing Religion in Digital Games Due to online forums’ hierarchical, digital form, the data are already clearly organized chronologically in a thread of posts by different users, as in the example of excerpts from one thread on GameFAQs in Figure 27. The figure furthermore exemplifies The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/ZKDWD2.

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Gender

Age

Country

Religious background

Bill

M

25

U.S.A.

Roman-Catholic

Geoff

M

36

U.S.A.

New Age

James

M

22

U.S.A.

Atheist

Eric

M

28

U.S.A.

Southern Baptist

Grant

M

23

New Zealand

Agnostic ex-Mormon

Edward

M

23

Hong Kong

Agnostic ex-Evangelical

Günther

M

32

German

Atheist raised Lutheran

Brandon

M

25

U.S.A.

Atheist ex-Quaker

Phil

M

25

U.S.A.

Atheist ex-Evangelical

Duke

M

26

U.S.A.

Pentecostal

Joan

F

28

New Zealand

Deist

Daniel

M

29

U.S.A.

Jewish

Greg

M

24

U.S.A.

Jehovah’s Witness

Bert

M

32

U.S.A.

Presbyterian

Dan

M

34

Japan

Reformed Evangelical

Nico

M

22

Netherlands

Atheist

Ali

M

25

Netherlands

Muslim

Abhi

M

25

India

Atheist raised Hindu

Swapan

M

30

India

Atheist raised Hindu

Strahan

M

34

Ireland

Roman-Catholic

Table 6. List of participants (anonymized).

two things. First, it presents an instance of how religious discussions were treated as recurring, conflictual, and sometimes unpleasant. Its title (“Am I the only one not looking forward to the religious arguments bound to ensue?”) echoes this sentiment.

As a user on GameSpot commented: “I think it [i]s strange that most of Offtopic is religion based,” referring to one of GameSpot’s largest sections (“Off-topic”).

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Figure 27. Excerpt from the GameFAQs forum.

Second, Figure 27 shows two highlighted examples of users announcing their religious position (e.g., “I’m christian and […],” “I’m devoutly religious, but seriously…,” “As an atheist”). This was commonly done to contextualize opinions (“Full disclosure, I’m not a religious person,”) and indicate authenticity (“I’d consider myself a pretty devout Muslim. My religion actually does affect the way I play”).

Which games prompt religious discussion? Based on the forum analysis, I was able to form a list of the game series which were most frequently referred to, by coding for titles as they occurred (Table 7). Games are ordered by the number of discussions they appeared in. The bottom three games occupy a shared spot, with equal occurrences.

The list provides a context for how players discuss these games, since these games represent religion in different ways. Broadly categorized, series such as Assassin’s Creed, BioShock, Dante’s Inferno and The Binding of Isaac build on historical religions such as Christianity, Islam and Ancient Greco-Roman faith. Series such as Dark Souls, The Elder Scrolls and Dragon Age each present their own religious system(s) – with their own original pantheons, mythologies and churches. Series such as Final Fantasy, Xenogears, Megami Tensei, and Devil May Cry, as analyzed in Chapter 5, eclectically 176

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juxtapose multiple fictional and religious traditions. Each combines elements of Biblical, Iranian, Greek, Hindu, Sumerian and numerous other mythologies alongside figures from Lovecraftian, Beowulfian, other fictional and original lore.

The list of games most mentioned in debates about religion is interesting in itself (and has informed other parts of this dissertation), but in this analysis it primarily provides context for the debates about religious narratives, tropes and rituals. The core of the analysis focuses on the different ways gamers relate to these religious issues.

Throughout the forum discussions I found four typical attitudes toward religious content in videogames, which I will set forth below: Rejecting, Debunking, Debating and Connecting.

Game(-series)

Threads

1

Final Fantasy

27

2

Assassin’s Creed

22

3

BioShock

22

4

Xeno(gears/-saga/-blade)

20

5

(Shin) Megami Tensei

17

6

Dante’s Inferno

16

7

Dark Souls

15

8

Dragon Age

9

9

The Elder Scrolls

8

9

The Binding of Isaac

8

9

Devil May Cry

8

Table 7. Game series by number of appearances in unique threads (2007-2017).

7.4.1. Rejecting: “Stay far away from this Satanic game” Some users choose to reject any game that disagrees with their own worldview.

Rejecters can be found across all variations of (dis)belief. Rejecting a game can be total, e.g., “[t]his game is worthless and is satanic. Jesus died on the cross to defeat 177

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Satan and the power of Sin,” or leading to personal calls to warn other believers: “Anyone who is a servant of Christ will stay far away from this Satanic game. Be warned this game is not of God or from God but from Satan. It’s seen in the advertizing and in the actual game itself.

In Christ, Andrew” Rejecters refuse to play a game when it endorses a worldview that disagrees with theirs. What fundamentally distinguishes ‘Rejecting’ from ‘Debunking’ (below), is that rejecters take the content of the game seriously, despite wishing to completely disengage from it. Indeed Andrew’s comments proved to be, as the discussion continued, out of real concern for the souls of those playing the game: a concern that gained both support (“People who call themselves Christians have no business playing this game. [Andrew and another user] are correct in what they have said”), as well as opposition (“But you’re battling Satan’s minions, not aiding them. Wouldn’t that be a good thing?”) and disbelief (“You’re joking right? I mean you don’t honestly believe Doom 3 was made by Satan”).

Rejecting is nonetheless not an attitude solely for believers. One presumably atheist or agnostic forum user states: “All I’m saying is that I can’t relate to someone who’s religious, and if I’m supposed to bond with this character and ‘go on a journey’ with him, I just, I can’t and I’m not interested in doing so.”

In order to gain more insight into players rejecting games’ religious contents, I contacted and actively sought out some of these forum users for further interviews.

Greg, for example, a Jehovah’s witness, felt alienated by representations of atheism and (other) religions, remarking that his religious life outright “limits what I play:” he stays away from violence, demons, and games like God of War and Devil May Cry that feature “un-Christian” content. Religion, he claimed, was usually revealed in 178

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games to be “window dressing:” mundane, irrelevant or it simply “turns out to be alien technology.”

Ali, a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim, felt that, although “heathen content is inescapable, you’ll have to deal with it if you want to play games,” which increasingly led him to refrain from playing games altogether. He referred to games like Uncharted, which use “pagan symbols,” the “satanic content” of the Doom series, and so on. This group of players further included brothers Dan and Bert, both Christian ministers, who resorted to shooting and sports games that lack religious content. This is true for all the rejecters I interviewed: while gaming is a fun activity for its challenges, gameplay and story, games all too often proved a distracting or even distasteful contestation of their beliefs.

7.4.2. Debunking: “It’s just a game” Debunking forum posts assert that the religious content of a game is essentially trivial, whether as a form of serious expression to begin with; or in its relevance to ‘real’-world actions and morality. For religious and non-religious players alike, debunking is the fundamental assertion that one’s beliefs remain unshaken, regardless of what kind of worldview a game confronts them with.

Debunking, in its simplest form, makes clear-cut distinctions between the real world and a virtual world, by stating that “it’s just a game.” Debunking is a rhetorical strategy to denounce fiction as having any sway over religious beliefs: “If a work of fiction makes you angry because in their fictional universe God maybe did not cause historical events that is pretty sad. This is coming from a religious person as well.” By extension, another religious player noted that what religion is ‘about’ is more important than works of fiction: “I’m Christian but nothing about this game [BioShock Infinite] bothered me […] it’s a work of fiction made for entertainment, so anyone who can have their ideals swayed by a story isn’t really getting what religion is all about.”

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Debunkers like the one quoted above essentially favour the truth-value of one text, such as the Bible or other religious writing, over another ‘text’ or media artefact – e.g., BioShock – by debunking the latter as a fictional text and respecting the former as more true and, hence, influential to their worldview. Similarly, other (often atheist or agnostic) users are led to the same kind of reflection, with a radically different conclusion: to them, neither is particularly meaningful, both the Bible and BioShock are works of fiction.

In a thread started by a religious player asking how atheists respond to religion in games, one atheist responded “Well, I don’t feel affected and no one should be… because you know why?... It’s just a game!... if you feel bad about a game then you have a problem...” According to another, “It’s just all fantasy to me. I don’t have a problem with it at all.” This interpretation of actions and stories in games as, in the end, irrelevant to ‘real’ life is shared by many religious Debunkers: “I am pretty sure that if you realize it[’]s a game and you don’t go and commit crimes or live an awful life God will understand ;). The other day I was punching birds in Crysis and I would NEVER do that in real life :P.” In such cases, Debunking entails not just the assertion that videogames cannot be seen as serious expressions; but furthermore that in-game behaviour has no bearing on morality outside of the game – whether religious or related to longstanding debates on videogames and violence. In other words, Debunking becomes the assertion that it is absurd in the first place to regard actions and stories in videogames, and all fiction by extension, as necessarily having any real impact on people, or gods.

What makes Debunkers especially interesting in light of religion in media, then, is that continued discussion leads to theological reflections on the truth and fiction of gods and religious texts. What differentiates the Bible from BioShock, for these discussants? On the one hand, for religious Debunkers their religious texts retain a special significance over videogame fictions. While on the other hand, by irreligious Debunkers every religion was seen as equally fictional, whether historically practiced or made up for a game. When all religious media are fictional and irrelevant like that – the Bible, BioShock, the Quran and Assassin’s Creed – the only conclusion for these 180

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users was that “Fantasy fits right in with more fantasy.” As one forum user put it, “I don’t really mind [religion in games], I consider Angels and Demons just the same as Trolls and pixies.” Another asserts, “I see religious elements in games as I see them in reality: it’s a bunch of myths and legends that make good stories.” For some of these non-religious players, then, Debunking is not only about making distinctions between fact and fiction, or reality and fantasy: every truth claim can equally be deconstructed as a self-referential narrative.

7.4.3. Debating: “It’s filled with religious references” Debating, as opposed to Rejecting and Debunking, can only happen when players engage explicitly with interpretations of the game. One user replies to a Debunking post (which stated “It’s just a game, don’t take it too seriously”), by expressing their dislike for such trivialization: “You know, I don’t like this. Just because something is a game/movie/show or w/e one shouldn’t dismiss the message it tries to convey.”

Another user explains their own decision to take a game seriously, when considering that even though “Bayonetta doesn’t take itself seriously, [that] doesn’t mean that it’s not serious. […] I know it’s just a game, a good game, but the underlying themes of the game do give me a little bit of a chill when I play it.”

What gave them “a little bit of a chill” was that “killing angels or any religious metaphor can be a[n] offensive thing to some people,” stressing that “whether it’s offensive or not can be subjective.”

That interpretations of games can be “subjective” is an important way in which the attitude of Debating differs from Rejecting and Debunking. Games, according to these users, have negotiable meanings: they can be offensive to some and fascinating to others. Debating users engage in vigorous debates about what games really mean to them. Players freely mobilize themes and references for their arguments – e.g., “It’s filled with religious references anyway. The Ark, the Covenant, the Flood... Hell, even the game is called Halo” – as well as authorial arguments: “I know that Darksiders has no religious undertones because the developers said it doesn’t.” Indeed, many debates 181

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concern the beliefs and opinions of game ‘authors’ such as Ken Levine, Hideo Kojima, or Ubisoft’s “religious disclaimer.”

An elaborate example should illustrate debates like these, by representing part of a specific discussion on whether Link – the protagonist of the Zelda series – is a Catholic.

The participants mount various arguments which employ both a detailed knowledge of the formal properties of Zelda games across the series, as well as their cultural and historical contexts (Figure 28).

These formal elements of the game range from visual icons to ludic elements – such as the “‘Book of Magic’ [item] in the first game, which had a cross on it, and is called ‘Bible’ [バイブル] in the Japanese version” (Figure 29). It further includes a number of narrative, musical, authorial and even paratextual/paraludic sources: a large part of the initial debate surrounds a picture of Link praying to Jesus and Mary in a church, taken from an official Japanese guide to the game by Nintendo (Figure 30).

Figure 28. Excerpt from two users Debating Link’s religiosity on IGN.com.

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Figure 29. The ‘Book of Magic’ item from The Legend of Zelda, called “Bible” [バイブル] in the Japanese original.

These kinds of light-hearted, sometimes associative analyses mobilize knowledge from both games and religion. Debates often point to a wide familiarity with other games for comparison (“I do find it interesting that basically every game that tackles religion seems anti­religion [such as] Assassin’s Creed, F[inal]F[antasy]X, Xenogears, etc.”). Furthermore, debates point to an extensive knowledge of religions, as well: the aforementioned discussion on Zelda continues for 36 more posts, with additional users pointing out other religious symbols in the game, discussing Aztec, Egyptian, Mayan, Muslim, and Christian elements, as well as the game’s own mythology which was introduced in later games. All to prove – or criticize – Zelda’s use of religion, and not uniquely so: the same debates occur for nearly all the games I encountered.

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Figure 30. A depiction of Link praying before a crucifix and the Virgin Mary, from an official Japanese ‘Player’s Guide’ (Nintendo, 1992, p.151).

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Finally, Debating shows that no matter how formally users engage with the game, interpretations are never final. Instead, Debaters frequently argue for entirely mutually exclusive interpretations of the same game – usually following their contrasting religious beliefs. Hence, Assassin’s Creed is at the same time a Christian game “against the illuminaties, the knight templars and the anti-christ” while other users argue that the game definitely “did imply that religion is false,” and that “[t]he idea that laws do not come from Divinity but common sense and that the miracles in religious texts were accomplished due to mind control. […] that’s a VERY strong anti-religious sentiment.”

The protagonist of Assassin’s Creed 2, i.e., “the main character of ACII (Ezio) is a damned Catholic himself,” while another user contrarily argues that the game is secular, in accordance with its historical period: “Renaissance Italy was the period of Humanism- secular, secular, secular. They portrayed it accurately, pack up your bible and go somewhere else.” Similarly, BioShock: Infinite is interpreted as both “one big ‘anti-religious’ aspect” while to others it shows that “societies without faith fail in the long run because of a lack of morality.” Despite the game’s frequent analysis by academics as a criticism of American Protestantism (e.g., Bosman, 2017b; Lizardi, 2014; Wysocki, 2018), one forum user argued instead that: “The game does a good job of emphasizing how the core values of religion are quite beautiful […] Love, community, redemption are all concepts the game looks at fondly […] By the time you reach the end of the game, it’s about people. Any vestiges of religious commentary are, by that point, positive.”

Debating, while a serious engagement with games’ religious content, all too often devolves into a stalemate. In many cases, players such as those above end up entrenched within their own interpretation which accords with their own particular worldview. In doing so, they remain in debate with each other’s conflicting interpretations of the same game.

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7.4.4. Connecting: “It makes me think…”

As opposed to Debaters’ tendency for stalemates, another group of users actively seeks to reflect on and connect with religious worldviews in games. This attitude of Connecting is different from Debating in that Connecting players seek engagement with – and often get a lasting impression of – a game’s religious content, rather than arguing for its agreement with their own beliefs. Opposite from Rejecting, Connecting often entails actively seeking out such games (instead of avoiding them), for various reasons. One reason expressed is that “theistic themes often make for a fantastic work of fantasy or fiction,” suggesting that religious worlds are inherently appealing to irreligious users.

This attitude toward religion in games is about more than ‘enjoying’ fantasies, however.

Central for those Connecting is a desire to understand and experience other worldviews – narratives in which religious characters, fantasy worlds and ritualized spaces present an escape from everyday life. Another forum user, who introduced their post stating “Full disclosure, I’m not a religious person,” explains: “I enjoy the ‘lore’ surrounding different religions. The sense of the unknown, the high strangeness, the savagery and difficulty in reconciling the cruelty of the world with higher ideals. People using these forces to manipulate others, and those that truly seem to have good intentions.”

For these players, religion is often something not found in the ‘normal,’ an enchantment of the world that is fascinating precisely due to its absence from everyday experience.

One agnostic forum user who displayed a Connecting attitude was Günther, whom I approached to ask where that desire for religious escapism came from. He explained finding solace in games’ certainty in comparison to real life: “the results of player actions in a game are far more often visible and relatable […] I would like for life’s choices to be seen as less differentiated and nuanced.” Indeed, as another Connecting player stated, in fantasy worlds faith in gods just makes sense “since the ones [i.e., the gods] in videogames often give good evidence that they exist, the people in those games’ universes have ample reason to be theists.”

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can safely experiment with the certainties of religious belief without actual conversion (cf. de Wildt & Aupers, 2018). Such desire and fascination is of course not exclusive to irreligious players; and indeed religious and irreligious players alike joined discussions by stating that they came into meaningful contact with other belief systems. One example is New Ager Geoff, who came into contact with gurus and meditation as a child through videogames, which introduced him to other belief systems “and that prompts a questioning of one’s own belief system.” By comparison, Methodist-raisedturned-atheist James was reminded of the personal side of religion by playing That Dragon, Cancer, which includes the player into the designers’ (autobiographical) struggle with their fatally ill child. For James, “the creators speaking about their own religious thoughts and feelings […] struggling with religion and questioning it,” gave him a “different sense of religion:” not as a “blindly trusting faith, more of a personal sort of thing,” stressing how it gave James a more empathetic look at the Christianity he had rejected in adolescence.

These encounters with other worldviews can be instructive and convincing, even when re-evaluating their own pre-existing beliefs. For instance, one participant explains her intriguing ‘meeting’ with God in Dragon’s Dogma, which led her to think about her own religiosity: “once you get to meet God, you learn God’s been pulling the strings all along;” making her wonder whether, outside of the game, “it’s possible that I’m only aware of the ‘appearance’ of God’s non-interaction when in reality God could be intervening in a way that’s not immediately discernible” (Joan). Such thought experiments are typical among players that actively connect to other-religious content.

A convinced atheist wrote about role-playing religiously and shared his game-induced doubt in an interview: “What if I’m wrong? What is the game trying to make me think about?

Just by being on the topic of religion [it] does make me question... I constantly question my worldview and, you know, whether I’m right or wrong. It makes me think: is this how people in the real world use religion?” (Grant) Seeking out, trying to empathize with and understand religious worldviews can lead to players re-evaluating and even changing their convictions. I contacted one user 187

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who had written that “Persona 4: Golden made me a better person,” explaining how it helped him realize and come to terms with the fact “that I was not religious at all. That I was the “a”-word, the one reserved for baby-eaters and neckbeards.” Another user, identifying himself as a “secular humanist” shared in a thread on Assassin’s Creed and atheism that “[t]hinking back to playing these games I can’t help but realize that they probably played at least a small portion in my deconversion.” One of them, when asked in an interview to elaborate, also explained that he ‘deconverted’ from Christianity, aided by seeking out games which “showed me it was okay to be an atheist” (Phil).

Throughout the interview, he stressed the role that games such as Persona 4 played in showing him the joy of personal investment and individual choice that games can celebrate without having to rely on faith. Using the ending to Persona 4 as an example, he explained: “The people you gained social links from call out to you with encouragement, the music swells in just the right way, and you toss aside your glasses to see the world how it truly is – which is what you make of it.” (Phil) In all, what makes Connecting, as an attitude toward religious representation in videogames, distinct from other attitudes found in online discussions, is this willingness to seek out other worldviews and connect with them. By doing so, players in many cases not only become fascinated by them, but also gain deeper understandings of their own and others’ beliefs by internalizing other ways of thinking and believing – be it temporarily or lastingly.

7.5. Conclusion: Pop Theology While previous research has looked into either how religion appears in games (e.g., Bosman, 2015; Šisler, 2008; Zeiler, 2014), or how games and small groups may function religiously themselves (Wagner, 2012; Geraci, 2014); there have been few attempts to articulate the discourses on religion in games within player communities widely. Namely, researchers have looked at religious beliefs in game development communities (Piasecki, 2016); at in-game guilds as ‘functionally’ religious communities (Geraci, 2014); and at Twitch Pokémon player communities’ symbolic and narrative 188

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mythologization of religion (Lindsey, 2015); but never at gaming communities at large, talking about religion in games in general. How do such public forums and their thousands of users operate as part of a public sphere: how do players with various (ir) religious worldviews discuss religion together and what implications does this have for theories of religious privatization?

Indeed, notwithstanding the value of former analyses (narrative, symbolic, game-specific and developer-focused), I argued that the methodological focus on either religious texts, production context or individual meaning-making, hinders an analysis of the role of game culture. Theoretically, I added, such methodological choices blinker the implications for the debate on the social significance of (mediatized) religion. Motivated by these considerations, I studied the way religion in games is actually evaluated and discussed by players in gaming communities on online forums.

In the analysis I distinguished four ideal-typical approaches towards the religious worldviews presented in videogames: Rejecting, Debunking, Debating and Connecting – a continuum from a straight-forward complaint against different religious views, to a full-fledged embracement of others’ worldviews in order to understand and empathize with them. Notwithstanding different positions, all of them engage seriously with the public debate about religion.

Rejecters publicly contest, rather than privatize religion in games: few users give as much weight to the representation of religion in these discussions, seeking out others to warn them, or to publicly announce and discuss why the game they reject is dangerous or harmful.

Debunkers publicly rationalize or disenchant, rather than privatize religion in games: debunking prompts deep theological reflection. Either (for religious debunkers), a moral hierarchy places holy religious texts above ‘just games,’ or (for irreligious debunkers), a more relativistic perspective emerges. For them, Holy Books or games are not essentially different, ‘merely’ making for captivating fictional texts.

Debaters publicly defend, rather than privatize religion in games: they defend it as essentially meaningful. Debaters end up defending their elaborate interpretations based on their own background, ending in contradictory readings of the same game.

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Importantly from a communication studies perspective, these include readings by players that are often not represented in academic and theological interpretations of those games.

Connectors publicly sympathize with and re-evaluate, rather than privatize religion in games: religions are treated as differing but comparable worldviews to be learnt from, understood and empathized with. While religious connectors learn to empathize with other faiths than their own, non-believers paradoxically voice a desire for religious experiences in the game. From their perspective, games provide experiential meaning in an overly disenchanted world.

Overall, the analysis demonstrates that religion is a vital topic of discussion amongst players in the game community. On game forums, religion is defended and attacked, found meaningful and trivialized; sought out, understood and misunderstood.

Religious traditions are compared: Christian theology is put alongside knowledge of ancient pantheons, Meso-American mythology and the gods and rituals of Skyrim or Zelda. Notwithstanding different positions, players are in dialogue about the ‘real’ meanings of (in-game) religion and this shows that games inspire conversations on religion. It is important to note, however, that the arguments players are making in this conversation are neither non-committal nor arbitrary. Quite the contrary: what they express online about in-game content is strongly motivated by their (non) religious identity in offline life. I therefore conceptualize this particular form of “textual poaching” (Jenkins, 2012) or “decoding” (Hall, 1980) of in-game religious texts as a form of ‘pop theology.’ By pop theology I mean the discussion of the truth and meaning of religion, god(s), and belief(s) in public and by the public: that is, in groups of untrained and variously (ir)religious ‘amateurs’ in offline- or online environments.

How should we consider such vivid public discussions in the context of the academic debate on secularization or, more specifically, the proposed privatization of religion? Luckmann argued about half a century ago (1967) that religions do not necessarily disappear, but change: outside of established institutions and churches, individuals construct their privatized system of ‘ultimate significance’ that are separate from the public sphere. On the one hand, my research findings align with this perspective of an ‘invisible’ religion outside of the churches and, particularly, the more recent assumptions that popular culture is part and parcel of this trend – sometimes 190

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leading to highly individualized, consumerist forms of religiosity (Partridge, 2004; Possamai, 2005; van Otterloo, et al., 2012). Indeed: for the ‘Connectors,’ in-game religion provides a clear source for reflexivity on their own religious position. God may be ‘dead,’ but not in videogames.

And yet, on the other hand, the involvement in this public ‘pop theology’ on forums also raises critical questions about the alleged non-institutional, socially insignificant and privatized nature of religion. First of all, the prominence of religion in popular media culture – film, series and games – may already be understood as another kind of institutionalization of religion: that of religion as a commodity, packaged and sold by the cultural industry of producers and publishers, to be eagerly swept up by consumers in search of meaning (Aupers & Houtman, 2006; Davidsen, 2018; Hoover, 2006; Schultze, 2003; Wagner, 2012).

Secondly, we cannot deny the collective and essentially public nature of the discussion about religion on online forums. Informed by offline worldviews and (ir) religious identities, I demonstrated, players fully immerse themselves in discussions and theological speculations about religion in the games they play. In her polemic with Thomas Luckmann, Kelly Besecke already noted that we can clearly see ‘invisible religion’ by looking at the public conversation about religion in self-help books, magazines and other mass media featuring religion and spirituality. Digital media platforms facilitate such public debates even better: the non-hierarchical structure and “participatory culture” of the internet (Jenkins, 2012), invites lay-people and amateurs to voice their opinions on religion and worldviews.

In a post-secular society, religion is alive and well in media and communication.

Media such as games prompt discussions on religion outside of churches: something that is particularly visible in the ongoing conversation in public places, media venues, and, as demonstrated in this chapter, online forums. Indeed: this is truly a public conversation. Anyone with an internet connection can partake. People participate not primarily as members of a religion, but from divergent religious and intersectional backgrounds and on their own accord. Prompted by in-game religion, they engage in heated conversation on how meaningful a game can be, for themselves and for others, vis-à-vis sacred texts and their own convictions: all to conduct what I call pop theology.

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Chapter 8. Playing the Other: Interviews on Religious Role-play19 The setting is 1191 AD. The third crusade is tearing the Holy Land apart. You, Altaïr, intend to stop the hostilities by suppressing both sides of the conflict.

(Assassin’s Creed advertisement, 2007) 8.1. Introduction The advertising blurb for Ubisoft’s first Assassin’s Creed game does two things.

Firstly, it promises to transport you to the Holy Land of 1191 AD – another place and time, infused by conflict and war between various religious identities: Catholic and Orthodox Christians, Sunni and Shia Muslims, historical (Nizari Ismailis) and fictional (secular) Hashashin. Secondly, it constructs the player as having a double identity: while playing, “you” are also “Altaïr” – born of a Muslim father and Christian mother, fighting Templars in 12th century Jerusalem. Role-playing is key to immersing “you” in imaginary game-worlds like Assassin’s Creed. In other games, as we saw, you might be a summoner of Shiva, a combatant of Ifrit (Final Fantasy), a follower of the Church of Atom (Fallout); the eponymous God of War, or a shaman, druid or priest (e.g., World of Warcraft).

Departing from a critique on literature perceiving such in-game textual representations as simplistic stereotypes and discriminatory forms of Othering, this chapter studies how players themselves experience the role-playing of (non-)religious identities in videogames. The main research question asks: • how does role-playing the (non-)religious Other in games affect the worldview of players?

This chapter is an adapted version of a published article: de Wildt, L., & Aupers, S. (2018). Playing the Other: Role-playing religion in videogames. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 21 (3), 1-18. doi: 10.1177/1367549418790454.

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To answer this research question, the study is based on a qualitative analysis of indepth interviews held with twenty international players from different (non-)religious backgrounds.

8.2. Games’ Fascination with the Religious As chapter 3 showed, the first Assassin’s Creed was developed as a Holy War-era adaptation of Prince of Persia starring Islamic missionary Hassan-I Sabbah (Edge, 2012). It focused on a world of Muslim-Christian tensions and was released in a time of renewed fascination with religion. The game started development in 2003, while Western world news was dominated by the effects of religious zeal in the shape of the 9/11 attacks and the War on Terror. Religious fundamentalism became a journalistic and governmental concern, leading to European and American anti-Islamic sentiments held to this day. The renewed relevance of religion prompted sociologists (Gorski, 2012), art historians (King, 2005), literary scholars (Mohamed, 2011), and political theorists (McLennan, 2010), among others, to conceptualize the current period as “post-secular” (Habermas, 2006; 2008). In critical dialogue with theories on the privatization of religion in Western countries, these academics argued in different ways that religion is once again an urgent topic in public debate, media and popular culture. The early 21st century has indeed seen films, books and games tackling this religious fascination, whether politically (e.g., America’s Army; Al-Quwwat al-Khasa), historically (e.g., Assassin’s Creed; Europa Universalis IV), fantastically (e.g., Skyrim; Final Fantasy VII), or domestically (e.g., BioShock Infinite; The Binding of Isaac).

Yet, videogames have always relied on religious tropes throughout platforms and genres. As chapter 4 showed, some of games’ religious roots are pre-digital, from the origins of the vampire-fighting clergyman in TSR’s original Dungeons & Dragons of 1974, to the current demonic- and religion-themed classes of World of Warcraft, which count 8 out of 12 classes, including Druids, Monks, Shamans, Paladins and Priests.

Outside of the fantasy genre, as Chapter 6 showed, religious organizations, rituals and pantheons occur in many contexts: religious belief survives the post-apocalyptic in Fallout 4; divine metaphors make sense of lost knowledge in Horizon’s post-apocalypse; Dead Space and Mass Effect show faith and worship in science-fictional space; and many more examples. Games may mirror spiritual experience (Journey); cast players 194

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as the Japanese sun goddess (Ōkami); or draw from a number of mythologies whether fictional (Zelda), contemporary (Hanuman Boy Warrior) or historical (Smite, God of War). Players, meanwhile, take up all these roles with much the same speed as they take up a controller, switch discs or download a new game.

8.3. Studying the Religious Other in Games How have players’ experiences with such religious roles been studied and approached by scholars? Various academics have by now assessed that religious representation is omnipresent in videogames (e.g., Krzywinska 2006; Wiemker & Wysocki, 2014, Guyker, 2014). Such studies generally draw from literary-theoretical, narratological, theological and other approaches that are firmly grounded in the method of studying text and representation. Given this focus on in-game texts and representations, the analysis usually results in a set of typologies (in what ways do religious signs occur?), genealogies (what are the origins of such signs?) and perceived gaps (which positions, traditions and identities are excluded in the use of these signs?).

The theoretical approach underlying such empirical analyses of in-game narratives, discourses and representations is often informed by critical theoretical approaches in the social sciences. As with any media text, representations in games are neither produced in a vacuum nor neutral constructs: they allegedly reproduce dominant ideologies, institutionalized power relations and social-economic conventions that, in turn, socialize players into these hegemonic worldviews (e.g. Aupers, 2012; Kline et al., 2003; Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009). From this perspective, empirical studies on representation and (religious) worldview are not merely descriptive. They typically demonstrate that minority, subaltern and marginalized worldviews are relatively underrepresented in the game or that they are framed in a stereotypical, often negative fashion. Studies on gender and race in games demonstrate for instance, that 52% to 80% of player-controlled characters are white and male (Everett & Watkins, 2008; Williams, et al. 2009) whereas women and men are designed to follow typically traditional “gender repertoires” (Miller & Summers, 2007; Butt & Dunne, 2017).

Although much of this research focuses on gender and race (cf. Dill, et al. 2005; Williams, et al. 2009; Shaw, 2010a), similar approaches can be found vis-à-vis the 195

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representation of in-game religion (e.g., Krzywinska, 2006; Šisler, 2008; de Wildt, et al., 2018). Religion, it is argued, is not only represented in a stereotypical way but functions as a trope to make distinctions between ‘good’ (such as Christian-like Priests, Paladins wearing crosses on their shield) and ‘bad’ characters (worshipping ‘evil’ gods, cults, primitive Shamans and sometimes Druids) (see Chapter 4). This process of Othering through tropes and genre conventions in videogame has the sociological function to draw “symbolic boundaries” between “us” and “them” (Lamont & Molnár, 2002) which confirm and reinforce hegemonic (Western/civilized/male/secular) identity by contrasting it with an imagined (non-Western/barbarian/female/religious) Other (e.g. Asad, 2003; Said, 1978; Boletsi, 2013). Related to games, Trattner recently pointed out that “Othering based on religious ascriptions appears in direct relation to other categories of social difference” (2017: 32). Constructing an Other in games is therefore never only based on religion, but always an intersectional combination of a particular religion with class, gender, able-bodiedness, race, culture and other aspects of identity (cf. Collins, 1993; Crenshaw, 1989). In games, examples of intersectional ‘others’ abound – especially as defined against the overwhelming male whiteness of protagonistic avatars. Such examples include disabled people and religiously revered aliens in Dead Space (see Carr, 2014); the African zombie in Resident Evil 5 (see Brock, 2011); and what Jessica Langer calls World of Warcraft’s “constant project of radically ‘othering’ the horde [...] by distinctions between civilized and savage, self and other, and center and periphery” (2008: 87).

Similar claims are made about First-Person Shooter Games’ frequent representations of the enemy as Muslim, Arab and person of colour. Vít Šisler analyzes representations of the “Arab or Muslim Other” as predominantly stereotyped in mainstream European and American videogames, schematizing them as enemies, and reducing both to an anonymous horde of monolithic, ethnic-religious caricatures (2008). Even when a choice is offered, the “unmarked” default avatar is typically positioned as white, male (Fordyce, et al., 2016), and might be varyingly mobilized to reproduce militaristic (Nieborg, 2006), postcolonial (Mukherjee, 2016), or eurocentric (Apperley, 2010b) ideas and sentiments amongst players.

This supposed reproduction of ideas and sentiments is theoretically implied but seldom empirically studied in what Kerstin Radde-Antweiler and others have called 196

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an “actor-centered approach” to videogames (Radde-Antweiler, Waltemathe & Zeiler, 2014; cf. Heidbrink, Knoll & Wysocki, 2014), that is based on the meaning-making of players (e.g., Schaap & Aupers, 2017; cf. Aupers, Schaap & de Wildt, 2018). Given the textual approach of (religious) Othering, scholars studying games in isolation of players can make no authoritative claims about the experiences and interpretations of those players, without asking them. Such analyses, then, fall into the trap of “instrumentalizing” play: a reduction of game-play’s meaning to the game’s formal (narrative, procedural, visual) properties, where “what players do is” merely considered to “complete the meaning suggested and guided by the rules” (Sicart, 2011). Instead, I hold that players have radically different interpretations of what games mean depending on their own intersectional identities of religion, class, race, gender, and so on. This idea of an active consumer “decoding” the “encoded” texts (Hall, 1980) is already a mainstay in the study of the reception of books, film, television (Fiske, 1987; Jenkins, 1992). In videogames, however, players are even encouraged to reconfigure games by moving, choosing and otherwise playing within their given roles (Raessens, 2005).

The problem of aforementioned readings of religious representation as “Othering” is that it is reductive to consider characters as “Other” when many games actually offer the chance to play as an Other. By focusing on religious representation as narratives of “Othering,” studies often dismiss the experience that is connected to role-playing the Other. By contrast to his own study on the represented ArabianMuslim Other, Šisler suggests elsewhere that playing as the Arab or Muslim Other – specifically when encoded as “self-representation” by Middle-Eastern developers – offers players profound insights into marginalized and contested identities, such as those of Palestinians in the case of Syrian-made Under Siege [‫( ]راصحلا تحت‬qtd. in Šisler, 2006). Indeed, when (but only if) certain identities are included as roles to play – next to or in spite of white, male, hegemonic avatars – some researchers have stressed the relevant possibilities of identification with these avatars (e.g., Hammar, 2016), especially in the case of avatars that function as semi-autonomous characters with their own speech, backgrounds and actions (cf. Klevjer 2007; de Wildt, 2014a).

The problem of analyses of ‘Othering’ is therefore two-fold. On the one hand, players are not necessarily interpreting games in alignment with how religion and religious followers are represented in those games. They rather understand and play roles 197

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differently based on their own cultural backgrounds, convictions and identities. On the other hand, they additionally take on roles that are not necessarily their own and are thus negotiating between their own social identity and their given identity in the game-world.

Based on these considerations, I aim to answer the following research questions: • How does role-playing the (non-)religious Other in games affect the worldview of players? ◦ (How) does it change the way they understand other (non-)religious identities? ◦ (How) does it change the way they understand their own (non-)religious identity? ◦ What are the differences and similarities in this respect between players with religious and non-religious worldviews?

8.4. Methodology In order to answer this question, 20 interviews were conducted with people of various religious backgrounds, recruited as part of what later became the analysis of chapter 7 and this chapter 8. Participants were theoretically selected for maximal variation of different currently held religious positions – often viewed by them in light of changes in their convictions from childhood to now (Table 6, chapter 7; reproduced below for convenience). Instrumental here, was the need to systematically study the different ways in which people with different (non-)religious beliefs and traditions make sense of role-playing a religious other in videogames. Rather, say, than seek out a representative sample of players (or gamers); nor of a demographically representative cross-section of religious people, this “maximum variation sample” is intended to “disclose the range of variation and differentiation in the field” (Flick, 2006: 130). The method of interviewing produces inductive insights into this varied range of personal experiences with religion and games, considering them as valid and meaningful for players regardless of historical facticity (cf. Aupers, 2012).

Interviewees were recruited on internet communities selected for pagerank, and regional and cultural differences, e.g., Indian or Moroccan-Dutch videogame 198

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forums. The table of respondents shows some bias: many respondents were American, male and/or white. This can possibly be explained by demographic biases amongst videogame players and videogame forum users – the latter arguably requiring a more active identification as a “gamer:” a label and culture which has been argued to be exclusionary, silencing or otherwise marginalizing women (cf. Cassell & Jenkins, 2000; Shaw, 2011; Golding & Van Deventer, 2016).

With the resulting population (N=20), qualitative semi-structured interviews of 1 to 2 hours were conducted via internet video calls. Players were asked about their (non-) religious convictions, identifications and backgrounds; about the religious contents and characters of the games they played and the connections they experienced between those. When the games mentioned by the respondents were unknown to the researcher, the interview was supplemented by engagement with the game in question, in order to provide context for the (religious) role-playing activities, experiences and meanings. In the first part of the analysis, I will discuss the medium-specific affordance of digital roleplay. In the second part of the analysis, I will analyze in empirical detail how this roleplaying the (non-)religious Other affects the worldviews of my respondents.

8.5. The Affordances of Digital Role-Play Role-playing is a common and vital affordance of videogames. In the most broad sense of the word, players always perform as an Other on the screen – whether as Pac-Man, Mario or Lara Croft in arcade and console games; heroic soldiers in First-Person-Shooters such as Call of Duty, or particular classes, races and characters in MMORPGS from World of Warcraft to Runescape. Such digital performances of identity cannot be dismissed as trivial acts without psychological or cultural meaning. Rather than treat the identities proposed to players as “avatars” or redundant “cursors,” “tools” or “props” standing in for the player (Newman, 2002; Aarseth, 2004; Linderoth, 2005), there is always a form of identification with the roles people play – a coalescence of identity between the player as a subject and the avatar as an in-game object (Vella, 2013; de Wildt, 2014b).

The latter becomes particularly relevant in the context of complex games like MMORPGS and virtual worlds. Sherry Turkle already argued in 1995, that “The anonymity of MUDS gives people the chance to express multiple and often unexplored 199

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aspects of the self, to play with their identity and try out new ones” (241) whereas James Paul Gee concurred that “games can show us how to get people to invest in new identities or roles” (2003). Richard Bartle referred to this as the “role-playing paradox:” by investing time, energy and emotion in the online character, the Other becomes the Self: You are not role-playing as a being, you are that being; you’re not assuming an identity, you are that identity; you’re not projecting a self, you are that self. If you’re killed in a fight, you don’t feel that your character has died, you feel that you have died. There’s no level of indirection, no filtering, no question: you are there. (Bartle, 2004: 155-156) Notwithstanding such dramatic claims of totally becoming the character, my respondents verify that their role-playing implies a form of self-chosen identification with the character. Role-playing, one argues, is an opportunity to “spend a day in someone else’s shoes” (Grant), to act as another and to temporarily identify with their worldview, convictions and belief. When playing, interviewees stressed, they experience a “blurring of the avatar and my personal self ” (Günther). Role-play also provides a way to take on positions that require fundamentally different worldviews and, from this perspective, one can try out deviant, (non-)religious belief that are opposed to one’s own. As one interviewee says: “you can role-play belief. It’s probably similar to method acting […] you temporarily think like someone else, but you can do it from your couch and just for a few hours at a time” (Duke). Religious belief: now available in your living room.

For “a few hours at a time,” players set aside their ideas of the world, ready to act and think like someone else. This mechanism of temporarily “bracketing” their own ideas on truth and faith while playing, was reported by many players: The more I feel a blurring of the avatar and myself, the more believable the game-world becomes. Because during these moments my real ‘self ’ doesn’t remind me of inaccuracies or things I wouldn’t normally accept or believe.

(Günther) Even Greg, a Jehovah’s Witness who preferred not to play games contradicting his worldview, concedes that “when immersed, I accept conditions of the game-world that 200

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are directly relevant to what I believe” (Greg), even when they oppose those beliefs: I automatically suspend my disbelief. To me that means accepting the setting as it is described. In fact, I don’t see any difference between taking on the role of your character and accepting the game’s world and its conditions.

I thus will argue that the affordance of role-playing provides an opportunity, at least during play time, to play at being an Other, and identify with their (non-)religious worldview apart from one’s own. More than that: immersed in their roles, players are able to temporarily suspend their belief and put their ideas on truth and faith between brackets, so as to freely experiment with other ideological positions. The question is then: what, if any, implications does this role-playing of the (non-)religious Other have on the worldview of these players? In what follows I will systematically look at religious nones playing religious roles; and religious believers playing with Other religious traditions, and with atheist characters and worldviews.

8.5.1. “I Sort of Believed:” From secularism to enchantment A number of interviewees were secular, identifying as atheists or agnostics, and were either raised without belonging to a religious tradition or had become non-religious later in life. How do they treat the religious content they encounter in games, and what is it like to play with religious characters and worlds as a religious none?

Nico, who describes himself as atheist and his parents as “militant atheists,” nonetheless felt charmed by religion in games from a young age “because I really like mythology and I really like games that are inspired by religion, Age of Mythology is one of my favourite games,” a strategy game in which ancient (Greek, Egyptian, etc.) civilizations appease, and are aided by their relevant gods. Although seeing it as “embarrassing to admit,” those gods made a lasting impression on him as a child because it: spurred a fascination that there must be so many gods and it was really cool to me. I sort of believed in those gods at the time. We didn’t believe in Jesus or God or whatever, but I believed in Thor and Loki and a god of darkness and a god of silence and stuff like that.

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He notes that exactly because he was not brought up with religious belief and had “never been confronted with an openly Christian game,” playing Age of Mythology “meant that I liked those gods and how I could use them in the game.” Nico even exported such beliefs, recounting “instances when I would try and go downstairs and didn’t want to wake anyone up as a child, so I prayed to those gods to silence my footsteps.” Indeed, Nico might serve as a strong example of what has been termed digital Games’ “reenchantment,” introducing gods and magic – safely, within the boundaries of a cultural product – to atheist consumers who actually “want to believe” (Aupers, 2013).

Videogames can familiarize the religiously unaffiliated with religious environments and religious beliefs in different ways. James, for instance, described himself as a “very strongly” convinced atheist, living in “techy, atheist […] very rational, programmatic” California. Playing Assassin’s Creed, James became fascinated with Islamic paraphernalia and architecture, noting how the game’s “climate of religiousness within the world made it feel more realistic.” It even helped him to take his world history class in the ‘real’ world. The reason, James points out, is that religion in the game is made very concrete and visceral: it did not exaggerate religion to the level of “angels and demons fighting,” but shows a humane, everyday city-setting where “people just sort of stand up giving religious speeches throughout the city.”

But games have also made James more sensitive and empathetic to religious believers. The game That Dragon, Cancer, an autobiographical project by Ryan Green and his family, deals with their youngest son’s cancer diagnosis and the family’s consequent struggle with their Christian faith. The game “left a lot of marks on [him]” because of its intimate, personal setting, making the religious Other relatable to him through the game’s design. Firstly, the game creates a domestic setting, including voice-over work that “just feels very realistic […] it sounds like I’m listening in their house. And that make it really personal.” This domestic setting includes the player as familiar: “the characters address you sometimes, they look at you,” and as an onlooker “you can empathize with them.” Most importantly, it is within this personal context that James concluded that “the creators are speaking about their own religious thoughts and feelings,” rather than many Games’ “surface level religious symbology” or a reduction of religion “as a set of beliefs.”

Instead of a set of rules and practices, the game shows, through personal experiences, both the hopes and uncertainties of religion. Particularly this emphasis on personally 202

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“struggling with religion and questioning it,” and the differences between Ryan and Amy Green in doing so, had the effect of “humanizing religious people” for James. He continues: “there is a lot of objectification of religious people within tech [culture] and games,” whereas “this game does a very good job of humanizing them, and then creating empathy for them” (James).

Games such as these allow secular players like James, Grant, Phil, and Günther to identify with characters with different worldviews, convictions and beliefs than their own”. As Grant puts it: “Just because I don’t believe in this thing doesn’t mean that I can’t spend a day in someone else’s shoes […] I relish the opportunity to role-play, to actually identify with the role of my character”. According to Phil, specifically “with regards to religion, the major advantage is that the experience feels more like it happened to you rather than to someone else” (Phil). This temporary identification has consequences for one’s own worldview: my atheist respondents confess that role-playing encourages, reinforces or strengthens their empathy for the religious Other.

8.5.2. “It’s like Indian Mythology.” From religious tradition to Perennialism For my religious interviewees, confrontations with games’ religious worlds and identities presented other challenges than to religious nones. After all, the various fantastical, historical and global religions frequently present different or exaggerated versions of the theologies and mythologies that fund these players’ actual beliefs. Such players often found in games the ability to switch between worldviews – in the same way that secular players found a way to temporarily accommodate their worldviews to the religious worlds they inhabited. These worldviews could easily be switched between, from monoto polytheistic, from theist to agnostic, and so on. Importantly, these worldviews are as much religious as they are cultural, geographical and temporal. Indeed, materialist approaches to religion emphasize that religion is not just determined by belief, but also importantly its creeds, practices and materials, including the plethora of religions’ architectural, visual and other signs (Meyer, 2006; Morgan, 2013; cf. Durkheim, 1912).

For instance, Bill has lived his whole life in Boston and identifies as a RomanCatholic. However, having spent some time as Altaïr in Assassin’s Creed’s Holy Land, Bill recounts that he has grown familiar with its surroundings: “you hear the call to 203

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prayer, you see Muslims praying, you go through mosques.” An environment he has familiarized himself with to such an extent that he confidently called it a “very accurate portrayal of what 99 percent of practicing Muslims go through on a regular basis.” Bill emphasized that running around Assassin’s Creed’s Jerusalem, Acre and Damascus gave a “kind of understanding [of] how in that time period religion played out and how people’s everyday lives compared to today.” Similar to El-Nasr et al.’s comparative digital ethnography of the game (2008), the authors’ accounts – as well as Bill’s – show two things. Firstly, that the game’s environments are understood and experienced differently viewed from atheist, Christian and Muslim perspectives. Their meaning depends on whether players regard 12th century Jerusalem as just another digital tourist cityscape; as a “holy land” or indeed as something akin to the religious “journey of a lifetime, a dream” (El-Nasr, 2008). In Bill’s case, Assassin’s Creed’s Jerusalem grants a Roman-Catholic an insight into the everyday experience of Muslims. Secondly, these experiences show that the process of familiarizing with the otherness of the games’ environment is not just a religious one, but a cultural, geographical, temporal familiarization as well.

That the process works between cultures and worldviews is something another respondent, Swapan, attests to. He grew up in a North-Indian town “where there was no internet, no library,” and in a conservatively Hindu family. When arcades came to his neighbourhood, “videogames were like the medium that gave us an outlook towards the world outside.” Through videogames, Swapan became familiar with the English language, with American, British and Japanese culture – and their religions. It showed him worldviews, he explains, “that only videogames told me that exist” (Swapan).

Likewise, Geoff also describes his 30-year long gaming hobby as a string of: Multiple games where it’s kind of been a theme of learning about different worldviews or different belief systems and just becoming aware of the existence of other belief systems. And that prompts a questioning of one’s own belief system.

Geoff was raised a Roman-Catholic but currently describes himself as New Age, “cobbl[ing] together my own version kind of a spirituality” in a “cafeteria-style religion.”

The first time he “encountered a religious-spiritual idea in a game that had an effect on [his] thinking” was in Faxanadu – a game that came out when Geoff first started playing 204

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games at the age of eight. Religion is intertwined with the function of the game: In order to save in-game progress [a] Guru would give you a mantra that you had to then repeat later on [...] And it was just like a random string of characters you had to input to return to your save. But that was something that I hadn’t encountered before. That term or idea… What is a guru? It’s not really a priest. It’s more like a teacher… That was a different way of thinking about religion than I had so far had up until that point of being raised Catholic and going to Sunday school.

While games started a fascination with Eastern religion for Geoff, Joan, Daniel and others; games had the opposite effect for Swapan. Instead of repeating mantras for gurus like young Geoff, Swapan instead encountered monotheism for the first time. He became “very much fascinated by the concept of pagan gods,” particularly those that had been part of his family’s everyday lives, because “according to Christians & Muslims, we Hindus have pagan gods.” By being confronted with other ways of viewing the world and acting them out as characters in videogames, Swapan started to compare different religious stories. The difference, he argues, is that “pagan gods each have their own story and can be killed. It makes them like us. Whereas in Christianity you cannot question god.”

This kind of worldview switching and comparison were shared by variously religious players. You might be able to engage in animism and “play a character that believes there is a living spirit in everything” (Eric), or if you are already familiar with that, to play games filled with Christian doctrines or Viking mythologies. Swapan played consecutively through Devil May Cry, God of War, Dante’s Inferno and Viking: Battle for Asgard – mechanically similar games that draw from widely divergent Christian, Greek and Norse theo-mythological traditions. Swapan tellingly illustrates the kind of fascination and comparison this prompts by explaining: “that last game got me interested into Norse mythology because I did not know about that before. And the more I read about it, the more I learnt that it’s a lot like Indian mythology,” effectively coming full circle.

Worldview switching, then, led Swapan and others to a form of religious 205

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relativism. More than that: experimenting with other traditions through role-play, led them to the conclusion that underneath the differences in traditional religious beliefs, doctrine, vocabularies and rituals, one may find a similar or universal kernel. Worldview switching, thus, may invoke a “perennial perspective” (Huxley, 1945) on religion.

Importantly, beside narrative cosmologies, mythologies and so on, Games’ systems also promote this kind of worldview switching and perennialism. As various players hold, “every game in existence has a slightly different ethical system than real life” (Duke). The assertion that both games and religions propose (ethical) belief systems through rulebased presentations are both supported in academic literature (Sicart, 2009; 2013; Zagal, 2009; Geraci, 2014), as well as by other interviewees. Edward, too, compares religions in games to being “much like any system which appears to imitate another in the real world.” Eric – who has been a Catholic, Mormon and currently identifies himself closest to a Southern Baptist – is adamant in comparing both religion and games to rule systems, searching “until you find a rule system that is satisfying or whatever that you like the way it works — it is the exact same thing with these systems as with religion.” Religion in this view becomes a question of taste, comparison and optimization.

8.5.3. “Slipping into a Secular Mindset:” Assumed Atheism Religious players, beside being able to compare other religious belief systems, similarly found ways of understanding and identifying with their non-religious other through games and their avatars. Much of the content, narratives and characters in games is secular or, at least, assumed to be informed by a secular, agnostic or atheist perspective according to various of my religious interviewees.

How do they deal with this assumed atheism of many games? In another sense of the word, how do they assume (take on) atheist identities, even if only to engage with much of the perceived “immorality,” violence, hedonism and Godless nihilism in games?

Duke, to begin with, is an outspoken Pentecostal and a youth priest, yet he “play[s] the characters in games as functional atheists for immersion purposes, and that helps [him] to understand their actions a bit better.” In The Last of Us, for instance, Duke can’t see himself believably playing that game and its “very nihilistic atmosphere,” in the role of

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a Christian, because it’s hard to reconcile Joel’s [the protagonist’s] mindset with a Christian one […] his acts would be unjustifiable because his only motivation in the final area is his own desire to set the world the way he wants it.

The “final area” Duke is referring to, is a scene in which the protagonist makes a selfish moral choice on which the player has no influence. Although this kind of characterautonomy is difficult for Duke – particularly since he considers it an atheist and hedonistic scene – he tries to play as the character given him: “I will try to play the game consistently with that mindset, which would probably be secularly by default.”

In doing so, however, he increasingly identifies with secular ways of thinking: “even though I struggle to get invested in games with strong religious overtones, I would say it’s actually pretty easy for me to slip into a secular mindset during games. In fact, it feels necessary.” Consequently, Duke argues that playing secular characters makes him “sympathetic to the atheists out there […] especially the (pretty rare) atheists who live in this part of the country that is incredibly religious.”

Role-playing the secular other eventually allowed for self-reflection on the “immoral” atheist within oneself. After lying in a game, Duke found out that “it gave me a realization about myself: that I have a capacity for dishonesty.” Eric states that temporarily acting like someone else eventually teaches him something about himself, “teaching [one]self to check constantly why and how you’re doing what you’re doing.” By Role-playing […] the game character who does things differently to achieve their goal, you’re being taught to self-monitor more actively, to check constantly, to compare your small decisions with your greater beliefs and your greater goal.

For some players, this type of reflection on one’s religious tradition, beliefs and behaviour, led them to completely new insights. Whereas Duke and Eric emphasize their increased empathy towards atheists, Phil and Edward argued that games helped them to realize they were not religious at all – even motivating their deconversion.

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Playing Bloodborne, Phil “noticed some peculiar parallels” between the Healing Church in that game and the Christian liturgy. Both share a ritual of communion, “the latter imbibing the flesh and blood of Christ, literally or metaphorically, to feel closer to Yahweh” and “the former drinking the blood of the Old Ones”. To Phil, “this core idea of transcendence through blood drinking is something I was entirely accustomed to with Christianity, but repulsed by in Bloodborne.” Edward, too, came to reflect on his own Christian belief through Dragon Age: Inquisition, precisely because its main religion, the Chantry, resembles Christianity. It resembles European depictions of (medieval) Christianity in its ritual practices, symbology and iconic churches, abbeys and chapels; as well as in its reverence of “the Maker” and the Christ-like Andraste.

Such comparisons between real and fictitious religions installed doubt about the validity of one’s own (Christian) tradition. Phil further worked through his doubt by playing games that feature eclectic religious iconography, such as Xenoblade Chronicles and Persona 4. Both examples are Japanese RPGs that heavily feature religious symbolism: Persona 4, for instance, includes figures from Christian, Hindu, Japanese and other theo-/mythologies, depicting Satan, Saint Michael and Shiva alongside Anubis, Quetzalcoatl and Amaterasu. All of whom “are shown more as myth than fact:” to Phil, for the first time, religion was presented as “rooted in people, as a manifestation of human nature.” Gods are “presented as masks one uses to face the world, manifesting as gods, angels, demons and devils,” and rituals and religious practices “are portrayed more as superstitions and tradition than committed religions.” At the end of the game, “you toss aside your glasses to see the world for how it truly is: which is what you make of it.” Persona 4”s mundane and eclectic religiosity, Phil argues, taught him to regard religion as “subservient to the people [its] images are rooted in.” Ultimately, “This is what really helped me come to terms with my atheism […] in fact games showed me it was okay to be an atheist.”

For Edward, the experience of playing through his religious struggles turned out to be therapeutic and transformative: I was raised and frightened into only ever looking at religion from a single perspective: Christianity. Even considering another perspective was almost akin to sinning […] But what Dragon Age: Inquisition allowed me to do was 208

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suddenly be able to come in as an outsider, I played an elf, and be forced to view it from the outside.

After Edward “viewed Christianity from the perspective of “an outsider” – through the eyes of an excluded elf – Edward investigated his religious identity. He goes as far as to refer to his life as “post-DAI” [Dragon Age: Inquisition] as the game “impacted how I think about religion” and “gave me the breathing room to reflect.” And yet, other games contributed to religious reflexivity as well. An important influence was The Talos Principle. In that game: Your actions can be read as an adherent to a Christian-esque […] monotheistic God [who] tells you not to go up the tower since you don’t need that knowledge. But you can choose to go up the tower […] I decided that if I went up that tower and defied Elohim [the God-voice], it would be like defying the God of real-life Christianity.

Going up the tower terrified Edward “in a very real way” and served as a way of role-playing himself, practicing the kind of audacity it took to “defying the God of real life Christianity.” Indeed, after Edward went up the tower: “I felt freer. Nothing bad happened […] I felt better and more in control of myself. I felt like I had more agency in life.” As a consequence, Edward decided to “take a break from Christianity,” eventually coming to identify himself as both transgender and atheist.

8.6. Conclusion: Now You’re Playing with Ultimate Meaning Based on content analysis of religious representations (narratives, beliefs, characters) in videogames, it is often implied that these contribute to a process of Othering religiosity: a stereotypical, schematic and moral way of representing religions that draws “symbolic boundaries” between “us” and “them” (Lamont & Molnár, 2002) and reinforces a hegemonic (Western/civilized/male/secular/Christian) identity by contrasting it with an imagined (non-Western/barbarian/female/religious/Muslim) Other (e.g. Asad, 2003; Said, 1978; Boletsi, 2013). Arguing that “dominant-hegemonic” representations in texts are always interpreted, negotiated and “decoded” (Hall, 1980) and, particularly, that videogames are not passively consumed but actively played, I asked: 209

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how does role-playing the (non-)religious Other in games affect the worldview of players?

Rather than seeing religion in games as representations of Othering, the analysis demonstrates that players from different (non-)religious beliefs take on different worldviews while role-playing the (non-)religious Other. In doing so, atheists relativize their own position, open up to the validity of religious claims or wilfully embrace its logic and ultimate meaning in the context of the game-world. In turn, Christians, atheists, Hindus and others switch between each other’s beliefs, compare traditions and sometimes, based on this process, draw conclusions about the similarities underlying world-religions. In other cases, they admit to “slip[ping] into a secular mindset,” gradually turning toward the position of a secular Other.

In short, the analysis indicates that the perspective on religious representations in games as an Other is limited. When we consider games as played and experienced (rather than read or analyzed as narratives afterwards), they are multi-sided tools that afford the possibility of actually playing the Other – of temporarily ‘bracketing’ or suspending one’s own world view and empathizing with the Other’s perspective. In itself, this is not surprising: from an anthropological perspective, play has always been understood as a “temporary suspension of normal social life” (Huizinga, 1938a, p. 12; cf. Caillois, 1961) – a “liminal zone” in which “serious” issues of everyday life, culture and politics are transgressed, reversed and re-negotiated (e.g. Geertz, 1972; Turner, 1982; van Bohemen, et al. 2014). In recent research on play in videogames, however, this ritual function of play is often narrowed down to a psychological dimension. Game-worlds are considered “laboratories” where adolescent players try out new personal identities (Turkle, 1995), safely express deviant emotions such as fear and aggression (Jansz, 2015), and “play with the controversial, the forbidden and subversive” through role-playing (Linderoth and Mortensen, 2015, p. 4).

Based on these findings I suggest that, instead, academics should pay more attention to the way role-playing games contribute to social-cultural dimensions of identity, or even citizenship in a multicultural Western society. “Personal identity,” after all, is inherently “social” and always shaped in relation to the Other (e.g. Mead, 1934; Goffman, 1959; Jenkins, 1996). Games, from this perspective, may indeed be understood as ‘laboratories’ for players to play the Other, but in a broader social and cultural sense 210

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beyond the individual: as a free space in which to experiment with worldviews and, in doing so, build up understanding and tolerance. By playing at being atheists, Christians, Hindus or Muslims in games, players may become aware that the absolute truths they were raised with are culturally contingent and replaceable by alternatives – both historical and fantastical. A thorough awareness of religious pluralism, sociologist of religion Peter Berger argued 50 years ago, opens people up for relativism and tolerance: The pluralistic situation multiplies the number of plausibility structures competing with each other. Ipso facto, it relativizes their religious contents. More specifically, the religious contents are ‘de-objectivated,’ that is, deprived of their status as taken-for-granted, objective reality in consciousness. They become subjectivized […] Their reality becomes a ‘private affair’ of individuals. (1969: 151-152) Two nuances remain in order not to overstate the role of games in this religious relativism. First of all, a caveat of the argument and data presented here is that ‘games’ are not a monolithic cultural category. While it is easy to find religion in game settings from the historical to sci-fi, and from genres of fantasy to the post-apocalyptic; not all games offer religious roles and characters to identify with. There is very little religious relativism to be found in games such as FIFA. Secondly, despite the overwhelming number of games that do depend on religious conventions of representation, players’ transportation was explicitly contextualized by play; and while it has led to reflection, it is a clearly bracketed, temporary activity. Overall, it thus remains a question what the offline implications are of role-playing the religious Other in multicultural society as a whole: I have no interest in claiming games to be a magical tolerance device, only a way for millions of players to experience what it is like to view the world differently.

Nonetheless, I have argued in this chapter that many games offer players the chance of playing the Other. Berger claimed that the relativism of cultural pluralism, ultimately, had a secularizing effect on individual belief, since it undermined the plausibility of ultimate meaning. In contemporary “post-secular” society (Habermas, 2006; 2008), a contradictory emphasis is put on fundamentalism, religious conflict and mutual Othering: atheists, Christians and Muslims are taking sides in what can be referred to as a “clash of civilizations” (Huntington, 1996; Eagleton, 2009; cf. Mamdani, 2004).

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This underscores the societal relevance of further systematic and perhaps quantitative research on my theory about games, role-play and religious relativism. To paraphrase Nintendo’s famous 80’s slogan, when players are afforded the chance to see the world from new perspectives, “now you’re playing with ultimate meaning!”

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“What does religion have to do with videogames anyway?”

(Anonymous Assassin’s Creed developer, GDC 2018) As the introduction claimed, and as I have argued throughout the chapters above, the presence of religion in videogames is so common that developers and players alike forget the extent to which videogames depend on religious conventions. Various religious traditions, as has been observed by other scholars and throughout this dissertation, are used by developers to add ‘gravitas’ to games; or to explain game mechanics; or to draw players into characters and worlds away from the disenchantment of modern life. I set out, five years before writing this, to look beyond what theologians, sociologists, game scholars and other academic writers had optimistically pointed out: there are religious signs in videogames. ‘So what?’ I have tried to ask as unceremoniously as possible.

What do videogames have to do with religion? And what does religion have to do with videogames, anyway?

1. Which choices lead game-makers to use religion in their videogames?

2. In what ways and which contexts is religion represented in videogames?

3. How do players make sense of, and relate to these representations?

And as a consequence of those, I ask in this conclusion: How should we theorize the appearance of religion in the biggest cultural industry of the (supposedly) secularized West, and what kind of religious change does this entail?

9.1. Which choices lead game-makers to use religion in their videogames?

In chapter 3 I argued that the logic of a commercial brand formed a ‘marketable religion’ – based on fieldwork in Montréal, and 22 interviews there with developers 217

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on the AAA (‘Hollywood’-style) Assassin’s Creed franchise, among whom were the key creators of the franchise’s decade-long history. The initial choice to use religion in Assassin’s Creed was, on the one hand, one of personal conviction: Patrice Desilets and his core team wanted to make a game that depicted religious institutions as dogmatic systems of powerful manipulation. On the other hand, subsequent choices made in marketing, production and editorial created a brand which commodifies religion to appeal to a global audience as wide as possible, without alienating or offending anyone. Religion in Assassin’s Creed, as the example ‘par excellence’ of commercially successful uses of religion in games, is thus used to create a nostalgic belonging without believing for everyone to place themselves into an esoteric mystery ‘behind history,’ that is brought into a ‘rationalized’ present of secular scientific logic. Chapter 4, based on 35 interviews with independent developers outside of the AAA system, showed that religious and irreligious developers alike were reluctant to put their own convictions into their games. Instead, they too contributed to a commodification of religious signs, in this case led by practical and economic considerations: by following the standardized conventions of Eurocentric religious representation in games.

9.2. In what ways and which contexts is religion represented in videogames?

In chapter 5 I took the Final Fantasy franchise as exemplary of one broad genre of games: fantasy role-playing games (RPG). The reason for doing so was three-fold: player discussions indicated it as the game series and genre that most prompted discussions about religion (Chapters 2, 7). Secondly, both the Final Fantasy games and the fantasy genre are indicative for placing religion in a nostalgic, (often faux-medieval) historical setting. Thirdly, the case study is deeply rooted in those standardized conventions described in previous chapters (Chapters 3, 4), thus presenting a fitting case study for a content analysis into those specific conventions. What I found is that Final Fantasy, and game series like it, juxtapose religious traditions eclectically. By drawing on cultural heritage from Egyptian to Abrahamic and Lovecraftian to in-house sources, fantasy games present worlds that make no distinction between traditions that are seen in a ‘world religion-paradigm’ as mutually exclusive (e.g., that believers of Christianity cannot also believe in Egyptian deities [see Hedges, 2017]), and as hierarchically different (e.g., that the mythologies of the Bible are different from the fictional stories of H.P. Lovecraft). Instead, these game ‘texts’ can be better understood 218

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through a paradigm of ‘multiple religious belonging’ (van der Braak & Kalsky, 2017), in which the materials and signs of religious and fictional cultural heritage co-exist, and can be ascribed to as existing non-exclusively. This blurs the distinction between representations of what is sacred in certain religious and cultural traditions, vis-àvis what is ‘merely’ fictional and meant for entertainment. In order to not reduce ‘religion in games’ to ‘religion in Assassin’s Creed’ or ‘religion in fantasy and history games,’ Chapter 6 theoretically selected post-apocalyptic games as a counter-case to historical games like Assassin’s Creed and fantasy games like Final Fantasy, both of which use historical settings to present religion nostalgically. Post-apocalyptic games, by contrast, take place at a futuristic end of human history (with all knowledge of religious cultural heritage lost), in which machines and other technology are framed as sacred. As a consequence, I argue that even outside of historical, nostalgic settings, post-apocalyptic and futuristic games use divine metaphors to frame technology that is beyond human comprehension as god-like. With all historical knowledge of technology lost, Horizon: Zero Dawn, the Fallout series and many games like them depict AI and atomic energy as omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent: to be venerated religiously by post-apocalyptic societies as divine.

9.3. How do players make sense of, and relate to these representations?

Chapter 7 studied 100 discussions on the five most popular gaming forums to get an overview of how player communities talk about religion in games from their own perspectives. I found that players variously either (1) rejected religious content as not fitting their established worldviews; (2) debunked games as trivial in relation to their established worldviews; (3) debated games as interpretable only according to their established worldviews; or (4) actively sought out games in order to connect to worldviews not already their own. In the process, their discussions showed that player communities are prompted by the games they play to conduct a collective ‘pop theology’ on the nature of gods, and compare the meanings of fiction such as games in relation to sacred texts – thereby muddying the distinction between fictional and sacred texts. Looking further into their life-long engagements with games and these questions prompted, both Chapters 7 and 8 use 20 subsequent interviews to show that irreligious and religious players alike, use games to experience how (fictional) religious Others see the world – whether it is to temporarily experience enchantment, 219

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to understand other religious systems than their own, or to try on atheism; in at least two cases leading to profound reflection and even conversions as a result.

9.4. Implications: Four religious changes Across these three sub-questions, how should we theorize the appearance of religion in the biggest cultural industry of the (supposedly) secularized West, and what kind of religious change does this entail? I defined religions, at the start of this dissertation, as (epistemologically) beliefs in (ontologically) supernatural substances; that (socially) take shape through collective practices and material cultures. Based on the six empirical chapters above, I argue that we need to reconsider in four ways how the use of religion in videogames changes religion in (Western) culture: from ontological substances to commodities and from sacred substances to simulacra; from socially privatized practices and material cultures back into a post-secular public sphere; and from an epistemology of belief to an epistemology of play (Error! Reference source not found.). Three of these changes can be mapped onto this dissertation’s main structure of encoding (which changes religion in videogames ontologically), content (which also changes religion in videogames ontologically) and consumption (which changes religion in videogames socially). The fourth, overlapping change is that religion in videogames is changed into a ludic epistemologically. After elaborating on the first three changes, I will conclude with this last epistemological change: both because it is a consequence of the other three, and because I argue that it is the most impactful for the way we should understand both videogames and religion.

I.

Encoding

From Substances to Commodities

Ontological change

II. Content

From Sacred to Simulacra

Ontological change

III. Decoding

From Privatized to Public

Social change

From Belief to Play

Epistemological change

IV. Conclusion

Table 8. Four Religious Changes.

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9.4.1. Encoding: From Substance to Commodity The encoding of religion in videogame development changes religious substances ontologically. What religious substance is in videogames is reduced to a commodity.

Religion cannot be comfortably conceptualized in these empirical cases as either (substantially) a connection to a supernatural substance (Marett, 1914; Spiro, 1966; Tylor, 1871; etc.); nor (functionally) a set of practices providing functions to societies and individuals (Bellah, 1964; Durkheim, 1912; Malinowski, 1925; etc.); nor (materially) a number of artefacts that mediate supernatural substances and encourage functions among believers (Meyer, 2006; Morgan, 1999; Stolow, 2005; etc.).

Rather, what we see in videogames that use religion is a wide-spread encounter with mediatized commodifications of substances (depictions of gods, transactions with gods, metaphors of divinity), and – by extension – mediatized commodifications of rituals (initiations, meditations, summonings). What I mean by mediatized, here, as opposed to mediated, is that these signs or their games do not function as objects mediating religious substances to the profane (in the way a human-made crucifix mediates Christ to a Christian [Meyer, 2006]); but that games present religious signs that exist only within their own, mediatized context. What I mean by “commodification,” as stated in Chapters 3 and 4, is a process by which something without economic value (culture, or in this case, religious substance), is assigned a use value and made exchangeable or interchangeable: i.e., made into a commodity (Marx, 1904, pp. 19-21).

More simply, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls a commodity “anything intended for exchange” (2005, p. 35), adding that it is not necessarily (e.g., when bartering) with “reference to money [but] with maximum feasible reduction of social, cultural, political or personal transaction costs” (ibid.). In all exchanges of commodity, from barter to capitalist exchanges, the commonality is in “the object-centred, relatively impersonal, asocial nature” of the exchange (ibid.).

In other words, by encoding religious substances and related rituals for consumption by anyone in this way – i.e., with a maximal reduction of religious meaning – they reduce gods, magic and other religious substances to universally exchangeable commodities devoid of substance. This is true, firstly, for the big AAA studios like Ubisoft which, as chapter 3 showed, who construct a globally marketable 221

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form of religion that is made recognizable to everyone – no matter where they are from – and controversial to no-one. A maximum reduction of religious substance and meaning that allows belonging for everyone, without the burden of belief for anyone (Chapter 3). Secondly, somewhat surprisingly, commodification also occurred at the other end of the spectrum of big industry. Independent developers – despite their (self-)presentation as unconventional – are dependent on established conventions of representing religion for reasons of social taboos, standardized game design practices, eurocentrism and economic precarity (Chapter 4). How so? On the one hand, I reiterated Brendan Keogh’s assertion that Indies’ ideal-typical “tension with Triple-A development” means indies not only oppose AAA, but are also “entangled in the narratives and values of the Triple-A industry” (Keogh, 2015, p. 156). I theorized that this finding of a tendency toward similar and standardized forms of representing religion, is a form of what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno once called “sameness” [Ähnlichkeit] (1944, p. 94): a process of standardization in cultural industries, regardless of the beliefs and intentions of the workers within that industry. They describe “sameness” as a process by which cultural industries are driven to monotonously commodify ideas, driven on the one hand by taboos on nonhegemonic groups and ideas (Horkheimer & Adorno, p. 96; hooks, 1992); and on the other hand driven by a maximization of profit, achieved by appealing to the widest possible audience, by which “words change from substantial carriers of meaning to signs devoid of qualities” (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1944: 133). Briefly put: a reduction from (religious) substances to commodities.

Finally, this process of commodification is different from the ‘market-ification’ observed by Luckmann and others. To reiterate, Luckmann proposed that rather than a disappearance of ‘religion’ in culture, religious meaning rather changed from an institutionalized setting into an “invisible religion” constructed through bricolage (1967, p. 103). In this ‘marketplace’ of religion and spirituality, individuals can pick and choose religious elements, in what has variously been called “do-it-yourself-religion” (Baerveldt, 1996), “pick-and mix religion” (Hamilton, 2000), “religious consumption à la carte” (Possamai, 2003) or a “spiritual supermarket” (Lyon, 2000; cf. Aupers & Houtman, 2006). However, the religion ‘sold’ in these cases – no matter how pieced together it is from a mosaique of New Age spiritualism, eastern traditions and whatever Instagram hashtag is in vogue – is still ostensibly offered as having genuine religious 222

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substance. By contrast, the commodification of religious substances in the case of videogame development further changes religious substances into commodities that are mass produced to be exchangeable and interchangeable for a mass audience. Seen in this way, commodification is the ultimate consequence of bricolage: a fast-food marketplace of religious commodities.

9.4.2. Content: From Sacred to Simulacra The representation of religion in videogame content further changes religious substances ontologically from sacred substances to (commodified) simulacra of the sacred: a specific kind of signs that become too far divorced from their original signified to carry the same (here, sacred) meaning. First, as a consequence of religious substances’ commodification, the distinction between fiction and religion collapses. What is held sacred within one religious community is presented as equally existent to what is held sacred by other communities, or unanimously held as fictional, and even ridiculous: there is no ontological difference between mediatized Shiva and mediatized phallicwheelbarrow-god Mara (Chapter 5).

We should think of this change as not just a change from substance to commodity, as argued above; but furthermore as stripping these mediatized commodities of their (mediated) sacredness. Religion is in such cases reduced to a self-contained, selfreferential system of signs with no necessary connection to an original signified substance. Jean Baudrillard has already called this situation “hyperreal,” in which signs no longer need to point to their referent to make sense in their own mediatized context (1981). Simply put, whereas most modernist conceptions of language stem from the idea that a sign has a signified (a tree, a boat, Jesus Christ, Shiva) and a signifier (a word or picture of ‘tree,’ ‘boat’ or the plethora of signs and objects that signify Jesus Christ and Shiva) – we see in situations like this that the signified is no longer necessary.

Religious signs in videogames function as such: they are signifiers without needing a signified to function.

Simulacra are imperfect copies of things – originally in theology as copies, particularly of something sacred that “ostensibly points toward a thing, toward the Real, but in a manner which that represented thing is not” (Pinkus, 2017, p. 2).

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The simulacrum from Plato to modern theology is almost always used in the context of images of the divine, and generally a “distorted representation, an image without an inner resemblance, without a true model, lacking the crucial dependence upon the original and passing through neither the Idea nor the Ideal; it therefore calls into question the ability to distinguish between what is Real and what is represented.” (ibid.; cf. Plato, 1996; Muckelbauer, 2001) A simulacrum was thus already before Baudrillard a distorted sign that comes to stand in for itself, rather than pointing to an original (‘real’ or ‘Ideal’) sacred thing.

This term fits what I have found, firstly because of how videogames’ commodify religious substance to the point that they become divorced from their sacred original.

Secondly, because its theological (and art-historical) origin places the concept of the simulacrum in opposition to the icons and idols that, as in theories of material religion, mediate the divine that they correctly represent, or even embody: to return to Meyer on the icon, as in the Introduction, “the Catholic icon: though carved from wood, painted, and set up – thus obviously ‘human made’ –, to the believing beholder (and possibly its maker) it appears as an embodiment of a sacred presence that can be experienced by contemplative gaze, prayer, or a kiss […] practices of mediation invoke the transcendental via particular sensational forms.”

(Meyer, 2006, pp. 13-14) By contrast, the mediatized commodities of religion in videogames do not mediate their sacred original as icons and idols do, as my research shows.

Instead, they are simulacra: copies that either have no original or have become so far divorced from an original that they become copies of copies without originals (1981). Disneyland provides an illustrative example for both Baudrillard (“a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra” [ibid., p. 12]) and Umberto Eco: “we not only enjoy a perfect imitation, we also enjoy the conviction that imitation has reached its apex and afterwards reality will always be inferior to it” (1986, p. 46).

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Disneyland, in their example, no longer needs a clear connection to a reality or original signified. There is no original copy: all six Disneylands around the world are copies of each other, presenting copies of copies of original sources, i.e., combining copies of Viennese royal architecture, endless self-referential copies of a mouse-turned-cartoonturned-merchandise, and a plethora of other historical and cultural ‘originals’ from pirates to princesses, into something that presents itself as a ‘pure simulacrum,’ without a necessary relation to an underlying reality. There is no original underlying sign of Mickey Mouse; just as there is no necessary original for the combination of rituals and inventions of Assassin’s Creed, or the mix of Ifrit and Lucifer in Final Fantasy, and so on.

Even if, as I did in Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6, we attempt to retrace and collect the genealogical origins of those signs, their originals are not necessary for the signs to function.

Simulacra of the sacred function in themselves, in lieu of their religious origins, for developers, games and players to encode, construct and decode these signs. In Baudrillard’s words “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody.

It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and shortcircuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself […] A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary.” (Baudrillard, 1981, p. 2-3) In videogames, we see cultural products offering simulacra of the sacred much like Disney offers its reality – self-contained and divorced from tradition. This is different from the “fiction-based” or “hyperreal religion” of other authors (Davidsen, 2013; Possamai, 2005; Cusack, 2010), who show that the fictions of Star Wars or Tolkien can be taken up as religious. By contrast, videogames’ commodified simulacra of the sacred do not inspire such lasting belief nor belonging. They are instead reconfigured at will eclectically in their commodified form, with no necessary connection to one original; nor to any vestige of the sacred, cultural or personal meanings that they carry for their believers.

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9.4.3. Decoding: From Privatized to Public The decoding of religion by videogame players furthermore changes how religions function socially. Considering the decline of institutionalized, practiced religious belief and belonging on the one hand; and considering the dominance of videogames as a cultural industry, it is straightforward to say that young people in the West are more likely to see religion in games than in a place of worship (cf. Newzoo, 2017; Pew, 2018). The industry has been able to fabricate communities of religious “belonging,” that share collective meaning, morality, and communal functions (Chapters 3, 7; Davie, 1990; cf. Geraci, 2014), but they do not necessarily share belief. In fact, when fans come together to discuss and bond over their shared experiences, most of them end up doing so without changing their established worldviews (Chapter 7). If anything, how players interpret religion in games is not only different from how other players interpret religion in games (Assassin’s Creed is a deeply religious game; but Assassin’s Creed is also a militantly atheist game), but also fundamentally unrelated to how developers intended to use religion in games (Assassin’s Creed as a militantly atheist game; Assassin’s Creed as universally religious for everyone). They are mere signs to be debated, and compared, but always in light of the player’s own pre-existing cultural worldviews, that they bring to this temporary experience (Chapters 7, 8).

They are opaque: the way in which religion is communicated through games (from developers to players), and around games (between players in huge communities of shared meanings), is more like a public projection screen than a transparent mediation of privatized experience.

This is a clear contestation, again, of theories of “invisible religion” discussed above (e.g., Luckmann, 1967), in that religion is returned from privatized systems of belief to public debate. Firstly, what games like Assassin’s Creed, Final Fantasy, and so on present to players is religions as institutions – albeit by mixing and matching their substances and practices as commodified simulacra. Secondly, while these representations may be decoded in widely different ways, the ‘post-secular’ public sphere is as a consequence abuzz with talk of religion, including on gaming forums where players compare, contrast and criticize their decodings in a “pop theology” (Chapter 7). As the analysis of players’ public conversation showed, religion is a vital topic of discussion amongst players in the game community. On game forums, religion 226

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is defended and attacked, found meaningful and trivialized; sought out, understood and misunderstood. Religious traditions are compared: Christian theology is put alongside knowledge of ancient pantheons, Meso-American mythology and the gods and rituals of Skyrim or Zelda.

Notwithstanding different positions, players are in dialogue about the ‘real’ meanings of (in-game) religion and this shows that games inspire conversations on religion. It is important to note, however, that the arguments players are making in this conversation are neither non-committal nor arbitrary. Quite the contrary: what they express online about in-game content is strongly motivated by their (non) religious identity in offline life. I therefore conceptualized this particular form of “textual poaching” (Jenkins, 2012) or “decoding” (Hall, 1980) of in-game religious texts as a form of ‘pop theology.’ By pop theology I mean the public discussion of the truth and meaning of religion, god(s), and belief(s): i.e., in public and by the public, in groups of untrained and variously (ir)religious ‘amateurs’ in offline- or online environments.

How should we consider such vivid public discussions in the context of the academic debate on secularization or, more specifically, the proposed privatization of religion? Luckmann argued about half a century ago (1967) that religions do not necessarily disappear, but change: outside of established institutions and churches, individuals construct their privatized system of ‘ultimate significance’ that are separate from the public sphere. By contrast, however, the involvement in this public ‘pop theology’ on forums raises critical questions about the alleged non-institutional, socially insignificant and privatized nature of religion. First of all, the prominence of religion in popular media culture – film, series and games – may already be understood as another kind of institutionalization of religion: that of religion as a commodity, packaged and sold by the cultural industry of producers and publishers, to be eagerly swept up by consumers in search of meaning (Aupers & Houtman, 2006; Davidsen, 2018; Hoover, 2006; Schultze, 2003; Wagner, 2012).

Secondly, we cannot deny the collective and essentially public nature of the discussion about religion on online forums. Informed by offline worldviews and (ir) religious identities, I demonstrated, players fully immerse themselves in discussions and theological speculations about religion in the games they play. In her polemic 227

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with Thomas Luckmann, Kelly Besecke already noted that we can visibly see religion in the public conversation about religion in self-help books, magazines and other mass media featuring religion and spirituality (2005). Digital media platforms facilitate such public debates even better: the non-hierarchical structure and “participatory culture” of the internet (Jenkins, 2012), invites lay-people and amateurs to voice their opinions on religion and worldviews.

In a post-secular society, religion is alive and well in the public spheres of media and communication. What I mean by ‘post-secular’ here, is the revitalization of religion in the media of what Jürgen Habermas identified as the religiously “deinstitutionalized” societies of the West: Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – in other words, (settler-)European societies (2008, p. 17). These societies, according to Habermas, are adjusting “to the continued existence of religious communities [despite] an increasingly secularized environment” (p. 19). Religion in videogames as such, in its commodified and simulacra form, proves to endure in digital media and entertainment through public consumption and discussion. When games prompt discussions on religion outside of churches, in public places, media venues, and online forums, it becomes truly a public conversation. Anyone with an internet connection can partake. People participate not primarily as members of a religion, but from divergent religious and intersectional backgrounds and on their own accord. Prompted by ingame religion, they engage in heated conversation on how meaningful a game can be, for themselves and for others, vis-à-vis sacred texts and their own convictions: not as privatized, but publicly.

9.5. Ludic Epistemologies: From Belief to Play (Concluding the Conclusion) So, when there is religion in videogames, it consists of (ontologically) commodified simulacra of the sacred; that prompt (socially) re-newed ways of discussing religion in the post-secular public sphere. This is in contrast to how religion has historically appeared as, and been theorized accordingly as (epistemologically) beliefs; in (ontologically) substances; mediated (socially) through collectively understood objects and functions.

What to make of the role of ‘belief ’? I argue that the biggest theoretical 228

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implication for the way we should understand religion and games is the epistemological change from dichotomies of belief and disbelief to play as a way of relating to religion.

Epistemologically, then, how religion is known and experienced in videogames, is fundamentally changed by play’s temporariness. Players may develop from their encounters with commodified religious simulacra a ‘kind of understanding’ of being ‘in someone else’s shoes’ (Chapter 8), but it is only understood as them occupying the temporary worldview of playing the Other: a temporary playing at religion, in the same way that children play at being soldiers, at being a doctor, running a shop (‘playing shop’) or having a family (‘playing house’). Hence, religions have meaning mainly within the delineated time and space of the videogame; and any knowledge presented within them is first and foremost true within their diegesis. This is why developers can take an amalgam of historically religious signs and stories and present them as a new, a-historical religious experience (Chapters 3, 5). This is why games can present multiple religions as ‘true’ next to each other, and collapse their distinction from fiction (Chapters 5, 6). This is why, despite some players’ reflections on their own religious lives afterwards, what is true or not about religion in the game is contained within the hours of media use (Chapters 7, 8). The consequence is that such temporary, mediatized religious experiences take place outside of history, as well as outside of the cultural context in which they are encoded and decoded (Chapters 4, 8).

When playing a game, I may play at being a believer, in a faux-medieval world, with absolute certainty of gods – until I am not, because I have switched off my computer, my temporary world and worldview.

What this means for the studies of religion and of videogames is foremost epistemological, i.e., that belief in sacred substances can be made into play-time with commodified simulacra; that age-old religious traditions can be tried on and discarded by players at will. This is a medium-specific theory, intransferable to other media no matter how playful they are theorized as (e.g., Hoover, 2006). As much or little agency as players have been theorized to have within the medium (e.g., Raessens, 2005; cf. de Wildt 2014a), they are at least able to appropriate and reconfigure what the game means for them and how they choose to interpret and understand it. Moreover, they apparently do so entirely separately from both how developers intended, and from how other players understood the experience themselves. In many ways these findings are in line with literature on (non-digital) play as a temporary, delineated experience; 229

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starting as early as Huizinga and Caillois, the latter of whom writes: “all play presupposes the temporary acceptance, if not of an illusion (indeed this last word means nothing less than beginning a game: inlusio), then at least of a […] imaginary universe. [...] The subject makes believe or makes others believe that he is someone other than himself. He forgets, disguises, or temporarily sheds his personality in order to feign another.” (Caillois, 1961, p. 19) But can games ‘make’ belief as Caillois states?

On the contrary, I argue that to call such a “temporar[y] shedding his [sic] personality” a form of belief is reductive, and that in the case of religious belief it ignores the more common and theoretically productive observation that millions of gamers now play with what were once fundamental sources of ultimate meaning.

Instead, religion finds a refuge in fiction – especially the enacted, embodied fictions of videogames – exactly because (young) people in the West do not believe anymore.

So what do we make of, on the one hand, arguments by scholars like Caillois and Wagner that play is equal to belief and; on the other hand, criticisms by scholars like Sutton-Smith and Raessens of modernist distinctions between play and non-play as dichotomous? In the introductory overview of the literature, I cited Wagner as continuing in Caillois’ (and Huizinga’s) footsteps by equating games to religion, and play to belief (Wagner, 2014; see also Geraci, 2014; Leibovitz, 2013): “[there is] a fundamental similarity between religion and games, generally speaking: both are, at root, order-making activities that offer a mode of escape from the vicissitudes of contemporary life, and both demand at least temporarily that practitioners give themselves over to a predetermined set of rules that shape a world view and offer a system of order and structure that is comforting for its very predictability […] games offer such ordered worlds on a temporary basis [whereas] religion attempts to make universal claims.” (Wagner, 2014, p. 193) Here, my conclusions align only with Wagner’s brief caveat against the similarity 230

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of games and religion, based on the temporariness of games’ structures vis-à-vis the universal, ultimate meanings of religion (although most of her work will go on to ignore this caveat in her argument). Religions, in the words of Peter Berger do indeed “construct a common world within which all of social life receives ultimate meaning, binding on everybody” (1967, p. 134), whereas games, as noted above, offer worldviews that are only temporary. That is the difference between play and belief: games delineate a separate time and place. Sutton-Smith argued similarly that “what is a potential and yet unlimited promise in religion is an actual but temporary gift in play” (2009, p.

85). However, as Sutton-Smith and others have also argued, a structural distinction between play and non-play is a dichotomy that disregards the “ambiguity of play” (2009), or in Raessens’ words: “modernist thought, including that of Huizinga, leaves no room for ambiguities and seeks to dispel them. As a result, however, Huizinga becomes entangled in insoluble conceptual tensions […] The solution is to do justice to these ambiguities, because they are so typical for play” (2010, p. 12).

Similarly, the dichotomy between belief and disbelief does not apply to the epistemological attitude of play. The temporary meaning-making of (digital) play is not a ‘make-belief ’ or a ‘real belief ’ or even a ‘suspension of disbelief ’ in the life-long sense of belief as accepting ultimate meaning. Based on the 180 pages above I argue that games demand a ‘ludic epistemology’ from players that transcends this belief/disbelief binary. That is: a playful engagement with religion’s ‘worlds,’ to use Berger’s word, as opposed to belief (that which is held to be true) as a doctrine. This concept of a ludic epistemology implies that play is a way of engaging in temporary systems of meaning.

Specifically, playing games allows players to enter a “real enough,” (Hong, 2014) or a “liminal space” (Turner, 1982), in which religion even when seen as explicitly fictional can be accepted with a measure of irony and reflexivity at a ‘safe distance’ to be played with, which has elsewhere been called a “lusory attitude” in general (de Wildt, 2014b; Suits, 1978) or “playful religion” more specifically (Droogers, 2014). The consequence of this is that players either contain their religious engagement within the context of play or, as the empirical material also shows, for players to reflect on their everyday (ir)religious attitudes in life outside of play – although belief is confined outside of it.

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Playing at religion in games can thus sound to the sociologically educated reader like a type of ‘effervescence’ in the way that Durkheim explains collective effervescence: “how would experiences like these not leave [a person] with the conviction that two heterogeneous and incommensurable worlds exist in fact? In one world he languidly carries on his daily life; the other is one that he cannot enter without abruptly entering into relations with extraordinary powers that excite him to the point of frenzy. The first is the profane world and the second, the world of sacred things.

It is in these effervescent social milieux, and indeed from that very effervescence, that the religious idea seems to have been born.” (1912, p.

220) However, there are two major differences. Firstly, there are so many more of those worlds available to the 21st century player in my research, than there are to the indigenous Australian Warumungu that Durkheim studied. Rather than a collectively shared and co-constructed ‘world of sacred things,’ there are multiple (commodified, simulated, de-privatized) worlds to return to the profane from, or switch between.

Secondly, the player’s experience is digitally delineated in space and time, between them, the screen, and the computer’s on and off button. As opposed to the kind of non-digital (role-)play that Huizinga, Caillois and Sutton-Smith write about, digital videogames offer closed-off, rule-based, audiovisual worlds that are encyclopedic, freely explorable and – more importantly – kept in check by the technological means and calculations of a computer: their boundaries are clear and unnegotiable. It is clear when and where play ends and starts. The overwhelming majority of effervescent experiences in videogames still take place within the clearly delineated space and time of a game’s screen (or increasingly a VR-headset), and a combination of buttons to play with or ultimately turn games’ temporary worlds on and off.

Although this thesis did not set out to study anything but religion in games, this of course has theoretical implications for how we should understand both religion and videogames. A ludic epistemology of religion – which, I suggest, is the dominant way in which young Westerners now encounter and know religion – requires a fundamental 232

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rethinking of how we have thought about religion up to now. Religion is no longer just the domain of belief in ever-lasting, ultimate meaning based on sacred substances, mediated by rich traditions of elaborate rituals and objects. Religion has become a game. There is, furthermore, a potential to better understand how other worldviews are encoded, represented and decoded in similar games: whether religious, political, ecological or other worldviews.

To stay within the stricter scope of this thesis, however: what does such a ludic epistemology entail for the encoding, content and decoding of videogames?

Firstly, when developers encode such worldviews, what are they playing at? They are reproducing conventions based on enchanted worldviews long-lost to many. By commodifying a world wherein gods are reduced to monsters or quest-givers; wherein rituals and sacred objects are reduced to quantifiable effects, and wherein religious values are reduced to commodified experiences (40 hours, 60 euros). Secondly, games play at religion when they present perfectly true worlds that do not just play with religion as an influence here and there. Instead they can represent all the enchantment of religious traditions, but with the certainty of gods’ existence and within the technical means and calculations of a predictable machine. Thirdly, when players take on these worldviews in the ways I have theorized above, they play at religion. They do not merely play with the idea of believing this or that, but they fully take on their roles as an ‘Other,’ playing at being religious, without belief. Just as a child would play at being a doctor or at running a business, they are dabbling in religion, trying it on, dismissing it and casting it off; all the while acting on a played truth. Religion is thus playfully encoded, decoded; temporarily connected with, debated and compared.

But unless players were already a believer in what is depicted, there is no mediation of such beliefs, only a ludic epistemology. Who wants to go back to the uncertainty and worldview-changing convictions of religious belief after that? Instead, millions of players choose to have all the possible religions in the world available to them as an experiment, playing at religion with the push of a button.

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List of Publications While most chapters have shown up elsewhere as articles, some publications did not make the cut for inclusion in this dissertation. Others are only tangentially related as side projects. I have taken the liberty of listing them here for further reading, e.g., on the religious origins of the scholarly and cultural concept of the ‘avatar’ in videogames; or on the decodings of not religious, but colonialist worldviews by Australian school children.

Journal articles (peer reviewed) de Wildt, L. & Aupers, S. (2020). Eclectic Religion: The flattening of religious cultural heritage in videogames. International Journal of Heritage Studies.

Studies. doi: 10.1080/13527258.2020.1746920 López, L.L.L., de Wildt, L., Moodie, N. (2019). ‘I Don’t Think You’re Going to Have Any Aborigines in Your World:’ Minecraft Minecrafting ing Terra Nullius. The British Journal of Sociology of Education, Education, 1-19. doi: 10.1080/01425692.2019.1640596 de Wildt, L., Apperley, T., Clemens, J., Fordyce, R., Mukherjee, S. (2019). (Re-)Orienting the Video Game Avatar. Games and Culture, Culture, Art.No. UNSP 1555412019858890, 1-19. doi: 10.1177/1555412019858890 de Wildt, L., Aupers, S. (2019). Pop Theology: Forum Discussions on Religion in

Videogames.

Information

Communication

&

Society, Society,

1-19.

doi:

10.1080/1369118X.2019.1577476 Butt, M-A., de Wildt, L., Kowert, R., Sandovar, A. (2018). Homo Includens: Surveying DiGRA’s Diversity. ToDiGRA: Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association,, 4 (1), 67-104. doi: 10.26503/todigra.v4i1.85. Open Access.

Association de Wildt, L., Aupers, S. (2018). Playing the Other: Role-playing religion in videogames.

European Journal of Cultural Studies, Studies, 21 (3), 1-18. doi: 10.1177/1367549418790454.

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Open Access. de Wildt, L., Aupers, S.D., Krassen, C., Coanda, I. (2018). ‘Things Greater than Thou’: Post-Apocalyptic Religion in Games. Religions Religions,, 9 (6), Art.No. 169, 1-20. doi: 10.3390/rel9060169. Open Access. de Wildt, L. (2015). Rituals of Reading: Ergodic ways of reading through contemporary technology. TXT Magazine, Magazine, 2 (1), 97-103. Open Access. de Wildt, L. (2014). Precarious Play: To Be or Not to Be Stanley. Press Start, Start, 1 (1), 1-20.

Open Access.

Book chapters (peer reviewed) de Wildt, L. (2019). “Everything is true; nothing is permitted:” Utopia, Religion and Conspiracy in Assassin’s Creed. In: B. Beil, G.S. Freyermuth, H.C. Schmidt (Eds.), Playing Utopia: Futures in Digital Games, Games, (149-186). transcript Verlag. ISBN: 9783-8376-5050-1. doi: 10.14361/9783839450505-005. Open Access. de Wildt, L. (2019). Entwining the National and Personal: Art Spiegelman’s Post-9/11 Shapeshifting. In: J. Folio, H. Luhning (Eds.), Body Horror and Shapeshifting: A Multidisciplinary Exploration, Exploration, (123-136). Leiden, Boston: Brill. ISBN: 978-184888-306-2. doi: 10.1163/9781848883062_014. Open Access. de Wildt, L., Aupers, S., Krassen, C., Coanda, I. (2019). ‘Things Greater than Thou’: PostApocalyptic Religion in Games. In: F. Bosman (Eds.), The Sacred & the Digital: Critical Depictions of Religions in Video Games, Games, (30-49). Basel, Switzerland: MDPI. ISBN: 978-3-03897-830-5. doi: 10.3390/books978-3-03897-831-2. Open Access.

Aupers, S., Schaap, J., de Wildt, L. (2018). Qualitative In-depth Interviews: Studying Religious Meaning-Making in MMOs. In: V. Šisler, K. Radde-Antweiler, X. Zeiler (Eds.), Methods for Studying Video Games and Religion, Religion, Chapt. 9, (153-167).

(Routledge Studies in Religion and Digital Culture). London: Routledge. ISBN: 9781138698710. doi: 10.4324/9781315518336-10 277

List of Publications

de Wildt, L. (2014). Entwining the National and Personal: Art Spiegelman’s Post-9/11 Shapeshifting. In: J. Folio, H. Luhning (Eds.), Body Horror and Shapeshifting, Shapeshifting, Chapt. 11, (125-136). (At the Interface). Oxford, United Kingdom: InterDisciplinary.net.

Encyclopedia entries (peer reviewed) de Wildt, L. (2019). Post-Apocalypse. In: A. Possamai, A.J. Blasi (Eds.), The SAGE Encyclopedia of Sociology of Religion. SAGE Publications.

Publications. ISBN: 9781473942202. de Wildt, L. (2018). Qualitative Data Analysis Software. In: A. Possamai, A.J. Blasi (Eds.), The SAGE Encyclopedia of Sociology of Religion. SAGE Publications. ISBN: 9781473942202.

Conference proceedings (peer reviewed) Butt, M., de Wildt, L., Kowert, R., Sandovar, A. (2018). Homo Includens: Surveying DiGRA’s Diversity. In: S. Beavers, D. Jayemanne (Eds.). Presented at the Gaming the Systems: Diversity Workshop, Workshop, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 02 Jul 2017-02 Jul 2017. [http://todigra.org/index.php/todigra/article/view/85] Open Access. de Wildt, L., Aupers, S. (2017). Bibles and BioShock: Affording Religious Discussion on Video Game Forums. In: Proceedings of the 2017 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play, Play, (463-475). Presented at the CHI [ComputerHuman Interaction] Play conference, Amsterdam, 15 Oct 2017-18 Oct 2017. New York, NY, USA. ISBN: 978-1-4503-4898-0. doi: 10.1145/3116595.3116625. Open Access. de Wildt, L. (2014). Enstranging Play: Distinguishing Playful Subjecthood from Governance. In: Proceedings of the Philosophy of Computer Games Conference 2014,, (Paper No. 2). Presented at the The 8th Philosophy of Computer Games 2014 Conference,, Istanbul, 13 Nov 2014-15 Nov 2014. doi: 10.13140/RG.2.1.3126.6009.

Conference Open Access.

278

Playing at Religion

de Wildt, L. (2013). Entwining the National and Personal: Art Spiegelman’s Post9/11 Shapeshifting. In: Proceedings of the 1st Global Conference Shapeshifters: Transformations, Hybridity and Identity, Identity, (Paper No. 27). Presented at the Shapeshifters: Transformations, Hybridity and Identity conference, Athens, Greece, 01 Nov 2013-03 Nov 2013. Open Access.

279

Nederlandse Samenvatting Voor jonge Westerlingen is het waarschijnlijker om religie tegen te komen in games dan in gebedshuizen zoals kerk of moskee. Dit proefschrift vertrekt van observaties door enthousiaste theologen, die overal in games – de grootste cultuurindustrie ter wereld – religie weten te vinden. Echter, als religies geloof veronderstellen in bovennatuurlijke substanties, die cultureel betekenissen krijgen middels objecten en sociale functies; wat is er dan echt religieus aan games? Playing at Religion zoekt betekenis in de verschijning van religie in games middels een encodeer/decodeer-benadering: ‘Wat betekent die religie in games dan voor de mensen die ze maken en spelen?’ Hoofdstuk 1 geeft een overzicht van de secularisatieliteratuur, leidend tot de vraag hoe mediatisatie religie verandert; en voor wie. Hoofdstuk 2 is een methodologie. De rest is drievuldig: over ontwikkelaars, games, en spelers.

Deel I over Encoderen begint met Hoofdstuk 3, waarin op basis van etnografie en 22 interviews met ontwikkelaars van Assassin’s Creed wordt beargumenteerd dat commerciële eisen van een corporatie leiden tot een nostalgische ‘Verkoopbare Religie’ die geloof commodificeert door het te reduceren tot een zo-acceptabelmogelijke versie voor een zo-groot-mogelijk publiek. Hoofdstuk 4 beargumenteert op basis van 35 interviews met onafhankelijke ontwikkelaars dat, ondanks de beloofde onafhankelijkheid van deze ‘indies,’ beide religieuze en niet-religieuze indies niet kunnen ontsnappen aan gestandaardiseerde, overgeleverde conventies van religie in game-ontwerp. Die conventies worden totaal los van de ontwikkelaar’s geloof toegepast, en zijn even gecommodificeerd als eurocentrisch.

Deel II over de Games zelf bevat Hoofdstukken 5 en 6: beiden inhoudsanalyses van twee genres – fantasy en post-apocalyptisch – die tonen hoe games religieus erfgoed historiseren en combineren in ‘Eclectische Religie’ of ze zelfs toepassen op nieuwe manieren, door goddelijke metaforen te gebruiken om ‘Godvrezende Technologieën’ te maken van AI en de atoombom.

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Deel III over Decoderen begint met Hoofdstuk 7, waarin 100 internetforumdiscussies tonen hoe games spelers inspireren om collectief een ‘Pop-Theologie’ te bedrijven, waarin ze de betekenissen en betekenisloosheid van religie in games bespreken, in de context van hun eigen (on-)geloof. Hoofdstuk 8 analyseert verder de ervaringen van 20 zulke spelers, door middels interviews te leren hoe zij ‘de Ander Spelen’ in games, waardoor ze zoveel religieuze geloven en identiteiten uitproberen als ze willen.

Dit proefschrift concludeert dat ontwikkelaars, games en spelers samen aan ‘religietje spelen’ doen, wat religies reduceert van bronnen van ultieme betekenis naar gecommodificeerde, gemediatiseerde simulacra die een ‘ludieke epistemologie’ mogelijk maken. Zo doende maken games het mogelijk om religietje te spelen zoals kinderen ook soldaatje of dokter spelen: een her-denking van religieuze wereldbeelden als niet langer een vraag van geloof of ongeloof in ultieme waarheiden; maar als iets om uit te proberen, te vergelijken en te laten vallen. Op die manier hebben miljoenen spelers wereldwijd alle mogelijke geloven in de wereld tot hun beschikking, om religietje te spelen met een druk op de knop.

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