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:
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