Chapter 2. Methodology
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