1.5. Encoding/Game/Decoding

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

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

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 [تحت الحصار], 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).