2.2. What this is not

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

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

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,’

8 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).