1.4. Religion and Games

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

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).

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

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.

5 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.

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

6 “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).

7 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]).

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.

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).