2.5. Data

minutes; whereas most people would read all three of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books in 26 hours.9 Second: players take active rolls in the fiction, participating through choices and exploration and so on (Aarseth, 1997; Raessens, 2005), best captured by elaborate and anecdotal first-person accounts of playing the game, called “phenomenological” by Brendan Keogh (2013; 2014), or “auto-ethnographical” by Celia Pearce, T.L. Taylor and others (Pearce 2006; Taylor, 2006; cf. Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce & Taylor, 2012). To this end, I rely primarily in all of my content analyses on formal, unambiguous content in games: their visual, narrative, mechanical (and so on) representations that exist in the same way for everyone playing them; and less on anecdotes, flukes, or bugs that may be interesting but may have only been available to me. I will supplement this where needed by documentation within (e.g., digital encyclopediae, Monster Manuals), around (manuals, walkthroughs, promotional material) and about (player-made wikipediae, reviews) the game.

2.5. Data

These methods resulted in the following data.

A total of N=78 interviews were used. 23 interviews were with mostly nonanonymized Ubisoft employees and one informant; 35 mostly non-anonymized interviews with independent developers, 100 player discussions online and 20 player interviews selected from those. Interviews averaged 1 hour and 16 minutes (Ubisoft employees), 1h8m (independent developers) and 1h25 (anonymous players) respectively, and the forum discussions span 2315 pages of pdf. Elaborated selection criteria and tables (including religion, parents’ religion, age, and so on) are presented in the empirical chapters where relevant. Anonymity was the default option for players, but developers were offered and often preferred to be non-anonymous. This option was included for two reasons: first, they consider themselves public figures whose personality is a fundamental part of both their religiosity and their art practice as (indie) game developers. Secondly, it made sense, in a market so saturated and huge, to base my analysis and arguments on well-known or even famous names where possible, such as Patrice Désilets, Jean Guesdon, Rami Ismail, Shane Liesegang SJ, and so on.

9 Data are averages, collected June 4th 2019, from 1780 players’ self-reporting on howlongtobeat.com, and calculations on howlongtoreadthis.com (which is based on reading speed and word count), respectively.

I deemed this preferable to presenting them as anonymous hobbyists or workers, and so to risk erasing the long careers of those interviewees, speaking from their vast experience and expertise. The forum discussions were anonymized where necessary, i.e., barely: players posted anonymously on public forums, according to the terms and conditions for that forum’s publication of their posts – as such informed consent was not deemed necessary nor possible (cf. Mo and Coulson, 2008; Bourgonjon, et al., 2015). Most players I interviewed were recruited based on their activity on forums, by contacting them directly and through calls for interview participants, posted on the five most popular gaming forums online (see Tables 5, 6).

The ethnographies were performed primarily in three places over three years, with supplementary events and participation where possible. First, from June to October 2017 I was among and interviewed the independent developer communities of Melbourne and Sydney, Australia, funded by the Junior Mobility programme: at hubs/ organizations such as the Melbourne Arcade, IGDA Sydney’s Beer & Pixels, Free Play, Contours, Bar SK, and so on. It also resulted in 19 of the formal interviews. Second, during an intense two week period of participatory observation as an ‘IGDA Scholar’ from 14 to 28 March 2018, I followed a group of promising young game developers and industry protégés (and somehow also got the same funding), at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, organized by IGDA’s Scholarship programme. This gave me access to the biggest, central event in the game industry (>28,000 developers from big companies to independent developers), a personal mentor – not so much for my budding game design career, but certainly for my personal network and later access to Ubisoft – as well as the Scholarship programme’s visits and off-the-record access to game studios, all of which furthermore resulted in 10 additional formal interviews. Third, from June to October 2019 I was at and around the Ubisoft offices in Mile End, Montréal in Canada, with the aid of Université de Montréal. Additionally, I visited gaming festivals, events and design hubs that are part of Belgian and Dutch developer communities including the House of Indie, Brotaru, the Dutch Game Garden, and the Games4Diversity (religion & game) jams; in Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent, Leuven, Amsterdam, Utrecht and, somewhat unusually, the Dominican monastery in Zwolle.

Some games will come up more frequently as case studies. In particular, Final Fantasy and Assassin’s Creed came up inductively as the two series that were most relevant for players. Chapter 7 (specifically, Table 7 and the accompanying analysis), will elaborate on this. Because players were studied first – despite the relevant chapters appearing at the end of this dissertation – these two series come up most frequently. Post-apocalyptic games are introduced in Chapter 6 as a counter-case to Assassin’s Creed and Final Fantasy, in which I analyse Horizon: Zero Dawn and Fallout 3 as indicative of that genre, to look at how religion appears when it is not framed as historical or fantastical. Background familiarity with other game titles was deemed necessary for other chapters throughout the dissertation (see Aarseth, 2003; Lammes, 2007); including the games made by the indie developers I interviewed; and all further recurring titles in discussions and interviews, such as BioShock, Dragon Age, Zelda, and The Elder Scrolls. By ‘great familiarity’ I mean having played through one of, preferably all of the available core titles in a series at least once, from start to finish (where possible) – this was mostly achieved in the past, which saved me a lot of time.

Each empirical chapter will elaborate what specific data, selection criteria and method(ology) were relevant to that analysis. Informed consent was obtained in every case where applicable. The project and its methods were approved of by the Social and Societal Ethics Committee (SMEC) at KU Leuven.