9.3. How do players make sense of, and relate to these representations?

through a paradigm of ‘multiple religious belonging’ (van der Braak & Kalsky, 2017), in which the materials and signs of religious and fictional cultural heritage co-exist, and can be ascribed to as existing non-exclusively. This blurs the distinction between representations of what is sacred in certain religious and cultural traditions, vis-àvis what is ‘merely’ fictional and meant for entertainment. In order to not reduce ‘religion in games’ to ‘religion in Assassin’s Creed’ or ‘religion in fantasy and history games,’ Chapter 6 theoretically selected post-apocalyptic games as a counter-case to historical games like Assassin’s Creed and fantasy games like Final Fantasy, both of which use historical settings to present religion nostalgically. Post-apocalyptic games, by contrast, take place at a futuristic end of human history (with all knowledge of religious cultural heritage lost), in which machines and other technology are framed as sacred. As a consequence, I argue that even outside of historical, nostalgic settings, post-apocalyptic and futuristic games use divine metaphors to frame technology that is beyond human comprehension as god-like. With all historical knowledge of technology lost, Horizon: Zero Dawn, the Fallout series and many games like them depict AI and atomic energy as omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent: to be venerated religiously by post-apocalyptic societies as divine.

9.3. How do players make sense of, and relate to these representations?

Chapter 7 studied 100 discussions on the five most popular gaming forums to get an overview of how player communities talk about religion in games from their own perspectives. I found that players variously either (1) rejected religious content as not fitting their established worldviews; (2) debunked games as trivial in relation to their established worldviews; (3) debated games as interpretable only according to their established worldviews; or (4) actively sought out games in order to connect to worldviews not already their own. In the process, their discussions showed that player communities are prompted by the games they play to conduct a collective ‘pop theology’ on the nature of gods, and compare the meanings of fiction such as games in relation to sacred texts – thereby muddying the distinction between fictional and sacred texts. Looking further into their life-long engagements with games and these questions prompted, both Chapters 7 and 8 use 20 subsequent interviews to show that irreligious and religious players alike, use games to experience how (fictional) religious Others see the world – whether it is to temporarily experience enchantment,