9.2. In what ways and which contexts is religion represented in videogames?

on the AAA (‘Hollywood’-style) Assassin’s Creed franchise, among whom were the key creators of the franchise’s decade-long history. The initial choice to use religion in Assassin’s Creed was, on the one hand, one of personal conviction: Patrice Desilets and his core team wanted to make a game that depicted religious institutions as dogmatic systems of powerful manipulation. On the other hand, subsequent choices made in marketing, production and editorial created a brand which commodifies religion to appeal to a global audience as wide as possible, without alienating or offending anyone. Religion in Assassin’s Creed, as the example ‘par excellence’ of commercially successful uses of religion in games, is thus used to create a nostalgic belonging without believing for everyone to place themselves into an esoteric mystery ‘behind history,’ that is brought into a ‘rationalized’ present of secular scientific logic. Chapter 4, based on 35 interviews with independent developers outside of the AAA system, showed that religious and irreligious developers alike were reluctant to put their own convictions into their games. Instead, they too contributed to a commodification of religious signs, in this case led by practical and economic considerations: by following the standardized conventions of Eurocentric religious representation in games.

9.2. In what ways and which contexts is religion represented in videogames?

In chapter 5 I took the Final Fantasy franchise as exemplary of one broad genre of games: fantasy role-playing games (RPG). The reason for doing so was three-fold: player discussions indicated it as the game series and genre that most prompted discussions about religion (Chapters 2, 7). Secondly, both the Final Fantasy games and the fantasy genre are indicative for placing religion in a nostalgic, (often faux-medieval) historical setting. Thirdly, the case study is deeply rooted in those standardized conventions described in previous chapters (Chapters 3, 4), thus presenting a fitting case study for a content analysis into those specific conventions. What I found is that Final Fantasy, and game series like it, juxtapose religious traditions eclectically. By drawing on cultural heritage from Egyptian to Abrahamic and Lovecraftian to in-house sources, fantasy games present worlds that make no distinction between traditions that are seen in a ‘world religion-paradigm’ as mutually exclusive (e.g., that believers of Christianity cannot also believe in Egyptian deities [see Hedges, 2017]), and as hierarchically different (e.g., that the mythologies of the Bible are different from the fictional stories of H.P. Lovecraft). Instead, these game ‘texts’ can be better understood