9.5. Ludic Epistemologies: From Belief to Play (Concluding the Conclusion

with Thomas Luckmann, Kelly Besecke already noted that we can visibly see religion in the public conversation about religion in self-help books, magazines and other mass media featuring religion and spirituality (2005). Digital media platforms facilitate such public debates even better: the non-hierarchical structure and “participatory culture” of the internet (Jenkins, 2012), invites lay-people and amateurs to voice their opinions on religion and worldviews.

In a post-secular society, religion is alive and well in the public spheres of media and communication. What I mean by ‘post-secular’ here, is the revitalization of religion in the media of what Jürgen Habermas identified as the religiously “deinstitutionalized” societies of the West: Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – in other words, (settler-)European societies (2008, p. 17). These societies, according to Habermas, are adjusting “to the continued existence of religious communities [despite] an increasingly secularized environment” (p. 19). Religion in videogames as such, in its commodified and simulacra form, proves to endure in digital media and entertainment through public consumption and discussion. When games prompt discussions on religion outside of churches, in public places, media venues, and online forums, it becomes truly a public conversation. Anyone with an internet connection can partake. People participate not primarily as members of a religion, but from divergent religious and intersectional backgrounds and on their own accord. Prompted by ingame religion, they engage in heated conversation on how meaningful a game can be, for themselves and for others, vis-à-vis sacred texts and their own convictions: not as privatized, but publicly.

9.5. Ludic Epistemologies: From Belief to Play (Concluding the Conclusion)

So, when there is religion in videogames, it consists of (ontologically) commodified simulacra of the sacred; that prompt (socially) re-newed ways of discussing religion in the post-secular public sphere. This is in contrast to how religion has historically appeared as, and been theorized accordingly as (epistemologically) beliefs; in (ontologically) substances; mediated (socially) through collectively understood objects and functions.

What to make of the role of ‘belief’? I argue that the biggest theoretical

implication for the way we should understand religion and games is the epistemological change from dichotomies of belief and disbelief to play as a way of relating to religion. Epistemologically, then, how religion is known and experienced in videogames, is fundamentally changed by play’s temporariness. Players may develop from their encounters with commodified religious simulacra a ‘kind of understanding’ of being ‘in someone else’s shoes’ (Chapter 8), but it is only understood as them occupying the temporary worldview of playing the Other: a temporary playing at religion, in the same way that children play at being soldiers, at being a doctor, running a shop (‘playing shop’) or having a family (‘playing house’). Hence, religions have meaning mainly within the delineated time and space of the videogame; and any knowledge presented within them is first and foremost true within their diegesis. This is why developers can take an amalgam of historically religious signs and stories and present them as a new, a-historical religious experience (Chapters 3, 5). This is why games can present multiple religions as ‘true’ next to each other, and collapse their distinction from fiction (Chapters 5, 6). This is why, despite some players’ reflections on their own religious lives afterwards, what is true or not about religion in the game is contained within the hours of media use (Chapters 7, 8). The consequence is that such temporary, mediatized religious experiences take place outside of history, as well as outside of the cultural context in which they are encoded and decoded (Chapters 4, 8). When playing a game, I may play at being a believer, in a faux-medieval world, with absolute certainty of gods – until I am not, because I have switched off my computer, my temporary world and worldview.

What this means for the studies of religion and of videogames is foremost epistemological, i.e., that belief in sacred substances can be made into play-time with commodified simulacra; that age-old religious traditions can be tried on and discarded by players at will. This is a medium-specific theory, intransferable to other media no matter how playful they are theorized as (e.g., Hoover, 2006). As much or little agency as players have been theorized to have within the medium (e.g., Raessens, 2005; cf. de Wildt 2014a), they are at least able to appropriate and reconfigure what the game means for them and how they choose to interpret and understand it. Moreover, they apparently do so entirely separately from both how developers intended, and from how other players understood the experience themselves. In many ways these findings are in line with literature on (non-digital) play as a temporary, delineated experience;

starting as early as Huizinga and Caillois, the latter of whom writes:

“all play presupposes the temporary acceptance, if not of an illusion (indeed this last word means nothing less than beginning a game: inlusio), then at least of a […] imaginary universe. [...] The subject makes believe or makes others believe that he is someone other than himself. He forgets, disguises, or temporarily sheds his personality in order to feign another.” (Caillois, 1961, p. 19)

But can games ‘make’ belief as Caillois states?

On the contrary, I argue that to call such a “temporar[y] shedding his [sic] personality” a form of belief is reductive, and that in the case of religious belief it ignores the more common and theoretically productive observation that millions of gamers now play with what were once fundamental sources of ultimate meaning. Instead, religion finds a refuge in fiction – especially the enacted, embodied fictions of videogames – exactly because (young) people in the West do not believe anymore. So what do we make of, on the one hand, arguments by scholars like Caillois and Wagner that play is equal to belief and; on the other hand, criticisms by scholars like Sutton-Smith and Raessens of modernist distinctions between play and non-play as dichotomous? In the introductory overview of the literature, I cited Wagner as continuing in Caillois’ (and Huizinga’s) footsteps by equating games to religion, and play to belief (Wagner, 2014; see also Geraci, 2014; Leibovitz, 2013):

“[there is] a fundamental similarity between religion and games, generally speaking: both are, at root, order-making activities that offer a mode of escape from the vicissitudes of contemporary life, and both demand at least temporarily that 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 […] games offer such ordered worlds on a temporary basis [whereas] religion attempts to make universal claims.” (Wagner, 2014, p. 193)

Here, my conclusions align only with Wagner’s brief caveat against the similarity

of games and religion, based on the temporariness of games’ structures vis-à-vis the universal, ultimate meanings of religion (although most of her work will go on to ignore this caveat in her argument). Religions, in the words of Peter Berger do indeed “construct a common world within which all of social life receives ultimate meaning, binding on everybody” (1967, p. 134), whereas games, as noted above, offer worldviews that are only temporary. That is the difference between play and belief: games delineate a separate time and place. Sutton-Smith argued similarly that “what is a potential and yet unlimited promise in religion is an actual but temporary gift in play” (2009, p. 85). However, as Sutton-Smith and others have also argued, a structural distinction between play and non-play is a dichotomy that disregards the “ambiguity of play” (2009), or in Raessens’ words: “modernist thought, including that of Huizinga, leaves no room for ambiguities and seeks to dispel them. As a result, however, Huizinga becomes entangled in insoluble conceptual tensions […] The solution is to do justice to these ambiguities, because they are so typical for play” (2010, p. 12).

Similarly, the dichotomy between belief and disbelief does not apply to the epistemological attitude of play. The temporary meaning-making of (digital) play is not a ‘make-belief’ or a ‘real belief’ or even a ‘suspension of disbelief’ in the life-long sense of belief as accepting ultimate meaning. Based on the 180 pages above I argue that games demand a ‘ludic epistemology’ from players that transcends this belief/disbelief binary. That is: a playful engagement with religion’s ‘worlds,’ to use Berger’s word, as opposed to belief (that which is held to be true) as a doctrine. This concept of a ludic epistemology implies that play is a way of engaging in temporary systems of meaning. Specifically, playing games allows players to enter a “real enough,” (Hong, 2014) or a “liminal space” (Turner, 1982), in which religion even when seen as explicitly fictional can be accepted with a measure of irony and reflexivity at a ‘safe distance’ to be played with, which has elsewhere been called a “lusory attitude” in general (de Wildt, 2014b; Suits, 1978) or “playful religion” more specifically (Droogers, 2014). The consequence of this is that players either contain their religious engagement within the context of play or, as the empirical material also shows, for players to reflect on their everyday (ir)religious attitudes in life outside of play – although belief is confined outside of it.

Playing at religion in games can thus sound to the sociologically educated reader like a type of ‘effervescence’ in the way that Durkheim explains collective effervescence:

“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)

However, there are two major differences. Firstly, there are so many more of those worlds available to the 21st century player in my research, than there are to the indigenous Australian Warumungu that Durkheim studied. Rather than a collectively shared and co-constructed ‘world of sacred things,’ there are multiple (commodified, simulated, de-privatized) worlds to return to the profane from, or switch between. Secondly, the player’s experience is digitally delineated in space and time, between them, the screen, and the computer’s on and off button. As opposed to the kind of non-digital (role-)play that Huizinga, Caillois and Sutton-Smith write about, digital videogames offer closed-off, rule-based, audiovisual worlds that are encyclopedic, freely explorable and – more importantly – kept in check by the technological means and calculations of a computer: their boundaries are clear and unnegotiable. It is clear when and where play ends and starts. The overwhelming majority of effervescent experiences in videogames still take place within the clearly delineated space and time of a game’s screen (or increasingly a VR-headset), and a combination of buttons to play with or ultimately turn games’ temporary worlds on and off.

Although this thesis did not set out to study anything but religion in games, this of course has theoretical implications for how we should understand both religion and videogames. A ludic epistemology of religion – which, I suggest, is the dominant way in which young Westerners now encounter and know religion – requires a fundamental

rethinking of how we have thought about religion up to now. Religion is no longer just the domain of belief in ever-lasting, ultimate meaning based on sacred substances, mediated by rich traditions of elaborate rituals and objects. Religion has become a game. There is, furthermore, a potential to better understand how other worldviews are encoded, represented and decoded in similar games: whether religious, political, ecological or other worldviews.

To stay within the stricter scope of this thesis, however: what does such a ludic epistemology entail for the encoding, content and decoding of videogames? Firstly, when developers encode such worldviews, what are they playing at? They are reproducing conventions based on enchanted worldviews long-lost to many. By commodifying a world wherein gods are reduced to monsters or quest-givers; wherein rituals and sacred objects are reduced to quantifiable effects, and wherein religious values are reduced to commodified experiences (40 hours, 60 euros). Secondly, games play at religion when they present perfectly true worlds that do not just play with religion as an influence here and there. Instead they can represent all the enchantment of religious traditions, but with the certainty of gods’ existence and within the technical means and calculations of a predictable machine. Thirdly, when players take on these worldviews in the ways I have theorized above, they play at religion. They do not merely play with the idea of believing this or that, but they fully take on their roles as an ‘Other,’ playing at being religious, without belief. Just as a child would play at being a doctor or at running a business, they are dabbling in religion, trying it on, dismissing it and casting it off; all the while acting on a played truth. Religion is thus playfully encoded, decoded; temporarily connected with, debated and compared. But unless players were already a believer in what is depicted, there is no mediation of such beliefs, only a ludic epistemology. Who wants to go back to the uncertainty and worldview-changing convictions of religious belief after that? Instead, millions of players choose to have all the possible religions in the world available to them as an experiment, playing at religion with the push of a button.

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List of Publications

While most chapters have shown up elsewhere as articles, some publications did not make the cut for inclusion in this dissertation. Others are only tangentially related as side projects. I have taken the liberty of listing them here for further reading, e.g., on the religious origins of the scholarly and cultural concept of the ‘avatar’ in videogames; or on the decodings of not religious, but colonialist worldviews by Australian school children.

Journal articles (peer reviewed)

de Wildt, L. & Aupers, S. (2020). Eclectic Religion: The flattening of religious cultural heritage in videogames. International Journal of Heritage Studies. doi: 10.1080/13527258.2020.1746920

López, L.L.L., de Wildt, L., Moodie, N. (2019). ‘I Don’t Think You’re Going to Have

Any Aborigines in Your World:’ Minecrafting Terra Nullius. The British Journal of

Sociology of Education, 1-19. doi: 10.1080/01425692.2019.1640596

de Wildt, L., Apperley, T., Clemens, J., Fordyce, R., Mukherjee, S. (2019). (Re-)Orienting the Video Game Avatar. Games and Culture, Art.No. UNSP 1555412019858890, 1-19. doi: 10.1177/1555412019858890

de Wildt, L., Aupers, S. (2019). Pop Theology: Forum Discussions on Religion in Videogames. Information Communication & Society, 1-19. doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2019.1577476

Butt, M-A., de Wildt, L., Kowert, R., Sandovar, A. (2018). Homo Includens: Surveying

DiGRA’s Diversity. ToDiGRA: Transactions of the Digital Games Research

Association, 4 (1), 67-104. doi: 10.26503/todigra.v4i1.85. Open Access.

de Wildt, L., Aupers, S. (2018). Playing the Other: Role-playing religion in videogames. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 21 (3), 1-18. doi: 10.1177/1367549418790454.

Open Access.

de Wildt, L., Aupers, S.D., Krassen, C., Coanda, I. (2018). ‘Things Greater than Thou’:

Post-Apocalyptic Religion in Games. Religions, 9 (6), Art.No. 169, 1-20. doi: 10.3390/rel9060169. Open Access.

de Wildt, L. (2015). Rituals of Reading: Ergodic ways of reading through contemporary technology. TXT Magazine, 2 (1), 97-103. Open Access.

de Wildt, L. (2014). Precarious Play: To Be or Not to Be Stanley. Press Start, 1 (1), 1-20.

Open Access.

Book chapters (peer reviewed)

de Wildt, L. (2019). “Everything is true; nothing is permitted:” Utopia, Religion and

Conspiracy in Assassin’s Creed. In: B. Beil, G.S. Freyermuth, H.C. Schmidt (Eds.),

Playing Utopia: Futures in Digital Games, (149-186). transcript Verlag. ISBN: 9783-8376-5050-1. doi: 10.14361/9783839450505-005. Open Access.

de Wildt, L. (2019). Entwining the National and Personal: Art Spiegelman’s Post-9/11

Shapeshifting. In: J. Folio, H. Luhning (Eds.), Body Horror and Shapeshifting:

A Multidisciplinary Exploration, (123-136). Leiden, Boston: Brill. ISBN: 978-184888-306-2. doi: 10.1163/9781848883062_014. Open Access.

de Wildt, L., Aupers, S., Krassen, C., Coanda, I. (2019). ‘Things Greater than Thou’: PostApocalyptic Religion in Games. In: F. Bosman (Eds.), The Sacred & the Digital: Critical Depictions of Religions in Video Games, (30-49). Basel, Switzerland: MDPI. ISBN: 978-3-03897-830-5. doi: 10.3390/books978-3-03897-831-2. Open Access.

Aupers, S., Schaap, J., de Wildt, L. (2018). Qualitative In-depth Interviews: Studying

Religious Meaning-Making in MMOs. In: V. Šisler, K. Radde-Antweiler, X. Zeiler (Eds.), Methods for Studying Video Games and Religion, Chapt. 9, (153-167). (Routledge Studies in Religion and Digital Culture). London: Routledge. ISBN: 9781138698710. doi: 10.4324/9781315518336-10

de Wildt, L. (2014). Entwining the National and Personal: Art Spiegelman’s Post-9/11

Shapeshifting. In: J. Folio, H. Luhning (Eds.), Body Horror and Shapeshifting,

Chapt. 11, (125-136). (At the Interface). Oxford, United Kingdom: Inter-

Disciplinary.net.

Encyclopedia entries (peer reviewed)

de Wildt, L. (2019). Post-Apocalypse. In: A. Possamai, A.J. Blasi (Eds.), The SAGE Encyclopedia of Sociology of Religion. SAGE Publications. ISBN: 9781473942202.

de Wildt, L. (2018). Qualitative Data Analysis Software. In: A. Possamai, A.J. Blasi (Eds.), The SAGE Encyclopedia of Sociology of Religion. SAGE Publications. ISBN: 9781473942202.

Conference proceedings (peer reviewed)

Butt, M., de Wildt, L., Kowert, R., Sandovar, A. (2018). Homo Includens: Surveying

DiGRA’s Diversity. In: S. Beavers, D. Jayemanne (Eds.). Presented at the Gaming the Systems: Diversity Workshop, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 02 Jul 2017-02 Jul 2017. [http://todigra.org/index.php/todigra/article/view/85] Open

Access.

de Wildt, L., Aupers, S. (2017). Bibles and BioShock: Affording Religious Discussion on Video Game Forums. In: Proceedings of the 2017 Annual Symposium on

Computer-Human Interaction in Play, (463-475). Presented at the CHI [Computer-

Human Interaction] Play conference, Amsterdam, 15 Oct 2017-18 Oct 2017. New

York, NY, USA. ISBN: 978-1-4503-4898-0. doi: 10.1145/3116595.3116625. Open

Access.

de Wildt, L. (2014). Enstranging Play: Distinguishing Playful Subjecthood from

Governance. In: Proceedings of the Philosophy of Computer Games Conference 2014, (Paper No. 2). Presented at the The 8th Philosophy of Computer Games

Conference, Istanbul, 13 Nov 2014-15 Nov 2014. doi: 10.13140/RG.2.1.3126.6009.

Open Access.

de Wildt, L. (2013). Entwining the National and Personal: Art Spiegelman’s Post9/11 Shapeshifting. In: Proceedings of the 1st Global Conference Shapeshifters:

Transformations, Hybridity and Identity, (Paper No. 27). Presented at the

Shapeshifters: Transformations, Hybridity and Identity conference, Athens, Greece, 01 Nov 2013-03 Nov 2013. Open Access.

Nederlandse Samenvatting

Voor jonge Westerlingen is het waarschijnlijker om religie tegen te komen in games dan in gebedshuizen zoals kerk of moskee. Dit proefschrift vertrekt van observaties door enthousiaste theologen, die overal in games – de grootste cultuurindustrie ter wereld – religie weten te vinden. Echter, als religies geloof veronderstellen in bovennatuurlijke substanties, die cultureel betekenissen krijgen middels objecten en sociale functies; wat is er dan echt religieus aan games? Playing at Religion zoekt betekenis in de verschijning van religie in games middels een encodeer/decodeer-benadering: ‘Wat betekent die religie in games dan voor de mensen die ze maken en spelen?’ Hoofdstuk 1 geeft een overzicht van de secularisatieliteratuur, leidend tot de vraag hoe mediatisatie religie verandert; en voor wie. Hoofdstuk 2 is een methodologie. De rest is drievuldig: over ontwikkelaars, games, en spelers.

Deel I over Encoderen begint met Hoofdstuk 3, waarin op basis van etnografie en 22 interviews met ontwikkelaars van Assassin’s Creed wordt beargumenteerd dat commerciële eisen van een corporatie leiden tot een nostalgische ‘Verkoopbare Religie’ die geloof commodificeert door het te reduceren tot een zo-acceptabelmogelijke versie voor een zo-groot-mogelijk publiek. Hoofdstuk 4 beargumenteert op basis van 35 interviews met onafhankelijke ontwikkelaars dat, ondanks de beloofde onafhankelijkheid van deze ‘indies,’ beide religieuze en niet-religieuze indies niet kunnen ontsnappen aan gestandaardiseerde, overgeleverde conventies van religie in game-ontwerp. Die conventies worden totaal los van de ontwikkelaar’s geloof toegepast, en zijn even gecommodificeerd als eurocentrisch.

Deel II over de Games zelf bevat Hoofdstukken 5 en 6: beiden inhoudsanalyses van twee genres – fantasy en post-apocalyptisch – die tonen hoe games religieus erfgoed historiseren en combineren in ‘Eclectische Religie’ of ze zelfs toepassen op nieuwe manieren, door goddelijke metaforen te gebruiken om ‘Godvrezende Technologieën’ te maken van AI en de atoombom.

Deel III over Decoderen begint met Hoofdstuk 7, waarin 100 internetforumdiscussies tonen hoe games spelers inspireren om collectief een ‘Pop-Theologie’ te bedrijven, waarin ze de betekenissen en betekenisloosheid van religie in games bespreken, in de context van hun eigen (on-)geloof. Hoofdstuk 8 analyseert verder de ervaringen van 20 zulke spelers, door middels interviews te leren hoe zij ‘de Ander Spelen’ in games, waardoor ze zoveel religieuze geloven en identiteiten uitproberen als ze willen.

Dit proefschrift concludeert dat ontwikkelaars, games en spelers samen aan ‘religietje spelen’ doen, wat religies reduceert van bronnen van ultieme betekenis naar gecommodificeerde, gemediatiseerde simulacra die een ‘ludieke epistemologie’ mogelijk maken. Zo doende maken games het mogelijk om religietje te spelen zoals kinderen ook soldaatje of dokter spelen: een her-denking van religieuze wereldbeelden als niet langer een vraag van geloof of ongeloof in ultieme waarheiden; maar als iets om uit te proberen, te vergelijken en te laten vallen. Op die manier hebben miljoenen spelers wereldwijd alle mogelijke geloven in de wereld tot hun beschikking, om religietje te spelen met een druk op de knop.