Given that the majority of game developers and players are demographically likely to be secular; studying religious representation without culture does not suffice. Which (cultural) values inform game development? And what do players from various cultures do with religious representation?
Paper long abstract:
Young people in the West are more likely to encounter religion in videogames than in places of worship like churches, mosques, or temples. For this paper I interviewed developers and players of games such as Assassin’s Creed to find out how and why religious representation is so appealing for, on the one hand, (mostly secular) developers in the biggest cultural industry to use in their games; and, on the other hand, for (mostly secular) audiences the world over. Based on extensive fieldwork, I argue that developers of videogames and their players engage in a pop theology through which laymen reconsider traditional questions of religion, by playing with them. Games allow us to engage with religious questions and identities in the same way that children might play house or pretend to be soldiers. This requires a radical rethinking of religious questions as neither a question of representation nor of belief or disbelief; but as worldviews to be played with, tried on, and discarded at will.