Abstract
In Godwired, Rachel Wagner reflects on what one becomes when immersed in a virtual reality, and on the stories, structures, and rules that shape these novel, and, at times, existential experiences. She defines virtual reality as “any form of digital technology that involves user engagement with software via a screen interface” (1). Experiences in those virtual spaces may share great formal and functional affinities with religious experiences. This is what this work explores, through “explicit” themes and images that are religious and can be identified in virtual reality, and with an incursion into how virtual spaces and experiences “can work like religion” (4).
Chapter Two explores how storytelling (in both form and function), an essential element of religious phenomena, works in video games. These hybrid stories provide – as games, as fate, as potential narratives, as catharsis, and as interactive systems – meaning to virtual experiences. The next three chapters explore the fluid nature of the self that is grounded in hypermediated societies.
Chapter Three lumps three “hybrid” entities into a “ritual–game–story thing” to shed light onto “religious” experiences of video game playing that arise out of specific forms of interactivity, type of play, rules that determine that interactivity, perspective of the narrative, and role of conflict. The focus thus shifts to the “intentions” (type of game, intensity, order, etc.) or “attitudes” of the “player–performer” who engages in the performance of meaning-making ritualistic activities. During those activities, “intent or mood may be the only way to distinguish between rituals and games” (75). Chapter Four transposes Mircea Eliade’s sacred/profane distinction onto virtual environments, revisiting the ideas on “intention” and “perspective” as criteria for what “is” or “is not” sacred. The focus is now on an individual’s valued virtual experiences or states of mind, wherein the “ordinary” can become “sacred” (even a hierophany or a magic circle) and the representation (image) can potentially be confused for the real in those three-dimensional virtual environments (Second Life, multiple player video games). Chapter Five explores the intersection of online experiences and our identities, the latter now understood as resolutely plural, fluid, in process, and hybrid. Everyone can become a “bricoleur” as to what counts as religiously meaningful in the various virtual encounters (technophobes, technomediators, technomonists) that impact on one’s “iPod self,” hyperidentity and imagined self. Imagination now joins the intention/perspective couple.
Chapter Six explores the notion of online communities, with a number of examples. It takes issue with a Durkheimian view of the sacred as community based and appeals to Victor Turner’s notion of communitas to explain how online communities that “tend to be informal, transient, and governed by temporary rules” (11–12) give forms to multiple and competing social worlds. Chapter Seven explores the moral implications of virtual violence and its virtual experience through a Girardian lens – the mimetic. This is particularly true of the video games with religious themes (such as KumaWar, Left Behind: Eternal Forces, Resistance: Fall of Man) that allow for “mimetic enactments of symbolic sacrifice” (12) or of “procedural evil” (162) – for example, the controversial video game Super Columbine Massacre RPG! Reflexivity, an important part of rituals (Grimes), becomes central in this experience of virtual violence and coextensive with the participant’s intentions. Chapter Eight analyses violent video games as an “experiential” form of the apocalypse genre, wherein the interactivity enables the player to enter into a “messianic” role, even if games offer no transcendent promises, but only the hope of winning. Notwithstanding the latter, interactivity allows players to make sense of what “evil” may mean. Chapter Nine suggests that since each manifestation of the religious can be a combination of things, the integration of religious elements or themes within popular culture is leading to the emergence of the concept of “transmedia story-telling.” This consists in a kind of world-building that shares, functionally, much with religion: “transmedia forms point beyond themselves to a ‘world’ that is reflected in but cannot be contained fully by any of the individual media streams we consume to access it … hierophanic streams pointing toward core realities or ‘worlds’ that defy the boundaries of any single film or book or media ritual” (84–85).
This reviewer remains to be completely convinced of the author’s premise that experiences with video games can be viewed as wholly religious. While the religious is often viewed primarily through its ritual(ization) of meaning-making form and function, thus enabling a collapse of the three categories of ritual, game, and story in a virtual environment, this, it would seem, can lead to some blurring of each of the categories’ specificity. In addition, a variety of distinct finalities remain to be more fully explored in relation to various “metaverses” (meta-universes). Nonetheless, the work very nicely crafts questions that address important issues and theoretical perspectives, and brings together concepts and ideas from a variety of disciplines (video and internet games, popular culture, new media, ritual studies, sociology of religion, etc.) in an original and highly creative use of scholarship. And finally, the work explores the ludic (“play”) aspects of the “religious” (following Huizinga’s views about Homo Ludens, 1955), whereby video playing, as part and parcel of popular culture, often becomes a space that is no longer “ordinary” or “real” life, but “somehow” sacred space.