Playing the Other: Role-playing religion in videogames

Abstract

In contemporary ‘post-secular society’, videogames like Assassin’s Creed, BioShock Infinite or World of Warcraft are suffused with religious elements. Departing from a critique on studies perceiving such in-game representations as discriminatory forms of religious Othering, the main research question of this article is: how does role-playing the (non-)religious Other in games affect the worldview of players? The study is based on a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews held with 20 international players from different (non-)religious backgrounds. Rather than seeing religion in games as representations of ‘Othering’, the analysis demonstrates that players from different (non-)religious beliefs take on different worldviews while role-playing the (non-)religious Other. Atheists relativize their own position, opening up to the logic of religious worldviews; Christians, Hindus and Muslims, in turn, compare traditions and may draw conclusions about the similarities underlying different world religions. Other players ‘slip into a secular mindset’, gradually turning towards the position of a ‘religious none’. It is concluded that playing the religious Other in videogames provides the opportunity to suspend (non-)religious worldviews and empathize with the (non-)religious Other. The relevance of these findings is related to broader sociological debates about ‘post-secular society’ and the alleged increase of religious fundamentalism, conflict and mutual Othering.

Keywords

Intersectionality Othering post-secular society religion roleplay videogames

Introduction

The setting is 1191 AD. The third crusade is tearing the Holy Land apart. You, Altaïr, intend to stop the hostilities by suppressing both sides of the conflict.

(Ubisoft, 2007)

The advertising blurb for Ubisoft’s first Assassin’s Creed game does two things. First, it promises to transport you to the Holy Land of 1191 AD – another place and time, infused by conflict and war between various religious identities: Catholic and Orthodox Christians, Sunni and Shia Muslims, historical (Nizari Ismailis) and fictional (secular) Hashashin. Second, it constructs the player as having a double identity: while playing, ‘you’ are also ‘Altaïr’ – born of a Muslim father and Christian mother, fighting Templars in 12th century Jerusalem. Role-playing is key to immersing ‘you’ in imaginary game-worlds like Assassin’s Creed. In other games you might be an agent of the gods (Skyrim), the second coming of Andraste (Dragon Age: Inquisition), the eponymous God of War or a shaman, druid or priest (e.g. World of Warcraft).

Game-worlds as diverse as those provided by Assassin’s Creed, Bioshock or World of Warcraft are suffused with religious narratives, symbols and representations. Departing from a critique on the literature perceiving such in-game textual representations as simplistic stereotypes and discriminatory forms of Othering, this article studies how players themselves experience the role-playing of (non-)religious identities in videogames. The main research question asks: how does role-playing the (non-)religious Other in games affect the worldview of players? To answer this research question, the study is based on a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews held with 20 international players from different (non-)religious backgrounds.

Games’ fascination with the religious

The first Assassin’s Creed was developed as a Holy War-era adaptation of Prince of Persia starring Islamic missionary Hassan-I Sabbah (Edge, 2012). It focused on a world of Muslim–Christian tensions and was released in a time of renewed fascination with religion. The game started development in 2003, while Western world news was dominated by the effects of religious zeal in the shape of the 9/11 attacks and the War on Terror. Religious fundamentalism became a journalistic and governmental concern, leading to European and American anti-Islamic sentiments held to this day. The renewed relevance of religion prompted sociologists (Gorski, 2012), art historians (King, 2005), literary scholars (Mohamed, 2011) and political theorists (McLennan, 2010), among others, to conceptualize the current period as ‘post-secular’ (Habermas, 2006, 2008). In critical dialogue with theories about secularization in Western countries, these academics argued in different ways that religion is once again an urgent topic in public debate, media and popular culture. The early 21st century has seen films, books and games tackling this religious fascination, whether politically (e.g. America’s Army; Al-Quwwat al-Khasa), historically (e.g. Assassin’s Creed; Europa Universalis IV), fantastically (e.g. Skyrim; Final Fantasy VII) or domestically (e.g. BioShock Infinite; The Binding of Isaac).

Yet, videogames have always relied on religious tropes across platforms and genres, from the origins of the vampire-fighting clergyman in TSR’s original Dungeons & Dragons of 1974, to the demonic- and religion-themed classes of World of Warcraft, which count 8 out of 12 classes, including Druids, Monks, Shamans, Paladins and Priests. Outside of the fantasy genre, religious organizations, rituals and pantheons occur in many contexts: Dead Space and Mass Effect show faith and worship in science-fictional space; religious belief survives the post-apocalyptic in Fallout 4; and church architecture (such as the Manchester Cathedral in Resistance: Fall of Man) sets the mood (e.g. Devil May Cry, Final Fantasy VII). Games may mirror spiritual experience (Journey), cast players as the Japanese sun goddess (Ōkami) or draw from a number of mythologies whether fictional (Zelda), contemporary (Hanuman Boy Warrior) or historical (Smite, God of War).

Studying the religious Other in games

How has religion in videogames been studied and approached by scholars? Various academics have argued that religious representation is omnipresent in videogames (e.g. Guyker, 2014; Krzywinska, 2006; Wiemker and Wysocki, 2014). Such studies generally draw from literary-theoretical, narratological, theological and other approaches that are firmly grounded in the method of studying text and representation. Given this focus on in-game texts and representations, the analysis usually results in a set of typologies (in what ways do religious signs occur?), genealogies (what are the origins of such signs?) and perceived gaps (which positions, traditions and identities are excluded in the use of these signs?). The theoretical approach underlying such empirical analyses of in-game narratives, discourses and representations is often informed by critical theoretical approaches in the social sciences. As with any media text, representations in games are not produced in a vacuum and neither are they neutral constructs: they allegedly reproduce dominant ideologies, institutionalized power relations and social-economic conventions that, in turn, socialize players into these hegemonic worldviews (e.g. Aupers, 2012; Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2009; Kline et al., 2003). From this perspective, empirical studies on representation and (religious) worldview are not merely descriptive. They typically demonstrate that minority, subaltern and marginalized worldviews are relatively underrepresented in the game or that they are framed in a stereotypical, often negative fashion. Studies on gender and race in games demonstrate for instance, that 52 percent to 80 percent of player-controlled characters are White and male (Everett and Watkins, 2008; Williams et al., 2009), whereas women and men are designed to follow typically traditional ‘gender repertoires’ (Butt and Dunne, 2017; Miller and Summers, 2007).

Although much of this research focuses on gender and race (cf. Dill et al., 2005; Shaw, 2010; Williams et al., 2009), similar approaches can be found vis-à-vis the representation of in-game religion (e.g. Krzywinska, 2006; Šisler, 2008; de Wildt, et al., 2018). Religion, it is argued, is not only represented in a stereotypical way but functions as a trope to make distinctions between ‘good’ (such as Christian-like priests, Paladins wearing crosses on their shield) and ‘bad’ characters (worshipping ‘evil’ gods, cults, primitive Shamans and sometimes Druids). This process of Othering through tropes and genre conventions in videogame has the sociological function to draw ‘symbolic boundaries’ between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Lamont and Molnár, 2002) which confirm and reinforce hegemonic (Western/civilized/male/secular) identity by contrasting it with an imagined (non-Western/barbarian/female/religious) Other (e.g. Asad, 2003; Boletsi, 2013; Said, 1978). Related to games, Trattner (2016) recently pointed out that ‘Othering based on religious ascriptions appears in direct relation to other categories of social difference’ (p. 32). Constructing an Other in games is therefore never only based on religion, but always an intersectional combination of a particular religion with class, gender, able-bodiedness, race, culture and other aspects of identity (cf. Collins, 1993; Crenshaw, 1991). In games, examples of intersectional ‘others’ abound – especially as defined against the overwhelming male whiteness of protagonistic avatars. Such examples include disabled people and religiously revered aliens in Dead Space (see Carr, 2014), the African zombie in Resident Evil 5 (see Brock, 2011) and what Jessica Langer (2008) calls World of Warcraft’s ‘constant project of radically ‘othering’ the horde […] by distinctions between civilized and savage, self and other, and centre and periphery’ (p. 87).

Similar claims are made about First-Person Shooter Games’ frequent representations of the enemy as Muslim, Arab and people of colour. Vít Šisler (2008) analyses representations of the ‘Arab or Muslim Other’ as predominantly stereotyped in mainstream European and American videogames, schematizing them as enemies, and reducing both to an anonymous horde of monolithic, ethnic-religious caricatures. Even when a choice is offered, the ‘unmarked’ default avatar is typically positioned as White, male (Fordyce et al., 2016), and might be varyingly mobilized to reproduce militaristic (Nieborg, 2006), postcolonial (Mukherjee, 2016) or eurocentric (Apperley, 2010) ideas and sentiments amongst players.

This supposed reproduction of ideas and sentiments is theoretically implied but seldom empirically studied in what Kerstin Radde-Antweiler and others have called an ‘actor-centered approach’ to videogames (Radde-Antweiler et al., 2014; cf. Heidbrink et al., 2014) that is based on the meaning-making of players (e.g. Schaap & Aupers, 2017; cf. Aupers, Schaap & de Wildt, 2018). Given the textual approach of (religious) Othering, scholars studying games in isolation from players can make no authoritative claims about the experiences and interpretations of those players, without asking them. Such analyses, then, fall into the trap of ‘instrumentalizing’ play: a reduction of game-play’s meaning to the game’s formal (narrative, procedural, visual) properties, where ‘what players do’ is merely considered to ‘complete the meaning suggested and guided by the rules’ (Sicart, 2011). Instead, we hold that players have radically different interpretations of what games mean depending on their own intersectional identities of religion, class, race, gender and so on. This idea of an active consumer ‘decoding’ the ‘encoded’ texts (Hall, 1980) is already a mainstay in the study of the reception of books, film, television (Fiske, 1987; Jenkins, 1992). In videogames, however, players are even encouraged to reconfigure games by moving, choosing and otherwise playing within their given roles (Raessens, 2011).

The problem of aforementioned readings of religious representation as ‘Othering’ is that it is reductive to consider characters as ‘Other’ when many games actually offer the chance to play as an Other. By focusing on religious representation as narratives of ‘Othering’, studies often dismiss the experience that is connected to role-playing the Other. In contrast to his own study on the represented Arabian-Muslim Other, Šisler suggests elsewhere that playing as the Arab or Muslim Other – specifically when encoded as ‘self-representation’ by Middle-Eastern developers – offers players profound insights into marginalized and contested identities, such as those of Palestinians in the case of Syrian-made Under Siege (تحت الحصار) (cited in Šisler, 2006). Indeed, when (but only if) certain identities are included as roles to play – next to or in spite of White, male, hegemonic avatars – some researchers have stressed the relevant possibilities of identification with these avatars (e.g. Hammar, 2016), especially in the case of avatars that function as semi-autonomous characters with their own speech, backgrounds and actions (cf. Klevjer, 2007; de Wildt, 2014a).

The problem of analyses of ‘Othering’ is therefore two-fold. On the one hand, players are not necessarily interpreting games in alignment with how religion and religious followers are represented in those games. They rather understand and play roles differently based on their own cultural backgrounds, convictions and identities. On the other hand, they additionally take on roles that are not necessarily their own and are thus negotiating between their own social identity and their given identity in the game-world. Based on these considerations, we aim to answer the following research questions:

How does role-playing the (non-)religious Other in games affect the worldview of players?

(How) does it change the way they understand other (non-)religious identities?

(How) does it change the way they understand their own (non-)religious identity?

What are the differences and similarities in this respect between players with religious and non-religious worldviews?

Methodology

In order to answer this question, 20 interviews were conducted with people of various religious backgrounds. Participants were theoretically selected for maximal variation of different currently held religious positions – often viewed in light of changes therein (Table 1). Instrumental here was the need to systematically study the different ways in which people with different (non-)religious beliefs and traditions make sense of role-playing a religious Other in videogames. Rather, say, than seek out a representative sample of players (or gamers), or a demographically representative cross-section of religious people, this ‘maximum variation sample’ is intended to ‘disclose the range of variation and differentiation in the field’ (Flick, 2006: 130). The method of interviewing produces inductive insights into this varied range of personal experiences with religion and games, considering them as valid and meaningful for players regardless of historical facticity (cf. Aupers, 2012).

Table 1.

(Anonymized) Participants (N = 20).

	Participant	Gender	Age	Country	Current religion	Religious background
1	Bill	M	25	United States	Roman-Catholic	idem
2	Geoff	M	36	United States	New Age	Roman-Catholic
3	James	M	22	United States	Atheist	Methodist
4	Eric	M	28	United States	Southern Baptist	Roman-Catholic
5	Grant	M	23	New Zealand	Agnostic	Mormon
6	Edward	M	23	Hong Kong	Agnostic	Evangelical Christian
7	Günther	M	32	German	Atheist	Lutheran
8	Brandon	M	25	United States	Atheist	Quaker
9	Phil	M	25	United States	Atheist	Evangelical Christian
10	Duke	M	26	United States	Pentecostal	Pentecostal
11	Joan	F	28	New Zealand	Deist	Pentecostal, later Baptist Christian
12	Daniel	M	29	United States	Jewish	idem
13	Greg	M	24	United States	Jehovah’s Witness	idem
14	Bert	M	32	United States	Presbyterian	Dutch Reformed
15	Dan	M	34	Japan	Reformed Evangelical	idem
16	Nico	M	22	Netherlands	Atheist	idem
17	Ali	M	25	Netherlands	Muslim	idem
18	Abhi	M	25	India	Atheist	Hindu
19	Swapan	M	30	India	Atheist	Hindu
20	Strahan	M	34	Ireland	Roman-Catholic	idem

Interviewees were recruited on Internet communities selected for pagerank, and regional and cultural differences, for example, Indian or Moroccan-Dutch videogame forums. The table of respondents shows some bias: many respondents were American, male and/or White. This can possibly be explained by demographic biases among videogame players and videogame forum users – the latter arguably requiring a more active identification as a ‘gamer’: a label and culture which has been argued to be exclusionary, silencing or otherwise marginalizing women (cf. Cassell and Jenkins, 2000; Golding and Van Deventer, 2016; Shaw, 2011).

With the resulting population (N = 20), qualitative semi-structured interviews of 1–2 hours were conducted via Internet video calls. Players were asked about their (non-)religious convictions, identifications and backgrounds; about the religious contents and characters of the games they played and the connections they experienced between those. When the games mentioned by the respondents were unknown to the researcher, the interview was supplemented by engagement with the game in question, in order to provide context for the (religious) role-playing activities, experiences and meanings. In the first part of the analysis, we will discuss the medium-specific affordance of digital role-play. In the second part of the analysis, we will analyse in empirical detail how this role-playing the (non-)religious Other affects the worldviews of our respondents.

The affordances of digital role-play

Role-playing is a common and vital affordance of videogames. In the broadest sense of the word, players always perform as an Other on the screen – whether as Pac-Man, Mario or Lara Croft in arcade and console games; heroic soldiers in First-Person-Shooters such as Call of Duty, or particular classes, races and characters in MMORPGS from World of Warcraft to Runescape. Such digital performances of identity cannot be dismissed as trivial acts without psychological or cultural meaning. Rather than treat the identities proposed to players as ‘avatars’ or redundant ‘cursors’, ‘tools’ or ‘props’ standing in for the player (Aarseth, 2004; Linderoth, 2005; Newman, 2002), there is always a form of identification with the roles people play – a coalescence of identity between the player as a subject and the avatar as an in-game object (Vella, 2013; de Wildt, 2014b).

The latter becomes particularly relevant in the context of complex games like MMORPGS and virtual worlds. Sherry Turkle already argued in 1995 that, ‘The anonymity of MUDS gives people the chance to express multiple and often unexplored aspects of the self, to play with their identity and try out new ones’ (241), whereas James Paul Gee (2003) concurred that ‘games can show us how to get people to invest in new identities or roles’. Richard Bartle (2004) referred to this as the ‘role-playing paradox’: by investing time, energy and emotion in the online character, the Other becomes the Self:

You are not role-playing as a being, you are that being; you’re not assuming an identity, you are that identity; you’re not projecting a self, you are that self. If you’re killed in a fight, you don’t feel that your character has died, you feel that you have died. There’s no level of indirection, no filtering, no question: you are there. (pp. 155–156)

Notwithstanding such dramatic claims of totally becoming the character, our respondents verify that their role-playing implies a form of self-chosen identification with the character. Role-playing, one argues, is an opportunity to ‘spend a day in someone else’s shoes’ (Grant), to act as another and to temporarily identify with their worldview, convictions and belief. When playing, interviewees stressed, they experience a ‘blurring of the avatar and my personal self’ (Günther). Role-play also provides a way to take on positions that require fundamentally different worldviews and, from this perspective, one can try out deviant (non-)religious beliefs that are opposed to one’s own. As one interviewee says: ‘you can role-play belief. It’s probably similar to method acting […] you temporarily think like someone else, but you can do it from your couch and just for a few hours at a time’ (Duke). Religious belief: now available in your living room.

For ‘a few hours at a time’, players set aside their ideas of the world, ready to act and think like someone else. This mechanism of temporarily ‘bracketing’ their own ideas on truth and faith while playing, was reported by many players:

The more I feel a blurring of the avatar and myself, the more believable the game-world becomes. Because during these moments my real ‘self’ doesn’t remind me of inaccuracies or things I wouldn’t normally accept or believe. (Günther)

Even Greg, a Jehovah’s Witness who preferred not to play games contradicting his worldview, concedes that ‘when immersed, I accept conditions of the game-world that are directly relevant to what I believe’ (Greg), even when they oppose those beliefs:

I automatically suspend my disbelief. To me that means accepting the setting as it is described. In fact, I don’t see any difference between taking on the role of your character and accepting the game’s world and its conditions.

We can thus conclude that the affordance of role-playing provides an opportunity to identify with an Other (non-)religious worldview. More than that: immersed in their roles, players are able to temporarily suspend their belief and put their ideas on truth and faith between brackets, so as to freely experiment with other ideological positions. The question is then: what, if any, implications does this role-playing of the (non-)religious Other have on the worldview of these players? In what follows, we will systematically look at religious nones playing religious roles; and religious believers playing with Other religious traditions, and with atheist characters and worldviews.

‘I sort of believed’: from secularism to enchantment

A number of interviewees were secular, identifying as atheists or agnostics, and were either raised without belonging to a religious tradition or had become non-religious later in life. How do they treat the religious content they encounter in games, and what is it like to play with religious characters and worlds as a religious none?

Nico, who describes himself as atheist and his parents as ‘militant atheists’, nonetheless felt charmed by religion in games from a young age ‘because I really like mythology and I really like games that are inspired by religion; Age of Mythology is one of my favourite games’; this is a strategy game in which ancient (Greek, Egyptian, etc.) civilizations appease, and are aided by their relevant gods. Although seeing it as ‘embarrassing to admit’, those gods made a lasting impression on him as a child because this:

spurred a fascination that there must be so many gods and it was really cool to me. I sort of believed in those gods at the time. We didn’t believe in Jesus or God or whatever, but I believed in Thor and Loki and a god of darkness and a god of silence and stuff like that.

He notes that exactly because he was not brought up with religious belief and had ‘never been confronted with an openly religious game’, playing Age of Mythology ‘meant that I liked those gods and how I could use them in the game’. Nico even exported such beliefs, recounting ‘instances when I would try and go downstairs and didn’t want to wake anyone up as a child, so I prayed to those gods to silence my footsteps’. Indeed, Nico might serve as a strong example of what has been termed digital Games’ ‘re-enchantment’, introducing gods and magic – safely, within the boundaries of a cultural product – to atheist consumers who actually ‘want to believe’ (Aupers, 2013).

Videogames can familiarize the religiously unaffiliated with religious environments and religious beliefs in different ways. James, for instance, described himself as a ‘very strongly’ convinced atheist, living in ‘techy, atheist […] very rational, programmatic’ California. Playing Assassin’s Creed, James became fascinated with Islamic paraphernalia and architecture, noting how the game’s ‘climate of religiousness within the world made it feel more realistic’. It even helped him to take his world history class in the ‘real’ world. The reason, James points out, is that religion in the game is made very concrete and visceral: it did not exaggerate religion to the level of ‘angels and demons fighting’, but shows a humane, everyday city-setting where ‘people just sort of stand up giving religious speeches throughout the city’.

But games have also made James more sensitive and empathetic to religious believers. The game That Dragon, Cancer, an autobiographical project by Ryan Green and his family, deals with their youngest son’s cancer diagnosis and the family’s consequent struggle with their Christian faith. The game ‘left a lot of marks on [him]’ because of its intimate, personal setting, making the religious Other relatable to him through the game’s design. First, the game creates a domestic setting, including voice-over work that ‘just feels very realistic […] it sounds like I’m listening in their house. And that makes it really personal’. This domestic setting includes the player as familiar: ‘the characters address you sometimes, they look at you’, and as an onlooker ‘you can empathize with them’. Most importantly, it is within this personal context that James concluded that ‘the creators are speaking about their own religious thoughts and feelings’, rather than many Games’ ‘surface level religious symbology’ or a reduction of religion ‘as a set of beliefs’. Instead of a set of rules and practices, the game shows, through personal experiences, both the hopes and the uncertainties of religion. Particularly, this emphasis on personally ‘struggling with religion and questioning it’, and the differences between Ryan and Amy Green in doing so, had the effect of ‘humanizing religious people’ for James. He continues: ‘there is a lot of objectification of religious people within tech [culture] and games’, whereas ‘this game does a very good job of humanizing them, and then creating empathy for them’ (James).

Games such as these allow secular players like James, Grant, Phil, and Günther to identify with characters with different worldviews, convictions and beliefs than their own. As Grant puts it: ‘Just because I don’t believe in this thing doesn’t mean that I can’t spend a day in someone else’s shoes […] I relish the opportunity to role-play, to actually identify with the role of my character’. According to Phil, specifically ‘with regards to religion, the major advantage is that the experience feels more like it happened to you rather than to someone else’ (Phil). This temporary identification has consequences for one’s own worldview: our atheist respondents confess that role-playing encourages, reinforces or strengthens their empathy for the religious Other.

‘It’s like Indian mythology’. From religious tradition to perennialism

For our religious interviewees, confrontations with games’ religious worlds and identities presented other challenges than to religious nones. After all, the various fantastical, historical and global religions frequently present different or exaggerated versions of the theologies and mythologies that fund these players’ actual beliefs. Such players often found in games the ability to switch between worldviews – in the same way that secular players found a way to temporarily accommodate their worldviews to the religious worlds they inhabited. These worldviews could easily be switched between - from mono- to polytheistic, from theist to agnostic, and so on. Importantly, these worldviews are as much religious as they are cultural, geographical and temporal. Indeed, materialist approaches to religion emphasize that religion is not just determined by belief, but also importantly its creeds, practices and materials, including the plethora of religions’ architectural, visual and other signs (Meyer, 2008; Morgan, 2013; cf. Durkheim, 1912).

For instance, Bill has lived his whole life in Boston and identifies as a Roman-Catholic. However, having spent some time as Altaïr in Assassin’s Creed’s Holy Land, Bill recounts that he has grown familiar with its surroundings: ‘you hear the call to prayer, you see Muslims praying, you go through mosques’. This is an environment he has familiarized himself with to such an extent that he confidently called it a ‘very accurate portrayal of what 99 percent of practicing Muslims go through on a regular basis’. Bill emphasized that running around Assassin’s Creed’s Jerusalem, Acre and Damascus gave a ‘kind of understanding [of] how in that time period religion played out and how people’s everyday lives compared to today’. Similar to El-Nasr et al.’s (2008) comparative digital ethnography of the game, the authors’ accounts – as well as Bill’s – show two things. First, that the game’s environments are understood and experienced differently viewed from atheist, Christian and Muslim perspectives. Their meaning depends on whether players regard 12th century Jerusalem as just another digital tourist cityscape, as a ‘holy land’ or indeed as something akin to the religious ‘journey of a lifetime, a dream’ (El-Nasr, 2008). In Bill’s case, Assassin’s Creed’s Jerusalem grants a Roman-Catholic an insight into the everyday experience of Muslims. Second, these experiences show that the process of familiarizing with the otherness of the games’ environment is not just a religious one, but a cultural, geographical, temporal familiarization as well.

That the process works between cultures and worldviews is something another respondent, Swapan, attests to. He grew up in a North-Indian town ‘where there was no internet, no library’, and in a conservatively Hindu family. When arcades came to his neighbourhood, ‘videogames were like the medium that gave us an outlook towards the world outside’. Through videogames, Swapan became familiar with the English language, with American, British and Japanese culture – and their religions. It showed him worldviews, he explains, ‘that only videogames told me that exist’ (Swapan). Likewise, Geoff also describes his 30 year long gaming hobby as a string of:

multiple games where it’s kind of been a theme of learning about different worldviews or different belief systems and just becoming aware of the existence of other belief systems. And that prompts a questioning of one’s own belief system.

Geoff was raised a Roman-Catholic but currently describes himself as New Age, ‘cobbl[ing] together my own version kind of a spirituality’ in a ‘cafeteria-style religion’. The first time he ‘encountered a religious-spiritual idea in a game that had an effect on [his] thinking’ was in Faxanadu – a game that came out when Geoff first started playing games at the age of eight. Religion is intertwined with the function of the game:

In order to save in-game progress [a] Guru would give you a mantra that you had to then repeat later on […] And it was just like a random string of characters you had to input to return to your save. But that was something that I hadn’t encountered before. That term or idea… What is a guru? It’s not really a priest. It’s more like a teacher… That was a different way of thinking about religion than I had so far had up until that point of being raised Catholic and going to Sunday school.

While games started a fascination with Eastern religion for Geoff, Joan, Daniel and others, games had the opposite effect for Swapan. Instead of repeating mantras for gurus like young Geoff, Swapan instead encountered monotheism for the first time. He became ‘very much fascinated by the concept of pagan gods’, particularly those that had been a part of his family’s everyday lives, because ‘according to Christians and Muslims, we Hindus have pagan gods’. By being confronted with other ways of viewing the world and acting them out as characters in videogames, Swapan started to compare different religious stories. The difference, he argues, is that ‘pagan gods each have their own story and can be killed. It makes them like us. Whereas in Christianity you cannot question god’.

This kind of switching and comparison of worldviews was shared by a variety of religious players. You might be able to engage in animism and ‘play a character that believes there is a living spirit in everything’ (Eric), or if you are already familiar with that, to play games filled with Christian doctrines or Viking mythologies. Swapan played consecutively through Devil May Cry, God of War, Dante’s Inferno and Viking: Battle for Asgard – mechanically similar games that draw from widely divergent Christian, Greek and Norse theo-mythological traditions. Swapan tellingly illustrates the kind of fascination and comparison this prompts by explaining: ‘that last game got me interested into Norse mythology because I did not know about that before. And the more I read about it, the more I learnt that it’s a lot like Indian mythology’, effectively coming full circle.

Worldview switching, then, led Swapan and others to a form of religious relativism. More than that: experimenting with other traditions through role-play led them to the conclusion that underneath the differences in traditional religious beliefs, doctrine, vocabularies and rituals, one may find a similar or universal kernel. Worldview switching, thus, may invoke a ‘perennial perspective’ (Huxley, 1945) on religion. Importantly, beside narrative cosmologies, mythologies and so on, games’ systems also promote this kind of worldview switching and perennialism. As various players hold, ‘every game in existence has a slightly different ethical system than real life’ (Duke). The assertion that both games and religions propose (ethical) belief systems through rule-based presentations are both supported in the academic literature (Geraci, 2014; Sicart, 2009, 2013; Zagal, 2009), as well as by other interviewees. Edward, too, compares religions in games to being ‘much like any system which appears to imitate another in the real world’. Eric – who has been a Catholic, Mormon and currently identifies himself closest to a Southern Baptist – is adamant in comparing both religion and games to rule systems, searching ‘until you find a rule system that is satisfying or whatever that you like the way it works — it is the exact same thing with these systems as with religion’. Religion in this view becomes a question of taste, comparison and optimization.

‘Slipping into a secular mindset’: assumed atheism

Religious players, besides being able to compare other religious belief systems, similarly found ways of understanding and identifying with their non-religious other through games and their avatars. Much of the content, narratives and characters in games are secular or, at least, assumed to be informed by a secular, agnostic or atheist perspective according to various of our religious interviewees.

How do they deal with this assumed atheism of many games? In another sense of the word, how do they assume (take on) atheist identities, even if only to engage with much of the perceived ‘immorality’, violence, hedonism and Godless nihilism in games? Duke, to begin with, is an outspoken Pentecostal and a youth priest, yet he ‘play[s] the characters in games as functional atheists for immersion purposes, and that helps [him] to understand their actions a bit better’. In The Last of Us, for instance, Duke can’t see himself believably playing that game and its ‘very nihilistic atmosphere’, in the role of

a Christian, because it’s hard to reconcile Joel’s [the protagonist’s] mindset with a Christian one […] his acts would be unjustifiable because his only motivation in the final area is his own desire to set the world the way he wants it.

The ‘final area’ Duke is referring to is a scene in which the protagonist makes a selfish moral choice on which the player has no influence. Although this kind of character-autonomy is difficult for Duke – particularly since he considers it an atheist and hedonistic scene – he tries to play as the character given him: ‘I will try to play the game consistently with that mindset, which would probably be secularly by default’. In doing so, however, he increasingly identifies with secular ways of thinking: ‘even though I struggle to get invested in games with strong religious overtones, I would say it’s actually pretty easy for me to slip into a secular mindset during games. In fact, it feels necessary’. Consequently, Duke argues that playing secular characters makes him ‘sympathetic to the atheists out there […] especially the (pretty rare) atheists who live in this part of the country that is incredibly religious’.

Role-playing the secular other eventually allowed for self-reflection on the ‘immoral’ atheist within oneself. After lying in a game, Duke found out that ‘it gave me a realization about myself: that I have a capacity for dishonesty’. Eric states that temporarily acting like someone else eventually teaches him something about himself, ‘teaching [one]self to check constantly why and how you’re doing what you’re doing’. By

Role-playing […] the game character who does things differently to achieve their goal, you’re being taught to self-monitor more actively, to check constantly, to compare your small decisions with your greater beliefs and your greater goal.

For some players, this type of reflection on one’s religious tradition, beliefs and behaviour, led them to completely new insights. Whereas Duke and Eric emphasize their increased empathy towards atheists, Phil and Edward argued that games helped them to realize they were not religious at all – even motivating their deconversion.

Playing Bloodborne, Phil ‘noticed some peculiar parallels’ between the Healing Church in that game and the Christian liturgy. Both share a ritual of communion, ‘the latter imbibing the flesh and blood of Christ, literally or metaphorically, to feel closer to Yahweh’ and ‘the former drinking the blood of the Old Ones’. To Phil, ‘this core idea of transcendence through blood drinking is something I was entirely accustomed to with Christianity, but repulsed by in Bloodborne’. Edward, too, came to reflect on his own Christian belief through Dragon Age: Inquisition, precisely because its main religion, the Chantry, resembles Christianity. It resembles European depictions of (medieval) Christianity in its ritual practices, symbology and iconic churches, abbeys and chapels, as well as in its reverence of ‘the Maker’ and the Christ-like Andraste.

Such comparisons between real and fictitious religions installed doubt about the validity of one’s own (Christian) tradition. Phil further worked through his doubt by playing games that feature eclectic religious iconography, such as Xenoblade Chronicles and Persona 4. Both examples are Japanese RPGs that heavily feature religious symbolism: Persona 4, for instance, includes figures from Christian, Hindu, Japanese and other theo-/mythologies, depicting Satan, Saint Michael and Shiva alongside Anubis, Quetzalcoatl and Amaterasu, all of whom ‘are shown more as myth than fact’: to Phil, for the first time, religion was presented as ‘rooted in people, as a manifestation of human nature’. Gods are ‘presented as masks one uses to face the world, manifesting as gods, angels, demons and devils’, and rituals and religious practices ‘are portrayed more as superstitions and tradition than committed religions’. At the end of the game, ‘you toss aside your glasses to see the world for how it truly is: which is what you make of it’. Persona 4’s mundane and eclectic religiosity, Phil argues, taught him to regard religion as ‘subservient to the people [its] images are rooted in’. Ultimately, ‘This is what really helped me come to terms with my atheism […] in fact games showed me it was okay to be an atheist’.

For Edward, the experience of playing through his religious struggles turned out to be therapeutic and transformative:

I was raised and frightened into only ever looking at religion from a single perspective: Christianity. Even considering another perspective was almost akin to sinning […] But what Dragon Age: Inquisition allowed me to do was suddenly be able to come in as an outsider, I played an elf, and be forced to view it from the outside.

After Edward ‘viewed Christianity from the perspective of “an outsider”’ – through the eyes of an excluded elf – Edward investigated his religious identity. He goes as far as to refer to his life as ‘post-DAI’ [Dragon Age: Inquisition] as the game ‘impacted how I think about religion’ and ‘gave me the breathing room to reflect’. And yet, other games contributed to religious reflexivity as well. An important influence was The Talos Principle. In that game:

Your actions can be read as an adherent to a Christian-esque […] monotheistic God [who] tells you not to go up the tower since you don’t need that knowledge. But you can choose to go up the tower […] I decided that if I went up that tower and defied Elohim [the God-voice], it would be like defying the God of real-life Christianity.

Going up the tower terrified Edward ‘in a very real way’ and served as a way of role-playing himself, practicing the kind of audacity it took to ‘defying the God of real life Christianity’. Indeed, after Edward went up the tower: ‘I felt freer. Nothing bad happened […] I felt better and more in control of myself. I felt like I had more agency in life’. As a consequence, Edward decided to ‘take a break from Christianity’, eventually coming to identify himself as both transgender and atheist.

Conclusion: now you’re playing with ultimate meaning

Based on content analysis of religious representations (narratives, beliefs, characters) in videogames, it is often implied that these contribute to a process of Othering religiosity: a stereotypical, schematic and moral way of representing religions that draws ‘symbolic boundaries’ between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Lamont and Molnár, 2002) and reinforces a hegemonic (Western/civilized/male/secular/Christian) identity by contrasting it with an imagined (non-Western/barbarian/female/religious/Muslim) Other (e.g. Asad, 2003; Boletsi, 2013; Said, 1978). Arguing that ‘dominant-hegemonic’ representations in texts are always interpreted, negotiated and ‘decoded’ (Hall, 1980) and, particularly, that videogames are not passively consumed but actively played, we asked: how does role-playing the (non-)religious Other in games affect the worldview of players?

Rather than seeing religion in games as representations of Othering, the analysis demonstrates that players from different (non-)religious beliefs take on different worldviews while role-playing the (non-)religious Other. In doing so, atheists relativize their own position, open up to the validity of religious claims or wilfully embrace their logic and ultimate meaning in the context of the game-world. In turn, Christians, atheists, Hindus and others switch between each other’s beliefs, compare traditions and sometimes, based on this process, draw conclusions about the similarities underlying world religions. In other cases, they admit to ‘slip[ping] into a secular mindset’, gradually turning towards the position of a secular Other.

In short, the analysis indicates that the perspective on religious representations in games as an Other is limited. When we look at games as played and experienced (rather than read or analyzed as narratives afterwards), they are multi-sided tools that afford the possibility of actually playing the Other – of temporarily ‘bracketing’ or suspending one’s own world view and empathizing with the Other’s perspective. In itself, this is not surprising: from an anthropological perspective, play has always been understood as a ‘temporary suspension of normal social life’ (Huizinga, 1938, p. 12; cf. Caillois, 1961) – a ‘liminal zone’ in which ‘serious’ issues of everyday life, culture and politics are transgressed, reversed and re-negotiated (e.g. Geertz, 1972; Turner, 1982; Van Bohemen et al., 2014). In recent research on play in videogames, however, this ritual function of play is often narrowed down to a psychological dimension. Game-worlds are considered ‘laboratories’ where adolescent players try out new personal identities (Turkle, 1995), safely express deviant emotions such as fear and aggression (Jansz, 2015), and ‘play with the controversial, the forbidden and subversive’ through role-playing (Linderoth and Mortensen, 2015: 4).

Based on our findings we suggest that, instead, academics should pay more attention to the way role-playing games contribute to social-cultural dimensions of identity, or even citizenship in a multicultural Western society. ‘Personal identity’, after all, is inherently ‘social’ and always shaped in relation to the Other (e.g. Goffman, 1959; Jenkins, 1996; Mead, 1934). Games, from this perspective, may indeed be understood as ‘laboratories’ for players to play the Other, but in a broader social and cultural sense beyond the individual: as a free space in which to experiment with worldviews and, in doing so, build up understanding and tolerance. By playing atheists, Christians, Hindus or Muslims in games, players may become aware that the absolute truths they were raised with are culturally contingent and replaceable by alternatives – both historical and fantastical (cf. Davidsen, 2014; Possamai, 2005). A thorough awareness of religious pluralism, sociologist of religion Peter Berger (1969) argued 50 years ago, opens people up for relativism and tolerance:

The pluralistic situation multiplies the number of plausibility structures competing with each other. Ipso facto, it relativizes their religious contents. More specifically, the religious contents are ‘de-objectivated,’ that is, deprived of their status as taken-for-granted, objective reality in consciousness. They become subjectivized […] Their reality becomes a ‘private affair’ of individuals. (pp. 151–152)

Two nuances remain in order not to overstate the role of games in this religious relativism. First of all, a caveat of the argument and data presented here is that ‘games’ are not a monolithic cultural category. While it is easy to find religion in game settings from the historical to sci-fi, and from genres of fantasy to the post-apocalyptic, not all games offer religious roles and characters to identify with. There is very little religious relativism to be found in games such as FIFA. Second, despite the overwhelming number of games that do depend on religious conventions of representation, surely other media, milieus and education have great roles to play too. Overall, it thus remains a crucial question of what the offline implications are of role-playing the religious Other in multicultural society as a whole.

Nonetheless, the data show that many games offer players the chance of playing the Other. Berger claimed that the relativism of cultural pluralism, ultimately, had a secularizing effect on individual belief, since it undermined the plausibility of ultimate meaning. In contemporary ‘post-secular’ society (Habermas, 2006, 2008), a contradictory emphasis is put on fundamentalism, religious conflict and mutual Othering: atheists, Christians and Muslims are taking sides in what is referred to as a ‘clash of civilizations’ (Eagleton, 2009; Huntington, 1996; cf. Mamdani, 2004). This underscores the societal relevance of further systematic and perhaps quantitative research on our theory about games, role-play and religious relativism. To paraphrase Nintendo’s famous 1980s slogan, when players are afforded the chance to see the world from new perspectives, ‘now you’re playing with ultimate meaning!’

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Lars de Wildt

Biographical notes

Lars de Wildt is a PhD candidate and Lecturer at the Institute for Media Studies at KU Leuven. His research (inductive, multi-method) currently focuses on the ways in which videogame players and developers play with religion in a supposedly secular age. Lars has been a Visiting Scholar at Deakin University in Melbourne, is a board member for Press Start Journal and chair of DiGRA Flanders, the Belgian game research organisation. Lars has published with Brill, Routledge, ACM, Religions journal and others.

Stef Aupers is a Cultural Sociologist and works as Professor of Media Culture at the Institute for Media Studies, KU Leuven. His current work deals with different research projects on games and culture. Aupers has published in journals like New Media & Society, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Journal of Contemporary Religion, Information, Communication & Society, European Journal of Cultural Studies, American Behavioral Scientist, Public Understanding of Science, Cultural Sociology, and European Journal of Communication.

References

Aarseth

(2004) Genre trouble, narrativism and the art of simulation. Wardrip-Fruin

Harrigan

(eds) First Person. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp.45–55.

Apperley

(2010) Gaming Rhythms. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.

Asad

(2003) Formations of the Secular. Palo Alto, MA: Stanford University Press.

Aupers

(2012) Enchantment, Inc.: Online gaming between spiritual experience and commodity fetishism. In: Houtman

Meyer

(eds) Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 339–355.

Aupers

(2013) “A world awaits:” The meaning of mediatized paganism in online computer games. In: Hofstee

van der Kooij

(eds) Religion Beyond its Private Role in Modern Society. Leiden: Brill, pp. 225–243.

Aupers

Schaap

de Wildt

(2018) Qualitative in-depth interviews: Studying religious meaning-making in MMOs. In: Sisler

Radde-Antweiler

Zeiler

(eds) Methods for Studying Video Games and Religion. London: Routledge. pp. 153–167.

Bartle

(2004) Designing Virtual Worlds. Indianapolis: New Riders.

Berger

(1969) The Sacred Canopy. New York: Doubleday.

Boletsi

(2013) Barbarism and Its Discontents. Palo Alto, MA: Stanford University Press.

10.

Brock

(2011) When keeping it real goes wrong. Games and Culture 6(5): 429–452.

11.

Butt

Dunne

(2017) Rebel Girls and Consequence in Life is Strange and The Walking Dead. Games and Culture. Epub ahead of print 28 November. DOI: 10.1177/1555412017744695.

12.

Caillois

(1961) Man, Play, and Games. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.

13.

Carr

(2014) Ability, disability and dead space. Game Studies 14(2).

14.

Cassell

Jenkins

(2000) From Barbie to Mortal Kombat. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

15.

Collins

(1993) Toward a new vision: Race, class, and gender as categories of analysis and connection. Race, Sex & Class 1(1): 25–45.

16.

Crenshaw

(1991) Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review 43(6): 1241–1299.

17.

Davidsen

(2014) The spiritual tolkien milieu. Doctoral dissertation, Leiden University.

18.

de Wildt

(2014a) Precarious Play. Press Start 1(1): 1–20.

19.

de Wildt

(2014b) Enstranging Play. In: Proceedings of the Philosophy of Computer Games Conference 2014 (Istanbul, 13–15 November [art.nr. 2]).

20.

de Wildt

Aupers

Krassen

, et al. (2018) ‘Things greater than thou’: Post-apocalyptic religion in games. Religions 9(6): 169.

21.

Dill

Gentile

Richter

, et al. (2005) Violence, sex, race and age in popular video games: A content analysis. In: Cole

Henderson Daniel

(eds) Featuring Females: Feminist Analyses of the Media. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association: pp. 115–130.

22.

Durkheim

(1912) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. North Chelmsford, MA: Courier Corporation.

23.

Dyer-Witheford

de Peuter

(2009) Games of Empire. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

24.

Eagleton

(2009) Reason, Faith, and Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

25.

El-Nasr

Al-Saati

Niedenthal

, et al. (2008) Assassin’s creed: A multi-cultural read. Loading… 2(3): 1–32.

26.

Everett

Watkins

(2008) The power of play. In: Salen

(ed) The Ecology of Games. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press pp. 141–166.

27.

Fiske

(1987) Television Culture. London: Routledge.

28.

Flick

(2006) An Introduction to Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

29.

Fordyce

Neale

Apperley

(2016) Modelling systemic racism. Fibreculture Journal. Available at: http://twentyseven.fibreculturejournal.org/2016/03/18/fcj-199-modelling-systemic-racism-mobilising-the-dynamics-of-race-and-games-in-everyday-racism/

30.

Gee

(2003) What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. Computers in Entertainment 1(1): 20–20.

31.

Geertz

(1972) Deep play. Daedalus 101(1): 1–37.

32.

Geraci

(2014) Virtually Sacred. New York: Oxford University Press.

33.

Goffman

(1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Garden City.

34.

Golding

Van Deventer

(2016) Game Changers. New York: Simon & Schuster.

35.

Gorski

(2012) The Post-Secular in Question. New York: New York University Press.

36.

Guyker

(2014) The mythic scope of journey. Online-heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet 5. Available at: https://heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/index.php/religions/article/viewFile/12176/6016

37.

Habermas

(2006) Religion in the public sphere. European Journal of Philosophy 14: 1–25.

38.

Habermas

(2008) Notes on post-secular society. New Perspectives Quarterly 25(4): 17–29.

39.

Hall

(1980) Encoding/decoding. In: Hall

Hobson

Lowe

, et al. (eds) Culture, Media, Language. London: Routledge, pp.128–138.

40.

Hammar

(2016) Counter-hegemonic commemorative play. Rethinking History 21: 372–395.

41.

Heidbrink

Knoll

Wysocki

(2014) Theorizing religion in digital games: Perspectives and approaches. Online-Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet 5.Available at: https://heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/index.php/religions/article/viewFile/12156/5992

42.

Huizinga

(1938) Homo Ludens. Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink.

43.

Huntington

(1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster.

44.

Huxley

(1945) The Perennial Philosophy. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

45.

Jansz

(2015) Playing out identities and emotions. In: Frissen

Lammes de Mul

, et al. (eds) Playful Identities. Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press, pp.267–280.

46.

Jenkins

(1992) Textual Poachers. London: Routledge.

47.

Jenkins

(1996) Social Identity. London: Routledge.

48.

King

(2005) Art and the postsecular. Journal of Visual Art Practice 4: 3–17.

49.

Klevjer

(2007) What is the avatar? Doctoral dissertation, University of Bergen.

50.

Kline

Dyer-Witheford

De Peuter

(2003) Digital Play. Kingston, ON, Canada: McGill-Queen’s Press.

51.

Krzywinska

(2006) Blood scythes, festivals, quests, and backstories. Games and Culture 1: 383–396.

52.

Lamont

Molnár

(2002) The study of boundaries in the social sciences. Annual Review of Sociology 28(1): 167–195.

53.

Langer

(2008) The familiar and the foreign. In: Corneliussen

Rettberg

(eds) Digital Culture, Play, and Identity. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp.87–108.

54.

Linderoth

(2005) Animated game pieces. Paper presented at the Aesthetics of Play Conference, Bergen, 14–15 October.

55.

Linderoth

Mortensen

(2015) Dark play. In: Mortensen

Linderoth

Brown

AML

(eds) The Dark Side of Game Play. London: Routledge, pp.3–14.

56.

McLennan

(2010) The postsecular turn. Theory, Culture & Society 27: 3–20.

57.

Mamdani

(2004) Good Muslim, Bad Muslim. New York: Pantheon Books.

58.

Mead

(1934) Mind, Self and Society. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

59.

Meyer

(2008) Religious sensations: Why media, aesthetics, and power matter in the study of contemporary religion. In: de Vries

(ed) Religion: Beyond a Concept. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 704–23.

60.

Miller

Summers

(2007) Gender differences in video game characters’ roles, appearances, and attire as portrayed in video game magazines. Sex Roles 57(9): 733–742.

61.

Mohamed

(2011) Milton and the Post-Secular Present. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

62.

Morgan

(ed.) (2013) Religion and media. Critical Research on Religion 1: 347–356.

63.

Mukherjee

(2016) Playing subaltern. Games and Culture 13: 504–520.

64.

Newman

(2002) The myth of the ergodic videogame. Game Studies 2(1).

65.

Nieborg

(2006) Mods, nay! Tournaments, yay! Fibreculture Journal 4(8). Available at: http://eight.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-051-mods-nay-tournaments-yay-the-appropriation-of-contemporary-game-culture-by-the-u-s-military/

66.

Possamai

(2005) Religion and Popular Culture. Bern: Peter Lang.

67.

Radde-Antweiler

Waltemathe

Zeiler

(2014) Video gaming, let’s plays, and religion: The relevance of researching Gamevironments. Gamevironments 1: 1–36.

68.

Raessens

JFF

(2011) Computer games as participatory media culture. In: Raessens

Goldstein

(eds) Handbook of Computer Game Studies. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp.373–388.

69.

Said

(1978) Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.

70.

Schaap

Aupers

(2017) Gods in world of warcraft exist: Religious reflexivity and the quest for meaning in online computer games. New Media & Society 19(11): 1744–1760.

71.

Shaw

(2010) Identity, identification, and media representation in video game play. Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.

72.

Shaw

(2011) Do you identify as a gamer? New Media & Society 14: 128–144.

73.

Sicart

(2009) The Ethics of Computer Games. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

74.

Sicart

(2011) Against procedurality. Game Studies 11(3). Available at: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/sicart_against_proceduralism.html

75.

Sicart

(2013) Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

76.

Šisler

(2006) Representation and self-representation. In: Santorineos

Dimitriadi

(eds) Gaming Realities. Athens: Fournos, pp.85–92.

77.

Šisler

(2008) Digital Arabs. European Journal of Cultural Studies 11: 203–220.

78.

Edge (2012) The making of: Assassin’s creed. Edge Online, 27 August.

79.

Trattner

(2016) Religion, games, and othering. Gamevironments 4: 24–60.

80.

Turkle

(1995) Life on the Screen. New York: Simon & Schuster.

81.

Turner

(1982) From Ritual to Theatre. New York: PAJ Publications.

82.

Ubisoft (2007) Assassin’s Creed® Game & Trailer. Available at: http://assassinscreed.ubi.com

83.

Van Bohemen

van Zoonen

Aupers

(2014) Negotiating gender through fun and play. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 43(5): 582–600.

84.

Vella

(2013) It’s a-me/Mario. Foundations of digital games conference 8: 31–38.

85.

Wiemker

Wysocki

(2014) When people pray, a god is born… This god is you! Online-Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet 5. Available at: https://heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/index.php/religions/article/viewFile/12167/6003

86.

Williams

Martins

Consalvo

, et al. (2009) The virtual census. New Media & Society 11: 815–834.

87.

Zagal

(2009) Ethically notable videogames. In: Proceedings of Digra. Available at: https://www.cs.vu.nl/~eliens/sg/local/report/game-ethic.pdf