Playing with Religion in Digital Games

9. The Importance of Playing in Earnest

193 The error people tend to make the most in thinking about games and religion is to assume that the primary opposition at work is the idea that religion is “serious” whereas games are “fun.” I propose that a more accurate distinction is between being earnest as opposed to being insincere in one’s engagement with the ordered world views that religions and games can evoke. The importance of constructing systems or worlds of order into which people may willingly enter is a key feature of both religions and games. The greatest offense in both experiences is to break the rules, that is, to become an apostate, an infidel, a cheater, or a trifler, to fail to uphold the principal expectations about how to inhabit that particular experience’s world view. To fail in being earnest in following the rules is to cause a disruption of order, a breach inthecosmos-craftingactivitythatbothgamesandreligioncanprovide. Of course, not all experiences of religious practice and gameplay will fit this definition, but many of them do. This, I propose, 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. While it is true that games offer such ordered worlds on a temporary basis and religion attempts to make universalclaimstosuchrule-basedsystems,therootimpulseof entering into ordered space reveals a deep kinship between religion and games that is startling and evocative. The Importance of Playing in Earnest nine Rachel Wagner 194 Rachel Wagner Playing by the Rules In Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, Johan Huizinga admits that “we are accustomed to think of play and seriousness as an absolute antithesis,” but he argues that such a separation “does not go to the heart of the matter.”1 Play infuses both religious ritual and games, according to Huizinga. Since play itself depends upon rules to happen, playispartof theveryprocessthatinstantiatesanorderedcosmos,aplay arena, a system for being in the world. Accordingly, definitions of games are often closely related to definitions of play, since play can be seen as a clarification for how interaction with the rules of a game actually works. Eric Zimmerman, for example, in an essay in First Person defines play as “the free space of movement within a more rigid structure.”2 The “more rigid structure” in most cases is, put simply, the rules of the game,andplayishowyouinteractwiththoserules.Hisobservationscan also apply to the “rules” of religious activity and the “play” with which a practitioner engages when enacting a ritual, such as vocalizing a liturgy or moving in regulated embodied ways.3 Play happens, Zimmerman says, in the “interstitial spaces” that exist “between and among [the system ’s]components.”Playworksagainstandinresponsetothestructures of the system, but it is also “an expression of a system, and intrinsically a part of it.”4 Such play with the system is characteristic of religious activity and of games, and in both cases it depends upon the “more rigid structure” of rules and often also upon any stories or texts that inform the shape of how the rules are to be enacted. As Alexander Galloway explains it in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, “The imposition of constraints also creates expression.”5 Sucharigidstructureoffersareliablesenseof order,evenif therules are agitated against, even if the point is seeing how you might bend or break them within the allowable parameters. There are always rules where there are games and, I suggest, also where there is religious activity . It’s the rules that allow the construction of a ritual or game-defined other space; it’s the rules that deposit the practitioner into this whatif world; and it’s the rules that define the system of user or worshiper engagement, creating a world that we experience temporarily or, in the case of religion, perhaps for a lifetime. Rules tell believers how to live. The Importance of Playing in Earnest 195 They articulate who can make authoritative decisions in the day-to-day world, and why. Rules dictate how sacred texts are read. Rules give us guidelines for behavior, often anchoring them in past sets of rules or the authority of previous rule makers. Rules tell us how to treat special objectsandsometimeseventelluswhattosay...