Playing with Religion in Digital Games

1. Dreidels to Dante’s Inferno: Toward a Typology of Religious Games

25 It’s hard to imagine two more different arenas than games and religion. Games strike us as a pleasant distraction, a space where amiable conflicts play out to a conclusion which, tomorrow, won’t matter much. Religious activity is clearly quite different. It calls for utmost seriousness and a minimum of conflict, and our commitment will yield consequences that can last a lifetime–or longer, depending on the views we hold on eternity. So goes the conventional wisdom. Yet games and religion share a long, rich, and intertwined history, even in the digital age. Consider a brief snapshot of the events at the 2011 Game Developers Conference. Theworld’stopdesigners,developers,andgamestudioshavegatheredto discuss the state of their art. Design guru and director of the NYU Game Center Frank Lantz steps up to the podium. In a highly anticipated talk, he advocates at length for the “sublime” in games. He explains that the venerable game of Go held a place in Confucian practice, and asks why poker and other complex games could not attain a similar stature: “Why can’t a video game be a spiritual discipline?” And he continues: “I want more video games that give me a space in which to entangle my mind with the mysterious infinite secrets of the universe. And this doesn’t have to be precious. Poker proves that it can have something vulgar and violent and dirty and shameful and dangerous and addictive. And if it’s deep enough, it can slingshot you all the way around to new orbits of insight and higher levels of consciousness.”1 In the days that follow, the conference takes up this gauntlet. Eric Zimmerman–who had been working with Deepak Chopra on the conDreidels to Dante’s Inferno Toward a Typology of Religious Games one Jason Anthony 26 Jason Anthony sole meditation game Leela (discussed below)–coordinates the annual game design challenge. He gives three prominent designers the task of comingupwithanewgamethataddressesthetheme“BiggerthanJesus: Games as Religion.” The previous year’s winner, on a totally unrelated challenge, had been Heavenville, “a sort of stock market that measures the social currency of dead people.”2 The result of Zimmerman’s challenge made headlines. Jason Rohrer came up with Chain World–a whole universe on a flash drive. The game could only be possessed and played by a single person at a time. Each player would live a life, be born and die, then pass the game on, leaving traces of their short virtual life to be discovered by the next possessor of the artifact. Because Rohrer’s game evoked a meditative practice, embraced a closed and fervent community, and presented a position on the ephemerality of life, Wired magazine devoted a feature to the question of whether Rohrer had designed a new religion.3 This kind of work would seem to be the purview of priests and shamans . And the attitudes of game designers on this frontier of religious thinking remain complex; Rohrer is a professed atheist, and Lantz has been vocal in his criticism of organized religion.4 Yet their fascination with religion is extensive and takes many forms. Games are exploring ways to tap the mind’s capacity for transcendent experience. Major studio titles regularly use religious characters and themes from existing traditions. Players are invited to immerse themselves in worlds where new religions can be explored. Thecriticalworktobedonehereisdaunting.Thischapteroffersone strategy for parsing that wide field: a backward look. Can we understand moreaboutthereligiousdimensionsof digitalgamesbylookingbroadly at the history of pre-digital games in religion? I make the following case: games have intersected deeply with religious practice across centuries. These intersections may be broadly placed into four types, each a different strategy for engaging with the “divine” or with the central object of a religious tradition. The four categories will then be held up to the current digital gaming landscape. Some of the four historic types will have direct corollaries; others will not. Those digital games that don’t followahistoricalprecedentmayprovetobeof specialinterest,pointing the way toward the unique aspects of the digital medium and the digital Dreidels to Dante’s Inferno 27 moment.Inshort,howdoweunderstandsomethinglikeRohrer’s Chain World–bold, inventive, and puzzlingly unique? A historical typology of sacredgamesmightallowscholarstoplacesuchadevelopmentwithin a larger historical and critical story. Such an undertaking comes with obvious reservations. An exhaustive survey of religious games is difficult if not impossible. The ludic arts present challenges, both historiographical and contextual, since they are often popular, plastic, and ephemeral performances...