Playing with Religion in Digital Games

Contributors

281 Nathan Abrams is Professor of Film Studies at Bangor University , Wales. He is the founding editor of Jewish Film and New Media: An International Journal and has written widely on U.S. and Jewish culture. His publications include The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema (2012); Norman Podhoretz and Commentary Magazine: The Rise and Fall of the Neo-Cons (2010); Jews and Sex (2008); Commentary Magazine 1945–1959: “A Journal of Significant ThoughtandOpinion”(2006);StudyingFilm(withIanBellandJanUdris; 2001); and numerous articles and chapters. Jason Anthony is a journalist and game designer based in New YorkCity.Heworksextensivelyattheintersectionofgamesandreligion, and his stories and essays have appeared in Religion News Service, Boston Review, Christian Century, and other outlets. His games include a fully gamed seminary chapel service (In the Cards), an athletic exploration of theJewishsabbath(Shabbat Put!),andan SMS gameoffreezetagexploring the call to prayer as a digital secular ritual (The Hush). Heidi A. Campbell is Associate Professor of Communication at Texas A&M University, where she teaches media studies. She has researched and published extensively on religion, new media, and digital culture since the mid-1990s. She is author of Exploring Religious Community Online (2005) and When Religion Meets New Media (2010) and editorofDigital Religion(2013).HerworkhasalsoappearedinHandbook on Internet Studies, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Journal of Contemporary Religion, Journal of Media and Religion, New Media and Society, and The InformaContributors 282 Contributors tionSociety.SheisalsoDirectoroftheNetworkforNewMedia,Religion, and Digital Culture Studies (http://digitalreligion.tamu.edu). Isamar Carrillo Masso isaPh.D.studentinnewmedia(games studies) at Bangor University, where she lectures in media and cultural studies and serves as Assistant Editor for the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds. She has taught English, literature, and linguistics since 1997 in Venezuela, Taiwan, the Czech Republic, and Oman. She graduated with distinction in 2008 from the University of Reading. Her dissertation was a corpus-based, critical discourse analysis of the portrayal of female characters in World of Warcraft and Diablo. Rabia Gregory is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Missouri. Her research focuses on religion and popular cultureinlatemedievalEurope.SheisauthorofMarryingJesus:LayPiety and Learned Devotion in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Gregory Price Grieve is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Director of MERGE: A Network for Collaborative Interdisciplinary Scholarship in UNCG’s College of Arts and Sciences; and Co-chair of the American Academy of Religion’s section on Religion and Popular Culture. He is author of numerous articles and the monograph Retheorizing Religion in Nepal (2007), and co-editor of Historicizing Tradition in the Study of Religion (2005). Grieve has been a research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and the Center for Religion and Media at New York University. Peter Likarish is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Drew University and a visiting scholar at the Palo Alto Research Corporation working with Nick Yee, studying the sociological and psychological nature of online gameplay. His focus is on real-world demographic prediction based on how individuals choose to play MMOGs. He presented the group’s findings in 2011 at HotPETS (a venue for hot topics in privacy-enhancing technologies). Shanny Luft is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, where he teaches courses on religion in America, global Christianity, and religion and popular culture . His research explores historical questions about the relationship betweenreligionandleisure,andhehaswrittenaboutamusementparks, Contributors 283 evangelical video games, the Protestant debate over the place of leisure in Christian life in the nineteenth century, and conservative Protestant hostility toward Hollywood cinema in the first half of the twentieth century. Kevin Schut is Associate Professor and Chair of the Media + CommunicationDepartmentintheSchooloftheArts,Media+Culture at Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia. He is interestedincultureandtechnologyandfocusesonthestudyofvideogames . Hehaspublishedpapersonhowthevideogamemediumintersectswith diverse topics such as history, mythology, and religion, and is author of Of Games and God: A Christian Exploration of Video Games (2012). He loves playing role-playing and strategy games and has spent hundreds of hours in imaginary worlds. Vít Šisler is Assistant Professor of New Media in the Faculty of Arts at Charles University, Prague. He has published extensively on issues related to Islam and video games in Communication Yearbook; European Journal of Cultural Studies; Information, Communication and Society; Global Media Journal; and Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. He is founder and Editor in Chief of Digital Islam...