Playing with Religion in Digital Games

Contents

Contents Acknowledgments · ix Introduction: What Playing with Religion Offers Digital Game Studies · Heidi A. Campbell and Gregory Price Grieve · 1 Part 1. Explorations in Religiously Themed Games 1. Dreidels to Dante’s Inferno: Toward a Typology of Religious Games · Jason Anthony · 25 2. Locating the Pixelated Jew: A Multimodal Method for Exploring Judaism in The Shivah · Isamar Carrillo Masso and Nathan Abrams · 47 3. The Global Mediatization of Hinduism through Digital Games: Representation versus Simulation in Hanuman: Boy Warrior Xenia Zeiler · 66 4. Silent Hill and Fatal Frame: Finding Transcendent Horror in and beyond the Haunted Magic Circle · Brenda S. Gardenour Walter · 88 Part 2. Religion in Mainstream Games 5. From Kuma\War to Quraish: Representation of Islam in Arab and American Video Games · Vít Šisler · 109 6. Citing the Medieval: Using Religion as World-Building Infrastructure in Fantasy MMORPGs · Rabia Gregory · 134 7. Hardcore Christian Gamers: How Religion Shapes Evangelical Play · Shanny Luft · 154 8. Filtering Cultural Feedback: Religion, Censorship, and Localization in Actraiser and Other Mainstream Video Games · Peter Likarish · 170 Part 3. Gaming as Implicit Religion 9. The Importance of Playing in Earnest · Rachel Wagner · 192 10. “God Modes” and “God Moods”: What Does a Digital Game Need to Be Spiritually Effective? · Oliver Steffen · 214 11. Bridging Multiple Realities: Religion, Play, and Alfred Schutz’s Theory of the Life-World · Michael Waltemathe · 238 12. They Kill Mystery: The Mechanistic Bias of Video Game Representations of Religion and Spirituality · Kevin Schut · 255 Gameography · 277 Contributors · 281 Index · 285 ...