Godwired: Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality by Wagner, Rachel (review)

The rapid development of media and digital technology in the last few decades has inspired a great deal of research into the intersections among religion, media, and culture. In Godwired: Religion, Ritual, and Virtual Reality, Rachel Wagner offers a creative and insightful text focusing on the interactions and parallels between virtual reality and religion. Wagner defines virtual reality as “any form of digital technology that involves user engagement with software via a screen interface” (1). The definition is understandably (if perhaps overly) broad, as her range of examples stretches from online worlds (Second Life) and transmedia franchises (Avatar, Star Wars)to flash mobs and digital prayer walls.

Wagner argues that our engagements with virtual reality and religion are analogous, with both presenting many of the same possibilities and challenges. She describes religion in terms of both bricolage and family resemblance: religion rolls together rituals, myths, texts, morals, and communal boundaries, resulting in a recognizable combination. The theoretical groundwork for tying virtual reality and religion together is laid in the third chapter’s analysis of the relationships among rituals, games, and stories. Wagner describes the “ritual-game-story thing” (54) as a complex hybrid, with each phenomenon displaying various degrees of interactivity, play, rules, narrative, and conflict. The differences among these three, especially between ritual and game, may be difficult to clearly demarcate, but Wagner argues that it primarily rests in the participants’ attitudes: rituals make ultimate claims while games make limited ones.

The remainder of the book is a collection of topics that build on this theoretical framework. Wagner explores the possibility of the “virtual sacred” in light of Mircea Eliade’s sacred/profane distinction (chapter four), the construction of identity (chapter five) and community (chapter 6) in light of virtual reality, and the potential for evil (chapter seven) and revelation (chapter eight) in video games. In the final chapters, she attempts to synthesize the key insights of these earlier chapters, arguing that both religion and virtual reality engage in world-building as a way of imagining sacred and virtual space. The synthesis rests on applying the concept of transmedia, in which an overarching narrative or world is developed across multiple forms of media, to religious traditions.

Wagner is particularly effective at problematizing the sometimes rigid distinctions between virtual and other spaces. Drawing on Victor Turner’s understanding of liminality, she argues that participants in a virtual space like Second Life begin as neophytes and enter that space through a ritualized process of logging in and rendering their avatars. Yet it is not only the threshold that is liminal: the largely consequence-free possibility for play within a virtual world renders the entire space liminal precisely because it allows for the sort of social disruption that enables Turner’s communitas. Moreover, the influence that online and offline lives have on one another, in concert with the possibility of constant online connection, means that virtual worlds have “persistent liminality,” which Wagner claims increasingly blurs the line between play and reality (159–60).

The primary concern with this text is that the distinction between ritual and game in terms of ultimate significance is noted but not sufficiently carried through the text. Wagner is surely correct that the individual’s decision to engage with rituals, games, and stories in the construction of a cosmos is, especially in a competitive symbolic marketplace, central to one’s experience with religion and virtual reality. However, her claim that opposition to the religion-as-transmedia view is rooted in its apparent individualism misses the deeper point that religion is making ultimate claims while the transmedia franchises of Harry Potter and Twilight are not.

This problem is highlighted by Wagner’s deployment of the exclusivist-inclusivist-plural-ist paradigm for interreligious dialogue as a structure for understanding how we see truth within our digital engagement. The exclusivist position views a religious tradition as an “answerbox” (221) that allows only for rigidity and assent, while the pluralist position is a...