Playing with Religion in Digital Games
2015; The Strong; Volume: 7; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1938-0399
Autores Tópico(s)Digital Games and Media
ResumoPlaying with in Digital Games Heidi A. Campbell and Gregory Price Grieve Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014. Introduction, gameography, contributors, index. 301 pp. $30.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780253012531Playing with in Digital Games promises to explore digital gaming a field filled with potential for new insights into the place, presentation, and impact of religion within popular culture, and makes the bold claim that games reflect and shape contemporary religiosity (p. 2). In this anthology, the essays are truly interdisciplinary: the authors hail from the worlds of journalism, game design, computer science, media studies, studies, and history. This wide range of disciplines creates a somewhat uneven collection of interest, most likely, to an academic audience. The essays make up three sections entilted Explorations in Religiously Themed Games, Religion in Mainstream Games, and Gaming as Implicit Religion. Of the three, the second is perhaps the most useful for its potential readers, but only the last section shows a clear awareness of the problems inherent in making claims about the meaning of religion in digital games.Three chapters in part 1 focus on the ways various games portray Jewish, Hindu, and Japanese ideas. Jason Anthony's Dreidels to Dante's Inferno aims to develop a unifying language for all types of games and help create a higher level of sophistication in games that engage religious content (pp. 43-44). I find Anrhony's piece troubling because it misrepresents and even trivializes and mystical experiences, especially when he discusses theoptic games, games that players explicitly assume the role of a divine god. Anthony implies that spiritual practices like deity yoga and the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola are nothing more than acts of the imagination. He does admit that having a god as an avatar is rarely the same as engaging the divine. On the other hand, he concludes that if the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises are ever gamified . . . they might define the potential of this category (p. 43). The idea that one could gamify an intensely mystical experience-one that takes place in a rigorous retreat under the careful guidance of an experienced spiritual director-suggests the author's lack of understanding of experience.Part 2 (again, perhaps most useful section of the book) contains essays that discuss how games manipulate and interpret ideas, given the influence of the culture and the ideologies of players. Vit Sisler compares representations of Islam in American-made and Arab-made games and shows that genre determines how the game portrays religion, reminding us that culture always shapes rule systems. Other chapters address the use massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) make of medieval symbols as infrastructure (chapter 6), how evangelical Christian gamers interpret and interact with overtly violent games (chapter 7), and how and why companies revise symbols when they release games in new markets (chapter 8).The final section of the book (which might have worked better at its beginning) looks at games through the lens of implicit religion. …
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