ABSTRACT
When we play video games, we also engage with powerful, world-orienting stories. The typical video game reflects a fantasy world with well-developed characters, engaging tales of triumph and woe, challenges to overcome, enemies to be defeated. Such myths show up too in religions around the world, showing us how supernatural beings-gods and goddesses-defeat forces of evil or overcome great challenges, often in order to protect humanity. Even those world religions that focus on a single god have stories about how that God acted on earth for humanity. In Judaism, for example, there is the story of the Exodus; in Islam, there is the story of Muhammad’s divinely guided escape from Mecca when his life was in danger. Christianity offers stories of a savior who, although he was killed two thousand years ago, will eventually return to defeat his enemies in the end times. Apocalyptic literature provides us with story after story of the violent defeat of masses of evil entities, who, while intent upon destroying humanity, instead find themselves crushed at the hands of God’s warriors. Through their shaping of our experience through guided actions, video games
reveal a kinship with religious ritual. Rituals are often, for all the other things they may also be, myths in action-that is, deeply meaningful and often interactive retellings of foundational stories. Religious rituals can be a means of taking a religious myth and providing a set structure for ritual participants to engage with that myth themselves, via gestures and/or re-enactments, perhaps even costumes and props. For example, the Exodus story is retold in the ritual of the Passover meal (Seder) and all its associated activities; the death of Jesus is retold in the ritual of the Eucharist (the Christian ritual meal), as well as in the procession through the Stations of the Cross practiced by Catholics (the series of images from the story of the death of Jesus). Some Muslim pilgrims end their hajj (ritual journey to Mecca) with a trip to Medina, following in the footsteps of Muhammad. The story of Hanuman (a famed Hindu deity) is retold in the Balinese Monkey Dance. These rituals walk participants through a sacred story via a fixed procession of events associated with traditional gestures, thereby teaching participants how to see themselves in relationship to the story, and allowing them to immerse themselves in it, as if they were actually “there” (i.e. witnessing or participating in the
originating events). Video games, too, have “ritual” components in their fixed structures, set storylines with room for certain choices but not others, and they invite us to engage with those stories via prescribed gestures and movements. Of course some video games are more story-driven than others, just as some rituals are more driven by myth than others. But the kinship seems apparent: both are fixed scripts that often involve stories, and that invite our interactive engagement with them. Sometimes, the connection between religion and video games is explicit, as in
the case of those games that use religious ideas or places as backdrop to the video game’s own in-world story. These kinds of religious games can create new contexts and new gestures and acts to be performed in relationship to depicted sacred spaces. But what is the relationship between sacred space in real life, such as a church or temple, and a virtual version of this same space, when it is digitally replicated and put into a video game? Who decides if and to what extent such spaces are sacred in their new environment? Virtual portrayals of sacred space can be puzzling for players if they aren’t sure whether to see the religious images in-game as relating only to the game or also having some implications for real life. Take, for example, the controversy caused in 2002 by Hitman 2: Silent Assassin (Eidos Interactive). The game requires the player to murder “terrorists” wearing turbans and hiding in the Golden Temple in Amritsar. For real-life Sikhs, the scene evoked memories of a massacre of Sikhs in 1984 when Indian troops stormed the Temple on suspicion of military activities (“Shops,” BBC News 21 November 2002). One obvious problem here is the memory of real violence that the game evokes. But games like this that present virtual replays of real violence also make some people worry that the game may evoke real life violence again, in that the game may encourage players to enact in real life what they are doing in the game. Concerned about both issues, some Sikhs requested a recall of Hitman 2 and removal of the digital Temple from the game. In 2007 a similar controversy erupted as a result of the digital depiction of a
real-life Anglican cathedral in another first-person shooter video game created for Sony’s PlayStation 3. Resistance: Fall of Man is set in an imagined alternative backdrop of Britain in the 1950s. World War II never happened in this game’s world, and Britain is threatened by hostile invasion by alien creatures called Chimera, bred in Russia but now running amok. Britain is the last European stronghold against the creatures, and American army ranger Nathan Hale is sent on a messianic rescue mission to help defend Britain against otherwise certain destruction. Resistance: Fall of Man raised the hackles of the Church of England1
not long after its release due to an intensely violent shootout in the game staged in a perfect digital replica of Manchester Cathedral.2 The Church responded with anger, public castigation, and threats of a lawsuit, arguing that the Cathedral’s image was used without permission and claiming that the violence in the digital cathedral was in bad taste. The game raises powerful questions about the nature of sacred space in virtual form, about the power of virtual storytelling and ritual, and about player immersion when playing video games. The considerable and carefully considered exchange that took place between the Church of England and Sony
reveals for us the intense and as-of-yet unresolved questions that portrayals of sacred space in virtual reality evoke, especially when these sacred spaces appear in violent video games.
