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E-book The Pop Theology of Videogames : Producing and Playing with Religion

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Penilaian

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During f ieldwork at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, I spent most of the week explaining my research to game designers. With over 28,000 of them attending GDC that year, there was a lot of explaining to do. The most common question was not, “Why do you study what we make?” Most game developers are acutely aware that their industry is the largest and most interesting cultural industry in the world. Rather, the most common question was:What does religion have to do with videogames anyway?The question struck me most immediately one time, not because the developer in question was so surprised, but because that genuine shock came from a developer who had been working with Ubisoft in Montréal for years. This is surprising only because this person had worked on Assassin’s Creed, a game series drenched in religion. It is about a faction of historically Muslim (now secular) “Assassins” who f ight the historically Catholic (now corporate) “Templars.” Both are in search of the biblical “Apple of Eden” throughout history, in a Dan Brown-like litany of rituals, revelations and religious symbology. Few game series engage so centrally with the role of religion in human history – indeed, the example will run throughout this book – yet the developer I’d met just had not thought of it like that.It suggested to me three things. First, that religion has appeared so centrally in videogames since their inception, that religion has become such an unsurprising presence, that it is barely registered by the very people who make and play those games. Second, that developers use religion in their work in ways that are so far divorced from religious practice and belief that it no longer strikes them as religious at all – but as just a convention of the genre, perhaps, or as such a minute detail (a texture, a building, a piece of music worked on for months) that it loses its religious context until an outsider like me points it out. Third, that videogames tend todepict religion in such a way that it neither offends, nor surprises, nor is necessarily even noticed by most, no matter how strong or absent their audiences’ personal religious beliefs are.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

794.8 DEW t

Penerbit

Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press., 2023

Deskripsi Fisik

160 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9789463729864

Klasifikasi

794.8

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Electronic Game

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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