Gaming Religion?: Teaching Religious Studies with Videogames

Abstract

RACHELWAGNER As a scholar interested in the intersection between religion and culture, a few years ago I found myself wanting to teach about religion and videogames but not feeling especially competent to do so. This was around 2007, when the academic study of gaming was still new and little scholarship on religion and gaming existed. I knew a few people who were working on case studies of particular games, but what I most wanted to think about more theoretically was how gaming can work like religion. John Lyden had laid the theoretical groundwork for more careful study of religion and film in 2003 in his Film as Religion: Myths, Morals and Rituals. I wanted to use his work as a model, and provide students with the tools and language to think about gaming as a phenomenon with religious qualities. The problem was I didn’t know much about videogames, and I wasn’t very good at playing them. Furthermore, as a busy scholar and teacher, I didn’t have the time to immerse myself in fan culture or spend forty hours playing a single game. My solution was to involve my students in my own learning process. Over a period of several years, I taught three semester-long iterations of an upper level seminar called “Religion, Ritual, and Virtual Reality” as I worked on the manuscript of the related book, Godwired: Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality. I spent the summer before the course creating the preliminary bibliography, then built the course around it. Each “unit” was affiliated with a projected chapter, and students worked through the bibliographical material with me, composing their own research questions and projects along the way. I wrote alongside them, discovering and synthesizing, asking questions for which I didn’t yet have the answers. Students thrived on the sense of co-discovery, and their insights were sometimes profound. After three iterations of the course, the book was finished, and several students had presented their own projects at local and regional venues.1 Right now, I am repeating this process as I teach the first of another series of upper level seminars that will result in my second book, to be focused on the intersection between violence, gaming, and popular apocalypticism. For this course, called “Religion, Media, Apocalypse,” we are again using selected videogames as part of a larger conversation about media and religion. We are also examining less interactive media like serialized television shows that explicitly evoke apocalyptic imagery as part of their negotiation of imaginations of the end times (Supernatural and Sleepy Hollow, for example). Any instructor who wants to learn about religion and gaming can adapt this kind of emergent teaching style in order to 