This Is Not a Game: Violent Video Games, Sacred Space, and Ritual

Abstract

Some things have to be believed to be seen.-Ralph HodgsonVideo games, especially those with religious content, create something similar to sacred space. They can, like sacred spaces, provide a sense of orientation via the assumption of an ordered cosmos with predictable rules. They too can frame discrete spatial elements, and sometimes even attempt to map the rules of the circumscribed space onto reality. They focus desire by presenting us with a symbolic arena in which designers have predetermined how things should work. In those video games that intersect directly with religion via symbolism or depiction of real sacred space, the game itself also often functions as a sort of sacred space, with many of the same features and symbolic, ideological functions. If the deliberate circumscribing of space is a means by which humans map order onto reality, then looking at video games as having ritual and spatial components seems an apt means of uncovering their ideological potential.In the middle of the twentieth century, long before video games were even imagined as a mode of popular entertainment, religious theorist Mircea Eliade argued that the recognition of the "sacred" within the "profane" world is a kind of order-making activity, offering a "hierophany" that reveals "an absolute fixed point, a center" within otherwise chaotic space (21). For Eliade, "to organize a space is to repeat the paradigmatic work of the gods" (32). The creation and maintenance of sacred space is a way of rejecting the chaos of ordinary life, of symbolically arguing instead for an ordered cosmos, represented symbolically by the ordered area of the sacred space itself set apart from the rest of life. Much more recently, media theorist Ken Hillis has expressed a similar sentiment about virtual reality's ability to induce our sense of desire, transcendence, and the ideal. Hillis notes an idealization of virtual reality, marked by "a widespread belief that space (understood variously as distance, extension, or orientation) constitutes something elemental." Virtual reality lulls us into thinking that the space behind the screen is real, since it "reflects support for a belief that because light illuminates space it may therefore produce space a priori." The illusion of space registers for us as real space. As a result, says Hillis, users of virtual reality "may experience desire or even something akin to a moral imperative to enter into virtuality where space and light ...have become one immaterial 'wherein.'" We are motivated by the desire for a "sense of entry into the image" and encouraged to view the screen and its mechanisms as a "transcendence machine" or "subjectivity enhancer," that "works to collapse distinctions between the conceptions built into virtual environments by their developers and the perceptive faculties of users" ("Modes of Digital Identification" 349). That is, the technology encourages us to see virtual reality as more "real" than reality.Brenda Brasher similarly observes in cyberspace what she calls "omnitemporality," that is, "the religious idea of eternity as perpetual persistence" (52). Although the notion of "omnitemporality" first manifested as a religious notion, the "concrete expression or materialization of the monks' concept of eternity," it finds new expression today in wired culture. Cyberspace, like the religious notion of the infinite, "is always present." It mimics much older ideas about heaven, since "whatever exists within [cyberspace] never decays. Whatever is expressed in [it] ... is perpetually expressed ... the quasi-mystical appeal that cyberspace exudes stems from this taste of eternity that it imparts to those who interact with it" (52). Virtual reality proposes a means of crossing beyond the vicissitudes of ordinary life into an "immaterial 'wherein'" of imagined permanence and the fulfillment of dreams. Virtual reality promises, at times, to work as a kind of sacred space itself.1 Hillis and Brasher are speaking of virtual reality in its most general sense, as a sort of imagined ideal space behind the screen. …