Shaman, paragon, God-mode: modern video games are heavily coded with religious undertones. From the Shinto-inspired Japanese video game Okami to the internationally popular The Legend of Zelda and Halo, many video games rely on religious themes and symbols to drive the narrative and frame the storyline. Playing with Religion in Digital Games explores the increasingly complex relationship between gaming and global religious practices. For example, how does religion help organize the communities in MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft? What role has censorship played in localizing games like Actraiser in the western world? How do evangelical Christians react to violence, gore, and sexuality in some of the most popular games such as Mass Effect or Grand Theft Auto? With contributions by scholars and gamers from all over the world, this collection offers a unique perspective to the intersections of religion and the virtual world.

Game studies has been an understudied area within the emerging field of digital media and religion. Video games can reflect, reject, or reconfigure traditionally held religious ideas and often serve as sources for the production of religious practices and ideas. This collection of essays presents a broad range of influential methodological approaches that illuminate how and why video games shape the construction of religious beliefs and practices, and also situates such research within the wider discourse on how digital media intersect with the religious worlds of the 21st century. Each chapter discusses a particular method and its theoretical background, summarizes existing research, and provides a practical case study that demonstrates how the method specifically contributes to the wider study of video games and religion. Featuring contributions from leading and emerging scholars of religion and digital gaming, this book will be an invaluable resource for scholars in the areas of digital culture, new media, religious studies, and game studies across a wide range of disciplines.

"Digital Religion refers to the contemporary practice and understanding of religion in both online and offline contexts, and how these contexts intersect with each other. Scholars in this growing field recognize that religion has been influenced by its engagement with computer-mediated digital spaces, including not only the Internet, but other emerging technologies, such as mobile phones, digital wearables, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. The Oxford Handbook of Digital Religion provides a comprehensive overview of religion as seen and performed through various platforms and cultural spaces created by digital technology. The text covers religious interaction with a wide range of digital media forms (including social media, websites, gaming environments, virtual and augmented realities, and artificial intelligence) and highlights examples of technological engagement and negotiation within the major world religions (i.e., Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism). Additional sections cover the global manifestations of religious community, identity, ethics, and authority, with a final group of chapters addressing emerging technologies and the future of the field. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the project, the Handbook is led by co-editors representing the humanistic and social scientific fields of religious studies and communication, though both also have experience in how those disciplines intersect"--

This book offers a critical and systematic survey of the study of religion and digital media. It covers religious engagement with a wide range of digital media forms and highlights examples of new media engagement in all five of the major world religions. This unique volume draws together the work of experts from key disciplinary perspectives and is the go-to volume for students and scholars wanting to develop a deeper understanding of the subject area.

Video games are a global phenomenon, international in their scope and democratic in their appeal. This is the first volume dedicated to the subject of apocalyptic video games. Its two dozen papers engage the subject comprehensively, from game design to player experience, and from the perspectives of content, theme, sound, ludic textures, and social function. The volume offers scholars, students, and general readers a thorough overview of this unique expression of the apocalyptic imagination in popular culture, and novel insights into an important facet of contemporary digital society.

In Playing On: Re-staging the Passion after the Death of God, Mirella Klomp shows how the Dutch playfully rediscover Christian heritage. Engaging theologically with a public Passion play, she demonstrates how precisely a production of Jesus' last hours carves out a new and unexpected space for God in a (post-)secular culture.

»Fictional Practices of Spirituality« provides critical insight into the implementation of belief, mysticism, religion, and spirituality into worlds of fiction, be it interactive or non-interactive. This first volume focuses on interactive, virtual worlds - may that be the digital realms of video games and VR applications or the imaginary spaces of life action role-playing and soul-searching practices. It features analyses of spirituality as gameplay facilitator, sacred spaces and architecture in video game geography, religion in video games and spiritual acts and their dramaturgic function in video games, tabletop, or LARP, among other topics. The contributors offer a first-time ever comprehensive overview of play-rites as spiritual incentives and playful spirituality in various medial incarnations.

This volume considers the implementation difficulties of researching religion online and reflects on the ethical dilemmas faced by sociologists of religion when using digital research methods. Bringing together established and emerging scholars, global case studies draw on the use of social media as a method for researching religious oppression, religion and identity in virtual worlds, digital communication within religious organisations, and young people's diverse expressions of faith online. Additionally, boxed tips are provided throughout the text to serve as reminders of tools that readers may use in their own research projects.

Video game studies are a relative young but flourishing academic discipline. But within game studies, however, the perspective of religion and spirituality is rather neglected, both by game scholars and religion scholars. While religion can take different shapes in digital games, ranging from material and referential to reflexive and ritual, it is not necessarily true that game developers depict their in-game religions in a positive, confirming way, but ever so often games approach the topic critically and disavowingly. The religion criticisms found in video games can be categorized as follows: religion as (1) fraud, aimed to manipulate the uneducated, as (2) blind obedience towards an invisible but ultimately non-existing deity/ies, as (3) violence against those who do not share the same set of religious rules, as (4) madness, a deranged alternative for logical reasoning, and as (5) suppression in the hands of the powerful elite to dominate and subdue the masses into submission and obedience. The critical depictions of religion in video games by their developers is the focus of this special issue.

Often dismissed as "not serious", the notion of play has nevertheless been at the centre of classical theories of religion and ritual (Huizinga, Caillois, Turner, Staal, etc.). What can be retained of those theories for the contemporary study of religions? Can a study of "play" or "game" bring new perspectives for the study of religions? The book deals with the history of games and their relation to religions, the links between divination and games, the relations between sport and ritual, the pedagogical functions of games in religious education, and the interaction between games, media and religions. Richly illustrated, the book contributes to the study of religions, to ritual, game and media studies, and addresses an academic as well as a general public. Philippe Bornet, Dr. Phil., born in 1977, is Lecturer in the Study of Religion at the Faculty of Lettres of the University of Lausanne, with focus on the history of interrelations between India and Europe. Maya Burger is Professor of Indian Studies and History of Religions at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lausanne, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations.