No. 43 - Gregory Grieve, Kerstin Radde-Antweiler and Xenia Zeiler: Value Formations through Digital Gaming

Many video games have explicit reference to religion both as narrative and symbolic content. Take, for instance, the Prince of Persia (Ubisoft 2008), where the player must defeat an evil Zoroastrian deity, and Tomb Raider (Square Enix 2013) whose final boss is a shamanistic Sun Queen. Other games, such as Assassin’s Creed (Ubisoft 2007), which is set in the Third Crusade, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda 2011), which centers around a civil war sparked by the worship of the god Talos, use both real and fictive religious events and places. It is interesting, however, that while game designers place religious el- ements in games, which are easy for researchers to excavate and speculate about, players themselves seem least interested in the religious aspects of games (Grieve, Radde-Antweiler, and Zeiler 2020). How should scholars of religion deal with the fact that player discussions of religion and engagement with religion are avoided, forbidden, and most of the time simply ignored? If not the category of religion, how should scholars of digital media theorize such religious elements? We argue that a more accurate concept would be the analytic category of value formations (see Grieve, Radde-Antweiler and Zeiler 2020). Using the performance of music in Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) as a touchstone, the authors define value as a second-order category used to theorize what actors find worthy or unworthy, and value formations as the collections and systematization of interdependent and entangled values. To be clear, we are not arguing for any type of preexisting good, beautiful, or typical (or bad, ugly, or deviant) values. Instead, we view value formations from a social-constructivist approach (Grieve, Radde-Antweiler and Zeiler 2020).

About the authors

Gregory Price Grieve
Gregory Price Grieve is Professor and Head of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He conducts research at the intersection of religion, popular culture and Buddhism, with a particular focus on religious practices that employ digital media, such as the Internet, virtual worlds, and video games. of the International Academy for the Study of Gaming and Religion, and its new journal, Gamevi- ronments.

Kerstin Radde-Antweiler
Kerstin Radde-Antweiler is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Bremen, field of work “Literatures and Media of Religion”. At the Centre for Media, Communication and Information Sciences (ZeMKI) she is head of the Lab “Media and Religion”. Her research focuses on new media, receptions and transformations of biblical tropes in different media, Ritual Studies (ritual transfer, ritual design), actor perspective religion history, and recent religions, especially the recent witch discourse.

Xenia Zeiler
Xenia Zeiler’s research and teaching are situated at the intersection of digital media, culture, and society, specifically as related to India and global Indian communities. Her focus within this wider field of digital culture is video games and gaming research, in India and beyond. Closely related to and supporting this are her other major research areas: In order to understand how digital spaces such as social media or video games, and more traditional media formats such as film or TV, shape and are shaped by various actors, she researches and teaches digital religion, popular culture, cultural heritage, and mediatization processes.