Playing with Religion in Digital Games

Heidi A. Campbell is Associate Professor of Communication at Texas A&M University, where she teaches media studies. She is author of Exploring Religious Community Online and When Religion Meets New Media, and editor of Digital Religion. She is Director of the Network for New Media, Religion, and Digital Culture Studies.Gregory P. Grieve is Associate Professor in Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is Director of MERGE: A Network for Collaborative Interdisciplinary Scholarship in UNCG's College of Arts and Sciences, and co-chair of the American Academy of Religion's section on Religion and Popular Culture. He is author of Retheorizing Religion in Nepal and editor (with Steven Engler) of Historicizing "Tradition" in the Study of Religion.

This collection builds on and adds to the best criticism in this young and exciting subfield and will grow more important as religion integrates further into our digital games.(Library Journal) ...[A]n ambitious and impressive compendium offering intriguing possibilities for further research and theory for the burgeoning field of cultural studies.(Publishers Weekly) This fine collection of essays represents a well-documented study of the effects and influences that religion (in general) has had on digital gaming and its players. . . . This volume will be a good launching pad for future research.(Choice) This edited collection is uniformly good and well worth reading. As the editors and authors note, the study of religion and gaming stands very near its beginning. They invite others to take up the study and this book offers a good starting point.(Communication Research Trends)

• Introduction: What Playing with Religion Offers Digital Game Studies / Heidi A. Campbell and Gregory Price GrievePart 1: Explorations in Religiously Themed Games1. Dreidels to Dante's Inferno: Toward a Typology of Religious Games / Jason Anthony2. Locating the Pixelated Jew: A Multimodal Method for Exploring Judaism in The Shivah / Isamar Carrillo Masso and Nathan Abrams3. The Global Mediatization of Hinduism through Digital Games: Representation versus Simulation in Hanuman: Boy Warrior / Xenia Zeiler4. Silent Hill and Fatal Frame: Finding Transcendent Horror in and beyond the Haunted Magic Circle / Brenda S. Gardenour WalterPart 2: Religion in Mainstream Games5. From Kuma\War to Quraish: Representation of Islam in Arab and American Video Games / Vit Šisler6. Citing the Medieval: Using Religion as World-Building Infrastructure in Fantasy MMORPGs / Rabia Gregory7. Hardcore Christian Gamers: How Religion Shapes Evangelical Play / Shanny Luft8. Filtering Cultural Feedback: Religion, Censorship and Localization in Actraiser and Other Mainstream Video Games / Peter LikarishPart 3: Gaming as Implicit Religion9. The Importance of Playing in Earnest / Rachel Wagner10. "God Modes" and "God Moods": What Does a Digital Game Need to Be Spiritually Effective? / Oliver Steffen11. Bridging Multiple Realities: Religion, Play and Alfred Schutz's Theory of the Life-World / Michael Waltemathe12. They Kill Mystery: The Mechanistic Bias of Video Game Representations of Religion and Spirituality / Kevin SchutsGameographyContributorsIndex