Creeds, Souls & Worlds of Worship: Players' Appropriations of Religious Worldviews through Game Forums

This study examines how players appropriate the religious narratives, imagery, and rituals found in popular games such as Assassin's Creed, Dark Souls, and World of Warcraft, given that many players identify as atheist, agnostic, or non-practicing while others hold devout faiths. Drawing on Stuart Hall's theory of active audience decoding, the authors ask how players relate game religiosity to their own worldviews and how they discuss these appropriations on internet forums. The work contributes to game studies by mapping player consumption of religious content and to the sociology of religion by suggesting that religion is not simply declining but is finding expression outside institutional churches through playful engagement with popular culture.

The analysis is based on 92 recent threads containing religious content, drawn from up to twenty threads on each of five major platforms: GameFAQs, Gamespot, NeoGAF, IGN, and various gaming-related subreddits. Using a grounded theory approach that moved from open to closed coding, the researchers identified recurring player types. Because participants often stated their religious positions outright, posters could be clearly divided into religious and non-religious groups, and each group displayed three forms of engagement: debunking, debating, and confronting. Debunkers minimized the significance of religious content, with religious players separating faith from fiction and non-religious players equating angels and demons with trolls and pixies. Debaters engaged deeply with the worldviews presented, often deriving sharply different interpretations from the same game. Confronters acknowledged the epistemic tension they felt during play, and many non-religious confronters actively sought out worlds of gods and ritual to experience faith without committing to belief.

The authors conclude that games function as a playful epistemic laboratory, an experimental space where religion can be engaged without the obligations of conversion to doctrines, traditions, or beliefs. This mediatized religious play, they argue, signals an epistemological shift within the religious milieu, moving from dogmatic belief toward playful engagement.