Current Key Perspectives in Video Gaming and Religion

Kerstin Radde-Antweiler's theses, published in a 2015 special issue on video gaming and religion, argue that religious studies cannot ignore video games, since games form part of today's mediatized life-worlds in which online and offline religious practice increasingly merge. She contends that games now reach well beyond "digital natives," citing German data showing that at least 20 percent of players in 2006 were between 40 and 64, and that gaming shapes religious identity construction in general rather than only within digital culture.

Radde-Antweiler cautions against overstating the influence of any single medium. Drawing on mediatization theory, she argues that media change interacts with individualization, globalization, and economization, so research should begin with actor-centered inquiry into gamers' mediatized worlds rather than with games as isolated objects. Her proposed analytical framework, "gamevironments," examines both the technical environment (narrative, interactivity, in-game performance, design, and gamer-generated content) and the cultural environment (social, political, religious, and regulatory contexts) of games and gaming.

On methods, she declines to prescribe a single research question or technique but insists that researchers explicitly define and justify their methods, sample, and theoretical assumptions. She describes a combined approach: qualitative content and discourse analysis of media coverage, drawing on Foucault and Keller, alongside media questionnaires, episodic interviews, photo-elicitation, and participant observation with actors.

Finally, she rejects the idea that scholars must personally play a game to analyze it, questioning the phenomenological "experiencing" approach associated with Heiler and van der Leeuw and the method of "thick playing." She nonetheless holds that familiarity with the gaming context is essential when designing questionnaires or interviews, with the necessity of play depending on the research questions and methods chosen.