gamevironments 2015

The document announces the establishment of a new Video Gaming and Religion Seminar within the American Academy of Religion (AAR), a major professional body for religious studies scholars. The seminar's application was approved by the AAR Program Committee, which granted it a five-year term from 2015 to 2019 with one session at each Annual Meeting. The author, Kerstin Radde-Antweiler, frames the initiative as a response to the marginal status of video gaming within Religious Studies, arguing that just as film illuminated religiosity in the twentieth century, video games now depict religious themes in the twenty-first.

The seminar's stated aim is to build a multidisciplinary, international network for discussing theoretical and methodological approaches to studying religion and video games, defined broadly to include personal computer, console, and mobile play. Its steering committee comprises six scholars from universities in the United States, Canada, Germany, and Finland, with a chair and co-chair structure. Planned outputs over the five-year period include an edited volume titled Video Games and Religion: Methods and Approaches and a special issue of the peer-reviewed online journal gamevironments.

The announcement also describes the seminar's first activity at the 2015 AAR conference in Atlanta, a pre-arranged roundtable using the sandbox game Minecraft as a shared case study. Panelists were asked to address how Religious Studies should engage with video games, which methods and research questions are appropriate, and whether scholars must play a game in order to analyze it. The roundtable was intended to demonstrate how game studies can advance the broader discipline of Religious Studies.