Paradise Lost: Value Formations as an Analytical Concept for the Study of Gamevironments

Grieve, Radde-Antweiler, and Zeiler's article argues that scholars studying religion and video games should replace "religion" as their primary analytic category with "value formations," defined as socially constructed, contested, and interdependent collections of values shaped by ethics, aesthetics, and norms. The authors contend that religion-centered approaches have lacked clear definitions of religion and have overlooked the fact that players rarely recognize in-game religious elements as religious. Value formations, by contrast, are presented as a framework better suited to capturing how gamevironments generate meaning through implicit religious themes and wider cultural discourses. The paper grounds this argument in a genealogy of the concept of value, tracing its origins in early modern political economy through later ethical, aesthetic, normative, and critical developments.

The empirical core of the study is the Far Cry 5 mission "Paradise Lost," in which the fictional Project at Eden's Gate cult serves as the antagonist. A ludographic analysis finds that the game sets a positively coded "good religion," characterized as voluntary, free, and rational community, against a negatively valued cult, with "Bliss" operating as a judgmental and implicitly religious negative value conveyed through visuals, audio, haptics, and gameplay. A content analysis of 803 English-language YouTube comments across four Let's Plays shows that viewers concentrate on the antagonist Faith Seed (103 mentions) and the Let's Player TheRadBrad (56 mentions), focusing on mechanics, boss fights, and emotional evaluation rather than religion itself.

Analysis of Steam forum threads reinforces this pattern. Although the game's narrative is saturated with religious framing, commenters seldom discuss religion directly, instead debating values such as self-determination and the value of life. On Steam, religion functions largely as a marker of American identity, politics, and nationalism. The authors conclude that value formations offer a more productive analytic category than religion for studying gamevironments, a claim supported by the convergence of player discourse toward ethical and political evaluation rather than religious categorization.