Moral Cognition Empowers Spiritual Experience in Chinese World of Warcraft

Abstract

How does a videogame—the Chinese version of World of Warcraft (WoW)—become “spiritual” (jingshen 精神) in the eyes of its players? The question is relevant to the cognitive science of religion (CSR) because in “WoW spirituality” a secular, foreign artifact comes to signify a quasi-religious specialness through processes operating largely outside of—and at times in spite of—the power structures (religious, political, familial) that would typically authorize such signification. It is therefore possible that players’ discourse on the spiritual value of gameplay draws upon a deeply intuitive, cognitively natural mode of human reasoning about inner spiritual phenomena and hence might have significance for CSR theorizing about emergent religiosity (nova religio). In this chapter I explore these possibilities as follows. First, I examine the gameworld as a site for positive moral experience—an essential component of WoW spirituality—and locate causal power in the game’s rich affordances for the intuitive moral reasoning systems identified by Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph’s “moral foundations theory.” Second, I align this causal power with recurrent themes in how players use jingshen to characterize gameplay, arguing that high levels of moral affect, engendered by the moral foundation systems engaged through gameplay, potentiate spiritual signification. Third, I suggest this moral affect is attributed spiritual significance when players use intuitive essentialist reasoning to interpret that affect. I argue that if essentialist reasoning is indeed directing moral affect into spiritual signification, this would help to explain several patterns in players’ attributions and rescindments of spiritual significance. In closing, I identify two contributions CSR can make to the study of emergent religiosity.