This Is Not a Game: Violent Video Games, Sacred Space, and Ritual

Abstract

Some things have be believed be seen.-Ralph HodgsonVideo games, especially those with religious content, create something similar space. They can, like spaces, provide of orientation via assumption of ordered cosmos with predictable rules. They too can frame discrete spatial elements, and sometimes even attempt map rules of circumscribed space onto reality. They focus desire by presenting us with symbolic arena in which designers have predetermined how things should work. In those video games that intersect directly with religion via symbolism or depiction of space, game itself also often functions as sort of space, with many of same features and symbolic, ideological functions. If deliberate circumscribing of space means by which humans map order onto reality, then looking at video games as having ritual and spatial components seems apt means of uncovering their ideological potential.In middle of twentieth century, long before video games were even imagined as mode of popular entertainment, religious theorist Mircea Eliade argued that recognition of sacred within profane world kind of order-making activity, offering hierophany that reveals an absolute fixed point, center within otherwise chaotic space (21). For Eliade, to organize space repeat paradigmatic work of gods (32). The creation and maintenance of space way of rejecting chaos of ordinary life, of symbolically arguing instead for ordered cosmos, represented symbolically by ordered area of space itself set apart from rest of life. Much more recently, media theorist Ken Hillis has expressed similar sentiment about virtual reality's ability induce our of desire, transcendence, and ideal. Hillis notes idealization of virtual reality, marked by a widespread belief that space (understood variously as distance, extension, or orientation) constitutes something elemental. Virtual reality lulls us into thinking that space behind screen real, since reflects support for belief that because light illuminates space therefore produce space priori. The illusion of space registers for us as space. As result, says Hillis, of virtual reality may experience desire or even something akin moral imperative enter into virtuality where space and light ...have become one 'wherein.' We are motivated by desire for sense of entry into image and encouraged view screen and its mechanisms as transcendence machine or subjectivity enhancer, that works collapse distinctions between conceptions built into virtual environments by their developers and perceptive faculties of users (Modes of Digital Identification 349). That is, technology encourages us see virtual reality as more real than reality.Brenda Brasher similarly observes in cyberspace what she calls omnitemporality, that is, the religious idea of eternity as perpetual persistence (52). Although notion of omnitemporality first manifested as religious notion, concrete expression or materialization of monks' concept of eternity, finds new expression today in wired culture. Cyberspace, like religious notion of infinite, is always present. It mimics much older ideas about heaven, since whatever exists within [cyberspace] never decays. Whatever expressed in [it] ... perpetually expressed ... quasi-mystical appeal that cyberspace exudes stems from this taste of eternity that imparts those who interact with it (52). Virtual reality proposes means of crossing beyond vicissitudes of ordinary life into immaterial 'wherein' of imagined permanence and fulfillment of dreams. Virtual reality promises, at times, work as kind of space itself.1 Hillis and Brasher are speaking of virtual reality in its most general sense, as sort of imagined ideal space behind screen. …