Beyond Solitaire Podcast 197: Lars de Wildt on the Pop Theology of Videogames
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Transcript
It's ad break time. I'm proud to announce that the Beyond Solitire podcast is sponsored by Central Michigan University Center for Learning through Games and Simulations. They just successfully funded their most recent game, Greg Luring Albbright's Keep the Faith, which is a light RPG about the growth of a religion. If you miss the campaign, do keep an eye out for a chance to late pledge in the coming weeks. Also, if you'd like to support Beyond Solitire, please head to patreon.com/beyondsolitire to help me keep the lights on. For now, though, enjoy the show. Hey gamers, this is Liz Davidson from Beyond. And this week on the pod, I have a very special guest. This is Professor Lars Deilt. He is an assistant professor of media studies at Hernigan. Uh, he can pronounce that better than me. He's also currently, this is like the coolest job title ever, a visiting professor at the H Highleberg Center for Apocalyptic and Postapocalyptic Studies. That's awesome.
How you doing today, Lars? Uh, I'm good. Yeah, it's a beautiful Easter Friday. It's a good good Friday to be awake, I guess. I guess. Yeah, it is a good Friday indeed, right? Oh, man. I forgot I was having a a religious studies person on the Eastern weekend. Um, but I actually had you on because I wanted to talk about your book, um, the pop theology of video games. Like that title alone immediately caught my eye. Uh, so for people who maybe need some context for the kind of work you're doing, um, what would you say that you study as a religious studies scholar? And then what specifically, uh, were you talking about in the pop theology of video games? just like the synopsis so we can get into questions.
Yeah. So I guess I would be something like a sociologist of religion or something like I'm interested in how people construct um together their worldviews and um uh media obviously play a play a big role in that like what we know about the world and how we know the world is mostly through screens right so um I'm 37 and I've only visited like a handful of countries I've been to like two places in the US for instance most of what I know about the United States and most of what people in the US know about Europe or China or anywhere in the world um we mostly you know know through media. And so what I became interested in I guess like 11 or so years ago um is how people construct um their understanding of the world through popular culture specifically. Um, and obviously as the kind of like biggest cultural industry we have, right? This gets thrown around a lot. Um, that supposedly video games sell more than movies and music combined. Uh, I'm sure there's some nuance to that, but uh, to me video games seemed like the thing to study. Um, partly also because you get put into these subject positions. Um, you know, you get assigned the role of American soldier or whatever. And a thing that I became interested in around 20 oh god 2014 uh which led to this book um is that my
friends and I grew up in this kind of hyper secular country right I think the Netherlands statistically where I grew up is one of the least religious countries in the world. Uh I think the Czech Republic is kind of on par. Um, but we were playing, you know, World of Warcraft and Dungeons and Dragons and like all these kind of games where um I was always like a priest and another guy was, you know, um, a druid or a shaman or like a warlock and all these kind of like religiously themed um, things to do. We would get quests from gods and kind of um, get blessings and divinities and stuff and that was all perfectly normal and we didn't really think of that much. Um so once I got paid to think about that I guess um my my question for the book was like why why do what turned out to be mostly secular game designers uh put religion in their products products that sell really well products like Assassin's Creed World of Warcraft obviously God of War Zelda like the whole series most years like top selling games will have at least one title in there that's kind of like got religion in there in either like a central way or just like in a way that we forget about. Right? So the question was why why do they do that? Um I was specifically kind of interested in like the forgettability or the invisibility
of religion like why did you know secular game designers make for you know boys like me um games about religion when neither of us are religious? like what central role does religion take up in that kind of society? Why does it sell so well? Uh and then finally, you know, the book is called producing and playing with religion or something, I think. Yes. And so like the the second part of that question is like okay, what do players actually do with that? Um so yeah, that became a long project and that book's been out for a while. Um, I finished most of the work like before the pandemic and then as everyone you know probably experienced things just kind of slowed down. Um, but yeah, so now it's been out I think for two years or something. Yeah.
Awesome. So when you say secular, so most of my listeners I do have an international audience but a lot of us are going to be in the United States. So what counts as a secular country and how did that impact you know you went to Montreal to re to interview people about Assassin's Creed you know you're on online forums which I'm assuming were people from a lot of different places so like how do you how do you um how do you define what is secular for the purposes of your work and do you see the United States as secular or not? I'm just curious. Um I mean there's absolute definitions of this, right? So like the secular would be technically um this movement away from religion as like a given a decoupling of of religion and state. Um but then statistically demographically we see that you know um the amount of people that identify individually as religious you know outside of how the state functions and stuff like that um is actually rising globally right Europe is kind of the only place where people are less and less religious but um um I'm gonna have to be careful with my word like I'm not I'm not good with demographics. I know that North America actually uh so the US including Canada and Mexico uh recently like also showed a kind of dip in religiosity but the way
I use secularism in my uh in my book I guess is just like people that don't assign to an institutionalized religion um and very often don't you know self-identify self-describe as religious right so people that you would call um or that we could call um agnostic atheists Um I also of course like you know pay just as much attention to to players that are religious or that are you know the classics uh like different forms of Christianity uh which is very much still the dominant religion uh on earth and in the US especially um uh and you know Islam, Hinduism, Janism uh I had I had a bunch of people in there including like all like more minor religions Um yeah so the question was like what what do I mean by secularism and mean is mostly people that selfidentify as not religious or belonging to a religious institution. Interesting.
Yeah. I think I don't remember the exact numbers but my dad sent me an article about the numbers for religion in the United States because of course my dad would send me that makes sense. Um but um but basically um Christianity is still kind of dipping although it wasn't dipping as hard this year as it was in previous years. But there's just more and more Americans that identify themselves as like spiritual but not religious or like I have some subset of spiritual beliefs but I don't consider myself a member of an organized religion. Um would that does that count as secular by these kinds of definitions? cuz I feel like so I live in a world where I'm an atheist like just for full disclosure and I feel alone so often like you can find little pockets of atheism and agnosticism in the United States but it's something that you don't tell people up front ever uh because you just don't know the response you're going to get.
Well, I mean I mean so so like what I think is funny is that first of all, yeah, there is like a lot of um kind of cultural social value put on religion, right? So it's not an individual thing of just like having faith that there is something or whatever. Um and secondly, what we see in so I said earlier that the Netherlands and the Czech Republic are some of the most uh um yes secular countries in the world. Uh they're also the only two that I think in their language um have a specific word for what you just said which is that you know you believe in something. You're not part of an institutional religion. I think in in Czech that's nutism but I might be very very wrong. Uh and in Dutch I'm 100% sure of this. It's which means like something isn't. Um, so what we actually see and what I think, you know, these video games that I wrote about are a sign of is that when people actually decouple the state and their own kind of religious identity from an institutional religion, right? Like I'm not Catholic or I'm not Protestant or whatever. there is still some kind of you know desire um to to connect with maybe the magic of it or the structure of the rituals or just the beauty of it like um going to going on holiday to southern France or Italy and like stepping into a church. Um, you don't have to believe uh in God for that and you don't have to like follow the
Pope or like read the Bible or you know convert to to to any kind of religion. Um but yeah, most people will have that kind of like desire. Yes. Uh so one of the major components of your book is talking about interviews that you conducted um at Ubisoft uh talking to people who were making Assassin's Creed. What made you choose to do Assassin's Creed as the game that you wanted to talk about? And also like how did you get in to do all those interviews? I mean I so like I should say as an academic we always have this like you know solid methodological kind of narrative. I wrote mine down a while ago so I forgot it. So I can be You did describe it in the book. So I can be like completely insincere. No, I mean it is sincere but it's not complete. It's not the whole story if I say that Assassin's Creed, you know, quickly became one of the bestselling franchises ever. It's one that is fundamentally about religion, right? Like so for those who don't know the series um um these games have always been about you know Muslim um hashim right assassins who um are trying to protect this kind of like artifact that is found in Jerusalem. Uh, and the Templars, the Christian Templars are trying to take that and
um, what kind of like becomes of that is this whole like franchise full of religious artifacts that are historically real and powerful and that are then explained as as sci-fi, right? So, it's like this fundamentally obsessed with religion, like as a franchise, it's obsessed with religion basically. Um, and at the same time it's very successful and at the same time it's made by what turns out to be, you know, very kind of like almost aggressively atheist people at the start of it. Um, so yeah, like theoretically that would be like enough to select this as a good case. Practically though, and I I definitely didn't put that in the book. Um, it's also just a question of access, right? So if your second question is like how did you get to talk to them? Um, it's after trying so hard to talk to anyone I could basically. Um, like I remember playing Horizon Zero at Dawn and talking to the people from Guerrero Games saying like, "Look, can I just be an ethnographer with you for like a couple like give me like an internship or something? I'll just stand by the water cooler and like talk to people and observe things."
um I got very close to like being able to do that, but basically um Sony didn't didn't like that or that was their excuse. Maybe they just didn't want like a nosy ethnographer there. So I I tried everything like I I got a um a scholarship from the International Game Developers Association in 201 17. So, I went to like GDC where a lot of the kind of AAA game designers come together. Um, tried to talk to everyone, but eventually it it was the Yeah, it was just moving to Montreal for for like a couple months. I think four and a half months I was there. Um, that was the trick. I have another friend called Peter Vona. He did the same thing to like a Swedish game studio called Paradox. Um, and he he basically just like showed up at their doorstep every day until they talked to him. Um, I did it a little bit differently, but I you know uh at some point you you you get some informants, you get access to a network of former workers and workers.
Most people were not anonymous or anything. Um nothing well accidentally in retrospect something NDA was disclosed. Um but like mostly I wasn't like they they learned very quickly that I wasn't like a scary journalist. I wasn't out to get scoops. I was just a very boring um academic who was going to probably take years to write a book and um like I wasn't going to write down anything nasty. I just wanted to reconstruct like how did that franchise come about and and I'm proud to say I was able to do that. Like I talked to at that point what had been every creative director. So like every person who like comes up with the game um traditionally like ever from like the first one. Um I talked to you know everyone on the brand team which is very cool about Ubisoft. It's it's a big organization. It's also somewhat of a burnout factory. Um but um there's like a couple people kind of controlling the end product and making sure that it's all consistent and um so I got to talk to many of those.
Um yeah, I just got really really lucky I think just hanging out in the right bars and and at some point like if you start talking to people or if you can tell them like oh no but Patrice Des already said yes, right? Um then you know other other people want to join in as well. So how do you um I mean let's just say that at least in the United States if you come up to somebody and you ask if you could talk about religion or Jesus they automatically think that you are trying to convert them to something difficult. So how do you approach conversations about these topics with people that you are interviewing? I I guess I leveraged some kind of like naive Europeanness or something. Um but I I I basically approached people saying like this is my topic. I'm interested in why religion. Uh I'm talking to these people. Would you also like to like sit down? I'll I'll get you like I'll buy you a drink or a coffee. I think I spent most of my PhD salary uh on like getting game designers who made three times 10 times my salary like getting them coffee because that's all I could get back, right?
Um yeah. I don't know. Um I just told them like this is what I'm interested in. Why'd you put the religion in there? Who makes decisions anyway? Um come talk to me. Maybe they just came for the coffee. I mean fair enough. So um a lot of this is covered in the book, but I'm going to ask also just so y'all know this book is available for free and I'm putting it in the show notes. So you should go read it. Uh we'll we'll flag that again later. But when you ask people about why religion, how many of them had I guess like a actual answer to that question? Because I feel like religion is something that people kind of feel instinctively about but don't approach critically. So how did that come out in the answers that you got? I was met with like so many confused game developers.
Like I like again Assassin's Creed is about like the Apple of Eden and like Templars and Muslims and like throughout history these kind of like religious groups and then I talked to them about it and they would still go so what does that have to do with religion? Like it's such like a staple of video games that I think it's almost become invisible. And I think people kind of assume that if a video game has religion or if anything has religion that it has this kind of like missionary goal that it's trying to make people religious. So one of the kind of silly hypotheses I had is that you know Ubisoft is secretly a Christian organization trying to trying to like popularize the Bible with kids or something. It's not. Um, so like mostly responses were meant like I was met with confusion like what does that have to do with religion anyway?
Um, but yeah, that's that's why interviews take like an hour and by the end we have like a good picture of that. Um, yeah, I don't know. I forgot what was the initial question again. Oh, basically like you know did most people have a real answer about why there was religion or Yeah. Yeah. And it was mostly to do with atmosphere. So one thing that I I learned about um game development which I'm learning again now that I'm I'm try for my new project I'm trying to interview people who make Call of Duty. It's not about religion. It's about another kind of worldview I guess military interventionism whatever. Um but one thing I learned is that you know thousands of people for like years or in the case of like the first Assassin's Creed like only 200 something people for like several years but still like a lot of people work on one title um takes them a long time and they're all kind of like what do you call that like when horses have like they have blinders on basically. Yeah. they look at like they're one tiny thing. And so the fun thing is that to like get them to talk to them all separately and reconstruct what they're doing.
Um I mean there there are of course like people who have the overview and that by definition is the creative directors. That's that's you know in the end I think those were the most helpful interviews to get like a good idea of like how choices were made. Um, and it turns out that the reason religion is in there, um, very often people explain it as like a form of atmosphere or magic. Uh, narrative kind of like, um, directors and writers and whatever, they usually explain it by saying, look, it's just like an easy way to explain things. Um, so outside of Assassin's Creed, the classic example would be the Paladin. If you have any game, if you pick up like a new board game or a tabletop game or like a new video game RPG and you see a class that has like a big shield with like a cross on it, you immediately know what the magic comes from. Like, okay, they're like obsessed with some divinity and they have like a strict rule set and they're probably like lawful good. You don't have to explain that. So, that was one explanation, right? It's like just practical. The other one was atmosphere.
Um, and then when it came to Assassin's Creed, the answer was very clearly that it started from like a Kebeekqua specifically like French Canadian uh view on religion. Um, which is that you know they were all children of the revolution is what what they call it. So, it's this kind of like myth or self-narrative of Kebeekqua religiosity that they were all Catholic and then one weekend they woke up and they didn't want to go to the church basically anymore. Like they all became atheists. Um, and Patrice Des spec specifically had this kind of like very very anti-religious, anti-dogmatic message that he wanted to convey with the first what was going to be like a trilogy, the first three Assassin's Creed.
Um that was taken out of course like Batist was just as like if a if a game designer becomes too big. Hideyokojima even right was like the famous game designer of of the Metal Gear Solid series and and later Death Stranding and so on was fired and like usually the political economic kind of explanation is that you don't want like a big icon to lead a game because there it's not always great for profit. You don't know what they'll do. Um you have to pay them a ton. So you kind of want to let a franchise kind of like just be reproducible. And so that's what Ubisoft did very well I would say. Um so they got rid of Patrice Deile and they uh uh they made it into a formula and that kind of like anti-dogmatic you know reason to put the religion in there this actual ideological reason to put religion in Assassin's Creed initially was taken out. it became a game that um for better or worse, right? Um was made to kind of please everyone and sell to everyone. So you don't want like a bunch of like I don't know, you don't want gamers in Indonesia, which is, you know, not just a Muslim majority country, but like where most of the Muslims in the world live. Uh you don't want them to not buy a game because it has or like because it has the suggestion that Muslims are bad, right?
Um the same for Christian minorities and whatever and especially when it comes to like more recent history than the crusade period. Um um yeah that became an important part of Assassin's Creed kind of like deoliticizing that making just again you know like I started out saying religion about a sense of atmosphere and like magic and ritual and structure. Yeah. Oh man, this is interesting. So I'm not saying that we should hurt people or be mean about other people's religions. I do think it's a little sad that like an artistic vision gets whacked in pursuit of just kind of like a oh everyone could be cool with this. But it leads me to another question which is so in your studies so far where is the line between this is this is religionist background noise. Maybe I don't even notice it.
People just accept it. How does it tip over into oh this is religious messaging and I'm going to respond to it differently? Because if you walk up to somebody, as we mentioned, right, you say, "Oh, well, I want to talk about Jesus," everyone's like, "Oh, whoa, whoa." Uh, but if you just put it in the game, it's almost like people don't consciously think about what they're doing. Like, how do you keep it seamless and like where can you see like breakthrough into consciousness when you study these things? Yeah. So there's three answers to that and like the basic one is that you know largely it depends on the player right so like when I when I did research into like player discussions and when I interviewed players um it it quickly became apparent that players from different cultural and religious backgrounds would read games differently. There's the famous story of like the the person who returned uh Bioshock Infinite, right? uh because it had the the baptism scene in it and you couldn't play the game without being baptized as you know the character from a first-person perspective. So you very much identify with that. Um if you didn't get baptized basically so this person very publicly dramatically returned it. Um this wouldn't have been a problem obviously if you're you know okay with that or if you just don't care very much. Right? So the first answer is like games become preachy or uncomfortably religious depending on the player. It's that simple. But that's also a really boring answer because like
we can see in general that there are trends that um game developers have figured out, right? And especially marketing teams, brand management teams, whatever, they know how far to go. And so the other answer to that is basically just stick to Christianity is the rule. Um because like Christianity especially kind of like Catholic harmless magical um stuff, right? Candles, uh incense and you know nice like European churches, uh church architecture like those are seen as nonthreatening to the widest audience apparently. Um the same goes I guess for like Zen Buddhism and stuff. Um I I interviewed a lot of indie uh developers, right? So people who work outside of big companies like Ubisoft by themselves about this question like why don't you put your own religion in there um and they were like yeah I mean if we make it anything else than generic Catholicism basically it becomes about that like we have to explain that.
Um, and then there's of course like a third category which you know especially older listeners and older people like us would would like know which is that you used to have like yes Christian games but they were so objectively preachy right Bible games they don't really exist anymore because the budget for games and you know making games in general it it there's so much like labor and capital needed for for that. um that we don't see those anymore. But I mean that's the final category for where it becomes clearly like no longer an invisible kind of religion. Um which is where you know the preachy pedagogical Bible games.
Yeah, this is a a larger question. I mean I don't know if anybody can actually answer this question but uh I just want to talk about it now. So, you know, I I feel like this invisibility aspect and like what is the least offensive? Uh it also sounds like kind of white, kind of male, like it fits right into all those descriptions of right like you know whiteness as normal, masculinity as normal and therefore invisible and now oh Catholicism normal invisible. um you know have does your work kind of like touch on those larger issues or is that something that's like in the back of your mind as you're working? Yeah, let's talk about um because it's true like certain categories including the category of like mildly inoffensive you know European Catholic um but also you know whiteness of male of often male main characters certain things move into the background they become invisible.
This is a very common concept obviously to call that hegemonic right. Um but whatever is like whatever conforms as close you know relatively closely to like a picture of a arbitrarily made dominant culture um becomes invisible and so absolutely what I just said about Catholicism in games is part of that. That's partly historically, right? Because like so Egyptian Dutch game designer Ramy Ismmail once told me and I love this quote so I want to attribute it to him. He said look if if games had originated in the Arabic world instead of you know as they just so happened to do like in in the US um then the paladin for instance wouldn't be a neutral character. it would be an invader, right? Um, and so we just have this kind of like historical hegemony that is reproduced not just in games, not just when it comes to religion, but everywhere. Um, the shadow side is of that of course is that we also have a kind of like a marked other. If you do want to make something look scary, you I mean if like in strictly English language media classically, right, every Disney movie, you have like a white male hero or a or a or a woman or a white woman, right? And you give them an American accent. Um if you have a villain, you give them a British accent, right? Um but like in video games, we go a little bit further than that, I would
say. And so, um, how do I say this in a way that you don't cut this from the podcast, but like basically we shouldn't be surprised that if we've just spent 20 to 30 years in video games playing, you know, white American soldiers and superheroes and so on and shooting brown people in kind of like vaguely sandy Middle East, you know, whatever our imagination of the Middle East is kind of settings. You shouldn't be surprised that after 20 30 years of that in 2025 we seem to not care about seeing you know those people but the actual people um yeah like being burnt alive their places these kind of like Call of Duty maps right being reduced to rubble because to us they've become this kind of like anti-hgemonic other that we don't identify with right I'm talking about us white people the main audience for for video games still if you look at what sells um that are completely ignoring an ongoing genocide you might say right if you're the international court of justice or South Africa or large deville you would call this a genocide no doubt no stutter um and we're completely ignoring that and then it's partly because of hegemonic reproduction of um yeah white male American military interventionist um um yeah andy and that includes very much the kind of othering not just of race
not just of gender but also of of religion right um the idea that we very often kind of dismiss brown lives all over the world right for lack of a better word I don't know if that's the right way to say this in English sorry if if it isn't um but you know a lot of that is often veiled under the excuse of like oh it's Islamophobia right Dutch right-wing um politicians have for for many years been saying, you know, we're not racist, we're just Islamophobic. We're just so secular that we are above these religions of violence. And that is why, for instance, you know, cousins or, you know, Palestinians or anyone who isn't, you know, white and secular like, you know, like us Dutch people or or whatever educated Americans um don't really deserve the same kind of sympathy. um and that's very much been reproduced in in video games and religion is very very much an excuse for that.
So, this leads me back around to one of the earlier points that you made like right in the start of your book, which is that especially in secularizing societies or societies where like churchgoing is low, and I'm not saying that we need to fix this by people going to church because god forbid, but um you know, if this is you're you're saying that video games and like sort of these pop culture representations of religion are in a lot of ways people's main exposure to religion and religious ideas And so, you know, what does that mean? Like, if everything is just sort of invisible and it's normal and you don't think anything of it, then what is it doing to you when you're kind of sleeping on that?
Yeah. I mean, that's the core question in my book eventually. So like if we have the observation indeed that like you know we see religion so dominantly in games and then if we look at you know which games sell and how many hours the average kind of European North American uh spends on these video games uh versus you know how many of them go to church or are baptized or like you know do their bar mitzvah or you know whatever kind of religious ritual. It it is kind of like a counterintuitive but statistically likely very correct uh observation to make that most people encounter religion in video games and not in a church or a synagogue or whatever, right? And so how does that change religion? Because it it does seem to be that like even if we're not religious or practicing religion, we do very much like to buy things that have like a surface level religion in there.
Um what do I mean by surface level? It means that you know you have the the audio and the visuals and like you even in in video video games specifically you have the ritualistic kind of like structure of it potentially there are some very good analyses also of how and this is by Robert Garachi who writes in virtually sacred a great book about second life and world warcraft that non-religious groups end up in like having practicing a kind of solidarity and a kind of like um social function that he says are just basically indistinguishable from church groups for instance, right? It's, you know, taking care of each other, checking in on each other. Um, uh, the same way you might say that, you know, people who aren't religious, but they really love one football club have what we call religious functions. It's funny like religious functionalism comes from you know well like squarely the work of Emil would be would be central to that originatory for that and he actually uses the word play much more often in that book um on religion than he ever does you know any of the famous terms about effervescence right this collective experience of religiosity and so you might say on the one hand especially more social games or anything that binds people including you know, the play of football or video games or board game groups, whatever, has, you know, religious functions outside of institutional religion. But like secondly, I feel like
there's something else going on that when people only engage, and then I'm back to like the topic of popular AAA video games like Assassin's Creed, God of War, whatever, with kind of like the surface level magic and atmosphere and, you know, the sounds and the feelings of religion. um without maybe the moral code or indeed the the community um then we get a kind of yeah a similacra of religion if that word makes sense. So if like a similacrim is um way back before Briar popularized that word kind of like a bad copy of of a god, right? What Christians and and um oh what in in in Judaism and Christianity and all the and like Islam would be called an idol, right? Um I think something like that might might be the case for video games. Like we only kind of get the surface level nice things about religion.
um without you know the work of it, the faith of it um without you know making it something that guides your life and your worldview and I'm not judging that. I'm not moralizing that. I'm not deploring that. I'm not na saying oh no we lost God we killed him. Um, but I do think it changes how we should think and talk about religion in this case because maybe the case isn't so much that people are becoming less religious because they're not going to church and not, you know, associating with an institutionalized religion anymore. Um, maybe we we have just the same desire. It's just been kind of commodified and and standardized and completely reduced to like a yeah a simulacum of religion through video games and other such popular culture consumption.
E that is really interesting. I'm going to think about this. So, what I want to ask you though is the other part of your book is talking about how players respond um to religion such as it is in their video games. And a lot of that involves, you know, looking at forums, looking at online commentary. And I'm just fascinated by this. So, I always ask academics who like work with this kind of this this kind of data, how do you choose what forums to look at? How do you decide what you're going to take seriously in all that chatter? because so much of it is just kind of throwaway chat. Uh, and then, you know, how do you um how do you like kind of sift through and pick what counts as evidence when you're making an academic point?
That's a that's a great question. Uh, also because like I was I was very overly ambitious um with that study. It was the first study I kind of did for my PhD. I was, you know, transitioning into like being a social scientist. Um, it was also like 2015 or something. So obviously the social media landscape has changed since like my more recent studies uh mostly on other things like obviously veer towards um you know more toward Instagram um Twitter um until a couple years ago and like um these things change right so if I would do it next year possibly Tik Tok would not be as interesting Twitter is called X now Facebook is for very few people and most of them are bots. um we would probably like have to look more at uh right if I'm pronouncing that anywhere near correctly right some people call this red note um so you know these kind of the places where people talk online simply said change and back then in 2015 there was still a lot of like Reddit was very dominant um and uh and video game forums were still a thing like believe it or not and so I just selected for like okay which are the most active ones. Where do most people veer to? On the angophone internet, which thankfully is a legitimate position when knowledge production is
mostly done in English anyway, when video games mostly at least then like originate from from the US, like produced in the US with a American audience in mind. Um, and so I I just picked the the main ones. Game facts FAQs were Oh, yeah. big forum back then. Um, I even forget the names. God, there was like the the really good one that you had to like kind of semi be invited to. Neo something. Anyway, I just like took the ones that were popular then again in 2025 or 26. There would be very different websites or platforms, but uh yeah, took them and then I way like overly ambitiously just collected way too much. I looked at like anywhere they would like be talking about religions or religiosity or religiousness or any of the major religions and I selected for that um looked at like engagement so like where is like most of the material and then I did something that academics call right thematic coding um so and again I was overly ambitious I wouldn't do this now with some more experience and I would probably automate parts of this. Um, but I I read way too many discussions basically of people fighting online about what games mean and what we should do with that and how that differs based on their religious position and I just
coded for like eventually the main things that I noticed the patterns that kept coming back. This is like what what coding means, I suppose. Like you notice things and then once they come back, this becomes like a a thing you code for. I I should probably not be a methodological instructor. Um uh which unfortunately for my university I am, but um uh was that like people announced their religious position, right? So they would be talking about Bioshock Infinite or Assassin's Creed or Final Fantasy or whatever and they would like very often start their post by saying well as a Muslim I think this or that or and then they would um yeah they would have different interpretations of of games than you know from each other obviously and what for me was very so obvious like you you have a podcast a long time ago with um Adrienne Shaw if I'm not mistaken, right? Yes.
So, Shaw's work on like on this is much better like but it's basically an encoding decoding question. And so, of course, we know that people from different class backgrounds, cultural backgrounds, religious positions, gender, whatever, like interpret games well and like any kind of like cultural text differently. They associate or identify with like different characters. They interpret things differently. that makes sense. What I found particularly intriguing is that like as academics and also as game developers, we have these very strong ideas of like this is the kind of worldview I want my my game to kind of like emit. Look at how clever we are with like the procedural rhetoric. Uh you locus calls it that. Um but then gamers don't really care. Players just don't don't care. And so you would have like there's these really good publications by people like Frank Bosman, a theologian uh um who like has you know article length and book length analyses of Assassin's Creed by Shock Infinite. These games that these players were talking about online um and yeah players don't care for them.
It's like it it means something completely different. So for one group of gamers, Assassin's Creed was, you know, the most anti-dogmatic, anti-religious game ever. And for like a whole other group, that same game they played, you know, the same thing meant something else else completely. Um, but yeah, that was a lot of work like reading through Yeah. what must have been like tens of thousands of angry people talking to each other online. It took me more than a year. Uh, so you know, you mentioned that you're doing new work on Call of Duty. So just a like how are you taking what you've learned from the previous experience and applying it here?
Um, that if I'm focusing on like how people talk about or interpret a game, I'm going to either automate it or keep it very small scale. Right? Small scale. What's automate mean? Oh, I mean, so like like if you're looking at like 10,000 forum threads, then there's very good supposedly very good quantitative like content analytical methods that just like kind of you know whether through corpus linguistics where you where you compare a set of texts to like a a representative really large set of text to see like oh which words are used more often than in the newspaper for instance, right? Um, that's one method to kind of see and automate like what do these people talk about and how do they maybe talk about it in ways that are different from the norm, right? So, oh, players seem to talk a lot about religion. How people do sentiment analyses, um, topic modeling, I don't know. I'm not very much at home at that.
But if I would do that again, I would definitely not, you know, as a human manually read all of that and code that. Um and and supposedly there's very good methods for that and you can learn methods um or like find co-authors to do that. Um or I would like do it more small scale. So I found it in the end much more helpful to like select players really well. Like if you're in so if we know from the literature that that Muslims, Christians and atheists all understand the same game differently, then you let them play the game and you interview, you know, you know, theoretically selected um people from different religions um and that usually gives much more rich data um than that. So that's one thing I learned from this project. Um, the other one is that turns out that um, if you want to talk to like people who make games, you just got to show up on their doorstep. So, I guess I should go to Wisconsin Madison for for for Activision at some point and Shanghai obviously. Yeah, indeed. So, what is the scope of your Call of Duty project and what kinds of data are you currently collecting for it?
Um, so like if the interest for me has always been about like how worldview is produced by by games, right? Um, and like why the people who make them do that and how the people who play them might understand it differently for that for this like first for the first book it was about religion. This one is I guess about um military age and I'm particularly interested in uh looking at that now again in 2025 because we're suddenly in a situation and when I say suddenly it's like it seems like this has happened really really quickly where yeah 25% of the the you know the income from selling games globally comes from Chinese people and that poses a really really interesting that challenge for um specifically that part of the game industry that reproduces um American military hijgemony, right? So, if you look at the bestselling games over the last decades, almost every year the bestselling game is a Call of Duty. And very often in the top 10, there's another Call of Duty. And in most of those games, um, yeah, you're an American soldier in like, um, you know, kind of like vaguely desert-like or another kind of terrain, but it's always that or a British soldier. And so I'll have to give them that. And why that's interesting to me is that Chinese players don't necessarily identify with that. Like American military aggression in 2025 from like a mainland Chinese
um, position doesn't sell really well. Uh, and then I wonder why. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, it's never been super popular anywhere, even even within the US, I would say. But, you know, it sells. Um, it's become a neutral kind of thing, and I think Chinese player preferences break with that, but more importantly, they're like state has a policy. This is how I got interested in that. It's like very strong policies. um like there's several government ministries kind of like deciding which games are allowed inside the Chinese market right which again has become a huge very difficult to ignore market and it's still growing um and so you have to get through sensors and the reason I got interested in this is because religion was always filtered out right so notoriously World of Warcraft is one of the very rare kind of like western games that became a huge success And um a lot of like the surface level religious stuff was taken out. Um but also for some reason all the all the skeleton skeletons like um every every time you see like a skull in World of Warcraft um in the Chinese version it's replaced by a piece of bread. Um whatever. And so I'm curious about how um yeah, how the game industry will change, the video game industry specifically, how it will change based on those like Chinese state policies and player preferences. And I'm I'm using
Call of Duty as a primary case study for several obvious reasons, but also uh because they were doing that really really early. What's really impressive is that already in 2012 they were working on Call of Duty online which was Chinese only and did relatively well. That's really thanks. So just this is maybe a stupid question but I'm assuming that so when you go online you can play with people in servers all over the world. So, even if you're in China playing a censored game, are you showing up in servers with people from other countries as well and you just see something different, but it's like a swap in or is it an entirely different server in an entirely different game? Um, it used to be the latter. So it used to be really really entirely different games and we are moving toward toward like a kind of like simultaneous release globally because again video games take a very long time and a lot of labor like a lot of people a lot of capital to make and so making separate versions I I expect will not like be you know uh what's the word for that in English I don't know doable not going to be feasible for a long time. Yeah. Yeah.
Um like it's just going to be too expensive to make separate Call of Duties the whole time. Like if you look at the 2015 Call of Duty online like what what eventually was released um it's so different like obviously there's you know more Asian characters um that you play um but also like instead of like the traditional enemies uh right terrorists let's say um they ch shoot monsters in that one and it was also the start of like what became the kind of like goofy side of Call of Duty away from the military realism like having all the kind of like cartoonish uh guns and like bright colors and stuff. Um but that was such a big effort um that the that the game industry is kind of going toward making one release for everyone. Um what exactly that will look like, we're only still like starting to see. But yeah, I expect that if you know if players from mainland China and like international editions get to play together, right? So the version that right now people in in Taiwan might be playing or in in Japan or whatever, then the the usual trick is to have like server side the basics and then on your computer you see the different thing.
This is nothing new, right? America's Army, the famous um the famous, you know, US military built um AAA shooter um that was released on the 4th of July, I think, in 2002, like a year after after 911. Um that that one always had players, you know, server side being equal, but then on your screen, you would always be the American soldier. You would never never play like the other side. You would never play the terrorists. Yeah. Um, I think David Nebore calls this the swapping paradigm. Sorry, I'm an academic like in the sense that I'm super neurotic about wanting to like not sell other people's ideas as mine. So, yeah, if it's annoying cut out, I say, "Oh, as this person said, but that's nei and I think that will be that will be the solution uh for now, right? If everyone's playing Call of Duty War Zone or Call of Duty Mobile, then the players in China will just see a slightly different game. Maybe we already see the promotional concept art though um like the posters and stuff and and the game covers. If you still buy physical games, they won't just have the white male soldier anymore. Um there's like a Chinese soldier next to it, right? So together, you know, we can kill the minority or the majority world. Um, and so it's, yeah, I do see a kind of change there that I don't quite know how it'll
develop, but I have I have four years to study that. So yes, I really want to touch base again when you are done with this study because I just want to know. But it also sounds to me like the true way to change hegemony is money. Yeah. Yeah, I mean the frustrating thing we have so much discourse academic but also popular, political, whatever about representation, right? So we all know that it is important for people to be able to recognize themselves cynically. I want to say maybe we shouldn't have to recognize ourselves in you know war or whatever. like we don't have I don't have my I don't have to have my bombs or my warships named after after women necessarily just like stop killing people maybe for for oil and stuff saying this to no one in particular right but in any other capacity it's we know that it's important for people to identify themselves to to see you know growing up as like a um I don't know like a girl or woman of color like to see yourself as a superhero as We all know that's important and we've been talking about that for decades now and nothing really much has changed. But then Chinese people turn out to like buy a lot of games and suddenly everything's possible. So absolutely I think ideology is made not by thoughts and figuring things out. Ideology is kind of made by actions and money. And so you might say
the only conclusion is to like look at the world through a Marxist lens. um or at least that you know discourses of feminism and inclusivity and representation are impossible unless you you know take a Marxist lens to that and include class to that. But maybe I'm just a brochist and like a class reductionist if I say that. But this is something that actively I'm trying to kind of reflect on and figure out in my work. But it does seem to be that money talks. Yeah. Yes. Well, you know what? Let's just make an appointment for whenever you're done with this study and we'll touch base on how it turned out. Um, so now it's time for some softy questions. But the first one I have to ask is I just need to know uh why is there a center for apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic studies? Because that's awesome. And then what what are you doing there specifically? Because I'm really hoping that video games are not bringing about the apocalypse. he um they're not but we are rehearsing the apocalypse very very very often in them right if we look at games like Fallout or and I'm playing a lot of Pacific Drive right now um which is super exciting to me it's a it's for me it's almost a fantasy game because I don't have a driver's license and like it's about driving a car and fixing it constantly and and and it's at you know after some kind of collapse right and So, it's a relatively popular genre of
movies and board games and video games and like popular culture in general to think about the end of the world and the kind of like bit that comes after that. It's maybe you could say a fundamentally religious obsession also, right? That every every society and every culture needs its you know end of the world narrative. Um but yeah, it's a pertinent question in general that people at the Center for Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic studies, it's suddenly a mouthful, think of a lot, which is that oof, like if climate change comes, if you know a nuclear war might again be a possibility, if you know all these possible ends of the world are suddenly on the table again, it seems, how do we think about that?
How do we deal with that? And um there's this famous quote by either Frederick Jameson or Slavo Xek and repeated by Mark Fisher. There's a really complicated genealogy of that. Like they literally don't agree who said it first, which is funny. Um that like we we imagine the end of the world so often like 90s disaster movies were great at that for instance. I don't know why the 90s were such a safe space to imagine um that. And so like we we we imagine the end of the world so often, but we never kind of imagine the end of capitalism or the world as it is. So one thing that I'm studying is like if we imagine the apocalypse, like where is the apocalypse? And like Pacific Drive says a lot already, but like Fallout is a great example as well. It's always like in the US, what happened to the rest of the world? Like did that ever exist or whatever. How did the world end? Like how do we imagine it? Is it like a disease? Is it like a zombie thing? Is it um whatever? Right. So, we have all these fantasies and then um we kind of imagine like what does Yeah. What remains and um having trading, having money, having profit incentives, um being very selfish and looting are often very important parts of the of the post-apocalypse. So again this is like a third separate um project ostensibly but it but it all comes from an obsession of like how do we understand the world? How
do we construct worldviews through playing them right? Through looking like looking at virtual worlds and walking through them. Who are we in those worlds? Are we American soldiers? Are we Christians? Are we looking for the apple of Eden? Are we looting like empty things? Um yeah. So this is just like another aspect of that question of how do we construct our worldview um in this case after the end of the world. All right, maybe two future podcast episodes. Uh but but for now um uh you know I normally ask people what their favorite um game they've been playing recently is. So I'll ask you the same question. What have you been playing recently you liked? Bord video game. This to me is always the most anxietyinducing question I ever get. Um because I feel like I have so much responsibility to say something as an academic who works on video games to have like some really niche like really good arty game that just has everything.
And I could say that you know obviously I'm playing Pacific Drive right now um because I'm working on the Apocalypse. But my default answer has just become and I will play it forever and I will say this forever. Super Mario World is the perfect game. And it's like nothing will ever beat it. It is everything. I'm just gonna leave that there and then see if my comments blow up. Um and then uh and then if you want uh to be found online, uh where can people find you and follow your work? Um I I guess I'm luriswilt.eu. um which just redirects to like a Google Scholar page or uh or a link tree I think. So, but that that should that should work. Thanks for asking.
Perfect. Mars, thank you so much for coming on and talking about some serious stuff but in toys that's all over the world. Thanks for inviting me. Uh all right, everybody out there. Uh if you're looking for me, I can be found everywhere is beyond solitire. Uh, and as usual, please like, subscribe, comment, ask questions, and most of all, happy gaming.