RGST 90WC employs a method of “contract grading.” Students select from over 20 available assignments to complete satisfactorily within an “experience point” (XP) system of evaluation. For the mandatory “midterm” assignment students must successfully reverse-engineer assigned gameplay into both an artistic analysis of video game design and a commercial market proposal to a hypothetical publisher. Students then select the object of their intellectual effort for the remaining accumulation of XP, participating in single player and/or cooperative campaigns (self-initiated research versus crowd-sourcing); theory-based research; creative game design; gaming experiences; data science analysis; ethnographic data collection; research on material culture; and/or discourse analysis. Students are challenged to conduct their own research as it relates to online content and game broadcasters, professional and amateur gaming tournaments, gaming expos, cosplay conventions, and other forms of fandom.

Kathryn Lofton writes that religion is the “word to intensify what we do when we name authority, practice interactions, and interpret life itself.” Such a functionalist approach to social practice reveals religion manifesting in a variety of ways central to video game culture, including but not limited to: (1) religion as a form of roleplaying, both esoteric and exoteric, (2) as a recourse for meaning-making and devotion, (3) as the worship of group identities and social constructions, (4) as the reification of social division, and (5) as the communal narration of sacred time and events. As Western subjects grow further disenchanted with established religious institutions, popular culture serves many as an immersive means of re-enchantment (immediate forms of transcendence). This course challenges students to investigate the consumer competition that arises between religious and commercial institutions, applying theories of game design and techno-social gaming dynamics to the study of contemporary religion in the United States. What kinds of religious institutions embrace folk traditions of “emergent gameplay”? Why do various religious practitioners “occupy gamespace”? What sorts of gaming aesthetics intrigue said practitioners (i.e., fantasy, narrative, challenge, discovery, fellowship, sensation, expression)? How do contemporary religions serve as institutional content creators offering users and consumers something “marketable distinct” from their competition?

Abstract

Syllabus

RGST 90WC: Religion and Videogames

by Dr. William Chavez, Department of Religious Studies, UC Santa Barbara