Videogaming Theology
Below is an excerpt of a book review on Frank G. Bosman’s Gaming and the Divine I did for Humanum Review, which is run out of the John Paul II Institute at the Catholic University of America. I was kindly invited to write a number of articles for Humanum over the last few years, and this latest review was for their current issue themed “Things to Focus On”. Please enjoy the excerpt and uou can read the whole review by clicking the link at the bottom of the page.
Introduction
At the end of the first year at a new job, I rewarded myself with the purchase of a retro 8-bit gaming console, a purchase that gave me access to games I played as a schoolboy. I was a kid all over again, losing myself in worlds where I fought street thugs, gathered powered up mushrooms, and warded off alien invaders. Now playing as an adult, I have come to appreciate these video games more out of nostalgia than entertainment. However, as a researcher in theology and culture, I wondered if more was at play than just mere entertainment. Such questions persisted as I surveyed the more recent offerings of more sophisticated platforms, endowed not only with exponential technological advances, but also designs and stories—and with these, flows of capital—that used to be the reserve of print and movies.
A rich literature has explored our collective immersion in gaming from various angles. For instance, Daniel Muriel and Gary Crawford have provided entries that discuss gaming not just as products of culture, but culture forming. Frans Mäyrä has gone further, considering gaming to be so all encompassing as to warrant being a culture unto itself, meriting a discipline in its own right. Jamie Madigan has looked into the psychology of gaming at the level of those who play them as well as those who make and sell them. There are gaps, however, at an intersection between gaming and the pursuit of the transcendent, as well as gaming as a theological issue. While D. Brent Laytham’s iPod, YouTube, Wii Play has looked at the theological dimensions of our culture of entertainment, David Miller’s God and Games and Hugo Rahner’s Man at Play have looked at play more generally through a theological lens. Kevin Schut’s Of Games and God has gone some way in bringing focus on video gaming as an issue of concern for Christian living (especially the lives of Christian gamers). However, a significant gap persists: the specific phenomenon of video gaming treated as a specifically theological concern.
Frank Bosman’s Gaming and the Divine fills this gap with a laser-like focus, exploring video games specifically as a subject of interest for systematic theology. This seemingly narrow focus, however, has enabled Bosman to explore video games’ capacity to delve into a plethora of issues pertaining to the divine, that in turn require a theological vocabulary to decipher. These Bosman unveils clearly and concisely, enabling this quintessential artifact of postmodern culture to become a touchstone for the continuation of some foundational cultural projects, one artistic, the other religious.
Art
Is Gaming art? The philosopher Monroe Beardsley once defined art as arranging “conditions intended to be capable of affording an experience with marked aesthetic character or (incidentally) an arrangement belonging to a class or type of arrangements that is typically intended to have this capacity.” By this definition, many arrangements of conditions can be classified as bearing aesthetic potency. While paintings use dyes and orchestras use wood and string as their conditions, video games arrange pixels to enable the player to perceive people, buildings, maps, and monsters. More than depict, games cohere these elements into a unity, a world into which players are drawn out of themselves and affectively transposed into the world of the game. Bosman takes this a step further, observing that the conditions of video games are not pixels strictly speaking, but texts, “discourse[s] fixed by writing.” Games work because a communication of information, facilitated by strings of subterranean code, underlies our perception of the movements of pixels from one set of plot points to another. Video games are then life-giving texts, fonts of animation to myriad places and beings.
What cements their aesthetic valence is their ubiquity in everyday life. If Andy Worhol’s Campbell’s soup can posters and Brillo box sculptures have taught us anything, it is that quotidian objects can also constitute the conditions whereby aesthetic experiences emerge. Therefore, we cannot deny this aesthetic capacity to a form of everyday entertainment like video games. Indeed, aesthetic experiences form the raison d’être of video games, experiences that gamers enter into frequently, if not everyday. However, does their quotidian quality make games parallel the kitsch so prevalent in other products of pop-culture? To this we can say that a game cannot afford to be kitsch, since kitsch does not enrich our associations of the objects depicted. Far from mere representation, a video game’s success as an aesthetic experience depends on more than simply an arrangement of pixels. It also transforms our experience of what is depicted, making the arrangement point beyond itself to something more. For Bosman, part of this “something more” is their being inherently…
