Religion and Digital Games: Past, Present, and Future Studies. An Overview

This article is a survey of over one hundred academic studies on religion in video games. Ranging from the early 2000s to 2022, it highlights the main themes and methodologies of these works as well as their relationship with the multi and interdisciplinary academic literature relevant for the study of this object: post-secularism, internet, the language of games, digital technology, anthropology and more. This overview is divided into two sections, each highlighting how specific methodologies from the social sciences and humanities have been used to address particular aspects of the representation, interpretation, and experience of religion in digital games. The aim of this paper is therefore not to report all the works that have been published on the topic of religion in digital games but to use most of the published and better-known works in this field to highlight some of its key epistemological characteristics and themes. Finally, in the conclusion, we focus on the limits of these past research and we indicate some future paths to follow. Most notably, we highlight 1) how such field has undeniably proven the relevance of a religious dimension in digital games, 2) the epistemological limits of a rather rigid distinction between the analysis of gamers and the one of games, 3) a lack of diversity in the specific objects studied and especially in relation to the new social reality of gaming, 4) the long-lasting fertile dialogue of this field with the interdisciplinary context of studies on many different topics for which it is reasonable to foresee a significant impact of A.I. and intermediality on the future of these studies.