Eclectic Religion: The flattening of religious cultural heritage in videogames

ABSTRACT

Religious icons and representations increasingly appear, in the West, as cultural heritage rather than active subjects of religious practice. While churches become tourist landmarks rather than places of worship; religions’ stories and characters – their intangible cultural heritage – survive as rich bases for popular media alongside their traditional use of mediating divinity. This paper studies one form of such popular media – Japanese videogames, using the Final Fantasy series as a case study – to ask which religions, folklores, cultures and their divinities are represented in videogames? (All of them, flattened non-hierarchically.) How are these divinities mediated in videogames? (Together, juxtaposed eclectically.) And what are the implications for including what are normally mutually exclusive mediations of divine worship into popular media together? (It re-introduces them to a practice common outside of Abrahamic, protestant conceptions of world religion, by freely combining cultural heritages and religious practices in what are called ‘multiple religious belongings’). While these representations of eclectic religion may seem to trivialise traditions by making them interchangeable, it also manages to de-objectivate them and reveal their fictional, artefactual origin as cultural heritage, while leaving them intact as contemporary practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Eclectic religion
• religious cultural heritage
• videogames
• multiple religious belongings
• fictionalisation of the sacred
• sacralisation of fiction

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers who helped refine and nuance the argument above, especially with regard to reflections on the Japanese context. Lars is personally thankful for the help of Eustache, whose expertise (within the purview of this article) gave us pause.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lars de Wildt

Lars de Wildt is Ph.D.-candidate and lecturer at KU Leuven’s Institute for Media Studies, studying how videogames changed religion in a supposedly post-secular age; and how networked media changed conspiracy theories in a supposedly post-truth age. Lars was Visiting Scholar at Deakin University (Melbourne) and Université de Montréal; and has published work in Information, Communication & Society; the British Journal of Sociology of Education; Games and Culture; the International Journal of Heritage Studies; the European Journal of Cultural Studies; and others.

S. D. Aupers

S. D. Aupers is a cultural sociologist and works as Professor of Media Culture at the Institute for Media Studies, KU Leuven. His current work deals with different research projects on games and culture. Aupers has published in journals like New Media & Society, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Journal of Contemporary Religion, Information, Communication & Society, European Journal of Cultural Studies, American Behavioural Scientist, Public Understanding of Science, Cultural Sociology, and European Journal of Communication.