Rhetoric of Religion
Spring 2003

The Function of Religion in Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games

“Game design is an art and a craft, and like all arts and crafts, it has techniques and approaches, and that implies that it can support a criticism.” -Ralph Koster

Since the beginning of time, religion has played a fundamental role in the development of human history. With communication becoming more and more computer-mediated, many aspects of human activity have migrated onto the world wide web, mirroring and sometimes replacing the real space activity. Systems of religion have proven to be no exception to this. While online role-playing games are often not taken seriously by the “real life” community, many aspects of online community life have generated both speculation and debate on the value of interactions and systems on the web. Game developer David Kennerly took the basic hack-and-slash computer game and infused it with symbolism, history, and intricate religious and political systems. The manner in which the religious system functions in Dark Ages Online Roleplaying mirrors the way a religion functions in reality; it serves to increase group cohesion and, through a complex structure of religious symbols, provide supernatural sanctions against the violation of group norms.

The first of the virtual communities was born with the first MUD (Multi-User Dimension). These roleplaying computer games ran on bulletin board systems or Internet servers and became immensely popular. In 1995, Korean computer game company Nexon Co. launched the first graphical online game. The Kingdom of the Winds, based on a tale of love from a popular Korean comic, combined elements from the immensely popular text-based online games with a simple low-bandwidth graphics engine, producing a new phenomenon; massive multiplayer online games. Two years later, Nexon released a second massive online game, Dark Ages Online Roleplaying. These virtual worlds located on the Internet involve players interacting with each other through graphical representations of themselves. In recent years, virtual communities have flourished thanks to the converging technologies of telecommunications and computing.

Virtual communities “are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace” (Rheingold). Many of these communities have attracted the interest of academic scholars from many fields including communications, sociology, law, and economics. Every action and interaction that can be observed is of interest. Since communities are based upon the creation of shared categories, in order to have a strong community people must gather and perform shared acts and rituals which communicate these shared categories.

People who take the Internet less seriously often question whether a community can exist in a place that itself does not exist. Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community, has an answer:

People in virtual communities use words on screens to exchange pleasantries and argue, engage in intellectual discourse, conduct commerce, exchange knowledge, share emotional support, make plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, find friends and lose them, play games, flirt, create a little high art and a lot if idle talk. (Rheingold)

Geographical factors are no longer the only determinants in the creation of communities. People do not form a community merely because they live in a common locale. Identifying common interests is a way of finding the elements that bind isolated individuals into a community. Communities are formed out of necessity – people united for a common need or goal. Players are set against dragons, wars, and death, and they persevere. While many may scoff at the idea of both children and adults playing in a world of fantasy, the online community fulfills a basic need for some – to feel that they belong. Players in an online game gain the feeling of being involved in something bigger than themselves. Part of a community in which they can live a different life and meet different people. Virtual intimacy may take time, but strong bonds can be formed without a single “real-life” glance. Having a system of religion inside of the game serves to reinforce this sense of community through group community actions and rituals, such as religious services and prayer, also adding a degree of realism to a medieval (“Dark Ages”) style of game, which mimics a time in which religion played a greater role in the lives and destinies of humanity. These sorts of phenomena along with others have captivated various scholarly spheres.

Since the dawn of the text-based online world, “MUDs [have been] living laboratories for studying the first-level impacts of virtual communities-- the impacts on our psyches, on our thoughts and feelings as individuals” (Rheingold). Of particular interest are communities which use religious systems as a foundation for the shared categories that their communities are based upon, and just how these shared categories operate. David Kennerly, creator and original game director of Nexon’s Dark Ages, may have said it best when he stated:

Dark Ages is a fictional world. Its gods are fictitious. But the experience is real. The inspiration is real. The volumes that people write, and the thoughts that a community in discourse conjures is real. It is a theater for the creative spirit. (Kennerly)

The religious system found in Dark Ages is one of the more complex found in the world of online gaming. A library of player-created works has been filled with over four hundred works of theology, magic theory, racial sociology, inter-village economics, music theory, psychology and more. The Dark Ages players have, essentially, founded a complete cosmology in which their characters function and it is continually shaped, maintained, and reshaped through discourse. "There is no religion that is not a cosmology at the same time that it is a speculation of divine things"(Durkheim). Kennerly states in the above quote, “The volumes that people write, and the thoughts that a community in discourse conjures is real.” Through the creation of shared categories, through creativity and through discourse, the community has created a reality in which it functions. These constructions become a part of the history of the game, and are used during rituals and events in the game. French sociologist Emile Durkheim states:

It is by common action that it takes consciousness of itself and realizes its position; it is before all else an active cooperation. The collective idea and sentiments are even possible only owing to these exterior movements which symbolize them, as we have established. Then it is action which dominates the religious life, because of the mere fact that it is society which is its source. (Durkheim)

It is because of religion’s “eminently social” nature that it is formed by and continually reinforced by ritual action in the player base that established it.
Just as religion has society at its source, many characteristics and values of a religion are infixed in the society that bore it. Because these values are intrinsically part of the society, they are deemed fundamental to its very existence. In many communities, such values and rules become the basis for a complete justice system, enforcing strict adherence to, essentially, the society itself.

Sacred symbols thus relate an ontology and a cosmology to an aesthetics and a morality: their peculiar power comes from their presumed ability to identify fact with value at the most fundamental level, to give to what is otherwise merely actual, a comprehensive normative import. (Geertz)

A religious system of sorts can be found in many different online games. These basic systems have been implemented in games as a way to keep the player population under control. Having a religious system that enforces social mores disallows the presence of carnivalesque behaviors. Ernest Adams, a writer for the computer gaming site, Gamasutra, comically testifies, “On-line, there's a way to create, and most importantly, enforce shared values. You tell your players: God exists, and He sees all. God hates sin, and punishes it reliably” (Adams).

The dawn of the internet age brought significant change to interpersonal communication. Because of new and improving telecommunication technologies, much human communication has been transferring to virtual settings. However, the framework and creation of these societies mirrors the creation of “real space” societies, in that religion, for one, functions for the same means. Games such as Dark Ages present parallel worlds very similar to our own reality. Dave Kennerly’s believes that “a fine game gives insight into the human condition... The world resembles a game, and all of us are players--our moves finite, our consequences irreversible.” The game then is acting as a terministic screen of reality.

"Even is any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality, and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality" (Burke 45).

By setting aspects of the human condition apart from others, and giving a sense of detachment from the situations and events that they can watch online, allows people to experiment and explore things that they might be excluded from in real space. The freedom of a separate life online, along with the guiding rules and values of a religious system allow individuals to feel like they can be part of a community in an age in which true community life is difficult to find. While many dismiss the religions of the internet and internet games as purely fictitious, it is not unreasonable for some to appreciate a new-found (if only pretend) feeling of the divine, in an online world where God and gods, magic and spirits can still exist and have great power. These games offer people a chance to rediscover a life they lost when they lost faith in anything they could not see, or a spiritual life they may have never known:

“In an MMORPG, the bandwidth is too low to experience anything religious. It's just a connection displayed on a computer screen. But when you are encouraged to imagine yourself in a relationship with divinity, the deep elements within yourself that religious people describe as the reflections of divinity shine. Thoughts you hadn't expected within your grasp naturally come to your tongue. Depths of ethical decisions become fathomable. An appreciation and re-initiation into the wonder of the world is born” (Kennerly).

 

Works Cited

Adams, Ernest. "Implementing God* in the Online World ." Gamasutra 24 Apr. 1998. 22 Apr. 2003 <http://www.gamasutra.com/features/game_design/19980424/implementing_god.htm>.

Burke, Kenneth. "Terministic Screens" Language as Symbolic Action. Berkeley: U of California P, 1966. 44-62.

Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religion. Trans. Joseph W. Swain. New York, New York.: The Free P, 1965.

Geertz, Clifford. "Ethos, World View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols." The Antioch Review. XVII.4 (1957).

Howard, Rheingold. The Virtual Community. 5 May 2003 <http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/intro.html>.

Kennerly, David. "The Role of Religion in Dark Ages: Online Roleplaying." E-mail to the author. 6 May 2003.

Koster, Rapheal. Raph's Page. 1998. 20 Apr. 2003 <http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/index.html>.