Born Again Digital: Exploring Evangelical Video Game Worlds

Evangelical Christians have been creating video games for over thirty years, outpacing the efforts of all other religions. By the count that guides the present study, 773 games were made for religious audiences through 2010, of which 474 identify their affiliation as only "Christian," or "biblical." Like other artifacts of digital religion, these games allow us to see the entanglement of people's theological and technological universes. However, unlike many other aspects of digital religion, religious video gaming's novel artistic forms, cultural critiques, and theological possibilities largely blossomed beneath notice. Evangelical video game culture, thus, presents the creative production of a historically significant avant garde whose critical perspective has been neglected outside its own community. In particular, Evangelical video gaming transforms the concerns that connect it to other digital cultures - "violence," for instance, or "immersion" - by attending to the moral status of the player-in-play. This study combines the methods of Religious Studies, Science and Technology Studies, and Cultural Studies to show how the popular artifacts of digital religion can shed light upon their cultural context. My initial frame orients Evangelical video games through broad theoretical concerns and a series of cultural histories then focus our attention upon specific telling instances. My introduction applies a relational ontology to establish a vocabulary for examining religious video games in terms of the digital, religion, and play. Chapter two considers how groups learn to live with computers and details the specific stakes of digital religion for Evangelical Christians in the context of "spiritual warfare." Chapter three situates my catalog of religious games within a detailed history of digital religion. Chapter four focuses on the place of Evangelicals in the debates around video game "violence." Chapter five then considers how those debates are visible in seven Evangelical First-Person Shooter games. Chapter six provides a theoretical orientation to the future of Evangelical gaming by considering the notion of "immersion" in games. Chapter seven concludes by summarizing findings and offering suggestions for further research. Finally, an appendix presents a catalog of religious games as a resource for ongoing research.Doctor of Philosoph

Interacting with Philosophy Through Natural Language Conversation

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Exploring Techno-Spirituality: Design strategies for transcendent user experiences

This thesis presents a study of transcendent experiences (TXs) — experiences of connection with something greater than oneself — focusing on what they are, how artefacts support them, and how design can contribute to that support. People often find such experiences transformative, and artefacts do support them — but the literature rarely addresses designing artefact support for TXs. This thesis provides a step toward filling that gap. The first phase of research involved the conduct and analysis of 24 interviews with adults of diverse spiritual perspectives, using constructivist Grounded Theory methods informed by relevant literature and by studies performed earlier in the PhD programme. Analysis found that TXs proceed in three phases — creating the context, living the experience, integrating the experience — and that artefacts support two phases and people desire enhancements to all three. This TX framework supports and extends experience structures from the literature: it recognises the top-level categories as phases in a cycle where integration may alter future contexts, and it extends the structure of TX by incorporating the relationships of artefacts and of enhancement desires to the phases of these experiences. This extended structure constitutes a grounded theory of transcendent user experience (TUX). The second phase involved the design and conduct of three “Transcendhance” game workshops for enhancing transcendence, which incorporated themes from the grounded theory and aimed to elicit design ideas in an atmosphere of imagination, fun, and play. Participants sketched 69 speculative ideas for techno-spiritual artefacts, and analysis mapped them to TX phases and identified possible extensions inspired by relevant research. The great majority of ideas mapped to the phase Creating the Context, with very few mapping to Living the Experience, which suggests that context may be easier than lived experience to understand and address directly. This point is especially important for experiences such as TX that are tricky to define, impossible to arrange or anticipate, and thus unsuitable for straight-forward “classic” user experience methods. The final phase involved the elaboration of workshop ideas to explore the extension of design fiction for TUX. Analysis related design fiction to the TX phases and suggested features that affect design ideas’ potential for TUX design fiction. This phase ended with the proposal and analysis of three new forms of design fiction — extended imaginary abstracts, comparative imaginary abstracts, and design poetry — using workshop ideas to illustrate the forms, their construction and use, and their benefits to TUX design. Transcendhance workshops and TUX design fictions approach techno-spiritual design peripherally, “sneaking up” on lived experience by addressing context and enabling the consideration of ineffable experience through storytelling, metaphors, and oblique imagery. This thesis combines the grounded theory of transcendent user experience with the Transcendhance workshop process and new forms of design fiction, presenting peripheral design as a promising strategy for facilitating design to enhance transcendent experience