Electronic Game Research Methodologies: Studying Religious Implications

Author(s): William Sims Bainbridge and Wilma Alice Bainbridge

Source: Review of Religious Research , Sep., 2007, Vol. 49, No. 1, Special Issue on the
Impact of the Internet on Religious Research (Sep., 2007), pp. 35-53
Published by: Springer

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 ELECTRONIC GAME RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES:
STUDYING RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS

WILLIAM SIMS BAINBRIDGE

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION*

WILMA ALICE BAINBRIDGE

YALE UNIVERSITY

REVIEW OF RELIGIOUS RESEARCH 2007, VOLUME 49(1): PAGES 35-53

A collection of pilot studies is described, illustrating how the religious implications

of video games can be studied electronically by content analysis, natural language
processing, ethnography or participant observation, and online interviewing. Many
popular games for the Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox plaiforms either mock accept
ed religion or present heterodox, exotic, or imagined alternatives to it. Online games
and virtual environments, like World of Warcraft and Second Life, offer inhabitants
emotionally compelling experiences connected to spirituality and the supernatural.
The methods employed here emphasize qualitative approaches, but connect them to
quantitative approaches as well. Methods like these can be useful to study a variety
of religion-related topics online. Electronic games are an especially good example
to illustrate these methods because they, like the World Wide Web itself, are a com
mercially successful vanguard of the new technologies that may be transforming
human culture.

T Nhis article presents new online research methodologies that could be used to study
religion, and illustrates them through a unifying topic: the religious implications of
electronic games. A number of researchers and members of the general public believe
that playing video games may encourage violent behavior in the real world, or may shift
the beliefs and values of the players in other socially undesirable directions (Felson 1996;
Anderson and Dill 2000; Rauterberg 2003; Barr, Marsen, and Noble 2005). Others believe
that electronic games can be educational, teaching fundamental thinking skills even when
the game lacks explicit curricular content (Economist 2005). Research on such questions
has not yet achieved a consensus (Boyle and Hibberd 2005), but the debate establishes a
prima facie case for the proposition that games could affect the player's orientation toward
religious issues. Electronic games may also reflect a well-established but growing com
puter-oriented counterculture fundamentally opposed to traditional culture, including reli
gion (Yinger 1960; Gibson 1984; Sterling 1986; Stephenson 1992). It is even possible that
certain categories of games satisfy some of the same psychological needs satisfied by reli

*The views expressed in this essay do not necessarily represent the views of the National Science Foundation or
the United States.

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 Review of Religious Research

gion: providing compensatory status, a sense of community, and transcendence of the mate
rial world (Stark and Bainbridge 1985, 1987).
Many electronic games mock conventional religion, and may thereby erode the player's
respect for the churches in his or her real community. Other games positively present ideas
and symbols from religions considered exotic in the West, such as Japanese Shinto and Clas
sical Paganism. Still others offer somewhat attractive invented religions. Religiously-based
criticism of video games has come both from Christian (Davis 2005; Morris 2005; Hardy
2006) and from Islamic (BBC News 2001; CNN.com 2001) quarters. Worldwide, in recent
years there have been three dominant home video game manufacturers-Nintendo, Sony
(PlayStation), and Microsoft (Xbox)-and the fact that the first two are Japanese may pos
sibly be significant. Its video games (like its graphic novels) could be a channel through
which Japan exports its religious traditions.
Electronic games are technically comparable to computer simulations, and simulation
has become a major methodological approach in the social sciences (Taber and Timpone
1996; Gilbert and Troitzsch 2005). In earlier research, one of us showed that computer sim
ulation was a valuable methodology for exploring the implications and rigor of social-sci
ence theories of religion (Bainbridge 2006). Especially in the case of online games, research
can examine how real human beings interact with each other and with artificial intelligence
"non-player characters" (NPCs), in complex environments that are at least as realistic as lab
oratory experiments.
This essay primarily illustrates the use of qualitative methodologies, such as ethnogra
phy and content analysis, but also shows how they can connect to quantitative approaches.
Given the essay's methodological emphasis, its substantive and theoretical values are more
latent than manifest. Its empirical topic, religious implications of video games, has largely
gone unnoticed by the scholarly community-although we think the games may indeed affect
the player's religious orientation, most likely in ways antagonistic to traditional western
faiths. This possibility raises theoretical issues, such as the role of face-to-face human inter
action in sustaining faith as opposed to private emotional experiences like those offered by
pre-Intemet games. Edward Castronova (2005) has argued that online games such as Everquest
and World of Warcraft are harbingers of a future in which much of human life takes place in
such "synthetic worlds." More modestly, we suggest that a massive shift is currently taking
place within video game culture, as all of the video game systems are connecting to Inter
net and games become social rather than individual experiences. Logically, social games, in
which each player must become a trustworthy quest companion within an enduring group
of players, will have even greater influence upon player's values, beliefs, and personalities.
This major shift could have the paradoxical result of greatly reducing the social isolation
widely believed to afflict many gamers, while drawing them even further away from con
ventional society into a subculture rife with religious deviance.

CONTENT ANALYSIS OF OFFLINE VIDEO GAMES

One cannot understand video games unless one has played them, so we worked our way
through seven of the most religion-relevant ones. Although we completed all the games, our
goal was not to win them but to understand them. Therefore, we occasionally consulted online
walkthroughs, instructions for every step posted on the web by expert players who thereby
gained status in the gaming community. We sometimes employed cheats, special bonus codes
revealed on certain websites that could help overcome obstacles. These games are extreme

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Electronic Game Research Methodologies: Studying Religious Implications

ly complex, so often we invested more than a work week becoming thoroughly familiar with
one, exploring its areas and implications rather than rushing to the end.
Depending upon the focus of research, a variety of techniques may be used to record
information. In a previous project we had documented about 750 programming errors in pop
ular video games, in preparation for to an analysis of their social-psychological implications
(Bainbridge and Bainbridge 2007). In that case, somewhat elaborate equipment proved very
useful. We had connected the several video game systems used in that work to a video cas
sette recorder and to a digitization device that ported action clips into a computer, where we
could select the best frames to illustrate each error, and post them on a website. For the fol
lowing examples, simple note-taking about religious themes was sufficient, although we
found that e-mailing our observations to each other as we separately explored games helped
motivate the work as well as record observations. The first four games described below and
in Table 1 were connected to popular movies, so examining the movies for comparison
became part of the research process.

Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe is the nearest thing to a popular
Christian video game at the present time, but nothing in the game specifically announces its Chris
tian character. Based on the first of a series of novels by C. S. Lewis, and produced in connection
with a movie, it supports values that Christians might admire. Jane Pinckard (2005) observed, "Dis
ney wanted to downplay the Christian allegorical elements in the film adaptation... to ensure wide
spread appeal among atheists, pagans, and god-fearing church-goers alike." Notably, the game play
encourages cooperation. The four playable characters are children whose virtues must be com
bined to achieve success: Peter (strong, natural leader), Susan (mature, patient), Edmund (athlet
ic, desires to succeed), and Lucy (adventurous spirit, empathy, desires to do what is right). For
example, at one point, three of the children must hang onto an ogre while Susan carefully shoots
arrows into it. The player must switch from child to child, playing as them in turn and sometimes
combining two, holding hands or one on the shoulders of the other. The game can accommodate
two players, who cooperate in moving the children forward, rather than competing.

The game includes cutscenes-unplayed scenes duplicating some action from the movie
about a lion character named Aslan, a Christ figure who dies sacrificially to be reborn.
Although Aslan is not explicitly connected to Christ, the fact that a child playing the game
cannot interact with Aslan provides a certain sacred distance. As in many games for small
children, failure to master a challenge does not lead to the death of the character played by
the user. Instead, the player is simply sent back to the beginning of the challenge. In a typi
cal video game for teens and adults, however, the player is given a certain number of lives,
losing one after each failure, possibly gaining lives along the way, and being forced to start
the game over if all the lives are lost. Given all the concern about violence in video games,
and the inconclusive scientific literature on its impact, we can wonder whether the games
have an effect on conceptions of death in the real world, either trivializing it or supporting
an expectation of reincarnation.

The Da Vinci Code recapitulates the story of a controversial novel and movie about the unraveling
of religious mysteries that have long been discussed in heterodox circles (Baigent, Leigh, and Lin
coln 1982). A professor of symbology and a government cryptologist, the hero and heroine, solve
innumerable puzzles and mystic metaphors to uncover murderers who turn out to be agents of a
Roman Catholic order. As the instruction booklet explains, "This conservative and highly regulat
ed sect of the Church values discipline and strict following of the rules above all. They have little
tolerance for other religions and their practice of corporal mortification (self-flagellation to absolve
their sins and keep pure) is looked down upon by the upper echelon of the Church... Their ability

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 Review of Religious Research

Table 1
Religious Themes in Several Offline Video Games

In Constantine, the very first thing a player must do is go to Hell. Based on a movie and graphic novel, the
story concerns John Constantine, a faithless soldier in the war between Heaven and Hell, at a time when infernal
demons have broken a truce and begun invading Earth. Many of his weapons have biblical origins: a pistol that
fires stones from the road to Damascus, a machine gun shooting nails used to crucify martyrs, holy water grenades,
a bomb called the Shroud of Moses, and finally, the spearhead that slew Jesus. Constantine's mission requires him
to shuttle back and forth between terrestrial Los Angeles and Hell's devastated version of the city, where infernal
fires hurl melting cars and buses through the sulfuric air. At the end, Constantine must fight against both the angel
Gabriel and Mammon, the son of Satan. Then he discovers that God had engineered the demonic invasion to
strengthen religious belief, which only reinforces his view that God is really no better than Satan.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is a fundamentally religious drama, but set entirely outside the
Christian tradition. The Star Wars stories concern the Jedi, akin to Zen masters, who possess super-normal pow
ers based on their knowledge of the Force. They must cultivate an almost Buddhist detachment from the world,
lest they be seduced to the dark side of the Force to serve their own personal desires rather than the spiritual needs
of the galaxy. This is the episode in which Anakin Skywalker is turned to the dark side, against the urging of his
teacher, Obi Wan Kenobi. Until the final level, the player alternates between the characters of these two Jedi, bat
tling enemies with a light saber and the occasional application of the Force. The Force can lift heavy objects that
block the path, throw things at enemies, cast spells on enemies to facilitate using the light saber on them, allow the
Jedi to jump great distances, and heal the Jedi when he has been wounded. Along the way, the player builds up the
abilities of both Jedi, only realizing near the end that this makes Skywalker a more formidable opponent when he
turns against Kenobi. In the final level, the two battle, with the player taking the role of Kenobi against Skywalk
er who is played by the game machine and becomes Darth Vader, the formidable villain of the series. The values
taught by Star Wars differ from Christianity not only in urging detachment rather than charity, but also in lacking
a deity and suggesting that humans can acquire god-like powers.

Castlevania: Lament of Innocence is set in Europe, centuries ago, telling the tale of a knight who tries to res
cue his beloved wife from a vampire's castle, which includes a large church. As the game's introduction explains,
knights "valued courage and honor, fighting heretics and heathens in God's name." The knight seeks the Church's
help in his quest, or at least its permission, but "The Crusades are raging in the East, and since the Church is focus
ing on fighting heathens rather than monsters, it has forbidden unauthorized battles." The only help religion offers
the knight is a couple of weapons - a cross and holy water - that sometimes kill the numerous enemies more effec
tively than his whip, knife, or axe. Ironically, once the knight has succeeded in his quest, and rescued his wife, she
reveals the only way her soul can be saved is for him to kill her, which he reluctantly does.

Final Fantasy X concerns the journey of the girl Yuna and her seven guardians, in a world named Spira, where
peace is periodically disrupted by an evil creature entitled Sin. Yuna is a summoner, meaning that her duty is to
journey on a pilgrimage, collecting Aeons to help her fight battles, until she reaches the destroyed city of Zanarkand,
where she must sacrifice her life to summon the final Aeon and defeat Sin temporarily. These Aeons are the crea
ture-like manifestations of dead souls, called the fayth, and are often named after supernatural beings from other
cultures, such as Bahamut and Shiva. Along the way, she also must perform "the sending," a ritual in which she
sends souls to the Farplane, their final resting place. The heroes have several encounters with the high priest Sey
mour Guado, who leads the worshippers of Yevon, the religion of Spira. Ultimately, the player learns that corrup
tion of the teachings of Yevon spawned destruction in their world.

God of War, which won several awards for best game of 2005, centers around Greek mythology and the inter
actions between Gods and mortals (Grossman et al. 2005). The player controls Kratos, a ruthless Spartan bent on
revenge against Ares, the God of war. Long ago, Kratos had been in battle against barbarians, when suddenly he
was about to be killed. However, at the last moment, he pleaded to Ares to save his life and promised his life to him
in return. Ares gave Kratos the power to slay the barbarians, and after that, Kratos loyally destroyed towns and
killed innocent people to satisfy Ares's desires. However, when Ares's evil plotting results in Kratos entering a holy
temple and slaughtering his own wife and daughter inside, he vows vengeance upon the God. Kratos goes through
many trials and tribulations to obtain Pandora's Box, the only weapon that can destroy a God. Throughout the
game, Kratos receives gifts of powers from the Gods, including the ability to call upon dead souls to help him fight
battles, granted to him by the God Hades.

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Electronic Game Research Methodologies: Studying Religious Implications

to blend with shadows is said to be uncanny, and their thirst to inflict God's vengeance, insatiable."
The book and movie clearly identified this group as the real Catholic order, Opus Dei, but perhaps
to blunt religious criticism, the game describes them as a disreputable splinter group of a fictitious
order, Manus Dei.

Unintentionally, the game offers religious players four sacred virtual environments in
which they could actually perform devotions: St. Sulpice in Paris (where the player can pray
at the stations of the cross), Temple Church and Westminster Abbey in London, and Ross
lyn Chapel in Scotland. By the end of the story, the player has learned that the male chau
vinist fathers of the church have deceitfully concealed the marriage between Magdalene and
Jesus, and the fact that their bloodline has continued to the present day. Their motive was
not merely to suppress women, but also to sustain the supposedly false myth that Jesus was
divine rather than being a mortal man. Refused permission to film at Westminster Abbey,
the moviemakers used Lincoln and Westchester cathedrals, instead. Both cathedrals received
considerable criticism for apparently supporting this heretical endeavor, and both posted
explanations on their websites: Lincoln publishing a sermon against the film and Winches
ter holding an exhibition debunking the story (Buckler 2006; West 2006; Till 2006; Kennedy
2006). However, the video game depicts each of the four genuine churches.

CONTENT ANALYSIS OF ONLINE GAME REVIEWS

Our experience with these games supports the view that many of them work against con
ventional religion, but this impression must be checked against other sources of information,
using a variety of methodologies. A number of websites serve evangelical Christian com
munities, and some of these comment on video games. Notably, a site called Christian Answers
offers many reviews of popular video and computer games that can be subjected to content
analysis.'
Each review includes four quantitative ratings, and social scientists should always be alert
to existing data that are naturally quantitative or quantifiable-so-calledfound data. The
four rating scales are: Christian Rating ("Is the game anti-Christian and immoral in any
way?), Violence ("Is it violent? Does it encourage violent behavior?"), Adult Content ("Sex
ual encounters, nudity, or suggestive or sexually immoral material?"), and Game Play ("Is
the game fun to play? High quality?"). These scales are scored from 1 (worst) to 5 (best),
which means that low scores on the Violence and Adult Content scale indicate that the game
heavily relies upon violence and sex. Games are classified by platform, which means the
particular machinery on which it is played. Table 2 shows correlations among the four meas
ures, plus means for four categories of platforms.
The correlations make sense, suggesting that social scientists can profitably work with
statistics from online reviews, which are extremely numerous in many fields. Violence and
Adult Content correlate with the summary evaluation called Christian Rating, but more so
with it than with each other. This is what one would expect with components of an index.
Game Play is hardly at all related to the three other ratings, implying that the technical qual
ity of a game is unrelated to its cultural orientation. Among the platforms, Nintendo is gen
erally reputed to be better for younger children, with its flagship Mario and Donkey Kong
games, and we see it has a higher Christian Rating chiefly because it tends to avoid Adult
Content (giving it a higher score on that measure). The final row of the table reminds us that
video games are different from personal computer games. The more favorable average rat

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 Review of Religious Research

Table 2
Quantitative Measures from Christian Answers Game Reviews

Christian Adult Game

Rating Violence Content Play
Correlations (r) for 363 Games:
Christian Rating 1.00 0.72 0.72 0.15
Violence 0.72 1.00 0.61 0.10
Adult Content 0.72 0.61 1.00 0.13
Game Play 0.15 0.10 0.13 1.00
Mean Rating from 1 (worst) to 5 (
49 Nintendo 64 and
Game Cube games 3.39 2.88 3.88 4.31
70 PlayStation and
PlayStation 2 games 3.13 2.89 3.56 4.31
33 Xbox games 2.97 2.58 3.27 4.21
165 PC games 3.67 3.36 4.13 4.39

ing of the personal computer (PC) games is probably well founded

lower cost of producing games for PCs means that several explicitl
been produced, which is not the case for the three video game plat
To carry out a pilot study using content analysis, we read through
games on the site, copying into a spreadsheet verbiage that express
criticisms, other than violence and adult content. We then inductiv
egory system to describe the various criticisms we found in review

Objection Categories
Presenting Asian Religions Favorably
Reviews of seven games complained that they presented Asian reli
For example, a review of Beyond Good and Evil observed, "At the s
Jade in deep meditation, Buddhist style. One of the characters even
tical powers of healing." A review of Dragon Ball Z: Budokai is bo
cept of spiritual energy (Ki or Chi) and by references to Japanese
Kami, and says, "The issue of the afterlife is also addressed in a ma
ing to biblical standards, as characters can be resurrected from the
Dragon Balls. Christians, however, know that resurrection comes fr
wishes." According to one review, in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind
utes it's 'The gods this, and the gods that...,' the Windwaker contain
you get a certain ability from the wind god and the ability to travel q
from the cyclone god... and the two sages when mentioned are said to
What really did it for me though, was that there is a point in the
to seek out two sages to pray to the gods for the master sword to b

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Electronic Game Research Methodologies: Studying Religious Implications

Presenting Alternate Religions Favorably

Fully nineteen reviewed games present images of alternative or invented religions, which
would be called cults if they existed outside the game. Reviewers seem especially disturbed
when the player must perform rituals or otherwise act in accordance with the deviant beliefs
of the religion. One reviewer notes about Dragon Quest VIII: "The characters in the game all
worship a certain Goddess, and you are required to enter her church to save your game. When
you talk to the Priest, he gives you some choices: Divination, Confession, Purification, Res
urrection. These options all serve different gameplay purposes such as resurrecting your char
acters, healing them of status ailments, saving your game, or telling you how much more
points you need to reach the next level." In The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, "There are dark
shrines around the world (Daedric Shrines) where you can find books and other lore about a
not-so-secret demon worshipping cult." In Xenogears a new religion sets out to destroy God;
the "Covenant" in the Halo series follows a religion dedicated to eradication of humanity, and
in Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, "One corrupted monk even practices an evil religion
in secret:" Exodus 20:3 says, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me," and Christian review
ers are offended when other deities appear in the games. Golden Sun: The Lost Age has a
Shrine of the Sea God; in Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven, "you hear about false gods," and in Fire
Emblem: Path of Radiance, "Characters often refer to the 'goddess' Ashera, and players will
meet Apostle Sanaki, the young girl said to be the goddess' mouthpiece."

Magic and Witchcraft

Perhaps reminded of Exodus 22:18, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," reviewers are
offended by thirty-eight games involving magic and witchcraft. Even the popular Pokemon
games for young children, in which the player trains cute little animals, comes in for criti
cism: "To gain the competitive edge, a trainer must use magic potions to heal and strength
en his Pokemon, and wear magic badges to control the stronger Pokemon. In addition, the
really powerful Pok6mon have psychic powers and can throw curses. This bears disturbing
similarities to witchcraft." Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories includes magic spells, and
"one character is known as a witch and has the power to rearrange people's memories." In
the Mortal Kombat II part of Midway Arcade Treasures 2, "Several characters engage in sor
cery, lending the game a darkly supernatural feel."

Ghosts
Eight games contain ghosts. One reviewer said of Star Fox Adventures, "The game has a
very mystical feel to it. The Krazoa Spirits are very ghost-like in appearance. When Fox col
lects one, it gets absorbed into his body, he floats into the air for a moment and his eyes glow
slightly blue. That can definitely make Christians uncomfortable." Perhaps innocently enough,
one of the tasks in Luigi's Mansion is sucking up ghosts with a vacuum cleaner. Metal Gear
Solid 3: Snake Eater presents a much gloomier view: "'The Sorrow' is a ghost who cries
tears of blood and forces you to walk down a seemingly never ending path filled with the
ghosts of every single person you killed in the game. This part was eerie and disturbing and
the ghosts let out an eerie yell every time you shoot them or punch them."

Spirit Possession
Finally, reviews of ten games explicitly refer to possessed or misused souls. A review of
Abe's Oddysee says, "The designers have given the player the ability to 'possess' other char

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 Review of Religious Research

acters, which is a troubling element for Christian players. This ability has to be used in order
to complete the game so it is not an option that can be ignored." In Soul Calibur II, "when
you soul charge you focus your soul or 'spirit' to get a stronger attack." At the end of Dark
Cloud, "you call out for a wandering soul so you can restore someone's life." In Okage:
Shadow King, "the boy summons an evil spirit and sells his soul to it to heal his sister's new
disease." In Final Fantasy VII, "Instead of actually dying, characters in this world diffuse
into the planet-into the 'Lifestream,' where their consciousness lives on." Another game
with an unorthodox view of the afterlife is F-Zero GX: "There is a level where you have to
race against your own soul and they mention something about 2 universes with one being
the underworld."

NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

The term currently used in computer science for analysis of written text is natural lan
guage processing or NLP. Automatic computer analysis of written text has a long history in
social science (Stone et al. 1966; Kelly and Stone 1975), and there has been a huge amount
of research activity in this area over the past decade, largely motivated by the need to improve
search engines on the World Wide Web (Belew 2000). A useful example is the Clusty search
engine, at clusty.com, which not only finds websites but also clusters them into groupings
on the basis of the vocabularies they use (Palmer et al. 2000).
Using a system like Clusty effectively requires the user to select keywords that really dis
tinguish the subject of interest from other topics. For example, the word "game" has so many
meanings and subcategories that it would not be helpful. In contrast "PlayStation" has only
one meaning, and the same can be said for "Jesus" even though a few men in Latin culture
have it for their first names. Entering "PlayStation" and "Jesus" into Clusty on November
7, 2006, turned up 176 websites, fully 44 of which were distinguished by the words "Sony"
(the maker of PlayStation) and the word "pulls." These sites referred to Sony's decision to
"pull" a controversial advertisement celebrating the tenth anniversary of the PlayStation that
depicted a young man wearing a crown of thorns formed out of the PlayStation symbol, with
the caption "Ten years of passion." The second largest category, containing 30 sites, refers
to an offer from the Landover Baptist Church to give a free PlayStation 2 to any child who
accepts Jesus as Lord and Savior. Close examination reveals that the offer is a hoax, and the
Landover Baptist Church is in fact an anti-evangelical parody website. This "church" is cur
rently proclaiming, "Welcome to Jesusland, formerly the United States of America."2 Anti
religion satires are common on the web, and the archetype is the decade-old Church of the
Subgenius, that parodies reverence for messiahs by worshiping a pipe-smoking normal guy
named Bob who sells tracts and advocates "slack."3
To conclude this section, we thought it would be appropriate to describe Attribute Value
Analysis, a new kind of NLP that is in the early experimental phase of development, and
forms a bridge back to more traditional kinds of content analysis. Traditional content analy
sis, whether quantitative or qualitative, relies upon human judgment. NLP is fully automat
ic and does not incorporate the judgments of human beings. Attribute Value Analysis (AVA)
bridges across these two well-established approaches, applying the values of a particular per
son through an automatic tabulation of the words used in a text document. The first stage in
the development of an AVA tool is development of a lexicon of words, which in this exam
ple consists of 1,600 adjectives that could describe the qualities a person possesses.

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Electronic Game Research Methodologies: Studying Religious Implications

The 1,600 qualities came from a line of research that began with a project exploring the
semantic differential. This is a commonly-used questionnaire scale that asks the respondent
to judge something in terms of several pairs of opposite adjectives, and has recently been
expanded for research over Internet by David Heise (Osgood, Suci, and Tanenbaum 1957;
Heise 2001). In the first phase of our research, 36 students in classes on the Sociology of
Organizations and on Small Group Processes were asked to think about the qualities they
would like to see in people they were working with. Each student wrote down as many as
twenty of these terms, then next to each one he or she wrote its opposite (antonym). Then
the classes discussed the words and selected eighteen pairs that seemed to cover the most
important dimensions of personality that were important for co-workers. This battery of
eighteen fresh paired-opposite items was administered to 512 respondents who were mem
bers of small work groups. Statistical analysis of the data confirmed that this process of item
generation was working, so the second phase of the project returned to the full list of qualities
the students had mentioned, identifying many more pairs of opposites. The third phase of
the work involved employing four standard thesauri to generate as many pairs of opposites
describing personal qualities as possible, without reusing any of the words or employing any
obscure terms.
A computer program was then built around the 1,600 adjectives, in the form of person
ality analysis software called Self. It was published on the CD-ROM accompanying the book,
Computing in the Social Sciences and Humanities (Burton 2002). The program asks a per
son to rate each of the adjectives on two scales: 1) how good or bad it is for a person to have
that quality, and 2) how much or little the respondent has that quality. Thus, the software
measures both the person's values and the person's self image. The adjectives are rated indi
vidually, but the computer can analyze responses in terms of pairs of opposites, looking for
contradictions as well as identifying areas where the person makes very strong distinctions.
Self-esteem can be measured as the correlation between the two rating scales, which reflects
how good the respondent feels his or her personal qualities are, and the very large number
of items makes it possible to measure self-esteem in different spheres of life rather than just
globally. For sake of the demonstration presented here, the authors of this article used the
software and prepared their personal data files (listed below as "Research Subject 1" and
"Research Subject 2") for further analysis.
A second computer program was written to scan text, counting how many times each of
the adjectives was used. This was a specialized program, designed just for our research, but
since we are both experienced programmers, one of us was able to create and test it within
a day. A reviewer of this paper asked how other scholars will be able to use ad-hoc programs
like this. The answer, for better or worse, is that as in the physical sciences, they will need
to form research teams including the necessary technical expertise. Social scientists who
lack progranmiing skills may often need to collaborate with computer scientists if they want
to take advantage of some of the latest methods. For example, many language analysis pro
grams are shared, but consist of modules that must be assembled by technically trained peo
ple for each particular application.
For analysis by this program, we downloaded reviews of the seven video games described
in the earlier section on content analysis of offline games. These reviews were published on
the following central game-oriented websites: G4 Cable TV Channel, Game Spot, Game
Spy, GamePro, Gaming Age, IGN, and PlayStation Magazine.4 We concatenated the seven
reviews for each game in a single text file, to compare games rather than individual reviews,

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 Review of Religious Research

Figure 1
"Good" Quality Attribute Value Analysis of Seven Games by Two Subjects

5.60 - -?

Final
antas
5.40 - - - - - - - --
God of War *
0 Narnia tastl
vania
4 80L I I lla IviConst tine
.!5. 80 0 0 0 m m - -
Star
co ~~~~~Wars

5.00 - -

Da Vinci
4.80 - -
4.80 4.90 5.00 5.10 5.20 5.30 5.40 5.50 5.60
Subject I
and used the program to count how often each adjective was used. Favorable reviews tend
ed to be longer than unfavorable reviews, so the number of times an adjective in the lexicon
was used ranged from 701 for Final Fantasy X and 524 for God of War down to 289 for Da
Vinci Code and 279 for Constantine.
One kind of output consists of the mean ratings of adjectives on each of our two Self
scales, adjusted for how often each adjective was used in the text. For example, the word
"magic" was used 10 times in the seven reviews of Final Fantasy X, and research subject #1
rated that word 7 on a scale from l=bad to 8=good. Research subject # 2 rated "magic" at 5
on the same scale. A total of 206 different words from the lexicon were used in the reviews
of this game. For each research subject, the number of times a word was used was multi
plied by the subject's rating of that word, then the products were summed and divided by
the total word count to get the mean. The result for Final Fantasy X was 5.53 for research
subject 1 and 5.39 for subject 2. Note that with this method both numbers are valid meas
ures, although only one of us had actually played the game. Figure 1 graphs the results for
one subject against the other, for the seven video games.
Clearly, reviewers employed very different words (as classified by the two research sub
jects) to describe Da Vinci Code than the other games. It differs from the others in repre

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Electronic Game Research Methodologies: Studying Religious Implications

senting conventional religion, if from a heterodox perspective, and from being largely a puz
zle game rather than an action game. Closer analysis would be required to explain why Con
stantine and the Star Wars game stand together but somewhat apart from the other games,
but their position at the center of the chart demonstrates that the two research subjects rated
the salient adjectives for these two games similarly. The different values systems of the two
research subjects are reflected in the curved arc of all seven games.
One way this approach might be used in future studies is as a screening device for textu
al material to be included in a traditional study. For example, we find it is entirely practical
to download a large number of classic novels from the Web, and run them through the process.
With only modest programming effort to handle input and output, this could be done for
many thousands of religious books, using the rating values of (e.g.) the half dozen members
of a research team, or of religious leaders representing diverse communities who volunteer
to participate in the study. Statistical techniques could then map the books and identify a
small subset of them that deserved close scholarly analysis, such as the books central to dif
ferent provinces of religious literature, or those marking the outer boundaries. Much work
remains to be done, exploring the utility of Attribute Value Analysis and the best techniques
for employing it, but for present purposes it makes the important point that many new meth
ods could be developed for analyzing data collected online.

ETHNOGRAPHY AND INTERVIEWING IN ONLINE VIRTUAL

WORLDS
This final set of pilot studies expands the scope of the research to include real social inter
action inside virtual worlds, exploring the two most influential examples, World of Warcraft
(WoW) and Second Life (SL). Many ordinary video games can accommodate two or more
players sitting in front of the same television set, as we noted in the case of Narnia. In con
trast, online games can accommodate thousands of players, with dozens interacting direct
ly in a local area of cyberspace. Our goal in entering WoW and SL was to explore the potential
of both environments for observing behavior and for person-to-person interviewing, although
they might also be suitable for controlled experimentation and survey methodology.
Both WoW and SL are extremely complex environments, as evidenced by the fact that
extensive wikis (collaborative online encyclopedias) have been created for both: www.wowwi
ki.com having fully 22,918 articles, and slhistory.org having 1,078. Both contain virtual
churches and have many other potential implications for religion. In both, the user creates
an avatar with a user-selected appearance (Damer 1998) who represents the user in the vir
tual world, walking and handling objects, and speaking with the avatars of other users through
a text system that combines the features of text messaging with online chatrooms. In both
environments, avatars can cooperate with each other to accomplish practical tasks, and they
are linked in an economic system. Both WoW and SL can be described as games, although
it is not really possible to "win" either of them. WoW is more obviously game-like, contain
ing many combats (duels of several kinds) and puzzles (quests and negotiations), with the
cultural assumption that players want to increase their status. SL could be described as a soft
ware toy (using the term proposed by Will Wright, the creator of the somewhat similar non
competitive video game, The Sims), but it has different meanings for different users, including
being the location for online college classes, conference meetings, and religious or spiritu
al fellowship gatherings.

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 Review of Religious Research

World of Warcraft could be conceptualized as God of War gone global, and is firmly root
ed in the well-established genre of fantasy quest gaming represented by both the table-top
role playing game Dungeons and Dragons, which dates from 1974, and by the text-only
online quest games generically called Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) dating from 1978 (Bar
tle 2004; Lummis and Kern 2006, 2007). To create an avatar in WoW the user selects one of
the following races: Humans, Dwarves, Gnomes, Blood Elves, Night Elves, Draenei, Orcs,
Tauren, Trolls, and a faction of the Undead animated corpses known as the Forsaken. The
user must also select one of several classes, including five with supernatural powers: War
lock, Mage, Shaman, Druid, and Priest. On January 11,2007, the number of WoW subscribers
surpassed 8 million. When a major expansion of WoW called The Burning Crusade was
released on January 16, 2007, 2.4 million copies were sold the first day. Only a handful of
religious denominations have more members than WoW does. Given its supernatural sym
bolism, its engagement of the user's emotions, and the many hours each week members may
participate, one could argue it has greater spiritual significance than all but a half dozen main
stream American denominations. Already, it has become the location for extensive social
scientific research (Williams et al. 2006; Nardi and Harris 2006; Nardi, Ly, and Harris 2007).
Second Life is an open-ended virtual environment in which "inhabitants" can build phys
ical objects such as architecture and working machines, thus creating their own spaces for
interacting. Participants buy land from the developer, Linden Labs, and a flourishing econ
omy exists between players using "Linden dollars" (L$). Our first experience with SL came
in August 2006 when the senior author gave a keynote address at the annual meetings of the
World Transhumanist Association in Helsinki, Finland. The conference was held both at a
real university and in Second Life, where an additional 40 international participants could
chat with each other in a virtual auditorium, and watch both the speaker and his PowerPoints
on virtual screens. As of May 21, 2007, a total of 6,588,455 people had created avatars in
Second Life, and 1,734,041 had activated that avatar within the previous sixty days. Between
10,000 and 50,000 tend to be online at any given time during the day.
These virtual worlds contain real humans, and thus the ethical rules for research with
human subjects are relevant. Many projects will not require human subjects review, howev
er, because the environments are public places. Anonymity of players is preserved by the
fact that both environments prevent them from using their own names. The exact standards
for evaluation will depend upon the nature of the research and the nature of the sponsoring
organization, but "45 CFR Part 690: Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects"
is widely followed by social scientists employed by educational institutions.5
There are several technical requirements for doing research inside WoW and SL, starting
with use of a credit card to set up accounts in each. WoW has a modest monthly charge for
each player, but SL is free unless the project requires a virtual headquarters location (for
example to distribute questionnaires or conduct experiments), or special clothing or virtual
devices. A high-speed Internet connection and a fast personal computer, ideally with advanced
graphics capabilities, are also necessary. For SL, we found that a good set-up was one com
puter with two high-resolution screens, one dedicated to the virtual world and the other ded
icated to simple graphics and word processing programs where we could manage data
collection. This did not work as well for WoW until we obtained a new game-oriented com
puter running the Vista operating system, but we made great use of a number of auxiliary
programs that did such useful things as take an instant census of all the characters online at
the moment (Ducheneaut et al. 2007), or chart price trends in the auction market for virtual

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Electronic Game Research Methodologies: Studying Religious Implications

objects. Both SL and WoW have a snapshot feature that allows one to save the screen con
veniently (Bardzell 2006). As with conventional photography, it is necessary to take account
of lighting conditions, because both worlds have night times, and WoW has rainstorms. Both
chat systems allow the researcher to paste in prepared questions, one at a time, but WoW has
a capability to embed each question in a macro programming routine that allows a single
button press to ask the whole question. The text from a chatroom in SL is easy to copy and
paste into a word processor, whereas WoW does not facilitate text capture, so a second com
puter for ethnographic notes may be required.
After only three or four hours practice, a researcher can navigate SL comfortably, but
there is no way to study WoW from inside without first becoming an experienced player. This
takes at least a full work week, and a month's preparation developing skill is probably more
realistic. To this point, one of us has already spent 400 hours in WoW with the plan to com
plete an extensive ethnography. This involved running eight characters as if they were research
assistants or native informants, including priests in five fictional religious movements. The
environment in World of Warcraft covers the equivalent of hundreds of square miles of for
est, agricultural land, hills, towns, and cities, containing thousands of non-playing charac
ters (NPC's), many of which are dangerous. Depending upon the location and the research
goals, the avatar may need characteristics that take effort to gain. In WoW we first used a
human priest named Maxrohn (after a deceased Episcopal Priest from our own family), who
could not really navigate the environment safely until he had worked his way to level 20 out
of the 70 levels in the game, gaining personal status, protective armor, and many magical
spells in the process. Last names in SL are provided by the program, and our first avatar was
called Interviewer Wilber to give the people we encountered instant awareness that he would
ask questions. To evaluate the potential of WoW and SL for research relevant to religion, we
carried out three pilot projects in each.

Development of Morality in WoW

It is widely believed that religion functions to uphold morality in society, by giving peo
ple transcendent motives to cooperate with each other (Parsons 1964; Bainbridge 2007). A
classic topic of social-science computer simulations is the evolution of cooperation among
artificial intelligence agents that lack religion or any other value except enlightened self
interest (Axelrod 1984). In World of Warcraft, we can observe how groups form out of the
need for self-defense and to achieve difficult goals (Homans 1950). WoWhas provisions for
players to link together in temporary groups or long-term guilds, as well as to trade with
each other and with NPCs across an economic network. We have been particularly interest
ed to observe and to experience implicit cooperation. To reach a target location safely, it is
often advisable to kill the monsters along the path, one by one, and we have often seen indi
viduals in pursuit of similar goals clear a path that benefits all of them, without coordinat
ing their actions through any kind of direct communication. To study group formation, the
researcher's avatar must be willing to join groups formed by other human players, and work
with them to accomplish the leader's quest.

The WoWApproach to Death

Using WoW as her prime example, Lisbeth Klastrup (2006) has analyzed the multiple
meanings of death in computer games, including the distinction between permadeath (which

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 Review of Religious Research

is permanent) and mere death (typically followed by immediate reincarnation). A WoWplay

er faces hundreds of duels to the death against NPCs and avatars, although we set ourselves
the goal of seeing how far we could get our priest without having him kill the avatar of a real
person. Our priest often died and was transported magically to a cemetery, where he had the
choice of asking a spirit to resurrect him, at the cost of "reincarnation sickness" that saps
strength, or running a long distance back to be reunited with his corpse. When Maxrohn
reached level 10, he "learned" a spell giving him the power to resurrect dead avatars, to spare
the owner having to run from the graveyard to the corpse. This is one of the abilities that
makes a priest valuable to a group of otherwise more powerful warriors, and it reminds us
that real religious professionals fill a particular role in the division of labor of modern soci
ety.

Interviewing WoWAvatars about Their Religion

At the most prominent training site for human priests, the Cathedral of Light in Stormwind
City, we interviewed priests to learn how they understood Holy Light, the core concept of
their invented religion. For example, a level 24 priest named Ozymandias, who seemed
knowledgeable about the fantasy faith, said, "The Holy Light is a great blessing that comes
to us from the Nether." A level 30 priest named Charlz was less knowledgeable: "Holy...
Umm... Light?" We asked whether the Holy Light encourages particular virtues. Charlz
replied, "Goodness, hope, and protection of the weak." In fact, the three cardinal virtues are
respect, tenacity, and compassion. Figure 2 shows Maxrohn being welcomed into the cathe
dral by an artificial intelligence NPC. The cathedral contains absolutely no recognizable reli
gious symbols. The doctrine of Holy Light involves emotional awareness of the unity of the
individual with the universe, but deities are not part of the doctrine. Thus, when a priest res
urrects an avatar, he draws upon his own spiritual union with the universe, not upon divine
aid.

Photographing Religious Architecture in SL

The SL search engine allowed us to find cathedrals, churches, temples, one mosque, one
synagogue, and other potentially religious sites. We toured them, photographed them, and
attempted to determine their current function, as in the following five diverse examples.
Skyler's Peace Garden is a pleasant outpost of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
where Skyler and his friend Dennis were ready to share their faith with visitors, who come
(Skyler estimated) about every ten minutes. Avatars of proselytizers do not constantly inhab
it the Second Life Church of God (First Pentecostal Church of Second Life), but a connect
ed web page (slchurch.blogspot.com) proclaims, "The Word of God Reaches the Metaverse.
Now with the soul count in second life just passing the 2.5 million mark, we feel that the VR
world is in more need than ever for the light of God's word." The replica of St. Paul's Cathe
dral in London appears to be a work of virtual craftsmanship, rather than a site of worship,
and the Bible near the altar is open to James 2:18, "Show me your faith without your works,
and I will show you my faith by my works." At MahaMaya (The Temple of the Devi), we
watched a slide show explaining that real life was merely another level of illusion, no more
real than Second Life, based on the insights of quantum physics, multiple reality theory, and
the Advaita Vedanta of Sankara. Finally, we found a magnificent Japanese temple complex,
complete with fish ponds and bridges, vacant and for sale at L$144,000.

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Electronic Game Research Methodologies: Studying Religious Implications

Figure 2
Priest Entering the Stormwind Temple of Light in World of Warcraft

ments. Each research trip to Second Life begins in our monk's cell, in a complex of austere,
virtual buildings amid beautiful trees that sway in the virtual wind that constantly blows in
SL. In the open-sky auditorium outside the SL Mystical Academy, we recorded a lecture on
astrological fire signs, as shown in Figure 3. We also participated in the morning chat circle
of the Temple of Ishtar and Inanna (comparable Babylonian and Sumerian goddesses), and
received an abridged Sumerian dictionary. At the Irreality Temple Complex we meditated
and received I Ching, Tarot, and Rune readings. We also attended a Transhumanist slide show
in which Giulio Prisco noted the parallels between his movement and religion, and refeffed
to the idea of computer entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil (1999; cf. Moravec 1988) that humans
could become immortal by being translated into avatars living in virtual reality. Prisco com
mented: "Some of the prospects that used to be the exclusive thunder of the religious insti
tutions, such as very long lifespan, unfading bliss, and godlike intelligence, are being discussed
by transhumanists as hypothetical future engineering achievements."

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 Review of Religious Research

Figure 3
An Astrology Class at the Mystical Academy in Second Life

1*~~~~~.

Interviewing Visitors to Religious Sites

So far, we have had bet er experience doing unstructured interviews than structured ones
in SL. Some of the usual formal cues that define a social situation are mis ing, such as a con
crete location and knowledge of who the other person real y is, while the informality of SL
encourages people to chat. When the conversation permit ed, we would ask the visitor why
he or she had come to the site. At First Unitarian Universalist Church of SL, a "UU" visitor
explained, "I come here a lot; it's peaceful." An avatar dres ed in a foppish manner and cal
ing himself Lord Christopher Woodward al eged he had come to St. Paul's Cathedral, "To
se k solace. . the woman I had begun to love is wedding another. And I do not know how to
regain my time or my lands." Thus, the motives that bring visitors to virtual churches may
the same as bring them to material churches, but for some there may be an element of play
acting. An hour-long conversation with a visitor to the SL Yoga Ashram se med completely
sincere. She said her views were influenced by many Eastern traditions, predicted we would
live major portions of our lives in SL, and announced, "The spirit soul wil be at home in the
spiritual sky, beyond time and space."

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Electronic Game Research Methodologies: Studying Religious Implications

CONCLUSION
As a collection of pilot studies, this research has shown not only that the electronic gam
ing culture contains many elements that are opposed to conventional religion, but also that
a loose network of Christian critics uses Internet to warn believers about this situation. We
have not attempted to evaluate a random sample of video games, since categories like sports
games, games for small children, and realistic military games probably seldom involve reli
gion. However, fantasy games like World of Warcraft often do involve religious or other
supernatural themes, typically heterodox or cultic in nature. This is the dominant game cat
egory for teenagers, and God of War was the highest-rated game of its year. Clearly, the reli
gious implications of electronic games deserve further study by social scientists.
In-game interaction with non-playing characters is a prototype of the extensive interac
tions with artificial intelligences all people will be increasingly experiencing in real life (Mer
rick and Maher 2006). Already, many business and government agencies use crude computerized
dialogue systems to provide information over the telephone, and the US military has achieved
great successes in the automatic driving of vehicles over complex terrain using computer
vision. It will be interesting to see whether ubiquitous artificial intelligence will transform
our spiritual conceptualizations of ourselves, including the issue of whether humans possess
immortal souls, given that human-like robots presumably do not. Preliminary research on
this challenging topic can begin now, using electronic games.
The methods illustrated here can be used to examine many other religion-related topics,
and vast amounts of religion-relevant text and other data are freely available online. For
example, some aspects of our participant observation work in video games would be analo
gous to viewing a larger number of religion-related amateur videos on YouTube (www.youtube.com/)
or a comparable video archive website. YouTube claims to have about 23,900 videos relat
ing to World of Warcraft, far greater than the 530 involving the word "Protestant," 5,670
"Catholic," and 6,450 "Jewish," but in future one would expect amateur video to offer great
scope for religious research. Already, online dating services (e.g. personals.yahoo.com) let
people search for mates on the basis of religious compatibility, and mate-seeking is active
ly carried out in virtual worlds, including Second Life and World of Warcraft. It has been a
decade since we ourselves began doing online religious ethnography (Bainbridge, 2000),
but the convergence of video games with the Web will greatly increase the opportunities for
studying religious culture and society online.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to William Sims Bainbridge, Ph.D., Division of Infor
mation and Intelligent Systems, National Science Foundation, 4201 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, VA 22230.
Email: [email protected].

NOTES
'http^/www.christiananswers.net/spotlight/games/platforms.html
2http://www.landoverbaptist.org/
3http://www.subgenius.com/
4www.g4tv.com, www.gamespot.com, www.gamespy.com, www.gamepro.com, www.gaming-age.com,
www.ign.com, and www.lup.com
5www.nsf.gov/bfa/dias/policy/docs/45cfr690.pdf

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 Review of Religious Research

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