Theological Reflections on Video Games: Insights from Theology Beer Camp 2024

Joshua Noel: 00:01:49

All right, cool, guys. Well, welcome to the geek stage. The first panel we've got down here, we're at St. Andrew Methodist Church. I can't.

I can't remember the name of the location. Really excited that we get to be here, though. It's a huge location. Really cool. Not my first time in Denver, but I've enjoyed it so far.

I'm Joshua Nolan. I'm one of the hosts of Systematic Ecology. Will was just telling you about all that. Nothing really more interesting about me, but do have another.

Usually we have like two co hosts and then someone we're going to talk to. So I have Taylor Thomas of Tillich Today. Awesome podcast. If you haven't checked that out, be sure you subscribe to that as well.

She has a PhD in philosophy at. Is that BU?

Taylor Thomas: 00:02:34

Yeah, theology and ethics.

Joshua Noel: 00:02:36

Theology and ethics. Okay, cool, cool, cool. Sorry, I forgot. I just. I'm like, I like your podcast. I am a nerd. But I'm also here.

Benjamin Chika is our keynote speaker for this particular breakout session.

He is the senior lecturer of philosophy and religion at Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts, and the author of Playing As Theology and Ethical Responsibility in Video Games. He's got a bunch of other books he's working on as well. Did you want to talk about some of the other stuff you're doing?

Ben Chicka: 00:03:07

Sure. So thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. The flyers that were passed around, they. They have a promo code on them, but it's expired.

If you really want to wait until next month, codes for the American Academy of Religion will be coming out. If you email me, I'll give you a new promo code. Yeah, I. What?

I'm working on a follow up to that book I'm writing about Paul Tillich and artificial intelligence right now. So I'm thinking a lot about technology and what it means for theology at the moment.

But today I'm going to talk about kind of the motivation behind my book playing as others. I mean, I came to it honestly. I'm the average age of a video game player right now. I grew up with the industry.

s going to wear like an Atari: 2600

I'm the president of the North American Paul Tillich Society this year, and it's reductionistic to say that I'm just doing Paul Tillich's theology of culture for pop culture and specifically video games. But there are some real structural similarities.

So one way to think about what we're doing when we talk about God and talk about theology and how we relate to what's ultimate has to do a lot with personal ident. How do you comport yourself in relation to what's ultimate? Societal forces can force you to do one thing and try to force you to do another thing.

But you can be confident in who you are, that you're, say, a child of God, and God created you this way so you know who you are. Tillich was already suspicious of supernatural talk in that way that, like a being created you to be in a very specific fashion.

Paul Tillich was a German American theologian, and he served in the German army in World War I. And he left Germany during World War II because he was pretty sure his friends convinced him Hitler was going to kill him. They were probably correct.

During World War I, he was basically grappling with the problem of evil and noticing that for a loving God, it seems like my prayers, as he put it in his journal, are just muttering good thoughts to my dying friends as I pull them out of the mud. So it sure doesn't seem like a being is in control of all this world. So he was already messing with language.

Like, God is the unconditioned context of the conditioned world. So everything here is a conditioned thing. We're conditioned in relation to one another, but God is unconditioned.

So God can't be things like our attributes, like conditioned things are beings with certain attributes. God is the contrast of that. I like his later language. He would later talk about God as the abyss of being or the ground of being is my favorite.

If you know Tillich, you probably know the ground of being. Untilich took that critique of kind of supernatural theology really, really seriously early on. But World War II just cemented it.

If you know anything about the history of German churches In World War II, Trip even played a little bit last night in his Bonhoeffer talk. That was like, that's not hyperbole. The German churches basically stood in line behind Hitler and the Third Reich. And, like, this is good.

This is true. God approves of it. You know, it wasn't just Heidegger that was like, I approve of the Nazis because of my ideas.

All the German churches were doing it too. Satilich is already has kind of is reaching back to an older tradition.

Plato, the Greeks, even older philosophers used to think about ultimate reality and name it God. But they didn't mean like a personal being. That's like you and I, except infinite.

So he's reaching back into that tradition, but he's simultaneously getting fed up with churches that aren't actually living up to their supposed ideals of, like, human flourishing and helping people, like, embrace who they are and accept themselves. They're exactly doing the opposite for anybody that's not a, you know, white German. So Tillich comes to. So he.

And he enhances his kind of critique of supernatural theology at the time, really starts talking about the ground of being, or I like, the abyss of being. Apparently he loved to reflect on bodies of water. So they're deep, dark. There's something meaningful there.

Life is there, but it's also mysterious and kind of scary. And you don't know what's there.

It's like he meant the ground language seriously, that God is literally not an extra entity, but just the ground of your being. You're here. You're not non existent. We don't have non existence. We have being forces try and destroy us.

But you can be confident in who you are and kind of move forward with that.

And he already, when in Germany, he had this speech called on the Idea of a Theology of Culture, which has been later translated, but for a long time it was just a speech. And then he eventually wrote Theology of Culture.

And he basically was thinking about the way that you could say, well, I'm confident in who I am because God created me and I feel accepted. He's not thinking of a supernatural God anymore, but he's thinking about how culture can basically do this.

One of his famous phrases is, religion is the form. Religion is the substance of culture, and culture is the form of religion.

And he got engaged in the New York City art scene in the expressionistic and impressionistic paintings. And he saw gay people, Jews, everybody who was persecuted in the Holocaust and killed being accepted. And he says, we're doing theology.

People's autonomy is being affirmed and they are who they are. And it's like flourishing rather than being kind of forced into a mold and only accepted if it meshes with that one mold. And he also his, his.

Maybe one of his bigger twists of a phrase, he talked about heteronomy, which, if you take it literally, means like, divine rule. So in, like, political theology, let's kind of make everybody follow, like our, like whatever we think God's rules are.

It actually more abstractly or generally means like everybody together.

So we could all be like, all our divisions go away in heaven and we're all like one in Spirit, when we're all with God in heave, Tillich doesn't mean that obviously he's reacting and rejecting supernatural theology. But if, like, God is the ground of your being right here, right now, God is also the ground of like, my being, your being, everybody else's being.

And there could be like an aha moment where, well, if like, I have the courage to be myself, even though society, like might reject me, like I have some individual courage, a light bulb could go off and say, like, oh, that's the case for everybody else too. And he thought saw theonomy as a. If a culture does it, it's basically religion. We're talking about its manifesting theology.

It's getting over conflicts between heteronomous forces. So you have to be homogeneous, heterogeneous, just like us. So the German church is saying, only like us or we're going to reject you.

Autonomous reactions of individuals kind of confidently knowing who they are and rejecting that. But Tillich was kind of.

He saw that as unfortunate because it should be possible to be who you are and live deeply in a community which autonomous reactions to heteronomous forces. So forces of domination, you can only. We're only going to accept you if you be like this. Autonomous reactions are like, great.

But he also sometimes called theonomy autonomy united with his own, its own depth, which is you're actually living deeply in a community with others now instead of in isolation. And the long and short of it is I see this happening in video games.

Like video game communities are theological and kind of functioning as religious communities in the same way that Tillich thought artistic communities were basically doing theological work. So let me give you some examples. So that was nothing about video games. And this talk is supposed to be about video games.

Has anybody played the game Gone Home or know what it is? So Gone Home was one of the first games they derisively threw the term walking simulator at. So this is not a video game. This is a walking simulator.

You're just walking around a house, picking up objects and listening to audio logs. So this is, you know, this is not. We're not shooting people. This is not a video game. What are we doing here?

Gone Home tells a story of realizing your character in the game. Your sister fell in love with another girl in high school in the highs and lows of coming out.

sex marriage. It came out in: 2014

I also know I speak more at video game conventions and video game developer conferences than I do to fellow academics nowadays.

And every time I give a talk, like, literally after every single one, some LGBTQ individual comes up to me and is like, you gave me language for what happens to me. Like, this is deeply, like, moving me, these video games. So picture somebody who maybe can't come out because it's physically dangerous for them.

Like, literally they could get killed in parts of the world still, like, that video game is more real than reality for them in some ways. Like, they're actually themselves now. Like, that's autonomy united with his own depth. And for Till, like, that's theology.

It's also changing the way people behave. So it's driving us toward theonomy.

When people who are rejecting people just for who they are just because they're different, all of a sudden widen the circle and embrace them. That's forming a theonomous culture where everybody is finally being accepted and we're getting over divisions. It was big during the pandemic.

People got Nintendo Switch owners. Did you play Animal Crossing New Horizons during the pandemic? During the pandemic, Nintendo put some of the worst stay at home orders.

Like, really, really, no. We're going to stay at home and enforce. It was during Easter and Ramadan.

Nintendo put some Christian objects in the game and some churches actually made little altars and they had Easter services in Animal Crossing. So they met virtually and they shared a virtual space as opposed to being separated in zoom blocks.

So it's still virtual, but it's actually a shared virtual space versus separated zooms. They didn't do anything, as always is the case, of course, they didn't do anything for non Christian religions.

So Rami Ismail, this independent game developer, says, well, I have some know how, so I will make some objects in the game and edit them. And he made.

He said, this reminds me of my childhood where I broke the fast during Ramadan and he made it kind of inter religious comparative theology event. He had a big Twitter following. It's always Twitter, not X for as long as that website exists.

He tweeted out, you know, come break fast with me and if you're not Muslim, come and tell us, like, ask us why we're doing this. Have a chat. And people came and they interviewed some people afterward.

And think about a Muslim in middle of nowhere America that probably has no mosque nearby, or a student who's a Muslim at a small school. And all those schools tend to have pretty poor services.

For non Christian students, like poor activities available, that shared space in a video game was more real and theologically meaningful than their real life condition in some ways. So it's not like it's not the content of games exactly. Like, hey, look, there's something religious happening in a game.

Just like Tillich was just looking at expressionist and impressionistic paintings. I've been talking with people playing these games. It's like, this is theology happening in games.

People's lives being affirmed, changing their behavior toward each other, and they're living deeply in a community as opposed to being isolated. I mean, the examples can go on and on. Tillich was a religious pluralist late in his life. I obviously am too.

So the fact that they can kind of cross those borders and we can talk about Muslim examples and the gone home Christian example, this is what it means for a culture to be theological. So theology of culture, you're just looking at something that just looks like video games, but it's theological if you have the right lens.

Joshua Noel: 00:15:37

I was going to see if I could get one example from you that you mentioned in. I don't remember which one. I read a bunch of articles all at once.

But you talk about the example of how affirming spaces were created for people in the LGBTQ community.

And like Mass Effect, specifically your MMO games, you know, Skyrim, that kind of stuff where you kind of have that ability to kind of have some gender fluidity in your choices. Could you maybe expand on some of what you were talking about with that?

Ben Chicka: 00:16:03

Sure. Did anybody play the Mass Effect games? Which version of Shep did you play as genuinely curious Commander Shepard? So within the.

Within the fan base, like, by and large, so it was like you could be male shepherd or female shepherd. Fem Shep kind of became the canonical. Everybody's shepherd. Like, Fem Shep was the real.

They liked the voice acting more basically, but it's not so it's not just in game changes. So somebody who's marginalized, like, finds their life affirmed for the first time. Tillich gave great sermons.

It's very funny Ground of Being theologians. This includes some people that were mentors of Taylor and I. They have these very, very abstract.

And if you're only familiar with supernatural theology, maybe hard to grasp concepts of what God and ultimate reality is. But they give great sermons and they have fun titles like Tillich's. Some of his sermons were the courage to be and accept that you're accepted.

He took that right from Lutheran, and he meant it pretty literally.

Like you can accept that you're accepted in the game just for no other reason than you're accepted because the ground of your being is with you always. You don't know how it's going to manifest, but it could happen through a game, it could happen through art. And then the communities changed too.

So Fem Shep became the real Shep. Video game conventions started changing so there's now safe spaces for LGBTQ folks at say I'm in the Boston area.

Pax east is a huge video game convention attended by now. It's four days long and it's probably over 125,000 people. I've given talks there and like 600, 700 people show up to it.

So it's not just people who are interested in theology already and I don't use some of these terms at a Pax east talk. But like it's happening.

So like people, it's actually happening in their lives and they just need some language to like, oh, like I needed the language to really, really express how it's happening. So Pax east has become more welcoming as the industry has fractured a little bit.

All the big websites of, you know, it's a big problem, it's, you know, late stage capitalism. Everybody is cutting jobs.

But the personality, you know, based coverage that's happened since everybody's got a Patreon, they're all very deliberate and like our community is inclusive.

Like we're going to kick you out and like it doesn't matter if you're paying for the Patreon, like we can remove your don't just get to pay and do whatever around, especially trans issues. So Gamergate is still like the mentality about does Gamergate ring a bell for anybody?

So just like misogynistic, homophobic, just treating people terribly just because they're different than straight white male. Some of that mentality is still out there, especially around trans gamers.

But all the big personality based coverage very much is communities that are accepting. So the hate is actually somewhat being pushed to the margins is an inverse of what it used to be. So I'm really, it's not perfect.

Tillich talks about times of Kairos, which is the right time, but it's always ambiguous because the ground of, the ground of being is everywhere. So we can kind of be opaque to it and cover it up or be transparent to it. So we can make hurtful or like life giving cultures.

So we don't know what's gonna happen in the given moment. Like there's bad elements still in video games but the good forces could overcome.

So it's not like video games are gonna save us and make heaven on earth. That's not what theonomy means. It's ambiguous, and it takes our participation to, like, drive it.

And even if bad things happen, that's like a key that something is. It's perverting some meaning. It knows there's something meaningful there, and they're trying to restrict it.

But now it's out in the open and we talk about it.

So it's actually, I'm kind of pleased that some Gamergate voices are still out there because they're not hiding anymore, and the industry is actively trying to push back against them. So it is not just the games itself, it's communities as well.

Joshua Noel: 00:20:07

Yeah, for sure. Did you. Do you have anything to look specifically you wanted to ask? I know you were.

Taylor Thomas: 00:20:12

I mean, I do have a question for Ben that I think draws on his book, and it's very irrelevant here.

Ben Chicka: 00:20:19

It's.

Taylor Thomas: 00:20:20

It's not necessarily Tillich specific, but I guess it is specific in terms of, like, what Tillich thinks a theology of culture can actually do. So I. I would like it if you might elaborate a bit further on.

Like, you know, you've talked about the experience of playing as someone you feel represented by in the game, but your book is called Playing as Other. Right. So what does that difference do for you? Like, and how is that? How are you working to look into that?

Ben Chicka: 00:20:46

So it's not just Tillich. I guess I'm in atillic mode, since I'm, like I said, I'm president of the Tilich Society this year.

So there's some unconscious aspect of me that's like I'm on a Tillich promotion tour or something. But Emmanuel Levinas is the other pillar of the book.

And one of the things I'm proudest of in the book is that if you buy stereotypical academic divisions of schools of thought, Levinas is like the start of postmodern thinking. And Tilik is like, a epitome of, like, modern thinking. So obviously they disagree on everything and have nothing to do with one another.

But you'll find in Tillich, now, he doesn't dwell on it and write books and books and books about it, like Levinas does. But you'll find until, like, the inviability of the other and the thing that you cannot cross and is the.

Like, you can try, but you can never, like, cross that Rubicon because the Other, like, their integrity, who they are, like, that groundedness, you can try and change it. But it's all like an illusion and a mistake in your head and like. So playing as others I actually think makes both Levinas's points.

So Levinas, if you don't know Levinas, my simple version is humans are really good at creating in groups and out groups, which is basically what I've been talking about. And we are actually really good at it in a problematic way. Biologically, we seem to have a propensity to it.

We just encounter people who like otherness. We're all different than each other, but we have friends, family, religious memberships, political memberships that we're kind of comfortable with.

And we don't really think about the fact that we're all different. And then at some point it's like, oh, this is too other and different and uncomfortable.

And now you just treat people differently because they're other, not realizing that we're all actually different. So the point is it doesn't matter who anybody is, because we're all others to each other and different.

So these in group out groups that are based on checklists of sort of similar to me or different are all just manufactured nonsense that violates something more basic and primary. But you don't encounter that when you talk about this issue.

So reading Levinas, reading Tillich, talking about this, me saying this right now is not actually encountering another. People debating this on a 24 hour news channel is not actually encountering the other. You actually have to have an encounter.

So reading Levinas is not an encounter of the other on the page or even Tillix. He has like a lengthy two paragraphs and that he sounds totally like Levinas, but that's basically it that I found in him.

But in a game you have to encounter characters that are fully fledged and have like a context and the world that they live in. And I compare it to this doesn't always happen, but sometimes it does. And it doesn't always happen is the unfortunate part.

But often parents who are anti, say gay rights as a kid, that comes out and then it's like, oh crap, I can't be against gay rights because I love my kid.

And then they have a moment where like, oh, gay people are like humans and like it's wrong to like treat humans this way because they had never thought of them as humans. They had thought of them as that other thing that's a political talking point.

So in games you got to interact with AI and characters and it's not unlike actually having to have that aha moment of oh, I've been mistreating a person. And I. That's like, against my theology. Oops. So the. But the.

And the fact that the AI characters have their own sort of integrity, like, going back to Mass Effect, the characters push back against you. So they actually, especially in the third one, have their own orientations.

So you can't romance everybody in the game because some of them are like, I'm not interested. I'm like, I'm interested in her, but not you. Depending on if you picked, like, male Commander Shepard or female Commander Shepard.

Joshua Noel: 00:24:40

Yeah.

Ben Chicka: 00:24:40

So the game pushes back on you and has its own sort of autonomy where it's like, no, no, no. Like, respect me. Like, you have to respect me, the AI character. Just like you want to be respected. So that's like affirming autonomy.

But, like, let's broaden it out to a group rather than just, you know, the games push back in a really important way, too.

Joshua Noel: 00:24:59

Yeah, I got a lot here. So I kind of paraphrased a couple of your lines when I was reading, and I should have wrote the whole quote down, but I am a bad podcaster.

When you were talking about AI, you kind of say that refusing to see God in the virtual other equates to real sin because the ground of being exists in the art, and these characters are, in a way, still reflecting that ground of being. So when we're refusing to see that, we're still kind of. And how Tillich uses the word sin and demonic are whole different things.

Because I was also gonna ask about, like, if we see that corruption in a game where it's not really reflecting the ground of being the way that we would think of it, how do we deal with, like, sin, demonic, like, all this kind of stuff when we're interacting with what's not real? You know, a lot of us are like, hey, I'm gonna play Kotor, and go completely dark side the whole time, because that's just fun, you know?

Ben Chicka: 00:25:59

So a lot of the games. So I gave a couple games as examples, you got to play in good faith.

So there are people that just try and mess with games and see what they can get away with. But if you take the game on, it's like, where it's at and play it seriously in the storyline and the characters it has, there's a chance to.

Tillich does put it in terms of, like, the demonic sometimes he uses religious language symbolically a lot, but he does mean that seriously, in that it's distorting something that's potentially true and beautiful and life changing. Just like he he was really critical of quote, unquote, realistic religious paintings. So he hated the. The Last Supper painting.

And he's like, this is religiously insignificant and I hate it. But, like, expressionist paintings and impressionist paintings, he thought.

Got you to think about the way they twist images and, like, the Scream is not a realistic looking face. Starry, starry night is not how an actual night sky looks. They twist something here right now to make you think there's maybe more going on.

And whether or not you can see the more or not is what Tillich refers to as, like, you're demonically, like, distorting the potential for something to happen there. I sometimes put it as groundless grounds. Like, you don't. You don't know how this is going to manifest itself in culture.

But Tillich meant these things seriously. He said God is real but doesn't exist. But he was. He does have an ontology. So he means that, like, God is the source of your existence.

You're just gonna have to get over thinking of God as a supernatural being.

But that lets you really say things like, well, like, the affirmation of who I am can happen through who knows what, a painting or a video game, but you gotta. You gotta, like, kind of play the game in good faith, I guess I would say.

Joshua Noel: 00:27:52

Yeah.

Ben Chicka: 00:27:53

Does that answer your question?

Joshua Noel: 00:27:54

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Taylor Thomas: 00:27:56

And I wanted to, I guess, follow up on that. You know, speaking of Tilik's language, you know, you know as well as I do, I study Tillich, too.

So we know that sometimes, even though it's evocative to people who grew up in a Christian context, that language, like sin and demonic. Right. He means something very different by that. It can get a little bit lost.

In your research, do you see, like, a new language emerging or do you see the possibility of, you know, some of those communities forming their own symbol sets to talk about these same experiences?

Ben Chicka: 00:28:27

Yeah, I think. I mean, I. I really think that Tilich would be super okay with. Tillich was in a weird place, right? So he's. He's really.

When he comes to this country, especially 40s, 50s, 60s, and then he dies, he's known as a important thinker, and he was on the COVID of Time magazine when that was a thing that mattered.

But he's simultaneously really knowing that his ideas challenge, and he means them to challenge because he's seen how very traditional supernatural beliefs prevalent in a lot of churches harm people, and he wants to get over that, but he wants to speak their language so they don't just ignore him. So he uses phrases like the demonic, even though it's not exactly, you know, he's not talking about demons.

He's not talking about actual sinful forces in control of things. But he does mean distorting potential and up. So he's playing with language symbolically.

I think if he would have lived, you know, miraculously to a long age and been around today, I don't know if it's like a new language emerging. I just think he would have pushed his thought further.

So, like, it really is just a theology of culture, and it's okay if they don't use the symbolic terms like Tillich does. I think he would still, I hope, would look at the religious, the video game communities, and not have to force the, like, the symbolic twist of.

We can use this word symbolically, but I don't actually mean it literally and just say, well, look at functionally what's happening, the sorts of lives they're changing, the way they change other people's behavior towards others and thus the community they're creating. I think you'd be okay with it. So I guess I don't have an answer of new language. So Taylor is also doing work about video games.

I just want to throw it back at you. Do you. Do you see, like, a specific language? Like, answer your own question.

Taylor Thomas: 00:30:22

Do you see you put that uno reverse on me. Damn. You know, No, I don't see a specific language popping up.

Ben Chicka: 00:30:32

I think.

Taylor Thomas: 00:30:32

I think I see my duty. And this is why I started the podcast on Tillich and want to talk to people like you and come to these events is because I think.

I don't even know that we necessarily need those same. Like, I don't think we need a word like sin or a word like demonic necessarily.

I think we just need a way to explain to people that there's this depth, penetrating reality and we have access to it and that it's very spiritually evocative. You know, even though traditions do do something for us. Like, I'm sort of on the boundary line between whether I'm still a Christian or not.

And yet I, you know, when I get revved up about a moral issue, I'm like, it is sin, and Jesus would like. So I definitely use it.

But I think, like, you know, the work we do and the work that we're doing here, if we can just get the point across that there's this depth there and that there's something there and that we don't have to just, like, go to work and then die like that's something, you know.

Joshua Noel: 00:31:27

Yeah. You know, it's funny.

I was going to bring you back to Mass Effect, and it's so funny because I'm like, I was afraid I was going to make this a Kingdom Hearts talk, and here I am with Mass Effect.

But speaking of Kingdom Hearts, I mean, when we're talking about, like, this theological language and stuff, one of the things that's challenged me is just how in that game, the main character kind of dies. He loses himself to darkness. He's split in two.

And in that, you kind of see the redemption of all these enemies you've been fighting this whole time as he works himself back to what does it mean to be and finds that courage to be, if you will, learns to exist as himself. And it's just kind of one of those, like, I see all this language.

In a way, I think it's more helpful that I played the games first and then read your stuff, because I'm like, okay, I could see this. I've read two books from Paul Tillich this week, and the whole time I'm like, I've seen this somewhere, and it's in video games.

And if I tell that to someone, like my parents, they're gonna be like, roll their eyes at me, maybe sigh. Or, you know, they're like, you mean you just sit over there smashing buttons? It's not about. And I'm like, oh, no, you don't understand.

But what was I getting at with Mass Effect? One of the things that you kind of hint at that I think, kind of can kind of help us wrap up this part of the conversation.

There were people who are able to experience the other as playing as FemShep. Right. Like, we're playing as a female character seeing that experience through their eyes.

But then there was also the people who were like, I just kind of really like looking at femshep, you know? So, like, when we're talking about, like, demonic intellic sense, is that kind of how you would look at that?

Like, there's the ability to play as the ground of being, see the art for what it is, or to really kind of turn it into objectifying, I guess maybe is the right word.

Ben Chicka: 00:33:07

Yeah, that's what I mean by. That's what I mean by playing is good faith. Like, you got to play the game in good faith. And that's when, like, Tillik uses demonic.

But it's really just opaque or, like, shining right through, like, a freshly cleaned window. So it's like, you're not. You're not playing as the ground of being.

It's just like in this experience it's breaking through and manifesting in personal confidence, changing your behavior towards others. But it's. It's just playing in good faith. But there's. There's games that.

So there's this kind of makes me think of a better answer to tailor your question about playing as others. So you're not just having an experience of encountering others in games. You're actually, you know, you can play as people. Quite unlike you.

I'm going to. I'm going to spoil the ending of Near Automata. It's quite old by now, but it's like a perfect example of something I think is important to say.

So we're in an academic ish context. Whatever Trips thing is, academic ish is we were in grad school at the same time. I can call them that. And sure.

Ending of Near Automata, it's this really difficult. You're kind of.

It's like a shoot em up and your character is flying as a ship through the ending credit scene and you're just shooting bullets and these enemies just keep flooding the screen. And it's like way too many. And these ships come in from the side of the screen and start taking them all out for you as the credits are playing.

And you actually, you have to play the game like five times to get to this real ending, but it gets shorter each time. They basically save you. And you get to the end of the game and it says, do you want to help others?

So it reveals to you that was real people's like character. They played the game and finished it. And that was. That was other people who played the game coming to your rescue.

And to make your like you're going to help other people. It says, do you want to do that? And if so we're going to delete your save file. So you're going to sacrifice yourself to help these other people.

So it really. It puts you in the. Like, it puts you in the position of the other at that moment. Like you would not have beaten the game.

It was very clear, like you're going to die if these other ships don't come in. So they did for you. Now what are you going to do for them? And it really, like the game's not about you at that point and it's all about the others.

So I absolutely deleted my save file. And it's one of the most beautiful endings of a game. It also has an existentialist robot in the game. So you should play it for that reason, too.

Joshua Noel: 00:35:59

Yeah, I. It's so funny because I feel like a lot of people hear that, like, okay, you delete your save file. But, like, my, like, I'm, like, obsessive.

I still have, like, my original PlayStation 2. Just because there is a save file on there where I have sora at level 99 on the original Kingdom Hearts. And I'm like, I'm not touching that.

That save file will exist forever.

Ben Chicka: 00:36:18

That save file was, like, easily 65, 70 hours. God.

Joshua Noel: 00:36:22

Yeah, that's tough.

Taylor Thomas: 00:36:24

Sacred.

Joshua Noel: 00:36:24

Yeah, Sacred saved files. That's the name of this talk. I had some other video game specific stuff, but I want to leave time for audience questions, too.

So to help us figure out which questions we want to ask, could you guys just maybe shout out some games that y'all play so we know, like, we're not just talking about stuff that y'all care about?

Ben Chicka: 00:36:45

Yeah. It is going to be a video game podcast, so we are not doing that unless we say what we've been playing lately.

Joshua Noel: 00:36:50

Right? Yeah. I mean, that's. That's fair. Anybody have any games they've been playing lately or just your favorite games you want to shout out?

What game is that? Just Roguelites.

Ben Chicka: 00:37:04

Just the genre of game.

Joshua Noel: 00:37:05

Okay.

?: 00:37:06

Incremental progress and constantly starting over.

Joshua Noel: 00:37:11

Ah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker E: 00:37:15

Hades.

Joshua Noel: 00:37:16

Hades. All right, cool. Elysium. That's for the Matrix talk. We actually have to exit the Matrix before we have that conversation.

You're not supposed to ask that. Any others? I know we got Galaga. Will likes Galaga. Donkey Kong.

Speaker E: 00:37:43

Persona.

Joshua Noel: 00:37:44

Persona. The Witcher. Okay. Yeah, Witcher's.

Ben Chicka: 00:37:47

Witcher's pretty cool. The Witcher's interest. So I just. I want to make a few comments.

Witcher is interesting because I love the unintended consequences bit, which is like, you can choose the right thing, but the Witcher doesn't play by traditional video game rules. It's not like the first Mass Effect with the Paragon system was a little bit like this.

So if you're gonna be good or bad, the choices are like, do you want to, like, save the starving children, or do you want to punt baby kittens into the blast furnace? You know, it's. Yeah, the Witcher.

You feel like you do the good thing and then something terrible happens, and then, like, is your Witcher good or bad? You know, life is messy that way. Or you think you do something good and it doesn't turn out that way.

I really, like, have anybody else played Undertale, so it's great because it's an RPG and it Makes you think you're supposed to battle these characters. And then it has an aha moment where it's like none of its mechanics are actually what you think.

And it's basically a pacifist game, but it remembers what you did. Unless you edit the save file so you can't go back. Like, you mistreated people, you harmed them.

You can restart the game, you can delete the game, but it actually hides a file on your computer. Then unless you look up where to find it, you can restart the game and it remembers what you did. Because our actions on people have lasting impacts.

You can't just say, oops, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it. It's like you actually did the thing to the person. So it's an interesting play on ethics.

Speaker E: 00:39:20

You would suggest people have to play a game that doesn't. With any other equipment other than, like, what could you get into that doesn't require like an entire gaming chair?

Joshua Noel: 00:39:37

That was fun. Yeah.

Speaker E: 00:39:38

Like what? Be great like this. What could you. What could I get into that would be something fun, Something that would be like interacting with other people.

Anyways, that would be my.

Ben Chicka: 00:39:48

So really look at the table of contents of my book. There's some flyers were passed out. There's a few more up here. And I focus on indie games.

They're shorter, by and large, and they run on just about everything. So I mentioned Gone Home already. That'll play on a MacBook nowadays. I didn't mention papers, please.

But it's a great game about immigration that makes it ethically complex and doesn't give easy progressive religious answers because it shows care for the border patrol officers too, because they have families that need to be taken care of. And if they don't do their job, they can, like, have their pay docked. And like, they have to do it like it's their job.

They got to do it then if you know, they got to live. So it's a great complex game. It'll run on anything that's going to. That wouldn't run as well.

Joshua Noel: 00:40:44

I don't think I know one that has absolutely nothing to do with anything we're talking about, but it's fun as hell. I want to be the guy. It is impossibly difficult, and for some reason that's what makes it fun. And I think everybody should at least play it some.

Cause if you do get to be the one person, one of the few that actually make it all the way through, you're like, I'm the guy. There's something about that, you know, before we do like open up to like regular. I want to be the guy.

Taylor Thomas: 00:41:12

Oh, I want to be the guy.

Joshua Noel: 00:41:13

It's great. Apples will fly, will fall up from a tree to kill you. Just because.

Ben Chicka: 00:41:19

Can I make one more specific suggestion? Yeah. So you played D and D for the first time. Go to the website. Good old games. So gog.com get the original Baldur's Gate.

Get the original Icewind Dale. Get Baldur's Gate 2 after you've played Baldur's Gate.

Joshua Noel: 00:41:34

Kotar.

Ben Chicka: 00:41:35

They're all enhanced editions now, but go to gog.com and get those.

Joshua Noel: 00:41:40

Yeah, Kotar's on everything these days too. You could even get that on your phone now. Knights of the Old Republic. So it's Star wars open world. Ish. I guess. Rpg. I don't know.

I don't know how you say that. It's a little bit older, but it's good. I think they're doing remakes soon. Yeah, that's good. Yeah.

So I had just one more I want to ask before we do like audience questions.

Ben Chicka: 00:42:05

Yes, I do want to get to audience Q and A. So I'm just.

Joshua Noel: 00:42:08

Yes. This is the last one.

Ben Chicka: 00:42:09

It's sort of been evident I'm not just giving a talk, it's a conversation.

Joshua Noel: 00:42:12

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm thinking of like, I have three games in mind as like examples here for this. But so Call of Duty, Ratchet and Clank.

And then I'm thinking of the Shadow of Mordor. So all of these games enemies will interact with you, they'll talk back. They have like real personalities.

Is there an ethical difference in your mind, like thinking of like the other, all that stuff when you're killing an ogre as opposed to a fellow human as opposed to like in Ratchet, Clank, the whole storyline is robots are better than organic matter. So we kill robots, but we don't kill the organics.

So it's like there an ethical difference when the other is a robot if it still has the same personality even if it's in a game.

Ben Chicka: 00:42:56

Well, there's first Call of Duty. There's been an ethical difference in Call of Duty just over the past decade and a half.

t person shooter in the early: 2000

And now you actually have like multiracial, multi gender squads and who know, who knew there's innocent civilians that aren't terrorists who need to be shot. In the Middle East. So Call of Duty has done a much better job. I mean. Yes. So an orc that's trying to kill you.

But it's interesting in that the Shadow, Shadow of Mordor and the sequel. Shadow was the first one, right?

Joshua Noel: 00:43:43

Yeah. Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War. Yeah, that sounds right.

Ben Chicka: 00:43:49

I mean they give the orcs some personality. So an orc trying to kill you is an orc trying to kill you. So like life and death situations, I think you're allowed to protect yourself.

But they do give them character pushback.

Taylor Thomas: 00:43:59

Add on, no pushback. What came to mind when you listed those games is Helldivers. Like in Juxtaposed. Besides Call of Duty, me and Ben play Helldivers online. Right.

And it's kind of like the antidote to Call of Duty. As much as I love that game where it's like, you know, there's some satire in it and you're having to kind of think about your.

Yourself as a basically a space colonizer. You know. I don't know if you wanted to touch on that.

Ben Chicka: 00:44:22

Yeah, I mean it's. I find it amazing that some people don't get like that you're playing as the bad guys in this. Like you are just space.

It's Starship Troopers, you're space Nazis. But yeah, like that. I mean playing as an other there is problematizing. Like it's the way I said Tillich thought of cultural moments as chirotic.

Like the right time.

Like it's bringing something out like that we don't talk about of like there's aspects of American empire that are very like nationalistic and even Nazi istic. If we're honest about the way we operate sometimes this video game is like. And we're proud of it.

And then you're like, no, I don't like I'm having fun playing. But this like I think we're the bad guys and like yeah guys, we're the bad guys. Yeah. So playing as the other that way can.

It's kind of like a form of deconstruction of problematic things that have been assumed.

Joshua Noel: 00:45:19

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

?: 00:45:22

Kind of where. So there's kind of the two different aspects of like you can play a game for like just the fun story and all of that.

Then you all have the other side where games like that Dry Man Cancer, which is if anybody's not familiar with it, kind of a based on a true story about a family who's living their life with a four year old Wesleyan. And like it's just A really heart wrenching game, but it allows you to be and experience something that I normally wouldn't be able to experience.

And so do you ever see kind of a turn to using more video games for those experiences that are in.

Speaker E: 00:46:15

Real life as well?

Ben Chicka: 00:46:17

So that dragon cancer is actually actively being used in some seminary classrooms for pastoral counseling to help. Because the parents of that child, the kid's name was Joel, I'm forgetting the parent's name.

But they worked with the dev team to tell their story and they play with the video game space and that you can kind of do whatever with it to imagine. So they question God in the course of going through their grief.

And they play with fantasy worlds of video games to think about what would it mean for our son to still have eternal meaning even though he's not with us anymore. So they kind of.

It gets dark and then their dead son in the game goes on like an uplifting journey and they play with going through space, which is kind of like connects with an afterlife sort of thing. So that's being used in seminary classrooms right now. I know, but I tell people it's like this will become more common.

I started off saying I'm the average age of video game players. It used to be a ridiculous notion that we would talk about theology and film or theology in TV shows.

But now every seminary in the country has some class on theology and movies.

Joshua Noel: 00:47:28

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ben Chicka: 00:47:29

So it's the same thing in as movies in the sense that there's blockbuster movies that are not particularly meaningful and they're either fun or they're not. Like, not all video games are necessarily ripe for theological analysis. And if you have fun, that's great. And then if you don't, you don't.

Joshua Noel: 00:47:43

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do we have any. Any other audience questions? I'll do front first.

?: 00:47:48

Yeah.

Speaker E: 00:47:50

Something I'm going back and forth. Is you talking about like part of one? The game starts off with a make your own character screen.

Then after you put your character together, the game says, wow, that's incredible. But we're just going to discard that and not use that anyway.

And then at the end of it, we see that the character removes the cursor that like you played.

Joshua Noel: 00:48:07

So the way you. Would you word the question just kind of as playing the game in good faith. When.

How do we play a game in good faith if the game isn't trying to respect our own autonomy? Is that kind of the question?

Ben Chicka: 00:48:20

Okay, Well, I would say in some cases the games want to make you feel uncomfortable for A point. Because, like, doesn't this feel bad when you're not allowed to make this choice and your choice is discarded or eliminated?

It's kind of a negative version of the end of Automata where it's trying to make you think about the other person's position, but in a negative sense. Wouldn't this suck if you were doing this to other people? But we're going to do it to you and you don't have a choice.

But that's also the real world where some people, like, don't have choices. So the being uncomfortable. It's October.

I love kind of artsy, meaningful horror movies because they make us look at the parts of life that theologians tend to not want to talk about because they want to think about meaningful things. And they make us think about like, my life being taken away, whether it's too soon and like, what did I waste my time on?

Like, they make us look at dark aspects of life that are real but we don't talk about enough. But maybe we should. So I think of deltarune and some part of Papers, please. The. The game pushes back a little bit in the sense that the.

The best ending, you have to depend on somebody breaking the immigration rules for your family to help you get out the way that if you were playing the game, quote unquote correctly, you wouldn't have been doing that for other people. And then the game kind of challenges you on that.

So I think they're trying to make you uncomfortable with a point that we actually do this to each other and isn't it uncomfortable? So I would say they're in line with what I've been saying about Ground of being.

Theology is about empowering people and then widening the group of who is accepted. There can be uncomfortable ways of doing that. Uncomfortable ways of doing that.

Joshua Noel: 00:50:14

Yeah. We got 10 more minutes, so let's go ahead and do a couple more questions.

Speaker E: 00:51:21

So I'm curious about, in talking about the culture of video games, you have like the creators of video games and the art itself and the people playing video games.

I'm curious about how this applies to sort of the in between space of people doing like mods and hacks or streaming or like speedrun communities where you are engaging with the game.

Joshua Noel: 00:51:45

Gotcha.

So the question would be, how do we talk about these things when there's that space between creators and players where sometimes players want to do mods or speedruns or engage in a different way? Is there still a way that that's applicable to playing in good faith? Yeah. Great question.

Ben Chicka: 00:52:03

So I don't think Good Faith is necessarily playing the way it was meant to be played. Ludonarrative dissonance is a term that I like.

It originated around the first BioShock game because the story and wants you to have sympathy for these little sister characters. But in the story of the game, you know, they're kind of creating and part of like all these monstrous people that you've been facing.

So the game is just mowing down people with guns and magic powers basically. And then the story is. But have some sympathy and do a kind hearted thing. And so the game ludo nar or the gameplay Ludo narrative story. Don't mash.

They're dissonant. But papers please. Is ludonarrative dissonant. The correct way to play is process all the immigrants paperwork correctly.

But the game arguably encourages you to play it incorrectly because it has the people talk to you and tell you stories. So some of these immigrants are like, the person behind me is like sexually trafficking me and I'm gonna die. Don't let him through.

You can do whatever you want. You can reject his passport and like send. Turn him away. Or you do it correctly and then I think you're killing this woman.

You have no reason to not trust what she's saying. I think about mods in a similar way. There have been mods that have overturned problematic games. So there's no diverse representation.

So they make modded characters after, gosh, what year was this done? I think it was last year. So after Roe v Wade was overturned, modders put abortion mods into the Sims.

Joshua Noel: 00:53:43

That's funny. That's funny.

Ben Chicka: 00:53:45

So like, that's good faith of not following the rules, but of like taking the game in terms of like, honestly what it's capable of and what it can do. So I wouldn't say Good Faith is just following the rules, but it's messing with it just to mess with it.

Or in the case of modding, messing with it because you see something there. I don't think that's against good faith.

Joshua Noel: 00:54:09

Yeah, that's. I think for me one of the most interesting sets of mods are like the Pokemon games because they're clearly made for kids.

Nintendo doesn't like the mods, but a lot of these mods, I was gonna.

Ben Chicka: 00:54:19

Say don't do it, they'll sue you.

Joshua Noel: 00:54:20

Yeah, but a lot of the mods that people use actually I feel like allows adults to play it in good faith because it's hard to play some of these where there's like it's so easy. But then some of the mods make it where it's your Pokemon really die or there's like more real consequences. So it's able to engage the story more.

Honestly, I feel like.

Ben Chicka: 00:54:38

Yeah, yeah, there's interesting mods. Yeah, like there's mods in the same. In the same way that people can do.

People can do terrible things to care female characters, especially if you want to watch some gross videos, see what characters do to women in Red Dead Redemption 2.

But Red Dead Redemption 2 also has an ethical story of a character kind of being a bad person and then coming to grips with it and it may be too late. And the actual story of Red Dead, I think is interesting, but the game lets you do whatever.

So that's not unlike making a mod that's monstrous or a mod that actually is saying, well, you're going to take away our abortion rights. We're going to inject them into this game.

Joshua Noel: 00:55:19

Yeah, I just got a couple more minutes. I know you had one.

Ben Chicka: 00:55:23

Yeah.

Joshua Noel: 00:55:26

So the question is about the implications of embodied theology around how we're playing as the other in our games.

Ben Chicka: 00:55:33

Yep. So like, yeah, couch co op is dead. We used to do that in the 90s and now not anymore. It's all online. So first of all, I did.

I worked in a neuroscience lab when I was still a graduate student and I applied some of that research to video games in this book. So we know now that our bodies react to online interactions. And then there was an aha moment where we did a study of reacting to videos.

So not interacting, but just watching something. So then, okay, we interact online. We can just watch something. So playing video games, various. The lab studied oxytocin, which we can talk about.

I'm not going to get. I want more questions. We can talk about what that means. Get spikes of it. Just like we do nice things to each other.

You get a spike in it, it makes us nicer to each other. We get that online, we get it in video games. So we actually do react bodily.

But in terms of the actual inter in person interaction, sure, something's lost. But the way I say, like, no, these games are more real than reality for some people. I gave you like unfortunate real life situation.

The video game is more real or better real than that. There's tons of stories of people who met online, got married and stayed married and are still married and have like a great relationship.

There are players who never played couch co op, but they played online. And one of them gets a cancer diagnosis and it's severe. And they all get together for the first time at their deathbed so they can say bye to their.

A friend who they only played with online before they die. So is it the same? No, but there's still something very real there that people are getting connections still.

Joshua Noel: 00:57:19

For sure.

Ben Chicka: 00:57:19

For sure.

Joshua Noel: 00:57:20

We're going to go a little bit over, but we started a little bit late, so I'm going to do one more question. And then the great thing about Theology Beer camp is that we're all hanging out. You guys can always just come up and ask anybody.

Ben Chicka: 00:57:29

Yeah, I'll hang around afterward.

Joshua Noel: 00:57:30

Yeah. So the question is, a lot of times we go to video games for escape, but is there a good way to practice seeing the other?

Embedding ourselves in our games while we're.

Ben Chicka: 00:57:42

Doing this for everybody in the room? I'm pretty sure Joshua is repeating the questions. So they're on Mike for the podcast.

Joshua Noel: 00:57:48

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ben Chicka: 00:57:50

I thought we said that ahead of time.

Joshua Noel: 00:57:51

I might have forgot. My bad.

Ben Chicka: 00:57:54

I mean, I do kind of. There have been surveys and I guess I kind of fall into this.

If there's a chance to create a character, I create something different for the sake of, like, well, if you're going to give me the choice to get. Have more diversity in the game, I'll create some character that's different, see what the experience is like, really. I think it's just having.

Like I said, when I speak at video game conventions, usually somebody comes up to me after my talks and is just like, you gave me language that helps me understand. Like, nothing about my experience changed. I just have the language to understand it and express it now and know that something actually happens.

So these philosophers and theologians, like, the experience was what it was, but now I actually understand it better just thinking about these. So, like a practice, a tool. I mean, that'd be interesting. Like practical video game theology or something like that.

Taylor Thomas: 00:58:55

Actually, do you mind if I follow up on. Yeah, this is something like, I got this from talk Talking with Ben and about Ben's book.

I started thinking about video games a little bit differently.

So, like, now when I go into a video game, if I really want to be intentional, you know, I don't turn on a podcast or a YouTube video while I'm watching. I like, I really. I put on a headset and I'm focused on the game. So I was playing Pacific Drive. That was one.

And I really just tried to take in the environment. And it did change something in me, like, in that moment or like, when I'm playing, you know, an rpg.

So I really like Assassin's Creed, and I've started playing Assassin's Creed a little bit different, where I'm like, okay, but what. What time is this character in and what's the relationship?

And, like, what would I do, you know, if I'm really taking this person's predicament seriously or, like, with Spider Man, I told you I was setting up fans so that I could really, like, you know, get into the swinging. But just, like, you know, like.

Joshua Noel: 00:59:44

That's so cool, right? Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, for me, myself, just, like, following up on that, too, is like, I have this weird thing of, like, you guys know I love Kingdom Hearts already. Will has a drinking game. Every time I say it, he has to take a drink, and he's already plastered. I'm sor. No, but I actually.

I take some of the songs from, like, different moments. Like, they have different themes throughout the game.

And I'll meditate to that as, like, a spiritual practice because, like, I know these moments of, like, when he's discovering that these other hearts lived in him or these other things that I'm able to just kind of think of, like, my inner connectiveness and how we're all interwoven in that.

And, yeah, it's weird, but I think the big thing for me was just kind of giving myself permission to say, hey, everyone else might think this is silly and stupid, but if I take it serious and I find meaning in it, then it is good for me. So just kind of giving yourself permission, I think, is a huge part of that.

Taylor Thomas: 01:00:36

Sorry, I got one more. Sorry, no, just one more thing, because this is something that me and Ben talks a lot about. So my favorite game ever is Battlefield 1.

It's the one set in World War I, right.

And I love that game because there's a scene where you get to play as a pigeon, and it feels so dumb, but the soundtrack, the music you're captivated by, and the pigeon is flying above all of this violence. And, like, I have some trauma from, you know, some. Some violence that I was experiencing.

And I was telling Ben during a podcast that, like, I think that that game cured me for a little bit. Like, every time I have an episode, I go play as that pigeon because it makes me feel like I'm liberated from, you know, all of that. That emotion.

And I found an online Reddit forum, and there are people who have that same experience where, like, playing as a damn pigeon.

Ben Chicka: 01:01:23

A pigeon?

Joshua Noel: 01:01:26

Yeah. Yeah.

Ben Chicka: 01:01:27

No, it's If I could add one more. So I did think of one more practical but also very specific to me. Example, I love Tetris effect.

And Tetris effect puts me in a meditative state to be ready to appreciate video games as a medium that could change me in some way. If you're stressed out, it also can just, like, relax you. So if you don't. Not even thinking about theology stuff, but Tetris effect, amazing.

It's Tetris amped up and the art is beautiful. The music is playing. So you can get really, like, intense high play. Tetris or the most relaxing, like, meditative state that I am.

The music with the pieces, the way they're flowing and the way the art looks.

Joshua Noel: 01:02:16

Yeah, good stuff. Well, guys, don't want you guys to miss what we. What's going on next in the event. Ben, thank you so much for joining us, man.

Yeah, give it up for Ben again. We're gonna be around if you guys wanna ask Ben, Taylor or myself any questions. You can find Taylor Thomas Tillicht today.

Wherever you get your podcast, make sure you follow that. Ben has those flyers if you wanna see his books. Is playing as other Theology and ethical responsibility in video games is kind of what his talk was.

Will and I are part of systematic ecology. That stuff's around too. So if you guys want to follow us, do so. And thank you guys for joining us. So, yeah, we really appreciate you all.

Ben Chicka: 01:02:56

All right, nice.

Joshua Noel: 01:03:00

That was fun.

Speaker E: 01:03:06

Ra.