Gaming + Religious Literacy
Religious Literacy
All of my work up to this point has been to increase religious literacy in my students and my other communities. Stephen Prothero's (2008) book Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--and Doesn't famously illuminated the fact that most Americans know very little about their own religions, much less the religions of others. And that ignorance will continue to our peril. Thus, my main and most vital commitment is to reverse that dynamic.
Gaming
Skillfully developed games can support that goal.
After I finished my doctorate, I whipped out my list of things I’d always wanted to do but had put off because of school and family concerns. Somewhere on that list was learning how to play video games. Don’t get me wrong. I have always loved video games. We’d been gifted a Commodore 64 when our children were young and I loved playing games like Mario Brothers with them. With a degree in elementary education, I had also always been invested in purchasing educational games for my children. But at some point I began believing that I wasn’t -- and never would be -- "good" at games. In fact, that’s a story about myself that I have believed all my life. So I stopped playing. But 30 years later (Christmas 2012), I finally bought myself an Xbox 360 and let it sit for a while in the corner along with the electronic drum machine that I just had to have because Rock Band taught me that I really should have been a drummer instead of playing the guitar since I was 8 years old.
In the meantime, having always been committed to excellence in teaching, I searched for methodological/pedagogical books about new trends in higher education and found a book titled The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game, by game designer and game studies professor Lee Sheldon. I was incredibly excited because I didn’t know much about gaming (except that I loved watching my grandchildren play) but I have ongoingly been committed to integrating new technology into my course structures. More searches brought me to people like Jane McGonigal, author of the book Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. After watching her interview on the Colbert Report, I immediately navigated to the family room, took my Xbox 360 out of the box, called my son-in-law to have him come set it up for me, and committed myself to playing games. And I've been playing ever since.
But playing games isn't just for fun! I very quickly realized that virtually all games have some sort of religious content -- or they are obviously about religion. One example is the game Bioshock Infinite, which has parallels to American religious history. The main Bioshock Infinite antagonist is named Comstock, who is the leader of an imaginary dystopian America that takes the form of a religious "cult." The U.S. has its own real Anthony Comstock, who was deeply concerned about "smut" in American culture. In 1873, he managed to get the U.S. Congress to pass an anti-obscenity law (The Comstock Act) that made it a federal crime to even talk about things like contraception (because he thought birth control was obscene!).