Methods for Studying Video Games and Religion

Vít Šisler, Kerstin Radde-Antweiler, Xenia Zeiler, Vít Šisler, Kerstin Radde-Antweiler, Xenia Zeiler

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315518312
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Game studies has been an understudied area within the emerging field of digital media and religion. Video games can reflect, reject, or reconfigure traditionally held religious ideas and often serve as sources for the production of religious practices and ideas. This collection of essays presents a broad range of influential methodological approaches that illuminate how and why video games shape the construction of religious beliefs and practices, and also situates such research within the wider discourse on how digital media intersect with the religious worlds of the 21st century. Each chapter discusses a particular method and its theoretical background, summarizes existing research, and provides a practical case study that demonstrates how the method specifically contributes to the wider study of video games and religion. Featuring contributions from leading and emerging scholars of religion and digital gaming, this book will be an invaluable resource for scholars in the areas of digital culture, new media, religious studies, and game studies across a wide range of disciplines.

Part 1
Textual and Audiovisual Narratives

1
Critical Discourse Analysis

Studying Religion and Hegemony in Video Games

Kathrin Trattner

I do not know how you arrived to this place. That is unimportant. What is important is the infidels are at our door, and have taken from us. To be part of our cause you must prove worthy. We shall see. We shall see.… Some of you may be selected for advanced training to carry the jihad to the infidel lands. Now is the time to show your quality.

The above quote is taken from the first-person military-shooter Medal of Honor: Warfighter (Danger Close 2012), more precisely, from a mission entitled “Through the Eyes of Evil.” The man speaking these words in Arabic is known as “The Cleric”: a rich Arab banker and the dangerous mastermind behind a globally active terrorist network, whose religiously connoted alias is no coincidence. His instructions begin the player’s tutorial, an introduction to the mechanics of the game, throughout which the player completes a short terrorist training by shooting at targets in a replica airplane, which she or he experiences “through the eyes of evil.” In this short fragment of the game, a highly stereotypical enemy image is presented: the Arab Muslim terrorist. This stereotype is informed by the complex intersections of various political, medial, and interreligious discourses. As such, it is part of a larger cultural framework. As Bogost (2008: 128) states: “[No] video game is produced in a cultural vacuum. All bear the biases of their creators. Video games can help shed light on these ideological biases.”

In the course of interrogating ideological biases, one quickly enters the domain of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). CDA is a type of discourse analytical research that focuses on critically deconstructing how hegemonic structures and ideologies are reflected in and enacted through language—which is not necessarily confined to linguistic properties. Cultural, historical, and intertextual contextualization are crucial to this approach. This chapter argues that CDA can be a useful method for analyzing representations of religion in video games, particularly those that are marginalizing and othering, and for placing them within a larger discursive context. This will be illustrated by the case study, which analyzes representations of Islam in recent Western military shooter games, using the example of Medal of Honor: Warfighter. The main research question investigated is: How is Islam represented and contextualized in recent Western military shooters through the portrayal of the games’ characters?

As the results of the case study will show, Islam is conceived as inherently ideologized and politicized in Warfighter. As such, it is most of all understood as the foundation of anti-Western terrorism, and positioned in sharp contrast to Western civilization, emphasizing a simplistic Self versus Other dichotomy, and thereby reinforcing established structures of cultural and political hegemony. This is in accordance with popular geopolitical images of the War on Terror (Bialasiewicz et al. 2007: 409), which resonate throughout different kinds of mainstream media, upon which the game significantly draws. Studying such complex interactions and their cultural and social embeddedness, as well as their consequences, is the aim of CDA.

Theoretical Background

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA): A General Overview

In brief, CDA is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily critically examines how hegemony is enacted and consolidated through discourse. It cannot be regarded as a uniform theory or method, but rather constitutes a specific approach and a “shared perspective” (Wodak 2001: 2) towards discourse and society from across multiple disciplines. Due to its multidisciplinary nature (van Dijk 2001), it is impossible to give one single definition of the concept of discourse as it is conceived of within CDA scholarship. Yet, at the core of any CDA-study lies the assumption that discourses: (1) not only mirror societal realities but determine and constitute them, and (2) “contribute to the structuring of the power relations in a society” (Jäger 2001: 37). The latter is exactly the point which draws CDA’s critical attention and which it aims to deconstruct and challenge. What can be deduced from this is that “the notion of context is crucial for CDA” (Meyer 2001: 15). This concerns necessary investigations of intertextuality (Fairclough 1992) and interdiscursivity (Jäger 2001), as well as a general placement of the investigated discourses “within their wider sociocultural and institutional frameworks” (Ensslin 2012: 23).

Furthermore, CDA’s critical perspective inevitably entails a positioning of the researchers themselves concerning the issue under investigation (Jäger and Jäger 2007: 15), which is why van Dijk (2001: 96) states that, by its nature, “CDA is biased.” In connection to its focus on the criticism of hegemonic structures, there is a strong emphasis on social-scientific enquiries within the broad field of CDA. Despite a number of shared general characteristics, however, CDA’s concrete application as a method varies greatly depending on the research question at hand, the researcher’s perspective, and the semiotic structure of the analyzed “text(s).” There are numerous methodological frameworks for conducting critical discourse analyses from different perspectives throughout various research disciplines, which sometimes differ greatly.

CDA and the Study of Religion

Despite its trans- and multidisciplinary nature, CDA—or, as some authors have argued, discourse analysis in general—is rarely applied in the field of religious studies (Moberg 2012; Hjelm 2014). Hjelm (2014: 856) argues that this absence of CDA as a method of analysis within religious studies (or sociology of religion in particular) is a grave neglect, as it offers “a framework through which to analyze the discursive construction, reproduction, and transformation of inequality in the field of religion.” Therefore, Hjelm (2014: 857) identifies CDA as a fruitful approach, not only for “looking at the ways in which religion, spirituality, belief, etc. are constructed in discourse,” but also for examining “the role of religion in creating and sustaining inequalities.” The emphasis CDA places on the importance of context—meaning the placement of discourses on religion(s) within their wider sociocultural, historical, and political contexts—can be extremely useful for analyzing discourses on religion(s) from a cultural studies perspective.

CDA and Game Studies

With regard to the study of video games, CDA is also a relatively rare approach. Among others, two reasons can be identified for this. First of all, as Ensslin (2012: 23) explains, CDA “tends to concentrate on factual rather than fictional text types” despite the fact that within the latter, as she argues, ideological content appears “as poignantly as—or even more poignantly than—in factual media discourse.” Secondly, a general focus on the analysis of traditional texts, in the sense of “linguistically defined text-concepts, and linguistic-discursive textual structures,” (Blommaert and Bulcaen 2000: 450) can be observed within CDA, hence it being difficult to apply such frameworks to a visual and procedural medium, such as video games. Aside from Ensslin’s work on (critical) discourse analysis and video games, Masso’s (2009, 2011) research and that of Machin and Suleiman (2006) are definitely among the most detailed and insightful in this combination of fields. What becomes apparent is that neither of these studies simply bases their analyses upon a ready-made methodological CDA framework, but rather adapts and extends those frameworks according to their own research questions and—importantly—to suit the semiotic structure of the medium in question.

Generally, CDA has not yet been explicitly employed or addressed as a method for analyzing representations or receptions of religious discourses within video games. However, I argue that it can be a very useful approach for several reasons. Masso (2009: 154) explains that

if we can argue that games exist in a social context (as opposed to an ahistorical social vacuum), and that there are operations of power within them, then it can be argued that the field of CDA has something to offer to the nascent field of game analysis.

With regard to portrayals of religion(s) in video games, Šisler (2008: 204) has also highlighted the importance of situating such representations (in his case particularly of Islam) within their broader medial, sociocultural, and historical contexts, in accordance with the general emergence of a critical approach towards video games within game studies (Galloway 2004; Leonard 2003, 2006; Bogost 2006, 2008; Santorineos 2008; Ensslin 2012). With its strong emphasis on intertextual and interdiscursive relations, CDA provides an excellent methodological basis for systematically analyzing the complex intersections of discourses on religion with other discourse strands and sub-topics that impact the narrative function of religion within the game.

Method

The Notion and Structure of Discourse

The method chosen for this chapter is based on Jäger’s (2001) theoretical and methodological account of CDA, which is very much influenced by Michel Foucault’s (1972) understanding of discourse. According to Foucault (1972: 49), discourses are not only “groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but […] practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.” As such, Jäger (2001: 37) points out that discourses significantly “contribute to the structuring of the power relations in a society,” which is of crucial interest to CDA investigations.

It is important to recognize that discourses are by no means isolated and static, but rather dynamic and “intertwined or entangled with one another” (Jäger 2001: 35). Thus, they “represent in their entirety a gigantic and complex ‘milling mass’” (Jäger 2001: 35). A comprehensive analysis of such a vast, complex, and ever-changing maze of utterances and actions hardly seems possible. Jäger (2001: 46) argues that a structuring of the components and layers of and around discourses is absolutely necessary in order to be able to analyze them. For this reason, he presents several terms which function as operational aids and also form the basis of his methodological framework (Jäger 2001: 47–51). These are summarized in Table 1.1 and illustrated through examples, which reference this chapter’s case study.

Table 1.1 The Structure of Discourse According to Siegfried Jager (2001: 47–51)

Term	Definition	Example
discourse strand	a thematically homogenous flow of discourse, which comprises a variety of sub-topics	the discourse strand War on Terror comprises sub-topics such as Islam, the Middle East, national security …
discourse fragment	a text or part of a text that deals with a particular topic; discourse fragments combine to form discourse strands	a specific video game or part of a specific video game that deals with a certain theme
entanglement of discourse strands	when a text references not only one, but various discourse strands (which is usually the case)	the discourse strand War on Terror is often entangled with the discourse strand religious extremism within particular media texts
discourse plane	the various areas in which discourse strands operate; various discursive planes impact one another and relate to one another	e.g., media, politics, science
discourse sector	a discourse plane can be further divided into discourse sectors	video games (as a sector of the discourse plane “media”)

Through these terminological abstractions, Jäger (2001: 35) attempts to break down the complex “milling mass” of discourses into more accessible, localizable categories, making them more approachable for actual analysis.

Methodological Application

Before applying critical discourse analysis as a method to a given research material, several steps need to be considered beforehand. First of all, the theoretical approach underlying the researchers’ understanding of their object of research needs to be explained (Jäger 2001: 52). In this context, this also means that it must be clear what notion of discourse is being applied in the course of the analysis. Also, the precise discursive localization of the object of investigation is crucial. As Jäger (2001: 52) explains:

If the issue at stake is how racism is disseminated in the media or in everyday life, one should not take the term racism as a kind of magnifying glass and with it launch a search for the expression of this ideology. Instead, one should endeavor to determine the location at which such ideologies are expressed. Such a location is the discourse on immigrants, refugees, asylum, and so on. This discourse (strand) provides the material, which has to be investigated.

With regard to the following case study, which is concerned with the representation and contextualization of Islam in recent Western military shooters as reflected in the portrayal of the game’s (Medal of Honor: Warfighter’s) characters, this means that, first, one needs to ask the question of the location of statements regarding Islam. Concerning the discourse sector of video games, and the genre of the military shooter, this thematization will most likely be found as part of the discourse strand War on Terror. Hence, this is the discourse strand that should be analyzed with regard to the representation of Islam.

Once it is clear what theories the analysis is based on, what the research question is, and how it can be discursively localized, appropriate research...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1 Textual and Audiovisual Narratives
• PART 2 In-Game Performance
• PART 3 Production and Design
• PART 4 Interactivity and Rule System
• PART 5 Gamer-Generated Content
• Critical Reflection
• Index