Editor’s Note: This is part of a series called UChicago Class Visits, spotlighting transformative classroom experiences and unique learning opportunities offered at UChicago.
Class begins with a final cutscene.
Projected on a large screen, a student guides a cloaked figure toward a beam of light atop a distant mountain. Trudging through blinding snow, the figure falls to its knees, unable to continue.
Then, a dizzying ascent into the sky. A freewheeling flight through red, torii-like gates. And finally, a blinding white light.
“How did this ‘payoff’ make you feel?” prompted instructor Marshall Cunningham.
Relief. Disappointment. Joy. Sorrow. The class is divided.
In the video game Journey (2012), players walk, slide and fly through dunes on a sandy pilgrimage. Without any dialogue other than a musical chirp, the character visits shrines and communes with other players to uncover the history of a fallen civilization.
The game is one of many on the syllabus of “Gaming the Gods: Video Games and Religion,” a new undergraduate course offered by the University of Chicago Divinity School—part of the campus-wide Year of Games. Using video games as primary texts, students analyze the religious themes and imagery used by developers and designers.
“The way this generation of students consumes media is primarily through video games,” said Cunningham, assistant instructional professor of the Bible and the ancient Near East in the Divinity School. “Let's take the medium seriously as a medium of storytelling—of meaning-making—and apply a critical apparatus to it so these students can be better readers.”
Throughout the course, students played Halo, Cult of the Lamb, Indika, I Am Jesus Christ and more, while discussing ritual, belief systems and depictions of religion.
“I feel like I'm really learning how to closely read different works of media. I've never been able to look at video games with such a critical eye before,” said Rafaela Grieco-Freeman, a third-year student in the College. “If you want to expand a different skill, I think this is a really fascinating class to do it.”
How to read a video game
Cunningham hasn’t played a video game in years. However, that didn’t stop him from teaching a new course entirely devoted to the medium.
“I asked students, what do you do when you're not doing school?” he said. “An overwhelming majority said, I play video games.”
When he proposed “Gaming the Gods,” Cunningham wanted to “meet students where they are.” He sees his lack of gaming experience not as a detriment, but an opportunity. Students are the video game experts—Cunningham brings the critical religious studies lens. Together, a foundation of shared authority grounds their class discussions.
Alongside video games, students read secondary texts such as Homo Ludens by Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga and Games as Agency by University of Utah Prof. C. Thi Nguyen. They also studied classical theory on ritual and think pieces on depictions of modern religions and the Gamergate controversy.
“There’s actually a surprisingly long history of people thinking about the overlap between play and ritual,” Cunningham said.
When students play a game in class, Cunningham likens it to critically reading a text aloud.
For example, together the class pieced together Journey’s mysterious past. Buried ruins and gravestones were evidence of a destroyed “before time.” Murals and character visions showed an advanced society undone by its own technology.
Grieco-Freeman, an art history and economics major, grew up playing video games but got deeper into the hobby during the pandemic playing Grand Theft Auto V, Fortnite and the Uncharted franchise with friends. When playing games for class, however, she consciously slowed down her gameplay.
“I looked at a lot of more details than I would've otherwise, even background details that normally somebody would just run past while they're trying to complete the quest,” she said. “I found myself really stopping and thinking.”
The insider/outsider problem
Cunningham also used Journey to illustrate one of the biggest tensions in religious studies: the insider/outsider problem.
Practitioners of a religion, or insiders, believe they do certain rituals because divine commandment prescribes it—eating or fasting at particular times, for example. Non-practitioners, or outsiders, believe rituals reinforce social norms and legitimize power, sometimes called a “functionalist approach” in religious studies.
Students broke into small groups and were tasked with adopting either an insider or outsider perspective to discuss the mysterious belief system.
To insider groups, the main character’s journey implied a belief in reincarnation. The interactions with other players showed the importance of communal experience and taboos around violence.
To the outsider groups, the game’s ending seemed brutal—a main character sacrificing themselves for the good of the world.
At the end of the discussion, Cunningham left the class with a pivotal question: How do our own beliefs color how we understand someone else’s religion?
“Students are thinking about how these games change their dispositions to the outside world, which is what we're trying to do in religious studies,” Cunningham said, “to make people think more deeply about sources of authority and the beliefs that they have.”
Making game jam
As one of their assignments, students partnered with the Media Arts and Design course “Introduction to Game Design” for a week-long Game Jam. In small groups, the classes worked together to design a card- or dice-based game that incorporated religious themes.
Shaw Carlson’s group designed a four-player game where players must put down cards to form a collaborative hand. Depending on an individual’s ritual card, players can win ritual points while blasphemies take points away. The mix of collective play and individual incentive creates a “complicated web” of strategy.
“In one of the texts we discussed, ritual describes the day-to-day, and it also comes from what the collective thinks and wants,” said Carlson, a third-year economics major. “That's one of the ways we wanted to show how a culture determines what becomes okay as a ritual and what's not okay as a blasphemy.”
For their final assignments, students could choose to continue working on their game or write a critical review of a game not covered in class.
Carlson plans to write a final review on his favorite game series, the indie darling Hollow Knight. In the sprawling platformer, an insectoid knight travels through a bug kingdom infected with a plague.
“There are super heavy religious elements. There’s an entire pantheon—the currency in Hollow Knight: Silksong is rosaries,” said Carlson, who has already clocked 100 hours in the sequel. “It’s so cool to analyze some of my favorite things in this way.”
