Talk:Religion and video games

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kill to save?[edit]

@Soetermans: § "Implicit narrative references" has the rather perplexing line

First-person shooter video games require the player to kill enemies, often violently so. By defeating enemies the player "saves" them.

How so? It sounds like some religious Inquisition in which the heretic's soul would be saved by killing him, but it makes no sense whatever in a video game. Or, if it was meant to apply to some specific videogame, that ought to be mentioned. Please {{Ping}} me to discuss. --Thnidu (talk) 04:42, 2 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]


@Soetermans: It's been a week since the above ping, with no reply from you. I'm going to delete the paragraph, because the second sentence, as I said, makes no sense without an explanation that isn't there, and without that sentence the first sentence is pointless in this article.

Please {{Ping}} me to discuss. --Thnidu (talk) 04:07, 8 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Thnidu:,
I've missed your previous ping I'm afraid. You're right, the paragraph does come off as odd. I'm on vacation for a couple of days, I'll have to look up the paper to see how it is originally phrased. Feel free to take it out in the meantime. Thank you for taking interest in the article, it means a lot to me. soetermans. ↑↑↓↓←→←→ B A TALK 09:50, 8 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Soetermans: Thanks for answering so promptly. I'm glad you're still "on the case", so to speak. I did take it out, just after writing that message, and of course it's still accessible in the history as well as my direct quote above. {{Ping}} to discuss. --Thnidu (talk) 20:59, 8 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Thnidu:, I looked up the source. It was in Tom Bissell's Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, on page 144. Bold is my emphasis.

I sometimes wonder if shooters are not violent enough. The vomitous Manhunt actually made me contemplate, and recoil from, the messy ramifications of taking a virtual life. Most shooters do no such thing, offering a pathetic creed of salvation-by-M-16, in which you do the right—and instantly apparent—thing and bask in a heroic swell of music. On top of that, the shooter may be the least politically evolved of all the video-game genres, which is saying something. Call of Duty 4 does not even have the courage to name its obviously Muslim enemies as Muslims, making them Russified brutes from some exotic-sounding ethnic enclave. I do not mind being asked to kill in the shooter: Killing is part of the contract. What I do mind is not feeling anything in particular—not even numbness—after having killed in such numbers. Many shooters ask the gamer to use violence against pure, unambiguous evil: monsters, Nazis, corporate goons, aliens of Ottoman territorial ambition. Yet these shooters typically have nothing to say about evil and violence, other than that evil is evil and violence is violent.

Reading it again, I'm not sure how to reword the paragraph, or use at all like before. I'd love to hear your input. soetermans. ↑↑↓↓←→←→ B A TALK 09:12, 15 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]


Now that I've seen the source material, I get the strong impression that the author's "salvation-by-M-16" refers to the player / first-person character, not to the shot villain: "salvation-by-M-16, in which you do the right ... thing and bask in a heroic swell of music." Once dispatched, the enemy character is of no more concern. It's the player character who, having polished off one more bad guy and added a notch on his barrel, gets the reward.
This reading, of course, leaves no room for the concept of saving the heretic by killing him. I'm pretty sure now that Bissell's use of the word "salvation" is purely ironic and leaves no room for an Inquisitional interpretation. I think the case is even stronger now, that the two-sentence paragraph should be left out altogether. I am awaiting your thoughts on the question. --Thnidu (talk) 13:53, 15 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Thnidu: Yeah, that was what I was thinking, he's not talking about the bad guys, but about the player being "saved" in a the end justifies the means sort of way. What do you think of Bissell's comment on Call of Duty featuring Russified Muslims? Is that usable you think? soetermans. ↑↑↓↓←→←→ B A TALK 14:27, 15 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Soetermans: Yes, I think it's usable, but not in that section. It's certainly an implicit use of "obviously Muslim enemies" (quoting Bissell, and a lot of bloggers agree; see below) while avoiding any explicit characterization of them as such. I'd put it in the lede of Use of religious elements—

The negative portrayal of religions has been criticized.
Religious elements are used in two ways: explicit and implicit. They are seen side-by-side in video games and do not exclude each other. Religion in Mass Effect, for instance, can be understood as an "unseen character".

It might go in subsection Islam, but I think the section lede is a better placement, maybe in a paragraph of its own. The other mentions under "Islam" all refer to real-world reactions to the game, which we have none of here AFAIK. And as far as this Bissell quote says (and unlike me, you know the game and probably have access to the book) there's no explicit use of Islam, quotations from the Qur'ān, Arabic language, or such; I'm guessing that the enemies are dressed in ways that shout "ARAB! MUSLIM!" (are they?)

Oh, better! I ran a Google search for "Mass Effect" enemies Muslims. Among the top hits:

Little is known about batarian religious beliefs. Mordin Solus has noted that batarians do believe in an afterlife. When a batarian dies, his soul leaves the body through the eyes. Treatment of the corpse is considered unimportant, unless the batarian's eyes have been removed by an enemy.
In 2186, a batarian preacher asks Commander Shepard to recover the Pillars of Strength scroll so that he can guide his followers through hard times. It suggests that the batarians' religious beliefs are based on words from sacred texts, similar to some human religions such as Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam.
  • GameFAQs: Mass Effect 2: Batarians *spoilers*:
    • "darkmaian23" asked
    "Do Batarians actually have any redeeming qualities? I haven't read any of the books, and all I've seen in the games is Batarians behaving ignorantly or doing downright nasty things. Attacking human colonies. Slaving. Torturing. Is this how the Batarians are as a species, or are we supposed to believe only a few of them are doing these things?
    • "SonyHoundDawg" replied
    Batarians are kinda like the Muslims of ME universe. All you here about and see is the bad stuff they do, just like real life. But of course you do meet the occaisional good one, just like real life, most of them are normal people.
    • "JowyBlightXXVII" added
    One more thing about Batarians as Muslims-
    immediately after meeting them in ME 1 you are given a codex about language talking about Arabic still being a human language. [underline added]
    If anything they seem to be based on the Barbary pirates.
  • Musings of a mad muslim scientist: Mass Effect 2 DLC - Arrival doesn't say anything about religion. Obviously Google picked it up partly because of the title, but it might be worth mentioning that, assuming this blogger is Muslim, he doesn't mention the topic at all.
  • Pop Matters: Space Jihadists: 'Mass Effect 2: Arrival' Just Keeps Digging Its Hole Deeper
Ah, the batarians.
No species save humanity seems exempt from being a “racial spokesman” in the Mass Effect franchise, a problem when each species tends to get painted with a broad brush and rarely permitted to overcome that characterization. The asari are defined by their sexuality. The krogan are savages. The quarians are gypsies. The volus are Jews. But onto the batarians Mass Effect‘s writers have granted the special distinction of space Arabs, whose narrative role seems to consist almost entirely on their depiction as religious and/or political extremists who hate humanity and the American-dominated Alliance Navy in particular with bombastic fervor.
The Geth and the Quarian Conflict resembles in many ways the age old conflict between Israel and its neighboring Arab states. While obviously the allegory doesn't work in every way , for one there are no robo-ethics involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict as well as the latter being a conflict based off of religion rather then revolution, the issue of fighting over a "homeland' or in this case a "home world" is key to both conflicts.

Whew! Well, these are all from blogs, so they're not considered reliable sources, but you may be able to use them as support for Bissell. Clearly he's not fringey about it.

--Thnidu (talk) 22:30, 15 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hey @Thnidu, you shouldn't have gone through all that trouble! It is very kind of you though. Obviously you've more research on this part, will you also add the information to the aticle? While I would consider myself to be pretty proficient in English, you as a linguist probably have more knowledge and skill in writing. soetermans. ↑↑↓↓←→←→ B A TALK 05:54, 18 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Rajan[edit]

Zed also criticized atlus for portraying the hindu deity Krishna 950CMR (talk) 14:06, 10 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

https://www.indiatvnews.com/business/india-hindu-leader-demands-blizzard-to-take-down-devi-portrayal-from-video-game-overwatch-339951 950CMR (talk) 14:09, 10 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Can someone add this 950CMR (talk) 14:15, 10 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

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