Video Gaming, Let's Plays, and Religion: The Relevance of Researching gamevironments.

Abstract

Many games "play" with religious symbols or construct symbolic universes to be understood as "religioscapes". It is not surprising that a lot of research from the narrative perspective focuses on game design and how religious symbols are transferred as well as transformed within the game. The crucial question, however, is this: are these symbols relevant to the gamers or do they just serve as decorative framing? The article discusses gamevironments as an analytical concept based on the actor-centered approach, which integrates the analysis of the game narratives with a view to combining the narrative and the ludic approaches. Thus, "games/gaming" - "environments" - in short gamevironments - comprises two levels: the technical environment of video games and gamersas well as the cultural environments of video games and gaming.The article deals with a specific example of what is one part of gamevironments. One new "environment" of games are the so-called "Let's Plays" - increasingly and widely popular self-recorded gaming videos in which the respective gamers, the "Let's Players", comment on their journey through the game as well as on various aspects of it.