Can Religiosity and Gameness Coexist? — Jesus Simulator

This past April, two games—I Am Jesus Christ and Jesus Simulator—became a talking point among gamers. Heavy with religious color from the titles alone, these games drew the attention of reviewers and the games press even before release, and the journalists who played them discussed the works' significance and limits while disclosing their own religious backgrounds: Protestant, Buddhist, Catholic, and so on.

In truth, religious material appearing in games is nothing strange. Religion is the IP with the highest recognition worldwide, so its worldviews, figures, and narratives make excellent material to handle in a game. The Diablo series, too, actively borrowed the Christian worldview of angels and demons, and there are games like Fight of Gods that put deities on stage in earnest.

Even so, what made these two games an issue was the peculiarity that they are built in the form of following Jesus's actual deeds. The two games do not take Jesus as a motif or deploy him as one more IP; they set out to reproduce, just as it is, the life he leads in Scripture.[1] So what, exactly, does it mean to reproduce the life of Jesus as play within a game? Or rather, before that: games prize agency, while Scripture has its development and conclusion already fixed—so are religiosity and gameness even compatible? I, who identify as both a scholar of religion and a scholar of games, started the game with a glad and fluttering heart.

The Gameness of Religion

The instant I opened my eyes, now inside the body of Jesus, the first place I ran to was the highest piece of terrain nearby. (I actually wanted to climb to the roof of the tallest building first, but despite possessing a carpenter's constitution, the Lord could not so much as climb a ladder, never mind do parkour.) I was curious whether Jesus would take fall damage. Alas—predictably, God does not take fall damage.

Jesus jumping from high ground to take fall damage.

This question matters both religiously and in game terms. At the Council of Nicaea in 325, Jesus was defined as God possessing full divinity, but at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 the doctrine of two natures was settled—that he is fully God and at the same time fully human. So if the aim had been perfect religious fidelity, Jesus ought to take fall damage. There would be no need to quantify the damage, but the fact that he can be struck is what matters. More disappointing than that, though, was that I came to feel the limits of the freedom this game pursues. If the purpose is to follow the divine Jesus's life, then fall damage would be an unnecessary feature. As if to prove this hypothesis, I clicked the mouse and pressed the keyboard, yet Jesus would not throw even the most ordinary punch.

Paradoxically, because Scripture is such a famous IP, many people have already chewed, torn, tasted, and savored it—in text (the Bible), in voice (sermons and homilies), and in films and dramas. So when the creators went to the trouble of making Scripture into a game, would they not have tried to offer some different experience? To define the concept of "gameness" precisely, a great deal of academic discussion would have to drag on inconclusively; but if we are hoping for something only the medium of the game can give, what is different? At this point I had hoped for agency—the kind that lets content and user interact. The text of Scripture is perfect and inerrant, not a stroke of it to be touched; but if it is being reproduced as a game, I thought, surely there could be some degree of freedom. Yet neither game[2] granted any such freedom.

Rather, the place where I discovered something specific to games was not freedom but another area. Even though this is a game in which the character's freedom can be regarded as virtually nonexistent, I Am Jesus Christ strangely enough implements an open-world field. Apart from going to do the next quest, there is nothing the character is built to do, yet they laid out a vast Judean wilderness all the same. A warning appeared that leaving the quest zone would incur a penalty—but can a gamer endure that? Of course not. I, too, ran straight for the edge of the wilderness.

The Faith stat visible in the upper right.

When you keep running off in the opposite direction from your quest, the Holy Spirit restrains you and the "Faith" stat drops. You cannot leave the map, and even when your Faith runs out you are returned to your original spot—so there was no real freedom—but the interesting thing is this Faith stat itself. In this game, "Faith" works like the "mana" that lets you use the "skills" (?) of transformation (miracles such as turning water into wine), healing, exorcism, resurrection, and God's Gaze.[3] And this mana pool rises in proportion to the number of believers. Of course, in practice you almost never fail to work a miracle because of a lack of mana. Miracle skills are basically unlocked through quests, and doing quests automatically raises your number of followers. And even if gamers like me voluntarily wander off and become lost sheep, right-clicking to pray fills the Faith stat back up, so there is no occasion on which Jesus, short of faith, fails to perform a miracle. Still, this growth element of faith and follower-count can be seen as something specific to the game.

Anyone who has practiced a religious life in depth can sympathize with the wish that "it would be nice if faith were quantified." How much more at ease one would feel to read the sutras and make 108 prostrations and know how much merit one had accumulated. This is all the more true in a religious environment where faith operates as a kind of symbolic power. In Protestantism, ever since the Reformation, one has had to be sure of one's own faith and also to prove it. So everyone, pastor and new believer alike, is anxious. To put it precisely, no one can affirm that their faith is, right now, whole. But what if a system were given in which attending dawn prayer earns 10 experience points and reading the Bible cover to cover earns 1,500; in which reaching level 10 grants the gift of tongues, level 20 the gift of interpretation, and level 100 the gift of healing? Anyone could be sure of the growth of their faith according to their own deeds. Believers thus carry a desire to confirm the growth of a faith that exists only abstractly. Even for non-Protestants, the "talent feast" (dallant janchi) most people attended at least once as a child is an emblem of this human desire. Just when the talent feast became a fixture in Korean churches as a system is not known, but the talent feast—where you are immediately rewarded for how often you came to church and how diligently you attended—has been used as a part of religious education in the Sunday-school instruction of children. (At the feast, children spend "talents," play-money named for the biblical Parable of the Talents, earned through attendance and good conduct.)

Of course, theologically it leaves much room for dispute. Tying the talent to a material reward inverts the parable's original meaning, and it is, besides, an event run on market logic. Moreover, while the desire to grow one's faith is general, the desire to confirm and make visible the growth of faith collides with Protestantism's core doctrine of Sola Gratia ("by grace alone").[4] For underlying it is the notion that faith can grow according to one's own conduct and righteousness rather than the grace of God. This desire conforms, rather, to the neoliberal principle of self-improvement. As George Ritzer argued in The McDonaldization of Society, it can be seen as a case in which the logic of McDonaldization—predictability and calculability—penetrates every domain of society: education, medicine, religion, leisure.[5]

And yet the human being is an imperfect creature. Within the abstract activity called religion, humans pursue growth and want, too, to confirm it. When the life of Jesus was gamified, the new experience it gave me was precisely this: it confirmed the gameness that was already present in religion. Just as we clear quests and hunt to make a better character, there is, within religion from the start, an inherent structure of game-like desire for growth. Whether these games caught that point well is, of course, a separate matter.

The Religiosity of Games

Regrettably, these games failed to dissolve a growth system well into the life of Jesus. So let us turn our gaze elsewhere. Owing to its atrocious feel and its seemingly AI-generated quality, Jesus Simulator is poorly rated; but I Am Jesus Christ has been rated "Very Positive" from right after release up to now. It fails to give game-like fun on many fronts—freedom, growth systems—and the minigame that repeats whenever you perform a miracle is bewildering past the point of mere tedium; yet go to the Steam reviews and many people have left positive verdicts, saying "this is not a simple game but a spiritual experience." However lacking the gameness may be, they say, directly experiencing Jesus's life and miracles from a first-person view gave a moving feeling different again from reading Scripture or sitting in a church pew. So what kind of religious experience did these people have in the game?

A simple minigame of pressing WASD repeats throughout the game.

There was, certainly, something new. Even though the contents of Scripture are very familiar to me from early religious education, there was the experience of seeing on a map—and running around on foot through—the scriptural place-names I had only ever heard of, and the experience of having Scripture's vaguely imagined historical setting concretely reconstructed. Take the Cleansing of the Temple, which every Christian knows: the event in which, when Jesus went up to Jerusalem at Passover, he overturned the tables of the money changers and dove sellers in the temple court and raged, "Do not make my Father's house a house of trade."

Reading this in Scripture, I naturally read past it; but actually visiting the Jerusalem temple in the game, it was not a scale where overturning a few tables would bring the chief priests and scribes over to confront you. There were many merchants inside and outside the enormous temple, and—fittingly for a marketplace—amid the din, a moderate commotion could not have drawn everyone's eyes. And yet the game's quest had me smash several animal pens and birdcages, and above all, when I smashed an animal pen, the sheep and goats inside did not vanish but roamed the whole market, throwing it into chaos. Where most games focus only on quest completion and choose to cut resources on what comes after, this game tried to draw a definite situation in time and space.

But can this be called a religious experience that a game can give? Strictly speaking, this is closer to an experience of representation than a religious experience. It is the experience of the gaps in imagination being filled as Scripture's text is rendered three-dimensional—of directly seeing, walking, and performing what one had read and heard. It is on a different plane from a religious experience accompanied by transcendence or the sacred.

What is disappointing is that the potential of the religiosity of games does not stop at the experience of representation alone. In today's religious-studies scholarship, religion and the religious are thought of as distinct. If religion (Religion) refers to institutionalized systems of belief—doctrine, scripture, community—the religious (the Religious) refers to the whole orientation toward transcendence, the sacred, and ultimate meaning that humans experience, even without belonging to a particular institutional religion. Collective ecstasy at a concert, sports cheering, political fandom, meditation apps—diverse religious experiences can be made regardless of any particular denomination or confession of faith.

Games are one more place where this "religious" can emerge. Not simply "experiencing again what one already knows," but feeling shared elation when, in World of Warcraft, you succeed at a raid together after staying up several nights, or asking after the meaning of life, death, and community in RimWorld—games hold the possibility of producing diverse sensations: the uncertainty and contingency humans cannot control, collective emotion, the pursuit of meaning. What is more, games can offer a different mode of religious experience even within institutional religion. The psychologist of religion William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, defined religious experience not by institution or doctrine but as the inner experience of the individual. True religious experience, he said, comes not from something like scriptural knowledge but is ineffable, accompanied by a noetic quality, transient, and arriving passively. To make a game from this perspective would mean—rather than an exorcism system bizarre both theologically and in game terms—offering choices like driving in the nails into Jesus from the standpoint of a Roman soldier, or making the player deny Jesus from the standpoint of Peter, so that the player meets an intense religious experience at an unexpected moment.

Waiting for a "Hungry Jesus"

In this context, let us look at the game again. The game tried hard to reproduce the life of Jesus. It strove to keep period accuracy down to the ethnicities of the people who appear, the events of Scripture, even the trees planted along the road. The 감람나무 (gamnamu) of Korean Scripture—which also surfaces in a familiar CCM (contemporary Christian music) hymn drawn from Habakkuk 3:17, in the line about the olive's fruit ceasing and nothing growing in the fields—is in fact a mistranslation: the Korean term denotes the Chinese olive rather than the true olive of Israel. Yet olive trees, the real thing, are easy to spot all over the game. They agonized over implementing the natural environment of the time. But when representation itself becomes the purpose, the best one can call it is an "educational game." No—even "educational game" is closer to an excuse. When I asked a non-Christian acquaintance who this game's target would be, they said "a game for Christians to play," while a Christian acquaintance said "an educational game for non-Christians." In the end it is unclear whom the representation is even for.

This is not to say representation is meaningless, but that so long as it stays at representation, the possibility the medium of the game holds is not fully realized. The Assassin's Creed series drew attention as a tool for history education not simply because it reproduced history. As the player's agency and choices intervened in historical events, new meaning—impossible through text—was produced. The reason I felt let down throughout the game is exactly this point. Between games and religion there are far more points of contact than one might think. The gameness of religion and the religiosity of games are both still-insufficiently-explored fields of possibility. In particular, the game makes the player not one who watches but one who performs. And religion has always demanded performance—praying, prostrating, fasting, making pilgrimage. The heart of religious practice has always lain in doing with the body. In that sense, games and religion may have stood, from the very beginning, in the closest possible place to each other.

So what is needed to realize this possibility? This argument is not about simply making games more fun. The Jesus in the game has no hunger gauge and no system for eating food. And so Satan's temptation to turn stones into bread is not a temptation. Because he takes no damage from falling, the trial of being told to throw himself from the top of the Jerusalem temple is not a trial. The heart of Jesus's temptation in the wilderness is the anguish and vulnerability of being fully human. If that anguish is not implemented within the system, the player can never experience it as performance. From Gadamer's hermeneutic perspective, the meaning of a text is newly generated in the process of the reader performing it. In this context, representation is not mere copying but the production of new meaning. A hungry Jesus, a Jesus who takes fall damage, a Jesus who agonizes before temptation. Only when Jesus as fully human is implemented within the game can the game become, beyond representation, a medium that lets us experience the religious.

[1] Some argue for using seonggyeong (성경) on the grounds that it is a more authoritative term than seoseo (성서) and has been used more universally in history; but this essay follows the tradition of the 1968 Common Translation Bible Committee, in which Catholics and Protestants jointly took part, and writes seoseo. (Both render as "the Bible"/"Scripture" in English.)

[2] The above concerns I Am Jesus Christ; Jesus Simulator, which begins from the Annunciation, had even less freedom.

[3] This, too, is a concept with much theological trouble in it, but let us move on.

[4] Of course, the most central religious principle among Protestantism's five solas, born of Martin Luther's Reformation, is Sola Fide ("by faith alone"). Even so, the driving force by which that faith is given and made to grow comes from God.

[5] George Ritzer criticized this social phenomenon as "the irrationality of rationality."