This Is Not a Game: Violent Video Games, Sacred Space, and Ritual

Abstract

In the middle of the twentieth century, long before video games were even imagined as a mode of popular entertainment, religious theorist Mircea Eliade argued that the recognition of the "sacred" within the "profane" world is a kind of order-making activity, offering a "hierophany" that reveals "an absolute fixed point, a center" within otherwise chaotic space (21). ...]says Hillis, users of virtual reality "may experience desire or even something akin to a moral imperative to enter into virtuality where space and light ...have become one immaterial 'wherein.'" We are motivated by the desire for a "sense of entry into the image" and encouraged to view the screen and its mechanisms as a "transcendence machine" or "subjectivity enhancer," that "works to collapse distinctions between the conceptions built into virtual environments by their developers and the perceptive faculties of users" ("Modes of Digital Identification" 349).