A Thousand Deaths


This month, the Ontological Geek has a theme: reli­gion and/or the­ol­o­gy in games. We have a great bunch of arti­cles lined up, from the very per­son­al to the deeply the­o­ret­i­cal, from both reg­u­lar OntoGeek con­trib­u­tors and sev­er­al guest writ­ers. We’d love to hear from you with your thoughts on spe­cif­ic arti­cles and the month as a whole – com­ment freely and e‑mail us at editor@ontologicalgeek.com!

The Mormons are a pecu­liar peo­ple. They will tell you this them­selves. Despite a solid two decades of increas­ing efforts at align­ing the church with­in the Protestant main­stream, they remain some­what apart. They have their own sto­ries, their own idioms, their own par­tic­u­lar his­to­ry, inter­twined as it is with the expan­sion of the American West. They have their own holy tomes astride the Bible — exten­sions, addi­tions, revi­sions, coun­ter­points. They are a peo­ple unto them­selves, in many ways. I used to num­ber among them.

The lan­guage remains with me, how­ev­er. The sto­ries and the con­cepts still inform my view of the world. Some things stay with you.

When we talk about videogames, we so rarely men­tion the reli­gions we fol­low, or once fol­lowed, or are pass­ing­ly famil­iar with. We so rarely speak of the ideas which formed us, of the sym­bols and the lan­guage that per­me­ate our under­stand­ing of these lit­tle worlds that some lit­tle gods have made for us to inhab­it. We speak of choice, and con­se­quence, and agency, and rarely of the con­texts in which many of us under­stand those terms.

A game, there­fore, about videogames, about agency, about the Mormons, and about how I see them.

[NORMAL]

[CITATIONS] (if you want to quick­ly find spe­cif­ic para­graphs)

A Thousand Deaths orig­i­nal­ly appeared on AWTR, here.