# Theology LLMS index: [llms.txt](/dvw/en/llms.txt) --- Theology? Why would a theologist…? Then it hits you: As the real is to the virtual, so the spiritual is to the real. Theologists should be more interested in virtual worlds than perhaps anyone else except the designers of such worlds themselves. I have two points to make before I begin this discussion. Firstly, I’m an atheist. I’m going to be talking about religions here, and try as I might to be objective it’s inevitable that my views are going to show through in places. If this is likely to offend you, please skip the remainder of this section. Secondly, I’m an atheist. I regard ethics and morality as important issues, but I don’t associate them with particular religious doctrines. Therefore, some of the things I’ll be talking about might not seem to be theology-related at all. If this apparent belittling of faith is likely to offend you, you too should skip the remainder of this section. Okay, so let’s get started…. A July 1999 poll [^261] in The Mud Journal asked “What kind of Mud would you like more of?” Of the 362 people who responded 10.3% indicated that they would like to see more religious-themed virtual worlds. This was lower than any of the other genres (horror 24.2%, futuristic 21.8%, old western 19.8%, sci-fi 13.3%, real world events 10.6%) but nevertheless 10.3% is not insignificant. Even so, many players and designers would be surprised to learn that there are virtual worlds in existence right now that were built as places of worship for real-life religions. I don’t just mean technopaganism, either, although this was among the first to be studied [^262]; there are virtual worlds created as places for people to participate in mainstream religious services, too. The E-church [^263], for example, was set up by a group of Christians in the charismatic tradition, and has met with some success at reproducing some of the essential features of a conventional church service [^264], if not the experience. Technopagans attempt to create a virtual space that can be sanctified as a place in which spirit is manifested. The E-church’s congregation, on the other hand, tries to replicate the real in the virtual; it only partially succeeds, because the technology gets in the way of some aspects of the service. Nevertheless, the E-church is adapting to account for these, and also to exploit some of the advantages that virtuality brings. Whether these experiments will lead to more or less real-world religious activity in virtual worlds depends on the specific religions involved, of course. It would take something of a debate before conventional Christian churches allowed baptism or weddings in virtual worlds, for example; the Roman Catholic Eucharist presents particularly thorny problems. In an examination [^265] of religions and cyberspace (including virtual worlds), Lorne L. Dawson noted the following additional traps awaiting anyone intending to move any religion from the real to the virtual—or, indeed, to create a new religion for virtual spaces only: - The propagation of misinformation and misunderstandings - Loss of control over religious materials - Loss of group identity among practitioners of religions - Negative effects of the interface - Blurring the frames of reality For the most part, virtual worlds are not regarded by their inhabitants as places where religion is important. Morality is important, but the basis of this—religious or otherwise—is rarely mentioned. Not only would it often be non-immersive to bring real-world religion into a virtual world, but (along with discussions about politics) it offers a good opportunity to fall out with your friends. That said, many virtual worlds do have a formal or informal system of etiquette in place for the bulk of their players, along with a stronger system of ethics for their administrators. Some of the latter go back years: The MUSH favorite Amberyl’s Wizard Ethics [^266] has remained unchanged since 1994, and MUD2’s Good Wiz Guide [^267] d ates back to MUD1. In an early analysis [^268] of the problem of determining an ethical system for virtual worlds, Chuck Haeberle poses the question: Should the moral values and ethics which we consider to be valid in real life be applied to the virtual world, or should we look at the virtual world as existing with a separate set of ethics? Ethical standards exist wherever humans exist, so virtual worlds—even anarchic ones—must have them. Haeberle notes that a virtual world operates over a potentially unending period, and that its players define how it is played by how they play it. They must always abide by the rules of the virtual world in which they play, but if they don’t like those rules they can play elsewhere. For this reason, some real-world values must be carried over—they’re part of the value judgment. Virtual worlds are an extension of real life; the interaction between players gives rise to a real-life morality that makes virtual worlds more than the mere games they would otherwise be. In other words, it’s because we’re real that virtual worlds must be treated in moral terms as if they were equally real. That said, there are big differences between virtual worlds and Reality. An ethical system that has evolved for real life may need to be adapted if it is to hold in virtual worlds, too. This is the position of Michael Cranford, who identifies [^269] the desire to be more greatly immersed as the great allure of virtual worlds. Virtual worlds offer the prospect of existence without limits; yet without limits, whence comes meaning? If everything is possible, if risk and consequence are not factors, why would anybody treat other people in a dignified or sensitive manner? Haeberle is right in that people should bring real-world morality into virtual worlds, but that doesn’t mean they do. Furthermore, if other people treat you badly in this virtual world, there’s no guarantee they won’t follow you to whichever other virtual world you go to instead. Cranford is ultimately pessimistic, seeing the ethical systems of virtual worlds as potentially eroding those of Reality. Because virtual worlds have fewer constraints than Reality, some degree of retrogressive behavior is inevitable. Cranford’s argument is basically anthropological. It’s interesting, therefore, to see what bona fide students of anthropology have to say on the subject of religion in virtual worlds. Many anthropologists take the view that a culture without religion is no culture at all; however, they have quite inclusive views as to what “religion” may be. Any system of beliefs in supernatural forces—with accompanying symbols and rituals—that serve to help people make sense of the world is a religion; deities are not a necessary component. From this perspective, do virtual worlds have anything in them that would qualify as “religion”? If so, it strengthens their claim to separate culture status; if not, it weakens it. There is an argument [^270] that although virtual world cultures don’t usually have an explicit religion, nevertheless they do have so many components that are analogous to what religions have that they could be treated as if they did have religions [^271]. For example, logging in is an acceptance of the “truth” of virtual worlds, signifying a belief in the non-real—a very ritualistic process. That there is, for certain people, a religious aspect to virtual worlds is the conclusion of Jen Clodius in her discussion [^272] of religion in DragonMUD. She noted that there were many traditional religious symbols in DragonMUD, but that these were present entirely for their evocative effects; if DragonMUD did indeed have a religious aspect, it would need to have symbols of its own. It did have some ceremony (particularly concerning the raising of players to the rank of wizard, that is, junior administrator). Could it be argued that this was basically a religious act at root? Starting with a very well-known anthropological definition [^273] of religion from Clifford Geertz, she invited members of the DragonMUD community to debate the suggestion that there was a religious aspect to that virtual world. Twenty-five participated in the resulting discussion. Taking a check-list approach to each element of Geertz’s definition in turn, the players decided: - DragonMUD has symbols. Some objects have a permanent place in the virtual world and have real-life significance to players, therefore they act as symbols. - These symbols can act to establish long-lasting moods and motivations. Furthermore, they do so in themselves; however, these motivations are primarily social. On the whole, the consensus was that the virtual world’s symbols did satisfy this clause of Geertz’s criteria, but not everyone agreed. - There are conceptions of a general order of existence in DragonMUD, assuming the context is DragonMUD itself and not the real world. - DragonMUD’s symbols clothe the conceptions of order with an aura of factuality because of their permanence and their meaning to the players. - DragonMUD has a unique realism. It’s less clear whether the clothing of conceptions of an order of existence in factuality caused this, though. Clodius concludes that for some players there is a religious aspect to DragonMUD, but she is hesitant to go beyond that due to what she perceives as her own possible cynicism concerning their motivations. Personally, I believe her cynicism to be more than justified. The DragonMUD players involved in the discussion criticized Geertz’s definition for its omission of any reference to a sense of “awe” or of the “sacred.” I think perhaps they missed the point: These are implicit in Geertz’s definition, which the players did not realize in their haste to show that DragonMUD did indeed have a religious aspect to it. If more of them had understood what Geertz was actually saying with his definition, they might have been less quick to assert that it applied to their virtual world. This isn’t to say that it doesn’t apply, of course—some players expressed that they did have a sense of awe concerning DragonMUD—but rather that the debate was incomplete [^274]. So far, I’ve described what religion has to say about virtual worlds, but not what virtual worlds have to say about religion. This is no different to what I’ve done in discussing other disciplines, of course: Virtual world designers may be interested in what geographers have to say about virtual worlds, but they’re not concerned with the problems that virtual worlds give geographers—that’s for geographers to worry about. In the case of religion, however, the creator/created analogy is too strong: The questions that virtual world designers pose for theologians are questions that PCs and NPCs pose for designers. In her book The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace [^275], Margaret Wertheim argues that what cyberspace offers (in both its virtual-world present and its cyberpunk promise) is akin to the world-view of medieval Christians. Back then, people had the notion that they were simultaneously embedded in both a physical world and a spiritual world. Wertheim charts this view through various scientific and mathematical spaces until she arrives at cyberspace, which has a physical/virtual split that mirrors the physical/ spiritual split of the medieval age. This book is a great starting place if you want to look into the spiritual and the virtual more fully. It’s not specific to virtual worlds, but they are mentioned, and what she says certainly applies to them. Her contention is that human beings have always had “other worlds,” whether Aboriginal Dreamtime or Greek Olympus, and that Western cultures in particular have always associated immateriality with spirituality [^276]. Virtual worlds’ offer of death that isn’t death is precisely what is promised by many religions. The level system of virtual worlds is like Dante’s description of the nine circles of Hell, the nine cornices of Purgatory and the nine spheres of Heaven: Players advance in experience and understanding until their ultimate ascendance to wizardhood. Cyberspace is being claimed as a realm for the self; this book explores how it could be a realm for the soul. Although the analogy between virtual and spiritual spaces is easy to draw, the consequences of it are not. Wertheim identifies the morality and ethics present in virtual spaces as much harder to explain than is the case for spiritual spaces. Although she takes some tentative steps, she never really comes close to answering her question. The moral underpinnings of virtual worlds cannot be explained in a self-contained fashion by the same appeal to the word of some deity that is available for spiritual worlds. Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control [^277] makes a very interesting point about the recursive nature of creation. In a wide-ranging eclectic mix of cyberholism, Kelly invests a few pages talking about virtual worlds. At first, this is the usual stuff about MUDs, MOOs, and quotes from Turkle. Then, however, he makes his killer observation. The ultimate “god game” would be a vast world, set into motion with a few well-chosen rules and populated by PCs and autonomous, AI-driven NPCs. Time would pass, relationships and interrelationships would form and tangle. All entities—PCs and NPCs—would alter their world, physically and socially, until it evolved into something quite different from how it started. At that point, the god who created it descends into it. Kelly’s is not a religious book, let alone a Christian one, but he uses a Christian analogy to pursue his argument. He describes the Biblical story of the Creation in terms of a designer creating a world. At the end, the designer (that is, God) creates a simulacrum of himself that he instantiates as Adam. He makes Adam just like he himself is, with free will and creativity. He turns Adam loose in the world. Mankind is now repeating the exercise; we are creating our own worlds. Is this the final act that completes God’s genesis—makes us truly the copies of him that we were always intended to be—or is it a foolish audacity? Put another way, is it a sacrament or a blasphemy? If you accept God as the creator of the universe, it must be one or the other—there’s no partial solution. By creating a virtual world, either you are completing God’s plan that humanity be in his image (sacrament, but does this mean God’s work is now done?), or you are mocking him through your arrogance and false pride (blasphemy, but does this mean humanity can never consider itself truly to be in God’s image?). Either way, just like God’s creation of mankind, any free-willed virtual creatures the designer creates will not be under the designer’s control: The creator has to pass control to the created. The designer—whether you or God—must “let go to win” [^278]. A third book, TechGnosis [^279] by Erik Davis, reverses the argument: By creating virtual worlds, we become the gods that we weren’t before. Like Wertheim, Davis takes the point of view that the technical merely hides the same mystical that humanity has always sought (although his approach is less anthropological and more evangelical). Virtual worlds are just one example of where this happens—the scope of the book is much wider. Nevertheless, in the few pages that he dedicates to the virtual worlds, Davis raises a number of interesting points. Firstly, he notes that virtual worlds of all kinds use magic as a metaphor to explain the kinds of things that you can do in them that you can’t do in Reality. They present a mystical fiction to account for the technological fact. Secondly, he observes that permanent death crystallizes a philosophical question concerning immersion. Do we identify with our online selves because they are as liberated as we want to be, or because they are as constrained as we really are [^280]? Finally, he makes a connection with Hinduism. The word avatar, used in (mainly graphical) virtual worlds to denote the virtual object under the player’s control, has Hindu roots. It came to virtual worlds through Habitat, although it was also used in the (single-player) Ultima series (of which many virtual world designers were aware) so it didn’t need any explaining to them [^281]. In Hindu belief, avatars have two identities: As separate from the gods; as indivisible from the gods. Virtual world avatars have the same duality of separation (two worlds) and identity (same person), but they apply the concept in reverse: People become gods; gods don’t become people. Davis remains undecided as to whether this is an ascent or a descent of the spirit. The similarity between virtual world existence and Hindu mysticism has been noted many times [^282]. A remarkable 1992 paper [^283] by Thyagi NagaSiva goes one step further, and proposes the use of virtual worlds as a foundation metaphor for a new, Western mysticism. NagaSiva takes the view that virtual worlds are places where different aspects of the individual can exist—different selves, in other words. The existent of different selves is not restricted to virtual worlds, however—Reality has many situations where individuals can be regarded as having a self different to that present in other situations. NagaSiva suggests that it is insightful to regard these different selves as existing in their own, private “virtual world.” Whether this virtual world is an actual virtual world running on an actual computer or a metaphorical virtual world is immaterial; the two may be considered as equally “real.” What we normally mean by Reality is therefore simply an agglomeration of multiple virtual worlds; true Reality would be the superset of all virtual worlds [^284], a subject/object unity akin to the Buddhist Nirvana or Christian Heaven. Individual virtual worlds are merely the worlds inhabited by particular instantiations of the self. People can find NagaSiva’s notion of Reality in any of their virtual worlds, although they will not usually perceive it in normal states of consciousness. You find Reality by unifying with the divine, thereby both transcending and subsuming the virtual world experience. NagaSiva’s paper seems a good place to end this discussion of theology and virtual worlds, but I shall nevertheless carry on (not least because ending here would imply I was for NagaSiva’s proposal, which I’m not [^285]). Instead, I’m going to take a brief look at the design of in-context religions (or, strictly speaking, deities) for virtual worlds. There isn’t a lot of work in this area; the main paper, Dan Hastings’s Designing God [^286], is very short. It does, however, cover most of the basics [^287]: - Are gods necessary? - If so, do the gods exist in the virtual world or are they merely fictional? - Who are the gods? - What do they want? - Where did they come from? - Why are they here? There’s great scope for designer creativity in this area; pantheons in particular offer fine opportunities for combining philosophical and artistic points with gameplay elements. Do the gods represent: emotional concepts (love, hate, trust); aspects of life (time, fate, chance); aspects of nature (air, sea, forest); natural forces (fire, storms, earthquakes); aspects of balance (law, chaos, good, evil)? Or do they represent something else entirely? There are some interesting consequences of having gods [^288] in virtual worlds, all of which need to be determined by the designer. What, for example, is the effect of worshiping a god (or of not doing so)? What are the myths, and do they conflict? How did these give rise to the symbols and rituals of faith that turn it into a religion? How much of the religion should be programmed in as laws of nature (which wouldn’t be tangibly different to laws of the land?) and how much should be left to enforcement by players or NPCs? A very interesting mechanism for implementing religion is described in an article by Paul Schwanz [^289]. His idea is to codify morality as tangible properties along four dimensions: health, wealth, power, and information. Players choose their characters to be givers or takers along each dimension, and the degree to which they are so. When players undertake an action, any reward they gain is split along those dimensions. Thus, for example, a character who kills a king would gain points if they were an assassin (rating high for taking health and power) but the king’s physician would lose points (because they are life-giving and loyal, that is, power-giving). Conversely, an assassin who healed a king would lose points, whereas a healer would gain them. By this ruse, players get to decide on the morality of their characters and can role-play them appropriately. As a system of morality, which could be used to give value to any virtual religion, this is an excellent approach. For identity exploration, though, it presents a barrier. This, perhaps, is the great irony of all virtual-world religious experience: It changes the player, but it can’t itself change in response. For such adaptability, people must rely on either themselves or on other people. Whether these other people are real, virtual, or imaginary depends entirely on the religion. [^261]: Tony Allen, MUD Stats. The Mud Journal, July 1999. http://mudworld.inetsolve.com/TMJ/editorials/jul99/allen2.php3. [^262]: Stephen D. O’Leary, Cyberspace as Sacred Space: Communicating Religion on Computer Networks. Journal of the American Academy of Religion Vol. 64 (4), 1996. [^263]: So as to protect it, this is not its real name. Interestingly, it’s a graphical world, rather than the textual kind that might be expected. [^264]: Ralph Schroeder, Noel Heather and Raymond M. Lee, The Sacred and the Virtual: Religion in Multi-User Virtual Reality. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication Vol. 4 (2), December 1998. http://jcmc.huji.ac.il/vol4/issue2/schroeder.html. [^265]: Lorne. L. Dawson, Doing Religion in Cyberspace: The Promise and the Perils. The Council of Societies for the Study of Religion Bulletin Vol. 30 (1), 2001. http://www.arts.uwaterloo,ca/SOC/relcybercsssr.htm. [^266]: Lydia Leong, Amberyl’s Wizard Ethics. http://www.godlike.com/mushman/wiz-ethics.html. [^267]: Not available to non-wizzes—sorry! [^268]: Chuck Haeberle, An Essay on Ethics and Virtual Reality. http://www.legendmud.org/Bibliography/texts/essay.html. [^269]: Michael Cranford, The Social Trajectory of Virtual Reality: Substantive Ethics in a World Without Constraints. Technology and Society Vol. 18, 1996. http://sundoulos.com/articles.aspx?in=18. [^270]: I first encountered this in a 1998 anthropology paper by a student at the University of Twente in The Netherlands. Unfortunately, although I have a hard copy of the original, it does not bear the name of the author, nor is it any longer available on the Internet. [^271]: In other words, they “virtually” have a religion. [^272]: Jennifer A. Clodius, Ritual and Religion in DragonMUD. http://dragonmud.com/people/jen/ritual.html. [^273]: “A religion is a system of symbols, which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” Clifford Geertz, Religion as a Cultural System. Chapter 4 of Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures. New York, Basic Books, 1973. [^274]: DragonMUD’s creator, Caern, was present at the debate and admitted to no feeling of awe at all. His reason, which every designer of virtual worlds will immediately understand, was, “it’s hard to be awed by the wires one’s pulled oneself.” [^275]: Margaret Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. London, Virago, 1999. [^276]: She doesn’t mean this in the atheistic sense, that is, “spirituality is immaterial to me, mate.” On the other hand, she doesn’t take the truth or otherwise of spiritual existence as a given; she talks about the beliefs of others, but does not push her own beliefs (whatever they may be). Her book is very objective in this regard. [^277]: Kevin Kelly, Out of Control. New York, Addison Wesley, 1994. [^278]: An idea that I don’t explore here but which might nevertheless give people food for thought is: Under what circumstances would you, as a designer, let your AI-controlled NPCs know that you exist? Why wouldn’t you do it immediately? Why not periodically? Why not once they’ve reached the ability to create virtual worlds within their virtual world? And how do your answers to these questions compare with the choices apparently made by (the Christian) God? [^279]: Erik Davis, TechGnosis. New York, Harmony Books, 1998. [^280]: He doesn’t ask whether the identification could be due to the fact that ultimately they are us, which is my own point of view. [^281]: It was also, you may recall, the name of a very early virtual world on PLATO. [^282]: Most unexpectedly in Edward Castronova’s On Virtual Economies paper. [^283]: Thyagi NagaSiva, The MUD as a Basis for Western Mysticism. 1992. http://www.luckymojo.com/avidyana/gnostik/mudpsyc.html. [^284]: Remember here that from NagaSiva’s point of view, “virtual world” means the world inhabited by a single virtual self; he doesn’t mean an enumeration of every descendant of MUD1. [^285]: If you insist on knowing why, it’s because I find his concept of Reality distinctly unappealing and never wish to find any of my selves there. [^286]: Dan Hastings, Designing God. Imaginary Realities Vol. 3 (1), January 2000. http://home.clara.net/stormbringer/mudos/designing_god.html. [^287]: The main omission is how characters interact with deities (if indeed they can at all). [^288]: Or a single god; the designs for monotheistic, dualistic, and polytheistic worlds have their own distinct issues. [^289]: Paul E. Schwanz II, Morality in Massively Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Games. April 2000.