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What are the current most prominent values we propagate and worship in video games? I am interested in investigating how our value system and, in an allegorical sense, the pantheon of worshiped gods has been redesigned, reinvented, or remained the same as before in our currently most dominant, both in use and profit, new medium – video games. I have been researching both topics of the “value = worship” equation and the industry, culture and community of video games for quite a while in various works of mine. In them I addressed modern idols of oppression and expression, and the freedom of digital interaction while crossing over to reality. By the end of this thesis, I hope to contextualise and find out what exactly some of the more vivid values are that we internalise and worship within these digital experiences we so gladly devote ourselves to. I wish to explore the history and social aspects of worship in religion and mythology up to the modern day, followed by a brief history and present context of video games in “western” society, and conclude with the analysis of selected datasets and contemporary references to refine and isolate the values most common and present in this newly emerging coded field, that I then recontextualise and portray as “a pantheon of deities”.

During this whole process I intend to use mostly qualitative artistic research methods, building up from the very base cultural, societal and psychological concepts towards historical and modern examples to create a context both for the importance of my thesis question and foreseeable conclusion. Conclusively, I have proceeded step by step to support my initial assumption, but by uncovering deeper connections and more drastic issues I surpassed the anticipations I had when I started my research.

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The fields of societal mythological, religious worship and the values we share, portray, consume in our most modern and prominent mediums, in this case video games, have always interested me. Even more so when I started questioning the links between them that kept seemingly popping up as I delved deeper into these topics, both in theoretical research and daily active engagement. More and more essays, books and other online texts about systemic issues, historical cultural speculation and analysis, theological reasonings and generational tendencies seemed almost completely intertwined or allegorical to these links.

The question of what I or those close to me were taught through the digital storylines and archetypes, – we so gladly worshipped – also seemed to arise. I use the word “worship” in the sense of people in the modern age are devoting their wealth, time and focus while internalizing the given values of these designed worlds similarly to all other societies through known history building from a certain dogmatic structure brough forth by religion, otherwise, mythology in at the time most prominent mediums such as oral tradition, still image, writing, etc. These social value systems dictate communally agreed upon behaviours both represented by and enforced on an individual, they are subject to change as the community develops but since they represent a certain collective standard, they as well have a tendency to stagnate and oppress.

A clear example of such a more “western” ¹ associative deity and / or the act of worship translating into the value upheld by the group that praise it can be observed especially vividly within the ancient Greek pantheon. Each individual god, goddess or other story/myth worthy character represents a specific virtue in itself, often even the word describing it deriving from the name/title of these icons. Zeus, the god of thunder but also hospitality (the ancient Greek word xenia (hospitality) linked with Zeus Xenios), Athena, goddess of war but also wisdom and clear mindedness, Artemis, goddess of the hunt but also respect for the balance of nature, Aphroditie, goddess of beauty but also overwhelming love and connectedness, Hephaestus, god of fire but also smithery and innovation, so on and so on, both explaining and contextualising not just core natural phenomena but also very crucial societal values that the communities at the time agreed upon. To further the point, since ancient Greece was quite the expansive civilisation (amongst others at the time, such as Egypt, Persia, etc.), they also specified worship to a smaller selection of these deities according to the most glorified values in each region. That is why famously Athens and Sparta ², both focussing on icons of war, they each chose a representation that fits with how they view the act too – Athens opting for wisdom and strategy in battle, while Sparta saw more importance on dedication and brute force. This “worship=value” equation, of course, goes further than just the Mediterranean coast and can be interconnected with other societies, for example, the ancient Greek “goddess of the dawn” – Eos, then later in Roman mythology named Aurora, shares resemblance with the Lithuanian deity – Ausrine, (originating the word dawn in Lithuanian – ausra), the Irish deity – Brigid, the Slavic – Zorya, the Norse – Dellingr and the Germanic – Eostre, which even originates the modern celebration of the Christian myth of the dawn / rebirth – Easter, as it was a way to integrate the new Christian practices with people of other, older beliefs celebrating the solstice. In a sense trying to bond over these same exact separately upheld values. With and through time the practices of worship did not necessarily diminish, as hordes of religious preachers would have you believe, but developed and translated with the change of communication mediums and newer media.

The oral traditions sharing these godlike allegories of high regard even in the very beginning of the human age were accompanied by acting out these storylines and depicting these characters in still image. Later, followed by writing down more exact plots and archetypes, as example, the bible, but also any of the highly regarded memetic myths filled with moral values we as a society praise and consume, such as the works of Tzu ³, then Shakespeare, then Shelley ⁴, then Murakami ⁵, etc. With the development of new technology new ways of recording and translation came to be, reaching the public who now devote and worship the gods of the cinema, after video killed the radio star, with their money, time, attention and silence. These “pixelated gods” then followed the individual and the collective society back home to their television sets. After which and most recently they started interacting and engaging with us in a more in-depth way as video games are drastically overshadowing any other medium by daily use, profit and expression in our little “western” world.

All of this randomly ranted through and loosely interconnected together, I must return and reiterate the very first question I brought up for you, my dear reader: What new or simply redesigned / rebranded old gods (values) do we worship, share and internalise through video games? Or via simply our most prominent and potential filled medium /media ⁶?

Level 1:
Mythology, Religion and the “Worship = Value” Equation

New branches of government, mythology and religion, both clinging to the past and abandoning it to focus on the future, develop through changing and preserving values that a society upholds and, in a sense, “worships”. In his book The Selfish Gene, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coins the term “meme”, basing the theory of memetics on Darwinian evolution within the fields of culture and societal information transfer.¹ In the vein of a gene, it is instead a “unit of culture” which propagates through the minds of individuals, jumping from one to another. Thinking of it analogous to genetics, a meme is only as successful as its contribution to the effectiveness of its host, similarly to myth it is only effective if it is helpful in guidance and upholding value.

More recently, that is where the wider spread and less defined expression of meme culture comes from. Sharing certain digital representations of emotions, ideas, socio-political views, types of humour and values over the world wide web. French sociologist David Emile Durkheim defined these specific values as social facts - things external to, and coercive of, the actor. They develop from collective influences and in doing so do not emanate singularly from the one. They cannot be analysed through simple reasoning or thought but require a study of history and socio-politics in order to observe their long-lasting, deeply rooted effects and understand their complex nature. The concepts of these memetic social facts bring about a clearer image of the previously mentioned interconnected pantheons - why there are deities representing the same human ideas between cultures and through time, as well as, why these deities differ between each other with how they approach or interpret their assigned ideas according to the approach and interpretation of the societies worshipping them. The American theologian and biblical scholar Mark Smith has written extensively on issues relevant to myths moving from one people to another in his work on “divine translatability”. Responding to and further developing on the works of Assmann, Smith in his incredibly detailed book God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World offers a basic statement of the concept: “translatability involves specific equation identifications of deities across cultures and the larger recognition of deities of other cultures in connection to one's own deities.”²

Figure 1: “Greek Gods” sketch from “Saturday Night Live”, Season 37. 2011.

Figure 2: First season playable god character roster of “SMITE”. 2014.

Smith also brings up the famous example of Herodotus ⁷ who, in his travels to foreign lands, recognised an Assyrian, Arabian, and Persian goddess as versions of Aphrodite, Horus ⁸ as Apollo ⁹, and Osiris ¹⁰ as Dionysus ¹¹. For example, we can recognise such allegorical value system applications and development with a few key differences analysing yet again the ancient Greek to modern Christian myths. Firstly, and most notably, the actual idea of worshiping these deities or deity, that at its core represents accepted communal values, has changed drastically with the widespread influence of monotheistic Abrahamic religions. As Stephen Fry in his book Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold so beautifully puts it: “Greeks did not grovel before their gods. They were aware of their vain need to be supplicated and venerated, but they believed men were their equal. Their myths understand that whoever created this baffling world, with its cruelties, wonders, caprices, beauties, madness and injustice, must themselves have been cruel, wonderful, capricious, beautiful, mad and unjust […] it is their refusal to see any divine beings as perfect, whole and complete of themselves, whether Zeus, Moros ¹² or Prometheus ¹³, that makes the Greeks so satisfying.”³ In other words, the worship comes with understanding and internalising the relatable metaphor and worth of it without unreasonably glorifying it beyond mortal doubt. That contrasting with the oppressively perfect, unfathomable and incomprehensible image of the modern Christian God, resulting in a cultural conservatism as the religion further continues to exist in our ever-developing world without questioning the relativity of certain values and prejudices it propagates. Other examples of moral or exemplary differences between these mythoi can be more clearly seen in the specific overlapping narratives that share similar if not the same motives and subjects. If we take the storylines of Philemon and Baucis (Ovid’s Metamorphoses) ¹⁴ and Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19:1) ¹⁵, both depicting a divine visit in disguise, in the first of Zeus and Hermes and in the latter of two angels, we see the common highly regarded value of hospitality, but at the same time the changes made to the story also depicts drastic societal moral differences too. In this story of theoxenia other underlying worshiped values, of eternal love and devotion (between two people) and the acceptance of a life well lived, are depicted as the elderly couple agree to turn around together to then be morphed into trees, symbolising this and the persistent connection to nature. In contrast to, the guilt-ridden ideas of human debauchery, vilification of alternative sexuality, genuine remorse for other people, and the objectifying and violent expression towards women, depicted as Lot offers his daughters to be mass raped instead of the male presenting angels, because the whole city wants to “know them” ¹⁶ in the biblical sense, and afterwards his wife being punished (turned to a pillar of salt) for turning around towards the burning city in grief and thus defying God. And with this divine translation the translation of societal values is apparent. Or the lack thereof. It is also adamantly clear within a singular myth’s development through time, too.

Figure 3: Character posters for “American Gods”, Season 1. 2017.

Taking, again, as example the bible, we can see examples of forced and sneaky (purposefully hidden and minute) changes in the language of scripture through history for the purpose of societal value shifts and oppression. For instance, the widespread new reasonings of religious homophobia since 1983, following the U.S. AIDS epidemic, explored more in-depth by the theological writer Ed Oxford, as an American company Biblica ¹⁷ spent enormous amounts of money to retranslate the German bible by replacing the words “boy molester” or “paedophile” and the phrase “lie with a boy” to “homosexual” (the word being first coined in Germany 1863) and “lie with another man”, and then later on importing this new reedited bible back to America to then be translated yet again into English and mass published throughout the continent. But, as introduced before, the change and spread of mythology and worship of the modern age is not just solely confided within what we regard as religion or religious beliefs. This type of social value mythology, either rooted in religion or pop culture, or anything else that carries the same memetic tendencies, resonates through the population influencing it and representing it simultaneously.

Figure 4: Kate Cooper – “Rigged”. 2016.

Figure 5: Morehshin Allahyari – “She Who Sees the Unknown”. 2016.

As the French literary theorist and semiotician Roland Barthes states in his book Mythologies: “The cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now done by laundry-detergent commercials and comic-strip character” – or the industry, the community and the culture of rich, expansive, fluid, immersive, allegorical, exemplary, full of endless technological and socio-political potential, yet still clinging, at the very least in the mainstream, to outdated views of certain social myths – video games.⁴

Level 2:
History and Present Context of Video Games in Society

The history of video games, from their creation to this very day, if studied even in the most basic sense shows a clear map of value change and thus the change of the industry, not in any way separated from but instead influenced by the world around it. In a sense being not quite a mirror but more a caricature of the surrounding society as any potential-filled artistic medium should be (even if, just as any revered previous medium, it still stays oppressed by the ideologies of the past and those that came before it). As every previous “generation”, the “generation” before us opted out to express from the very inception of the video game world that it is a passing phase and, it being a new somehow “foreign” medium, pushed the blame of violence and corruption onto it.

As Douglas Adams writes in his book The Salmon of Doubt: “I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”⁵

This seems to ring quite true and somehow timeless when we take as example even the radio when it was first invented and called the “new invader of the privacy of the home”, “a disturbing influence” and how “it has gained an invincible hold of their children” according to the American Journal of Psychiatry.⁶ Yet from tongue to paint, to dance and song, to pen, to print, to vibrating membranes moving the air around ear drums, to light projected on fabric and then shot at glass through cylinders, to coded pixels responding to our touch – the storylines, architypes, moral subjects and socio-political views as values have been retold, rewritten, redesigned and rebranded through time and through culture, teaching and sharing what we agree upon and / or what we don’t and shouldn’t. Apart from the simple, but so incredibly important for our little modern capital “C”, the capitalist “western” world, fact that the video game industry in 2021 was estimated to be worth over 178 billion dollars ($178,000,000,000.00), more than the print, the movie and the social networking industries combined, the act of play and interaction is simply and unmistakably crucial to human nature and society, to teaching, to evolving as people, it is primary to and a necessary condition of the generation of culture.⁷

Johan Huizinga, a Dutch historian and one of the founders of modern cultural history, states in his book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture: “Our point of departure must be the conception of an almost childlike play-sense expressing itself in various play-forms, some serious, some playful, but all rooted in ritual and productive of culture by allowing the innate human need of rhythm, harmony, change, alternation, contrast and climax, etc., to unfold in full richness.”⁸ Accepted or not, the medium, the industry, the community and the culture of video games exists and is as deeply rooted in today’s society as society is deeply rooted in it. Not losing track of worship and value, them relating and correlating as one, they are fully expressed and structured upon within video games. From ancient tales of allegorical godly figures carved into stone to pushing “E” or “X” ¹⁸ to interact with them.

Before developing the point any further, as the development of myth was previously expanded upon, so should there be at the very least the bare minimum of explanations of video game history. In October 1958, physicist Villiam Higinbotham created what is thought to be the very first video game on an oscilloscope resembling the far more famous later released game PONG!.⁹ After this invention non research targeted gaming started being developed until it was finally released in arcades in 1971 and for the first home video game console in 1972. Even if overlapping a new measurement of console generations has begun and with-it new heights of graphics, immersion, accessibility, depth and complexity. First 1972, second 1976, third 1983, fourth 1987, fifth 1993, sixth 1998, seventh 2005, eighth 2012 and finally the ninth generation 2020. But with all this progress hand in hand came oppression and stagnation copied to a T from the society it was developing in. Before 1983 video games in general were created and marketed to a wider demographic of individuals – famously designed, developed, coded and founded by a significantly less disappointing ratio of men to women. The games were sold as entertainment for the entire nuclear family, not to mention, that by focussing on a more inclusive crowd the actual gamers were more diverse. As Ms. Pac-Man (independent in her title and in her admiration, though still stereotyped in her depiction as an independent woman) was a wildly more successful successor – Electronic Games Magazine in 1982 wrote: “the game’s record shattering success derives from its overwhelming popularity among female gamers”.¹⁰¹¹ Yet all of that changed with the “video game crash” of 1983, as publishers started flooding the market with subpar releases such as the infamous and downright despised “worst game ever made” – E.T. for the Atari 2600, and most adults simply stopped playing them.¹² Following the crash, when it came time to market the brand-new Nintendo Entertainment System, to revive the industry, instead of selling it in the electronics section, Nintendo started selling it in the toy section and since toys were separated into a binary selection of boy and girl, they made the decision to target the male demographic. This decision was followed up with relentless marketing (by Nintendo and all other top brands such as Atari, Sega, etc.) based on toxically masculine attributes, at the time regarded as the absolute norm in other industries, focussing on the objectification of women, oppressive gender roles, the sexualisation of children or gaming and the simple alienation of any other demographic.

Figure 6: A small sample collection of the homophobic, racist, sexist, rape propagating, etc. video game advertisements in magazines and TV, popular between the late 1980’s to the early 2020’s.

Tragically so, since throughout the whole of the industry to this day, according to Entertainment Software Association: Annual Report 2015, more adult women play video games than even teenage boys do.¹³ This type of behaviour resulted in the significant decrease of non-male engagement in both the production and consumption of this budding new medium. With the decrease of in any way varied engagement and consistent gatekeeping, gaslighting and cognitive dissonance ¹⁹ from the community, that feels violently entitled in their singular white, straight, “western”, cis male representation (which the before mentioned, movie, tv, literature – any outside industry at all influenced, marketing has led to), inevitable stagnation, the monotony of broken triple A titles ²⁰ and xenophobic tribalist white saviour complexes expressed in misguided online harassment campaigns disguised as “social movements”, such as “GamerGate” ²¹ in 2014 (later, manifesting from this example, the forming of world wide web attack group culture into political, subsequently social stands and patterns of behaviour, in a sense worshiping the act of hatred, spilling into real life), started to seek solidity as the status quo: making the games worse, losing the industry money and propagating toxic, dehumanising and dismissing behaviours within the interacting society, picked up from the sheer force of habit of marketing and lack of representation from previous generations of mediums. Such as the stagnation and oppression of certain cultural / religious / mythological worship, the same are some specific outdated and very blatantly violently oppressive values within the new art form of video games, mirroring and creating a cartoonish hyperbolic caricature of the surrounding society from the 80’s until now.

Figure 7: A graph depicting the drastic decrease of women in computer sciences since 1984, according to the National Science Foundation, American Bar Association of Medical Colleges, made by the Code/Art non-profit organisation. 2020.

But all that said, the bright shining future and present possibility for truly feminist, in the sense of equally representative, equally non-oppressive and equally non-discriminatory – as the American author, professor, and feminist social activist, bell hooks so eloquently put it in her book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center: “The struggle to end sexist oppression that focuses on destroying the cultural basis for such domination strengthens other liberation struggles. Individuals who fight for the eradication of sexism without struggles to end racism or classism undermine their own efforts. Individuals who fight for the eradication of racism or classism while supporting sexist oppression are helping to maintain the cultural basis of all forms of group oppression.”, expression and the opportunity for these completely logical, intersectional, unnecessarily overly vilified beliefs / values is and always has been there.¹⁴

Figure 8: Jazmin Morris – “a collection of objs”. 2019.

Level 3:
Deities / Values of the Video Game Pantheon We Worship Now

Now, anxiously hopeful for the future and furiously critical of the past and present, after two chapters of laying down the sociological and theological, contemporary and historical groundwork for this topic, the questioning “if” we actually worship these digitally displayed values, “if” our devotion to them and to the forceful propagation of them is actually that drastic and impactful, or “if” we even had / have a choice in choosing them, is finally and completely redundant. The “if” by this point becomes blatantly purposeful and intentionally malicious ignorance, no longer fuelled by cognitive dissonance but by the need to uphold a systemically oppressive ²² personally favourable structure.

Yet before any reader, feeling as if their previous representation, fulfilment or deeply positive attachment to video games as a whole disregard anything that has been pointed out so far, enters a fight or flight ²³ response, due to a part of their identity being attacked by anything that has thus far been discussed. Then, please, Dear Reader, think of the contrast, in regards to all the presented facts, between how relatively small and monochromatic your included community is and how overwhelmingly, almost at the sense of a hyperobject ²⁴, large, diverse and purposefully collectively insulted, dehumanised, disregarded and dismissed are the communities who barely ever, or maybe even just recently, solely to fill a quota, had a chance to see any small thing to associate with. As the already previously introduced bell hooks in her book Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism writes: “For how does one overthrow, change or even challenge a system that you have been taught to admire, to love, to believe in?”¹⁵

Even if drastic or overly dramatic sounding, these thoughts, apart from being exemplary supported by all the previous research analysed in this thesis, shine through in other works crucial to the field such as: The Ethics of Playing, Researching, and Teaching Games in the Writing Classroom by lecturer and professor of rhetoric Richard Colby, associate professor of English Matthew S. S. Johnson and associate teaching professor Rebekah Shultz Colby, Augmented Learning: Research and Design of Mobile Educational Games by the director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program and professor Eric Klopfer, Values at Play in Digital Games by the founding director of Tiltfactor Lab, the CEO of Resonym, artist and designer Mary Flanagan and professor of information science Helen Nissenbaum, A Method for Discovering Values in Digital Games by design researcher, lecturer, applied mathematics instructor and author Shadi Kheirandish and professor of designing interactive systems and author Matthias Rauterberg, The Gamification of Learning and Instruction by professor of instructional technology and author Karl M. Klapp, The Relationship between Player’s Value Systems and Their In-Game Behavior in a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game by post-doctoral fellow Chaoguang Wang and assistant professor of electrical engineering Gino Yu, and, not to mention, Game Value by professor and author Vedat Yiğitoğlu, in which he introduces the reader to the subject matter by stating that: “”Game” as a term, implies the game beyond its meaning and expands on it. This work solidifies the idea that, in essence games are “a form of communication” between numerous planes of thought. As such along with their rising importance, it’s no longer sufficient for games to be investigated under any single discipline, instead requiring the subject to be investigated under a variety of disciplines.”^{16171819202122}

The value of representation and diversity or lack thereof in, at the very least, most recognisable and popular triple A titles, which stand at the forefront of the industry, exemplifies a widely disregarded, ignored and quite often purposefully disputed bias, that is propagated not just by the advertisers and producers but also by a substantial part of the generation of gamers raised while taught outdated and stagnating socio-political ideals integrated from the mediums predating and around the development of this one, so eloquently discussed in the Misogyny, Racism and Homophobia: Where Do Video Games Stand? conference presentation by video game developer and known spokesperson for diversity in video games Manveer Heir.²³ The impact of some of these mass worshiped video game culture values, for example “militarism” ²⁵ is worrying and clearly detrimental. As is incredibly pedantically dissected and brought forth into the spotlight by associate professor of communication studies and author Roger Stahl in his book Militainment, Inc. in which he argues that a new interactive mode of militarized entertainment is recruiting its audience as nationalised, tribalist and xenophobic virtual-citizen soldiers, by presenting and viewing war and the designed righteousness or play of it as entertainment – or “militainment” – in contemporary pop culture.²⁴ But as I keep reiterating again and again, in this new, still budding, promising interactive and continuously developing medium there is still tremendous potential to fight and unlearn oppressive social facts and memetic tendencies groomed into the public consciousness. Not just that, but there is and has been from the very beginning decisive hope and determination within the wider community of this ground-breaking industry to use it for revolutionary and, in the most attainable and realistic sense of the word, utopian social visions.

Figure 9: A slide from the presentation “Misogyny, Racism and Homophobia: Where Do Video Games Stand?” at GDC 2014.

Figure 10: Harun Farocki – “Serious Games III: Immersion”. 2009.

With this sentiment in mind, it is finally time to return to our core questions: what do we decide to worship in our modern day, what are the values we choose to propagate and internalise? In seeking another, more quantitative, granted still relatively subjective, hint of an answer to these queries, I have developed through a multi-step process to refine a selection of these worshipped values, appearing in direct response to the player’s interaction with the game. Firstly, collecting rankings, ratings and charts of video games according to their popularity, income, sales, community sizes, etc. with at the time most recent data. Then proceeding to cross-reference the titles of each dataset and compiling a new one according to the frequency of repetition throughout. After which picking the twenty seemingly most popular through all datasets and creating a list of possible interactions and immediate responses for each game. And lastly, cross-referencing the frequency of repetition of the responses to create yet another dataset in which socio-political values, akin to those of religious / mythological deities in days gone by, would be attributed to them. These top ten most common, but in no way the only, values, personified representations (given my own fun little broken portmanteau ²⁶ names) and relative sister deities from other pantheons, representing our own designed reflections of the contemporary world, through the pre-coded and pre-rendered mirror of video games, in my research ended up being:

1. “Ab’spre’sa” – the deity of “abandoning, self-preservation and salvation”, an utterly selfish version of the ancient Greek goddess Soteria ²⁷,

2. “Imp’ex’up” – the deity of “implementation, extension and upgrading”, analogous with the godly Greek smith Hephaestus,

3. “Consum’im” – the deity of “consumerism”, a perverse ouroborous ²⁸ offshoot of the Roman Bacchus,

4. “Vi’mur” – the deity of “violence and murder”, resembling an amalgamation of all the Greek Phonoi ²⁹,

5. “Spe’eef” – the deity of “speed and efficiency”, similar to a drugged out Roman Mercury ³⁰,

6. “Lu’sta’su” – the deity of “lurking, stalking and survival”, like a bloodthirsty version of the Greek titan Lelantus ³¹,

7. “Gri’pr” – the deity of “grinding and progression”, mimicking a Kafkaesque ³² Roman Janus ³³,

8. “Fr’a’ove” – the deity of “freedom, agility and overcoming”, a less fulfilling version of the Celtic goddess Aine ³⁴,

9. “As’vica” – the deity of “association and vicariousness”, a less family trauma plagued Norse Loki ³⁵, and

10. “Nour’ri’co” – the deity of “nourishment, ritual and cooking”, similar to the Greek Hestia ³⁶.

Figure 11: My research process of cross-referencing top video game lists, their top contenders, the immediate outcomes of a player’s interaction within them, values attributed to the outcomes, and the top most popular values emerging from these steps.

Each of these made-up digital deities representing a completely real collection of values, from a real selection of games, picked from real lists of numerical data based on interaction, to simply make clear in a hyperbolic sense that in no way is it “JUST A GAME” but it is a continued, translated and pixelated way of worship, reinvented, redesigned or even created a new for the modern day from the ones in the distant past, that fair maidens, fierce warriors and live animals would be sacrificed to. Only in contrast now we sacrifice time, money, wealth, physical and mental health, and whatever space we have still echoing inside our heads to internalise what we worship in these video games (as well as the rest of the internalised media around them), to learn the social facts, the memetic tendencies and teach them or act out (systemically, violently, dehumanizingly or otherwise possibly more positively) according to them in contrast to other people.

Figure 12: A small sample collection of video games with more inclusive and feminist values between the late 1980’s to the early 2020’s. (“Caper in the Castro”, 1989. “GayBlade”, 1992. “The Orion Conspiracy”, 1995. “Fallout 2”, 1998. “Lim”, 2012. “Gone Home”, 2013. “Radiator 2”, 2017. “Dys4ia”, 2012. “Journey”, 2012. “Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator”, 2017. “Life Is Strange” series, 2015-2021. “Foobar Vs. the DEA”, 1996.)

Boss Fight

Having gone step by step building up from the very base cultural, societal and psychological concepts towards historical and modern examples to create a context both for the importance of my thesis question and the conclusion of “what are the current most prominent values we propagate and worship in video games”, we arrive at the previously exemplified values in the last chapter and my allegorical redesigns of their godly counterparts which permeate through our collective subconscious as the dichotomy of progressive and stagnating memetic myths, systemic norms and social facts. In the hierarchy, image and interaction of these modern and not at all new archetypes we can more clearly see what we as “western” society really devote ourselves to, what do we uphold, what do we support? And what hope and beautiful possibilities for new ever-expanding worlds, including and representing anyone looking for such a supportive and fulfilling mirror, do we have only if we indeed take an admittedly hard but mandatory step to call ourselves and the ones around us out. Conclusively, we should not dismiss or fearmonger video games as the creators and propagators of all modern evils, preaching the past both in medium and decade as ideology, nor should we accept the socially enforced worst part of video games, their environments and values as a norm, solely because someone said it is “just a game”.