Godwired ─ Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality

Godwired offers an engaging exploration of religious practice in the digital age. It considers how virtual experiences, like stories, games and rituals, are forms of world-building or "cosmos construction" that serve as a means of making sense of our own world. Such creative and interactive activity is, arguably, patently religious.

This book examines:


the nature of sacred space in virtual contexts
technology as a vehicle for sacred texts
who we are when we go online
what rituals have in common with games and how they work online
what happens to community when people worship online
how religious "worlds" and virtual "worlds" nurture similar desires.


Rachel Wagner suggests that whilst our engagement with virtual reality can be viewed as a form of religious activity, today’s virtual religion marks a radical departure from traditional religious practice – it is ephemeral, transient, rapid, disposable, hyper-individualized, hybrid, and in an ongoing state of flux.

Rachel Wagner is Associate Professor of Religion at Ithaca College, USA. Her work centers on the study of religion and culture, particularly religion and film and religion and virtual reality.

1. Walkthrough 2. The Stories We Play: Interactivity And Religious Narrative 3. The Games We Pray: What Is This Ritual-Game-Story Thing? 4. The Other Right Here: In Search of the Virtual Sacred 5. Me, Myself and Ipod: Hybrid, Wired and Plural Selves 6. God-Mobs: Virtually Religious Community 7. What You Play is What You Do? Procedural Evil and Videogame Violence 8. Xbox Apocalypse: Video Games, Interactivity and Revelatory Literature 9. Making Belief: Transmedia and the Hunger for the Real 10. Expansion Pack