Spreading the world: religion and MMOGs

Mike Sellers posts on religion and MMOGs over at Terra Nova, and it's one tricky subject.  Read the subtle post carefully, then see how the comments shoot off in different directions.

A few thoughts:

• There's a huge difference between religion as sociology (character types, guilds, buildings, laws) and religion as game ontology (prayer works, gods are more than powerful NPCs, eschatology is part of the game, etc).  What if characters had a religious logic to reincarnation - i.e., rewarded for ethical behavior, punished for violations.
• There's a vast difference between religion as magic and religion as, well, religion.  Think about what it means to have spells work without any other signs of that numinous superstructure, or what it means to play a character worried about the afterlife without access to any magic.  A good object to focus on would be prayer - imagine a game where prayer isn't magic, might not work, and its mechanism isn't immediately accessible.
• Could one sect in a schism be ultimately right?  How would players learn that?  Indeed, would settling a religious dispute be a workable game structure?  Hypothetical: a religion splits over a rite.  It turns out that rite #2 is actually efficacious, and rite #1 has been flawed for centuries.  Would religious war be a good thing?  Would characters have to perform some eschatological struggle, like the harrowing of hell, to redeem older generations, and how would that be rewarded in-game?
• How much of a religious structure could be hidden from players?  One character's developmental arc could be the progressive discovery of truth through study, ritual, traveling to holy sites, learning from teachers.  Siddhartha the MMOG.  But what would be the ethics in making such a structure truly mysterious, rather than historically so?  What would it mean for a person to play a character who learns, after investing money and time, that they must behave in ways they find repellent, in order to fit with the revealed truth of that world?
• I await a series of religion's games.  Shia, Mormonism, Shinto, etc., the MMOG.  Like the Pentagon's game, each of these would teach, reward, delight, and spread the wor(l)d.

Comments

[J. Goard]

Wow.

I've been away from your blog for awhile; good thing I still had it in my bookmarks.