Please note: the following article contains some spoilers for the videogames Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and Horizon Zero Dawn.
As both a Christian and a gamer, one of the things I find particularly fascinating is the point where these two disparate areas of my life intersect. There are plenty of websites and blogs dedicated to Christian responses to and interaction with the video game industry and, contrary to what some might expect, it’s not all Jack Thomson-esque ‘Violent Vidjagame’ rants. There is a sizeable community of Christian gamers on the internet and, seeing both their faith and their gaming as important parts of their identity, they like to explore how they interact in their lives and what Christianity might have to say about gaming as a hobby; about the types of gameplay on offer or the stories games tell. Sites like Game Church and Geeks Under Grace often explore this side of things and, though I don’t visit them much, I too like to ponder what my faith has to say about my hobby. In particular, and especially in the last few years, I’ve been thinking about the idea of ‘pilgrimage’ in video games and it surprised me to find that there doesn’t seem to have been a lot of discussion on this topic across the internet, so far.
According to Wikipedia, “a pilgrimage is a journey, often into an unknown or foreign place, where a person goes in search of new or expanded meaning about their self, others, nature, or a higher good, through the experience. It can lead to a personal transformation, after which the pilgrim returns to their daily life.” It’s a kind of adventure, a temporary stepping outside of ordinary life often, but not always, with a destination or goal in mind. It does not have to be religious - indeed there’s a growing market for secular pilgrimages focussing on mental health and wellbeing.
Based on the above definition, many video games are already about pilgrimages of one kind or another. A hero is chosen to go on a quest that takes them out of an otherwise less-than-thrilling existence and, through the course of that journey, revelations unfold before them, lessons are learned, powers are gained, etc. etc.. Sometimes this even takes the form of an actual pilgrimage, like in Final Fantasy X where your characters all accompany Yuna, the summoner, who must visit each of the temples of the Fayth in Spira, to beseech their aid in defeating the monster Sin.
Often, as indeed is the case in Final Fantasy X, the pilgrimage structure is actually subverted with the intent of saying something negative about organised religion or about spirituality in general, or just to provide an exciting (if now rather predictable) twist in the narrative. Even then, in a lot of cases, the actual revelations themselves are far from profound and the whole experience is built more on having fun than on any kind of self-improvement or spiritual development. And that’s fine. That is what games are for. But I believe they can often be so much more, whether they intend to be or not.
Before I look at some specific examples of games where I think this is the case, however, I’d like to look at another concept, related to the concept of pilgrimage, which I think captures even more closely what video games can be. That concept is peregrinatio, a Latin phrase meaning to travel abroad, but used by Augustine of Hippo in the 4th century to refer to a way he thought Christians should journey through life, as those who are sojourning away from their homeland, rather than comfortably situated within it already. The Celtic church took the term and used it even more specifically: peregrinatio pro amore Christi - journeying for the love of Christ. As Esther de Waals described it in her book The Celtic Way of Prayer: The Recovery of the Religious Imagination, the Celtic peregrinatio is a “seeking, quest, adventure, wandering, exile”. It is this concept that led so many Celtic figures, like St. Columbanus and St. Aidan, to leave their homelands and travel to spread the word of Christ, founding new Christian communities across the British Isles and beyond. Another Celtic saint, St. Brendan the Navigator, even left behind a fantastical (and probably allegorical) journey narrative as his legacy - one which could make a fascinating premise for a game in its own right - so committed was he to the idea of setting out and letting God lead the way.
The Celtic idea of peregrinatio permeates Celtic Christianity, such that journeys, both physical and spiritual, hold special significance and there are many Celtic prayers dedicated to the idea of journeying with God. When looking at the medium of video games, I wonder if a virtual journey might not also hold such significance.
So what examples do I have of virtual pilgrimages? What have been my digital peregrinationes? Well, the most obvious example that comes to mind is Thatgamecompany’s masterpiece, Journey. A very simple game with a wordless story about a mystical journey up a mountain, Journey is a game about pilgrimage. The exact nature and purpose of the pilgrimage are obscure, told only through images the player finds in shrine-like locations at the end of each level, but over the course of the titular journey, you gradually build up a power of mystical light that allows you to float through the air for longer and longer periods, enabling you to reach more complicated platforming elements and to interact with a series of surreal, fabric (or scripture)-like beings who aid you on your travels.
You can also meet and play along with other players playing the same level at the same time as you. These meetings are not pre-arranged and you have no control over them. Neither are you able to communicate with the other player through any means other than your own character’s movement through the world and through the ‘speaking’ of bright glyphs of light, the meaning of which is… whatever you want them to be. In these simple interactions, whilst surrounded by beautiful locations, strong environmental storytelling and the stirring, emotive music of composer Austin Wintory, the game brings out the sense of wonder and attachment one finds in travelling with others, even those we do not know when it is done for the same sacred purpose.
And, like the title suggests, Journey, just like many pilgrimages, is really about the journey, not the destination - to the point that when you complete the game and reach the destination in the midst of bright light and jubilant harmony, the game takes you right back to the beginning to do it all over again. This idea of the journey itself being the significant part runs right through the idea of peregrinatio and it has become a feature of many pilgrimages, something we can see coming through even as far back as the Canterbury Tales, where a pilgrimage journey, rather than a particular place or time, is the backdrop for all of its varied stories.
Which brings me to my next category of games, the so-called ‘walking simulator’ and specifically the Chinese Room’s seminal example Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. The title might lead you to suspect that it has a Christian theme from the off, but, if anything, that’s a red herring, at least on any surface evaluation of the game.
In Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, you wander around the deserted English village of Yaughton and its surrounding countryside, witnessing scenes from the recent past played out in silhouettes of golden light and slowly unravelling the series of events that lead to the village’s deserted state, eventually making your way to the place where all the events began, an observatory on the edge of the village. It is a very haunting, peaceful and reflective game. There is nothing one might consider action and you are almost entirely passive in your reception of the story, choosing only which paths you take around the location. The soundtrack, by the excellent Jessica Curry, is a mixture of orchestral swells and English choral music and, combined with the beautiful countryside views, it lends the game a further emotional and meditative filter. Even without the story, therefore, Everybody’s Gone… has the feeling of a kind of spiritual journey, and I personally found it to be an enriching and deeply moving experience.
There is an interpretation of the story which I found on the internet, however, that adds another layer to this spiritual perception of the game. Through the course of the game you learn about how an alien presence referred to only as the Pattern, and appearing as the golden light you’ve been witnessing, had made its way into Yaughton and begun affecting and eventually disappearing all of the village’s inhabitants. It’s certainly possible to view the Pattern as a malevolent alien force and the disappearances as acts of murder, but this isn’t how one character in the story - an American scientist who is an alien of another sort in this quiet English village - views the events. For her, the Pattern is something beautiful and being united with the Pattern is not just desirable, but the ultimate way to be. These two different attitudes to the Pattern are similar to attitudes you may find to the idea of God and Heaven, but there’s more to this spiritual interpretation than just that.
Throughout the game, you witness again and again how, before it ‘takes’ people, the Pattern brings out the conflicts and struggles of that person’s life and, from a certain point of view, resolves them. It is, essentially, bringing about a kind of confession and reconciliation, analogous to the actions of the Spirit in Christian Theology, such that the person’s eventual acceptance and disappearance is not all that unlike a kind of Christian rapture after all. This interpretation of the story, combined with the laidback exploration of Yaughton turns this virtual journey into a spiritual experience, a kind of digital peregrinatio, if approached with the right mindset. And, as will all such journeys, it leaves you with a lot to ponder and reflect upon afterwards, something I still find myself doing, especially when listening again to its beautiful soundtrack.
Though Everybody's Gone… has a definite endpoint and goal, just like with Journey, it is the journey itself, the experiences you have along the way and that you take with you as you move on, that is really important. This idea of experiencing a journey is especially important in the next category of games I will look at: open-world games.
In an open-world game, the game opens up a massive area and allows you the freedom to explore and stray from the path towards the next main objective, choosing instead to follow sidequests, hunt collectables or just enjoy the scenery. When I suggested to someone that open-world games might be particularly important to the idea of pilgrimage in video games I was exploring, they said that they thought they would be particularly unsuitable because they are always distracting you away from the main task, but, I would argue, that is precisely what makes them some of the best candidates for this kind of virtual/spiritual experience. In an open-world game, you are given the chance to make your own goals and to choose to experience the game world in spite of, or at the expense of, rather than dictated by, the game’s narrative or gameplay loops. This enables a more meditative experience and the option to overlay what the game already provides with your own spiritual reflection.
At this point, it is worth considering how we might meditate and reflect on art generally. Paintings have often been the object of or inspiration for spiritual reflection. One can gaze on a beautiful painting - especially if it is of a religious subject, but even if not - and appreciate the ideas it contains, the creative talent that bore it and the God that lies behind all such creativity and beauty. Video games need be no different, except that, often, they create an experience we can actually inhabit in a much more direct way than with a static artwork. On top of this, they often utilise the creative talents of worldbuilders, those with the skill to create fictional realities that excite us and in which we can believe, if only for a time. Worldbuilding, it should go without saying, is a creative talent particularly close, in certain ways, to the creative act of God Himself and the one, in my opinion, which depends most on that existing creation. Thus, reflecting on the vistas of an open-world game is both similar to reflecting on any other work of art and also to reflection on creation itself, such as we might do during a physical pilgrimage.
For an example, I’ve picked a game I’ve only recently finished playing: Horizon Zero Dawn, in which you play a young woman named Aloy in a post-apocalyptic world of primitive tribes and massive, animal-like machines. The game’s story takes Aloy on a massive journey across the remains of the American midwest and deals with the themes of multiculturalism, environmentalism, religion and identity and the dangers of technology. In the course of the rich and often tragically haunting story, you learn that much of how the world appears in Aloy’s time is down to a complex terraforming AI which has rebuilt life on earth after manmade machines wiped it out entirely. Aloy’s home tribe have essentially mythologised this AI into a mother goddess, but Aloy, in a quest to learn who she really is, must learn the truth for herself. This lends the game a kind of pilgrimage feel, as Aloy’s journey takes her to the ruined “shrines” and “temples” of this AI’s history in her efforts to understand that history and, in the process, put an end to a digital “demon” that threatens all life on earth.
On your way to these discoveries, however, you can also just explore the world and, whilst it is often fraught with danger, it has a breathtaking beauty and is permeated by the kind of stillness that one can only find in the natural world. Reflecting on the artificial creation of this world, both in real life and in the terms of the narrative leads me to reflect on the creation of the real world, to appreciate all the more how it has come into being and to worship the creator who enabled that to happen. Journeying through Horizon’s forests, deserts and mountainscapes also gave me the time and space to reflect on other things as well and, with things spiritual in mind, any trip into that world can become part of life’s peregrinatio.
There are other titles I could talk about which have been or contained elements of meaningful pilgrimages for myself, but about which I don’t have time to go into detail. Games like ABZȖ, made by one of the designers who worked on Journey and with music by the same composer, which creates a mystical underwater journey of startling beauty and, with its environmentally-told story of a quest for a mystical, life-giving water (the abzȗ of the title) is full of spiritual metaphor. Or like SOMA, an existential horror game set in the ruins of an underwater research station, which I played when I was just starting to understand that I might have an anxiety disorder. The philosophical questions it posed about the nature of existence and human consciousness turned it into an unlikely pilgrimage of its own, one I found I desperately needed to complete.
