Playing Religiously

A monastery. A Buddhist pagoda. An underground temple. A shrine. An idol. A ring of stones.

There are religious buildings everywhere in MUD2. And it's not just buildings: icons, a cross, a ciborium, a crozier, a prayer wheel, altars, Buddhist statues ... Then there's the special stuff for Christmas and Easter. What's going on? Why so much religion? Isn't it offensive to Buddhists to depict a corruption of their faith where priests regress into apes? Can't Christians object when their holiest symbols are used as tokens to kill fantasy monsters? Should Moslems complain that their faith isn't even represented at all?

This article concerns religion in MUD2. Like politics, religion is something you should never discuss with your friends :-) . Because it is founded on faith - and the whole point of faith is that you believe things without supporting evidence for or against - it's always a problem trying to discuss matters of religion without making people feel uncomfortable or look idiots. I shall therefore avoid any mention of the particular merits of individual religions and leave it up to you to reflect on whatever form of spirituality suits you best. Instead, I shall concentrate on issues arising from how religions are presented in the game.

Besides, as a player of Elephant MUD points out, prejudice in a MUD is based only on behaviour. Your race, creed and religion are all concealed. So why does MUD2 explicitly bring it up?

First, let's consider the purpose of the religious contents of The Land.

It's fairly well documented that the concept of time in MUD2 is used as a metaphor for danger. The older something is, the more dangerous it is likely to be. Perhaps there is a similar use of religious elements as a device for conveying atmosphere? Maybe signs of faith could be interpreted as meaning security, or that deep thought was required, or (on a crasser level) that the place was crawling with undead?

Well if there is such a metaphor, I can't find it. The monastery is fairly empty; there's not a lot of danger there, unless you count PKs sitting in the crypt as dangerous :-) . The pagoda, on the other hand, has some fairly tough mobiles (apes) wandering around its lower floors and some very unpleasant ones as you ascend it. It does have a rather complicated back story to justify what's going on and the idol, too, has meaning. There's half a story behind the druidic island, but that seems incomplete (as did the idol until the giants were added). The monastery, though, is just "there".

I concede that there may be some sense of mystery that is invoked by the trappings of a religion. Although people may have a sound grasp of their own religion's rituals, those of other faiths are often unknown to them. Therefore, encountering these will add a worrying sense of unease, like when you walk into a restaurant abroad for the first time and you're not quite sure what the procedure is for getting a table or ordering the food. References to ancient temples and hallowed chambers certainly have more resonance with feelings of disquiet than they would if they were ancient store-rooms or bed chambers. But ramping up the emotions for a couple of small rooms doesn't explain the presence of major complexes like the monastery.

I've given this a lot of thought and come to the conclusion that the religious nature of these big show-stoppers is almost incidental. They're there for architectural reasons only. If you want a big building which is set a ways back in time but isn't like a castle or anything, you pretty well have to go for one of a religious origin. If you think of old, old constructions that survive to this day, they were either funded by the state or the church (or both). The monastery is there because if you want a large, vaguely medieval ruin that's not on the scale of a palace, it's an obvious solution. The pagoda involves stepped difficulty of mobiles and incorporates a strong puzzle-solving element. It could have been done as a straight tower, but we already have the keep. The pagoda's oriental setting serves to make the puzzle seem more inscrutable to a Western mind, nothing more. (It's also quite well researched - I did pagodas at school and I know a little about them).

So that's it? There's nothing special about the religious buildings and artefacts? They're just a component of the game world like any other?

Mmm, no, they're not. There's a moral issue here.

To use religious buildings and objects as if they were just regular ones is to miss their symbolism. In fact it's worse, it's to ignore their symbolism. To a Buddhist, a statue of the Buddha is something to be respected, not something to be whacked so it teleports you away from a bunch of rampaging orang utangs. To a Christian, an altar is a communion table, a place of sacrament; it's not just a piece of cluttering furniture. To modern day New Age faiths, suggesting that slabs in stone circles are for pointless animal sacrifice is an alarming misrepresentation.

This issue of general disrespect is where people are likely to take exception to MUD2 over its attitude to religion. The game doesn't do anything gross like present demons as being cool or anything, but it rides roughshod over people's faiths. This is not a very tolerant thing to do. Why, when the game is geared up elsewhere to promote an open, forward-looking morality (such as teaching people that being antisocial doesn't pay, or encouraging individuals to experiment positively with their sense of identity) does it treat religion as empty of meaning except in the sense that its constructs can have some physical purpose? avoid calling themselves "gods". Is this deliberate, or is it just wild insensitivity.

I have to say, I believe it's deliberate. MUD2's author, Richard the arch-wizard, is an atheist and proud of it. Even the top-most level of the game is, studiously, archwiz - few implementors of Internet MUDs can resist calling themselves "gods". By consistently treating religion as nothing more than the sum of its physical building blocks, consciously disregarding any hint at any greater spiritual aspect, he promotes the idea that this is all there is to it - that people with faith are, in some sense, deluding themselves. It's built into the game, it's implicit, it's relentless. It's wrong. To me, it smacks of indoctrination. If people want to find spiritual or cultural fulfilment in some belief system, it's not the job of a game to try to undermine that. Either MUD2 should be completely secular, making no reference to any religions at all, or it should use some invented religion(s) of its own. To use real world religions is to demean them.

I love MUD2. I think it's a wonderful place. But this is the one thing about it that I really, really wish had been done differently.

And just for the record, so you know: I'm an atheist too.

Further Reading

Most MUDs and similar sorts of games that have religion follow the familiar, narrow "X classes, Y races, Z skills/spells" formula in an effort to force players to behave differently from one another, because neither the players nor the worlds are able to sustain anything rich enough to stand alone. They extend this naturally into having a pantheon of individual gods. Fair enough. Then they trivialise religions by having commands like join <deity's name>. Like it's that easy ...

Thee Church ov Moo is an extra-game religion for players of MOOs. Basically, it's a post-modern take on religions, which is fun if you don't respect people's religious beliefs but embarrassing if you do.

In contrast, of course, there are MUDs which exist for the benefit of adherents of real world religions. I won't point any out, because I wouldn't want to seem to be favouring one over another, but a July survey in the MUD Journal indicated that 10% or so of MUD players would like to see more MUDs based on a religious theme. The author of the article expresses surprise that it's so low.

This article first appeared in the February 2000 issue of Witch?