Panel: RELIGION AS ART - ART AS RELIGION



1135.4 - ANGELS, DEMONS, AND DIGITAL WORLDS: RELIGIOUS SYMBOLISM IN THE ART OF VIDEO GAMES

AUTHORS:
Kapcar A. (Masaryk University in Brno ~ Brno ~ Czech Republic)
Text:
Video games increasingly function as artistic environments in which religious imagery, myths, and esoteric traditions are reinterpreted and experienced outside institutional religious frameworks. Drawing on Christopher Partridge's concept of occulture, this paper examines how contemporary video games transform religious symbolism into interactive aesthetic experiences. Games such as Shin Megami Tensei, El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron, and Baroque combine elements from Christianity, Buddhism, and other mythological traditions into hybrid symbolic worlds populated by angels, demons, apocalyptic narratives, and ritual imagery. In these environments, religious symbols are not presented as objects of belief but as components of artistic and narrative expression through which players encounter existential themes such as morality, transcendence, and cosmic order. This shift also reflects changing inequalities of authority over religious meaning, as symbols historically shaped within theological and institutional contexts are reinterpreted by artists, designers, and players within digital cultural production. By analyzing the aesthetic logic of these games, the paper argues that video games constitute an important contemporary space in which art serves as a medium for engaging religious imagination. In this sense, interactive digital media participate in a broader cultural transformation in which artistic expression increasingly serves as a site for reflecting on questions traditionally associated with religion, while simultaneously redistributing cultural authority over sacred symbols across new creative and technological domains.