This article posits faith as an indicator of community in online social formations around the videogame Animal Well. We analyze how an online community around Animal Well was formed and sustained through an active, ongoing feeling of hope. Our exploratory analysis nuances understandings of online videogame communities, illustrating what faith as a focus of inquiry may offer postdigital scholars interested in the affective, material experiences of contemporary videogaming. Faith is an active process of truth becoming, where conventions are disrupted by risking familiarity for potentiality. This conceptualization of faith adds to postdigital scholars’ interest in the relationship, the indissolubility, of the digital and physical in lived experience. When people play games, they and the games co-create realities, propelled by the hope of something they believe into existence. Players have faith in what signs they hope to see, in what those signs will signify, and crucially, in each other. They have faith that they may pick up the threads of reality-making someone else has begun and spin a new part of reality for someone else to find. Realities, in faith-forming gaming communities, are irreducible to digital-physical activity. Realities are not augmented or virtual but believed into existence.

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Learning to Believe Animal Well’s Postdigital Potentials Through Faith-Forming Gaming Communities

  • Corey Bray,
  • Christian Ehret

摘要

This article posits faith as an indicator of community in online social formations around the videogame Animal Well. We analyze how an online community around Animal Well was formed and sustained through an active, ongoing feeling of hope. Our exploratory analysis nuances understandings of online videogame communities, illustrating what faith as a focus of inquiry may offer postdigital scholars interested in the affective, material experiences of contemporary videogaming. Faith is an active process of truth becoming, where conventions are disrupted by risking familiarity for potentiality. This conceptualization of faith adds to postdigital scholars’ interest in the relationship, the indissolubility, of the digital and physical in lived experience. When people play games, they and the games co-create realities, propelled by the hope of something they believe into existence. Players have faith in what signs they hope to see, in what those signs will signify, and crucially, in each other. They have faith that they may pick up the threads of reality-making someone else has begun and spin a new part of reality for someone else to find. Realities, in faith-forming gaming communities, are irreducible to digital-physical activity. Realities are not augmented or virtual but believed into existence.