| dc.description.abstract | Videogames are an expressive medium. Much like with other forms for entertainment and popular culture, its purpose is to engage an audience and entertain. Popular culture has become more widely accepted as a platform that overlaps the lines between low- and high culture (Løland, Martinsen, Skippervold 2014: 10 – translated), and as a result; opens for new ways to study and interpret various aspects of society. Videogames, in comparison to other types of popular culture, open for new ways to interpret these aspects, as they allow the consumer to interact with the product, and through this interaction, new interpretations can be created. This is a study on how the videogames Bloodborne and Final Fantasy X reflect, reject or reconfigure religious ideas and investigate what kind of religious critique that is implied in their procedural rhetoric. The study uses the theories of procedurality, procedural representation and procedural rhetoric, developed by videogame-designer and academic Ian Bogost in 2010 and procedural religion, coined by professor Vit Šisler in 2016. These theories allow for a new way to look at the expressive and persuasive capabilities of videogames through their computational design. To analyze a videogame’s structure, the study will also use the terms of game world, player/character and game activities, coined by professor Óliver Pérez Latorre in 2015 to look at the game’s design from various standpoints. Through their ludological and narratological structure I have made the discovery that Final Fantasy X’s procedural religion express a rhetoric of no-religion, whereas Bloodborne’s expresses religion as an unchangeable entity at its core, only corrupted by human intervention. I have also found that the religious critique implied in the games carries resemblance to the modern philosophical thinkers of Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx. However, while FFX endorses Nietzsche’s critique of religion, Bloodborne critiques it. Videogames carry a reflection of how we perceive various aspects of modern society. The rhetorical value of analyzing videogames is found in their participatory nature. Allowing oneself to be immersed, not just by the narrative, but also the ludic design, allows for meaningful representation to be created that could not be expressed in other types of popular culture. | eng |