In the Christian monastic tradition, silence is frequently elevated as a privileged site of encounter between the self and God. Contemporary advocates of that tradition routinely figure silence as an anti-consumerist balm to modern ills. Richard Rohr, for instance, suggests that the modern person is so often dissatisfied with life and consumed with boredom because they fail to recognize silence, solitude, and stillness as the sign of God’s pervasive and gracious presence in creation. Thomas Merton similarly remarks that a preference for noise over silence has led to the conflict ridden condition of the modern world. Life is too loud and too busy, these spiritual teachers warn. Quiet down, or you’ll miss your chance to hear the inaudible whisper of the living God.
The modern person’s unfamiliarity with silence is not purely a personal failing, teachers like Rohr will argue. Rather, it is the very noisiness of contemporary life in a consumer-driven culture that prevents us from truly experiencing silence. Even our leisure practices drown out silence, preempting any possibility of stillness by flooding our downtime with distracting amusement. Among these leisure practices, it is hard to imagine a greater enemy of silence than the video game. Bright, noisy, tactile, and fast-paced, the video game seems carefully designed to target any sense that might become vulnerable to the slow, introspective stillness recommended contemporary advocates of monastic silence.
Yet, even as the form itself appears undeniably opposed to a kind of contemplative stillness, there are a surprising number of popular video games that prominently feature simulated experiences of silence and solitude. In this paper, I turn to the simulated silence at the heart of consumerist culture’s distracting leisure practices to challenge an oppositional narrative of monastically informed Christian spirituality that positions ‘silence’ as a pure mode of anti-consumerist religious practice. Against this narrative, I suggest that video games’ simulations of silence challenge the potential idolatry of religious silence as a privileged site of encounter with God both by disrupting an over-simplistic binary of noisy consumerism and quiet spirituality and by serving as potential icons of God’s enduring presence in the midst of consumer culture. To this end, I analyze two case studies:
First, the 2009 game Minecraft, which features a singular player trying to survive in a virtually infinite and nearly uninhabited landscape. Throughout the game’s 16 year history, fans of Minecraft have regularly remarked in forum posts and YouTube video essays about the piercing yet almost spiritual feeling of loneliness that the single-player mode of the game can cultivate. The early gameplay itself can evoke a monastic quality, with players tending simple gardens and passing the nights in simple wooden huts or caves shorn into cliffsides.
Second, the 2019 cult classic, Outer Wilds, whose gameplay consists of exploring the ruins of a long dead alien civilization in a solar system orbiting a star approaching super nova. Like Minecraft players, Outer Wild fans have shared online how the game taught them to appreciate the beauty of passing things, practice detachment, and overcome anxiety about death. Some have even remarked that the game opened them to theistic faith. Even more explicitly than Minecraft, the gameplay of Outer Wilds has a monastic feeling. The game is defined by a time loop of 22-minute cycles, creating a liturgical rhythm where the player watches the sun explode again and again as they learn to meditate, study texts relating the mystic delight their now extinct alien forerunners took in the mysteries of the cosmos, and contemplate the entanglement between universe and themself, its last observer.
Through my analysis of these two games and their reception among gamers, I ask: What should we make of the spiritual affects of silence and solitude that emerge in the heart of consumerist culture’s commodified leisure activities? This paper argues that it should invite us to interrogate the simple binary proposed by popular advocates of monastic spirituality between consumer culture and traditional religious practices of stillness and solitude. Consumerist commodities are important sites of contemporary spirituality, and traditional religious modes of spirituality are sites of consumerist commodification. Scholars serious about understanding spirituality under capitalism cannot afford to dismiss an experience of interior silence inspired by playing a video game nor romanticize one brought on by reading a classic of western spirituality, mass-produced and printed on acid-washed paper.
In a theological vein, this paper argues that the consumerist/anti-consumerist binary prevalent in contemporary Christian spirituality places undue constraints on God’s freedom and prevents us from recognizing God in and in spite of consumer culture. Following the work of Antonio Alonso, this paper argues that the resistance mode of theological accounts of consumer culture thinks too much of the human capacity to overcome consumer culture and thinks too little of God’s capacity to draw near to us in spite of it. By attending to the spiritual affects generated by video games, this paper suggests that even the unlikeliest artifacts of consumer culture can become translucent to the light of grace. Drawing on the recent work of William Cavanaugh, I argue that the possibility of translucence is best understood through the category of the icon, which calls the mind to attend to God’s presence without collapsing the difference between God and the material that mediates God’s approach.
In recent years, video game players have gathered on online forums to narrate their spiritual experiences of solitude playing the popular 2009 game, Minecraft, and the 2019 cult classic, Outer Wilds. Online, players describe how the game simulates an experience of silence that can effect feelings of loneliness but can also inspire introspective reflections on one’s relationship to God and the world. This paper turns to these sites of simulated silence at the heart of consumerist culture’s distracting leisure practices to challenge a narrative of monastically-informed Christian spirituality that positions ‘silence’ as a pure mode of anti-consumerist religious practice. Against this narrative, I suggest that these paradoxically ‘noisy’ simulations of silence decenter religious silence as a privileged site of encounter with God both by disrupting an over-simplistic binary of noisy consumerism and quiet spirituality and by serving as potential icons of God’s enduring presence in the midst of consumer culture.