Video games are becoming an ever more important site for the negotiation of complex religious ideas and identities. The papers in this panel consider the ways that apocalyptic imagery in Disco Elysium, Far Cry 5, and Binding of Isaac work in the American context and how Black Myth: Wukong fits into the Chinese cultural strategy of Guochao, an active attempt to reshape Chinese self-conceptions. The papers in this session examine how video games and other cultural products help people to reflect upon and navigate major turning points in a culture's life when it seems that the world is falling apart and new one is coming into being.
Disco Elysium is a 2019 video game where the player plays as Harry DuBois, an amnesiac policeman and complete disaster of a human being tasked with solving a murder. Unlike more traditional “post-apocalyptic” narratives, this game’s setting exists not after a catastrophe, but at the intersection of several. It is a story where the world at once has ended (failed social and political revolutions of the past), is ending (Harry’s own obliteration of and struggle to rebuild the self), and will end (the Pale, connective tissue that both holds the world together and will someday swallow it). All the game’s characters are caught in a moment between the failures of the past and the inevitability of destruction in the future, unable to change either. Yet this is not cause for despair, but an invitation to discover the wondrous in the everyday and rebuild freed from normative demands.
This paper examines how recent video games reinterpret American evangelical apocalyptic discourse across different cultural registers. Focusing on the 2011 independent game The Binding of Isaac and the major studio release Far Cry 5, it argues that these games mobilize biblical apocalyptic imagery to critique two distinct cultural afterlives of dispensationalist eschatology: the intimate psychological world of the evangelical family unit, and the broader political landscape shaped by militant Christian nationalist doomsday prophesizing. In The Binding of Isaac, the apocalyptic imagery of fire-and-brimstone evangelical programming becomes the symbolic language through which a child interprets the collapse of his family unit, and expresses feelings of responsibility for his parents' separation. Far Cry 5 projects the same discourse outward into narratives of militia culture, political violence, and national catastrophe. Together, these games demonstrate how video games have become an indispensable medium for reinterpreting American evangelical biblical discourses of apocalypticism for wider publics.
At the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 2017, President Xi Jinping emphasized that national prosperity depends on “building stronger cultural confidence,” grounded in Chinese history and tradition (Xinhua, 2017). One prominent example is guochao, or the “Chinese cultural craze,” through which Chinese scholars and state-owned media celebrate the incorporation of traditional and religious narratives into consumer culture, showcasing cultural confidence locally and globally. This paper examines two guochao cases highlighted by state-owned media: Li-Ning’s 2018 “Wu Dao (A principle of Daoism)” sportswear line and the 2024 video game Black Myth: Wukong, an imagined sequel to Journey to the West. I argue that the state constructs guochao as a cultural branding strategy that repackages Chinese religious narratives into globally consumable cultural products, envisioning a future in which China reclaims the center of global cultural consumption by converting Chinese identity itself into a marketable commodity.