From the outside, religion and fighting games seem like they would make for strange partners. The world’s largest religions are thousands of years old, with material and cultural legacies to match. They contend with weighty, mystical topics: morality, enlightenment, meaning, the nature of death, and the purpose of the universe. Meanwhile, fighting games are distinctly modern inventions that can seem frivolous at best and sinful at worst. In the late ‘90s, the Christian Coalition of America even threw its support behind a bill that would have established heavy penalties for arcades that allowed children to play “graphically violent games” like Mortal Kombat.
But not all believers feel this way. Not only does the Fighting Game Community have its share of religious players, some of its members are finding ways to actively combine their faith and their hobby. For these individuals, fighting games and religion are more than compatible – they are, in some ways, complementary.
Refreshed And Productive
Nelejts is one of these players. Her relationship with fighting games is older than her relationship with Islam, into which she converted when she was 19. And her commitment to gaming is only slightly less intense than her commitment to his faith. “Tekken, Mortal Kombat, and Dragonball FighterZ have most of my time with 200+ hours each,” she says. Training mode accounts for a large chunk of that time. It’s also one of her favorite times to listen to the Quran, Islam’s holiest text.
“I will usually play the Quran when I want to feel spiritually productive,” she explains. “Islam consistently reminds us that life is [temporary] and that we should prepare for a day when we leave this Earth.” By contemplating the idea of the eternal, she makes it easier for herself to switch from the hurried pace of day-to-day life to “the repetitive and inquisitive nature of labbing.”
“When training,” she says, “you’re not under a time constraint. You already understand the problem your need to correct, or the solution you need to achieve.” So success is just a matter of sustained, patient focus. For her, the rhythms and cadences of scripture inspire that focus. As she puts it, the Quran is “spiritually refreshing.” And though she isn’t fluent in Arabic (the language in which the Quran is recited), her knowledge of the text is enough to connect her to its meaning.
One of her favorite sections is Surat Al-Baqarah 2:155, which reads, “We shall test you with something of fear and hunger, some loss in goods or lives or the fruits of your toil, but give glad tidings to those who patiently persevere.” Of course, Islam is roughly 1,400 years old. When its founders counseled patient perseverance, they didn’t have fighting games in mind. But when Islam and gaming come together in a lab monster like nelejts, the two are a perfect fit.
Fulfillment And Fellowship
Another religious fighting gamer goes by the name Kurushii Drive. Like nelejts, Kurushii Drive didn’t fully arrive in his religion until his teens. Though he has been nominally Christian his whole life, his faith only began to resonate with him after a bad experience with a different gaming genre.
“Out of a desire to make friends and fit in, I got pretty immersed into [the extremely popular battle arena game] Dota 2 when I was 14, to the point I would consider addiction,” he says. The game dominated his thoughts, and the “constant toxicity” that he experienced as a player quickly “had a negative impact on my attitude and personality.” Not long after picking up the game, he abandoned it. And his religion, which had been relatively rote before, rushed in to fill the void.
“Megachurches were what I attended for Sunday service at the time, and I realised that the larger environment was not as satisfactory for developing strong fellowships with people that could support my growth in Christ. I stopped going to those megachurches altogether, and looked for small groups on the Internet to connect with.” It took him a few tries to get it right. But when he did, he found himself returning to an older hobby: fighting games.
“The first time I played one was at a camp when I was 11, where I and some friends I made there would button mash on vanilla Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and Street Fighter IV during the game lounge hour.” From there, he found BlazBlue, Guilty Gear, Under Night, and his favorite franchise, the King of Fighters. The community surrounding these games was much smaller than the one he’d encountered through Dota, but for him that was a good thing. Instead of chasing fads, he knew he needed to find “a smaller circle through which I could have responsibility [and] accountability on a more personal level.” When he met a group of Christian fighting gamers, he knew he’d found his home.
“This group of friends was extremely valuable to not only growing in my faith, but also in helping me understand the importance of a strong sense of community.” Whereas nelejts feels a resonance between his religion and the experience of playing fighting games, Kurushii Drive keeps himself tied to the tenets of his faith through is relationships with the people of the FGC. For him, the scene is a unique place for “meaningful, truth-rooted fulfillment and fellowship”: “the innate community-orientedness of the FGC is what genuinely makes that aspect easier to seek compared to mainstream games’ communities.”
The Soul Still Burns
Having found a better balance in his life through Christianity and the FGC, Kurushii Drive is giving back. He started a student organization at his university that’s dedicated to fighting games, and he also runs a YouTube channel that features Under Night highlights and compilations. As far as his life as a Christian, he describes himself as being committed to the work. “It is very easy for me to be down or stressed out mentally, and without being diligent in reading and meditating on Bible verses, my mind would collapse…So in this way, it’s a constant struggle, but I feel that without it I would not grow in my faith.”
Perhaps more than anything else, this is what ties religion to the FGC. Ultimately, both are ways for us to courageously confront our own weaknesses and failings. Although no one would ever confuse the contemplative air of a mosque or a church for the boisterous pulse of a fighting game tournament, those superficial differences mask more fundamental similarities. Just as Nelejts fights to achieve a state of sacred patience and Kurushii Drive struggles to keep his worst instincts at bay, all of us are fighting for our own ideals and against our own demons.
In all likelihood, there will never be a fighting game religion. All on its own, pressing buttons may never be enough to save your soul. But as long as we burn to discover our best selves and to connect deeply to others, fighting games and religion will always have something in common.
Eli Horowitz feels that his atheism is also a good fit for the FGC: every time he misses an input, it’s clearly proof that God doesn’t exist. He is the author of the world’s first FGC novel, Bodied. Buy his book here and follow him on Twitter for FGC jokes, memes, stats, highlights, and overall positivity.
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