A Short Ponderable about MMOs and Motivation

As much as MMOs are driven by so-called Big Bads, the top enemy of whom people have united against, it's kind of funny how few times that plot device has worked in the real world. 

The most obvious example is ol' Adolph Hitler, with folks such as Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and other great conquerors as other examples, but for the most part conflicts and wars have little to do with opposition to a specific leader. If you made a list of the top reasons why people go to war, there's race, territory, resources, and history*, but the one bugaboo that almost never gets brought up in MMOs is the one I was wondering about: religion.

Most MMOs out there don't have religion as a primary motivating factor in warfare or conflict like we do in the real world. Hell, even in a lot of RPG campaigns I've been in, religion has hardly been a motivating factor. More frequently I see a "orcs hate the elves and the dwarves hate the goblins" dynamic but you rarely see an "our gods hate your gods" motivator. If such a motivator exists, it's kind of a secondary thing, where "yeah, the gods dislike each other" motivation tacked on to the primary ones. 

In a world where the gods actively intervene on behalf of their adherents, you don't get a lot of "Our gods are real, and yours don't exist" assertions. Neither do you see the "we worship the same gods, but ours is the correct way to worship them!" argument.

Ah, Life of Brian. I love that movie.
From Yarn.

***

I was put into this frame of mind when I remembered a story that my sister-in-law once told me about when she was in Vet school in the Deep South. This first year she was there, they were coming up on the end of the semester and the Winter Break. Conversation with some of her classmates devolved into what they were going to do for Christmas. 

Knowing that she was Catholic, one of her classmates asked my sister-in-law what she was going to do instead of Christmas.

"Uh, celebrate Christmas," my sister-in-law replied.

"Oh," her classmate responded, "well, we know that Catholics aren't Christian, so when we celebrate Christmas, you celebrate...."

"Christmas. Catholics are Christian."

"No they're not."

My sister-in-law was flummoxed. This was the first time she'd encountered anybody who didn't think that Catholics aren't even Christian, which would be a bit of a surprise to the Pope. 

Then again, I've met people whose version of Christianity is such that they believe the Pope is the Anti-Christ, so... Yeah.

***

I guess we kind of tend to sweep these sort of conflicts under the rug when we play MMOs or RPGs, because the concept of "nobody is correct" and "everybody is correct" with regards to religion touches a raw nerve with people. Besides, religion in the real world comprises a large amount of a person's identity --whether we realize it or not-- and that's kind of hard to replicate in a fictional world where you don't have any real personal stakes. At most, you tend to get what I call the "Exorcist" type of religious interaction. As in the book and movie, the "Exorcist" references the temptation to worship and devote yourself to evil, as opposed to merely worshiping somebody else's gods.

Once in a while religion does come
up in an MMO in a way that is relatable.
But you know, it could be worse.
From Knowyourmeme.

This conflict is comfortable --if you want to call dealing with evil comfortable-- because we're familiar with the tropes involved. It's much harder to drop, say, the Wars of the Reformation into an MMO or RPG because it forces us to look harder at why religion makes us do what we do. That's not a path toward a successful and popular game.

But what do you think? I've talked enough, and danced around certain aspects of this topic enough.

#Blaugust2023

*The "you started a fight with us years ago, so now it's our turn to get back at you!" reason.