Belongs To Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

A game entry records a video or card game whose content draws directly and documentably on a religious tradition's own mythology, iconography or cosmology, rather than a game that merely uses vague or invented spiritual themes, Okami's own player role as Amaterasu, the Shinto sun goddess, built around a direct retelling of the Amano no Iwato myth, or Black Myth: Wukong's setting after the end of Journey to the West, among the documented examples the atlas records.

An entry records a game's developer, publisher, release year and country of origin, and states plainly, and separately, its religious subject, which specific tradition, myth or figure the game draws on and how directly, and its documented critical or scholarly reception, whether that treatment has been read as a serious, affectionate engagement with a living mythology or as a looser, more decorative borrowing, keeping the game's own commercial and critical history distinct from a judgment about the tradition it draws on.

An entry cites the sources actually available for a modern commercial game, chiefly reference works, games journalism and, where one exists, an academic or semi academic study, naming a source's own limits, journalism rather than peer reviewed scholarship, an encyclopedia rather than an authored study, honestly rather than presenting it as more authoritative than it is.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The academic study of how religion appears within digital media, video games among them, is a documented field with its own named history: Heidi Campbell's original 2012 collection is credited with founding digital religion as a named area of study, treating religious belief, practice, authority and community as things formed and expressed through digital media itself rather than simply religion that happens to use a digital delivery channel, and the 2021 second edition, co-edited with Ruth Tsuria, updates that founding account for the smartphone and social media era that followed it.

That documented field provides the broader scholarly frame a game entry's own religious subject sits within, even where the field's own case studies more often examine social media, online ritual and digital community than commercial video games specifically, and an entry states this honestly, using the field's own established method, reading a digital work for how it forms, borrows from or represents religious practice, as the general approach a case specific study of an individual game then applies.

An entry draws on this documented field for its method and its history, while keeping a specific game's own religious content sourced to material that actually examines that game, games journalism and reference works chiefly, since the broader field's own texts are cited here for method and context rather than for facts about any one title.