Exploring Religious Identification of Video Gamers Confronting Video Game: A Case Study of The Sims 3 Videogame Girl Gamers

Video Games are known as one of the most effective and popular media in current age. This article is an attempt to study the influence of videogames on the religious identification of gamers by studying The Sims 3 game. Important features such as cultural and religious contexts of players and their participation in making narratives in the game are effective in their reception of influence. Stuart Hall’s Base Model of Encoding/Decoding with the help of other components from James Gee have been used to make this model more applicable to video Games. Research methodology used for this research included in-depth interview with gamers of “The Sims 3” and studying their interaction with this game. The results of the study indicate that although in minor cases we have seen some resistance against the ideology of the game, players don’t have the power of resistance against game’s main hegemony, i.e. consumerism and hence are classified in dominant position in Hall’s grouping.