Starfield—A Video Game Where Religion and Moral Choices Take A Front Seat

Deep space adventure! Thrills! Quests! Space pirates! Religion!

Religion? Yes, in the new video game Starfield, players, amid battles, death-defying escapes and thrilling rescues, also seek enlightenment in outer space and find it in acts of generosity and mercy or in simple contemplation.

Does Starfield offer answers to life’s deep questions such as the meaning of life? As one of the game’s priests tells the main character visiting his temple, “If you find it, be sure to come back and let me know. It would make the next sermon more memorable if nothing else.”

Without giving any answers, Starfield gives players plenty of opportunities to find some—including joining any of its three religions: the Sanctum Universum, which sees –as its name suggests—all things as holy; the Enlightened, an atheistic faith which reveres human kindness; and House Va’ruun, a destructive cult of death that worships the Great Serpent God.

While the good folk of Sanctum Universum and the Enlightened are busy feeding the homeless and asking, “Is God real?” the renegades of House Va’ruun spend their time destroying spaceships in their god’s name.

And, as we would like to see happen in real life, good deeds are admired and praised by the nonplayer characters—otherwise known as NPCs—while bad deeds are frowned upon.

The video game has attracted attention from people who know video games and who also know religion.

Experienced gamer Richard Clark, host of the “Video Game Feelings” podcast and former editor-in-chief of the Christ and Pop Culture website was wowed by a mission wherein his character stumbles on an early model Earth spaceship mid a 200-year journey to a new world. Clark had to tell the passengers that the planet was already inhabited—shocking news which collapses everything they thought they knew.

“That sort of brain-breaking moment is what the gamer is going through,” he said. “They are thinking, ‘There is a lot happening here and I don’t know how to process it.’” 

Former game store owner and religion reporter Tracie Simer noted and liked that Starfield—unlike other video games that are antagonistic toward religion—casts a refreshingly positive light on faith and its people

Simer, who is now part-time dungeon master for tabletop games also appreciated the tolerance shown by the game’s characters, allowing one to live and let live, no matter what religion they chose.

Isaac Bradshaw, a school counselor from Maryville, Tennessee, and priest in the Anglican Church in North America, also casts a positive vote for Starfield’s approach to religion. “I think this approach is almost more real in the way that people operate their spiritual life in the 21st century,” he said. “It’s an option you get when you build your character, and it operates in the background. You get to choose the extent to which that background influences your choices.”

Will Starfield’s popular take on religion-as-space-adventure result in more occupied pew seats in America’s houses of worship or is it simply another step in the continued evolution of video games from Pac Man to the construction of civilizations and beyond?

The question, while not as deep as some of those posed in Starfield, might prove to have more real-world consequence in its answers than those that can be generated in cyberspace.