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About us Practical matters How to find us dr. L.A.W.J. (Lars) de Wildt

Research interests

Lars de Wildt studies how media cultures and industries shape contemporary worldviews.

His NWO-funded Veni project "Reorienting Global Gaming" (2025–2029) studies how Western games adapt to Chinese worldviews; and his first book, The Pop Theology of Videogames: Producing and Playing with Religion (2023, Open Access) studied how Western game developers sold religion to secular audiences. Lars was previously part (2021-2024) of the AHRC-funded project "Everything Is Connected: Conspiracy Theories in the Age of the Internet." He has been a (visiting) researcher at the universities of Leuven, Heidelberg, Bremen, Jyväskylä, Tampere, Montréal, and Deakin.

For more, see larsdewildt.eu or Linktree.

Publications

The Pop Theology of Videogames: Producing and Playing with Religion

Marketable religion: How game company Ubisoft commodified religion for a global audience

Participatory Conspiracy Culture: Believing, doubting and playing with conspiracy theories on Reddit

Politics of Production: Videogames 10 years after Games of Empire

Breaking Barriers: The Emergence of a Videogame Culture and Industry in the Arab World

Encoding/Decoding Entertainment Media

Grieving World of Warcraft’s Chinese Server Shutdown

Video-Game Religion beyond the Anthropocene

Conclusion: Pop Theology

Franchised Esotericism: Religion as a Marketing Strategy for the Assassin’s Creed Franchise

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Press/media

Een kind kan alles maken in Roblox, behalve winst [de Volkskrant]

Religie is standaardformule in videogames [Friesch Dagblad]

Gaming: only the benefits of religion but not the drawbacks [RUG Magazine]

Old books, dark wood, stained glass: The UG’s all about dark academia [UKrant]

“There is something about conspiracy theories that is just fun”

New Books Network (Game Studies, ep. 7): Lars de Wildt, The Pop Theology of Videogames

Mediated Intimacies Episode 4 – On our intimate relationship with God in video games with Lars de Wildt

¿Curas samurái? La curiosa obsesión del videojuego japonés con los cristianos

大不相同,《刺客教條》原始劇情竟然有太空船?!

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