Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

My guest this week is Celia Pontin, who works for the Committees of Advertising Practice, and has done a PhD (I was her supervisor) on video games and theology. Celia talks about how for her a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome an unnecessary obstacle – and that this is the element that makes it fun. She explains how she drew on the religion and film methodology and looked at how the interactive nature of video games affects our ability to interpret them meaningfully through a theological lens.  We talk about why someone might choose to be a villain in a game and how video games give us the freedom to consider options we wouldn’t consider ‘being’ in real life. We bring in the question of fatalism in the case of fixed narratives. We learn that Celia originally considered going to university to do astrophysics and that when she was a teenager she had wanted to be a vicar. We learn why she doesn’t always like describing her PhD to people she doesn’t particularly know and she reflects on the influen