How the Human Capacity for Religious Ritual
Makes Playing Games Possible
Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutpunkt 2026 book Seasons of Larp. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
Have you ever had that moment where you are able to step back from an activity and, seeing it as if for the first time, you realise how profoundly strange it is? Try to do that for a moment with larping. Why do people pretend to be other people? To collectively agree to follow a strict set of rules not set down by the laws of nature or a powerful authority? To enter an imaginary space that makes us feel emotions that are often painful, sad, or scary? To feel the stress of balancing and obtaining resources and goals that will have no value the next day?
If you’ve done it before, it’s an easy answer: it’s because it is fun. Playing a larp, or any game, is just inherently compelling. But why? Why do humans find playing games so fulfilling? By the harsh logic of evolution, shouldn’t we have evolved mental capacities that encourage us not to waste our valuable calories on things that don’t help us reproduce our genes? Yet we know that evolution has produced the opposite: all kinds of animals play, even fish, reptiles, and invertebrates (Burghardt, 2006).
Playing games is a more profound activity than our culture understands it to be, closely related not just to the play of children but to the most important and holy elements of culture: religious ritual. Games, like ritual, are how humans form community, how we share meaning, and how we understand the world around us.
Humans, like all animals, practice rule-bound abstract activities full of personal expression. They are key to how we interact with the world, and they have inherently enjoyable capacities. This capability to play and perform, and our desire to do it, leads to religion, art, and larp.
This behaviour is primal, biologically wired in our brains, and the oldest form of culture. We know that ritual predates writing, organised societies, religion, even language and advanced cognitive thought, because humans are not the only creatures that practice it. For instance, birds perform specific kinds of ritualistic behaviors when courting a mate: they leap around in repetitive, rule-bound dances, flash feathered displays, present beautiful objects, and create specially designed buildings designed to attract the attention of the opposite sex (Sharma 1969). These behaviors may have once been purposeful – males in some species offer food to attract female birds – but over the generations the behaviors have become ritualised. In other species the food is offered in increasingly unnecessarily stylish ways, and the female does not even eat the offered food (Stokes, 1971). The food has transformed from a practical tool into a ritualised symbol that promises sex. The same thing occurs with animals as simple as flies: mating behaviour in which flies offer food to the female has transformed in some species to weaving small webs with food in it, and in some species there is no food at all, just attention grabbing little sails that have no practical function except their beauty and their ritual meaning (Lorenz, 1966).
Like rituals in humans, these behaviors follow abstract rules and are specific to a time and place. Rituals have meaning only in particular circumstances, and only because other members of the species recognise the meaning of these symbolic actions. They are more than mere communication: rituals involve a kind of excessive individual expression beyond what is practically necessary to convey the meaning. There is a playfulness to them, even when they are performed in deadly seriousness. Human ritual is of course more complicated than the ritual of birds and flies, and we transmit our rituals culturally, not just biologically. But the basic behaviors are overall of the same type: using rule-based artistic expression to communicate an idea.
Just like the instinctual behaviour of animals, most of our rituals are inherently compelling. They are fun! We do them because they are entertaining and meaningful, not just because of their cultural meaning. It is most likely that mythological explanations and meaning were layered on to rituals after they had become fixed important elements of our culture (Tonna at all, 2019).
In addition to rituals that convey a message, like asking for a mate, we also perform rituals that seem to have no external goal at all, like group dances, prayers, and singing. This is because rituals, in animals and humans, are powerful tools for both creating community, and they help provide a sense of control and order to the chaotic world around us. Animals (including humans) use predictable repeated behaviors to calm ourselves in stressful situations (Krátký et al, 2016). Entire communities do similar things: communal rituals can make the unpredictable world of storms and famines seem more orderly and controlled. After performing a ritual, you can say, “we sacrificed a dozen oxen to Poseidon, so the risk of our sea voyage being wrecked by storms is less now,” and ease some of your fears (even if it’s unfounded). Ritualistic behaviour might not be able to directly affect natural forces, but it does have a powerful effect on the people who participate in it. People who participate in synchronised ritualistic activity like dancing and singing create strong bonds and become better at cooperating (Wiltermuth and Heath, 2009). Shared cultural practices, like rituals, coordinate our thinking; teaching a community of people to categorise objects and sounds in the same way, form shared models of the world, and perceive it in the same way (Roepstorff et all, 2010). Communal ritualistic behaviour evolved because it forms strong community bonds, and it allows people to coordinate and work together.
Ritual is also integrated with our communities in important ways. People gather in specific places, at specific times, to observe specific worlds of arbitrary rules, not just for fun, but to actually create a kind of societal transformation. Rituals are able to transform groups from children to adults, from debtors to lenders, and from enemies to allies, through celebrations like quinceañeras, gift-giving festivals, and weddings. These rituals can involve activities that seem more like forms of non-serious play, like clowning, insult competitions, and mock fighting (Turner 1982 and Schechner 1976).
In post-industrial societies, our culture is more fragmented. Many parts of society – like government, business, and education – are divided from religion, but still have their own secular rituals. The rituals of signing documents, court proceedings, and graduations – all with their own sets of rules that are often as isolated and arbitrary as those of a game or larp. Meanwhile, more playful ritualistic activities – involving colourful costumes, storytelling, and dancing – persist in ways that we no longer recognise as ritual, cut off from their former societal roles. We dance and sing on stages, chant together with our team in locker rooms, and even initiate casual conversation with ritualised phrases: handshakes and waves, accompanied by a “Hello, how are you doing?” and the response, “I’m well, how are you?”
Another place we find ritual is in games. The most important element of a game is that it relies on a set of arbitrary rules, like the limitation on how you can move pieces in chess, or where you can put your body in Twister. These rules have their own logic, separate from that of the world outside the game. Ritual also prescribes a set of clear rules that practitioners must follow, and a logic that gives them a meaning other than the one they have in the wider world, such as requiring everyone to take a sip of wine at communion, for instance, but ‘flavoring it’ (to heretically apply a game term here) as partaking in the blood of Christ. These rule-based worlds have clear limits, and are usually specified to only exist in a particular place and time – within the walls of a place of worship, the boundaries of the soccer field, or in the town square during the announced time. This division between the rules of the game/ritual and the wider society is what influential game theorist Johan Huizinga is referring to with “the magic circle.” Games, even more so than traditional ritual, are full of play, expressiveness, and art, in the beautiful tokens we use, the way we narrate our actions, or the way we move. In fact, games are a kind of play. They are play with rules: ritualised play.
Games and rituals are two sides of the same coin, both different expressions of the same behaviour. The main place games differ from ritual is that games are no longer purposeful – they aren’t integrated into broader society the way an adolescence-to-adulthood ritual like a Bar Mitzvah is. Games are practiced for their own sake, just for fun.
Live action roleplaying is even more ritualistic than board, athletic, or card games, because it involves performance to a greater extent. In all larps we take on a unique, ritual-specific role, with its own special attributes and responsibilities that exist only in the situation. We play and elaborate on our behaviour – we perform – to make our actions more compelling to other players and observers, as practitioners in religious rituals do, or animals do in their mating rituals. Larps incorporate much more meaning and symbolism, putting the focus on the story layered onto the game rules. But although larps are siloed in art or play contexts, they still possess the inherent functions of ritual: to create community and meaning.
When we role play, we engage in a ritual-like activity that cannot help but bind us together and enact new mental patterns and models. Rituals and games are both capable of transcendence – they take us out of the usual world and allow us to experience new ways of thinking as a community. When we larp, we practice shared behaviors and shared ways of thinking. We are not just passive viewers but actually acting out the behaviour patterns of the game, and together all our brains are connected by the same specific rule-based logic of the game world (Fingerhut, 2021). This is how games are able to create similar emotions and experiences in each player.
Rituals are designed to transform us: to change people’s relationships with one another, with the seasons, with the natural forces that control our world. Although larps are no longer practiced in the context of societal transformation, they still have the same power as rituals, because they use the same mental capacities: coordinated action, play, and rules. When put together, these have powerful abilities to form communities, make the world feel more ordered, and transform the way we think and relate to one another and the world.
We can still obtain the benefits of ritual even outside of the holy site. Games and experiential play create their own kinds of holy sites, through which we are transformed and can have powerful, even sometimes religious, experiences. We can form community, think in new ways, and participate in that essential kind of behaviour that makes us communal animals – sharing a space and a way of thinking, and for a short time experiencing together a different world.
Bibliography
Burghardt, Gordon M. (2006) The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits. MIT Press.
Fingerhut, Jeorg. (2021) ‘Enacting Media. An Embodied Account of Enculturation Between Neuromediality and New Cognitive Media Theory.’ Frontiers in Psychology 12.
Huizinga, Johan. (1938) Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Routledge.
Krátký, Jan, Martin Lang, John H. Shaver, Danijela Jerotijević, and Dimitris Xygalatas. (2016) ‘Anxiety and Ritualization: Can Attention Discriminate Compulsion from Routine?’ Communicative & Integrative Biology 9 (3). doi:10.1080/19420889.2016.1174799
Lorenz, Konrad. (1966) ‘Habit, Ritual, and Magic’ in On Aggression. Translated by Wilson, Marjorie Kerr. Metheun & Co.
Roepstorff, Andreas, Jörg Niewöhner, and Stefan Beck. (2010) ‘Enculturing brains through patterned practices.’ Neural Networks 23, pp. 1051-1059.
Schechner, Richard. (1976) ‘From Ritual to Theater and Back’ in Ritual, Play and Performance, edited by Richard Schechner and Mady Schuman. Seabury Press. pp. 196-222.
Sharma, Indra Kumar. (1969) ‘Courtship in Birds.’ Japanese Journal of Ornithology 19 (86). pp. 28-33.
Stokes, A. W., and Williams, H. Warrington. (1971) ‘Courtship Feeding in Gallinaceous Birds.’ The Auk 88 (3), pp. 543–59. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4083749.
Tonna, M., Marchesi, C., and Parmigiani, Stefano. (2019) ‘The biological origins of rituals: An interdisciplinary perspective.’ Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 98 (96). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2018.12.031.
Turner, Victor. (1982) From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. PAJ Publications.
Wiltermuth, S. S., & Heath, C. (2009) ‘Synchrony and Cooperation.’ Psychological Science, 20 (1), pp. 1-5. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02253.
This article is republished from the Knutpunkt 2026 book. Please cite it as:
Long, B. 2026. ‘Games Are Rituals.’ In Seasons of Larp eds. Erlandsson, A., Svanevik, M., Holkar, M., and Brind, S. Gothenburg. Knutpunkt.
