Gaming is filled with good, evil, and other moral issues that many studies assume are interpreted by players as religious. It generates curiosity as in all the studies about video gaming and religion, for most players, in-game religious imagery and narratives usually do not seem to matter. If not as religion, how should scholars of digital media theorize these elements? The authors argue that a more accurate concept is value formations. Using the performance of music in Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) as a case study, the authors define value as a second-order category that theorizes what actors find worthy or unworthy, and value formations as the collections and systematization of interdependent and entangled values. The authors approach value formations as contextualized social constructions and are not arguing for any type of normative preexisting good, beautiful, or typical (or bad, ugly, or deviant).

The chapter: Link 

Grieve, Gregory P., Kerstin Radde-Antweiler und Xenia Zeiler. 2022. „Value Formations through Digital Gaming.“ In The Oxford Handbook of Digital Religion, hg. v. Heidi A. Campbell und Pauline H. Cheong, C20.S1-C20.N1: Oxford University Press.