Finding Pilgrimage In Video Games: Why Game Worlds Make Perfect Spiritual Journeys

Nathan Webb

I was first called into the digital ministry landscape in 2020 – that all-too-familiar era of livestreaming churches becoming the norm amidst a pandemic.

Specifically, my focus area would be creating a safe space for my people: the nerd, the geek, and the gamer (of which I am all three).

The logical starting place for this ministry was a streaming platform called Twitch. This has historically been a place where hundreds of millions of gamers would watch their favorite content creators stream video games with an interactive chat.

Over the course of four effective years of streaming ministry, I would play well over a hundred video games for a growing church community.

But then the tide changed. Twitch was no longer the platform it had once been – at least not for our community.

We needed a shift.

Mostly, that shift took us to YouTube and it took us away from live broadcasting.

But there was a kind of dissonance left in our identity. We played games together… if we weren’t doing that, were we still the same community?

It was around this time that I began to discover the work of fellow Phygital Fellow Phil Dieke, who enamored me with his podcast theme that year of pilgrimages. The more I heard the guests share their calling to this work, the more it resonated with me.

This is what we had been doing all along.

All of those games we’d played on Twitch over the span of years hadn’t really been what everyone else was doing. We weren’t just playing, we were taking journeys together into video games.

This led to the experimental next phase of Checkpoint Church: the Pixel Pilgrimage.

We wanted a place where people could slow down—where spiritual curiosity could breathe, where meaning could emerge without being forced.

In 2025, we completed four Pixel Pilgrimages—Everhood, Neva, Keeper, and The Beginner’s Guide. Each one was different. Each one drew different participants. And still, a core group continued to show up across them. That alone tells me something important: this isn’t just a program people try once. It’s becoming a practice.

The Name

“Pixel Pilgrimage” is a pretty literal title, and it’s still the best one we’ve found.

A pilgrimage is travel with intention. It’s movement that changes you. It’s not just consuming an experience; it’s being reshaped by it.

Traditionally, pilgrimages come with markers: rituals, moments of reflection, signs that you’re on the path and not just wandering.

And a lot of games — especially the kinds of games we’re drawn to — already function that way.

One of the biggest surprises of this work has been realizing how naturally pilgrimage practices and video games fit together. We started noticing “pilgrimage markers” inside games from the very beginning, and by the time we played Neva, it got almost hilariously obvious. The save mechanic in that game acts like built-in cairns — those stone stacks pilgrims use to mark a trail — without us designing that connection at all.

See… this helped me realize why this had always been working for us when we played games together as a Christian community. The overlap between spirituality and gaming is already there.

I’ve been amazed by how much convergence exists between spirituality, contemplation, and video games — especially in the kind of writing and research around “reading games well.”

Even when it isn’t explicitly Christian, it often approaches games as spaces for reflection, depth, and transformation. That has been deeply affirming for our community.

Pixel Pilgrimage isn’t a weird outlier; it’s part of a broader recognition that games can hold real weight.

Over the next several posts, I look forward to sharing with you some of the insights of our first year of spiritual pilgrimages into video games. And, maybe, you’ll even find yourself wanting to take one, too.