Animism in Play
Most games, but roleplaying games in particular, carry with them certain philosophical assumptions about how the world works. A character sheet embodies a certain view of personhood and what makes a person henself. Rules express a particular idea of how the world works and what parts of it matter most, what we should focus on in this game, and what we should leave aside. If you agree with these assertions, they can seem invisible to you, but that doesn’t mean the game hasn’t made them. The Fifth World makes assertions like these, too, but you might not agree with or understand all of them, because rather than asserting what most people believe today, they try to assert what people in the Fifth World believe, and how they see the world. And they do not see things as most of us do today.
When civilization collapsed and climate change and mass extinction raged, those who survived did so only because they recognized that the old ways wouldn’t work anymore, so they tried new ways of living and relating. Over time, a combination of harsh natural selection and clever adaptation left a world of hunter-gatherers and gardeners, and in such a world, animism could not help but return.
Each community has their own specific belief system, making the world far more religiously and philosophically diverse than ours, so we might more accurately talk about animism not as a unified belief system, but as the lack of specific beliefs peculiar to the agricultural and civilized societies of the past.