Computer games are a poor man's Holodeck. Desktop-accessible virtual images are now manipulated by millions in order to jack up their adrenal glands, crack puzzles, fantasize, satisfy urges for combat and control, or reprogram their reflexes Pavlov-style. It goes without saying that such urges do not, in general, make for a particularly profound culture. But to judge from the archetypal images, themes, and characters that continue to populate so many computer games, players also remain attracted, however superficially, to the deeper patterns of myth.

We are not talking Homer here, or even Beowulf. Taken in toto, the virtual world of gaming resembles some savage disembodied theme park infested by deer hunters, F-16s, and kick-boxing Japanese school girls. And yet the fact remains: the world of computer games is saturated with occult, mythological, and even spiritual themes. As Margaret Wertheim argues in her book The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, cyberspace has become a kind of "soul-space," an escape from the chilly Einsteinean spacetime of the everyday world into the animated universe of premodern people. It is as if the ancient human intuitions banished by rational technology have returned to haunt the ludic fringes of technology's ultimate progeny. Looking at the roster of new and forthcoming games, these hauntings show no signs of letting up, and with the millennium nigh, a few games are even taking a curiously and explicitly religious turn.

Much of the game world's world's supernaturalism can be laid at the feet of "sword & sorcery," that hackneyed genre of wizards, goblins, and bloody broadswords that first emerged from the pulp pens of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard in the 1920s and '30s. J.R.R. Tolkien refined this world into genuine myth, and it was probably The Lord of the Rings that most influenced Don Woods when he completed the first text-based computer game at Stanford's AI lab in the early 1970s. Adventure, aka Colossal Cave, was dominated by tough puzzles and geeky humor, but its space would lay the foundations for myriad digital phantasms to come: an underground cavern filled with dwarves, dragons, and treasure chests. One of the first "virtual worlds" carved out of bits was a teensy cosmos of neomedieval code.

Meanwhile, the musty world of offline strategy games was also undergoing a revolution in the early 1970s. Rather than lording over hexagonal field maps, fans of Dungeons & Dragons became characters inside the cartography. Players conjured up their highly immersive gamespaces with oddly-numbered dice, rule-books, and, most notably, their own internal powers of creative imagination. Since the imagination is the anthropological source of magic in the first place, it was hardly surprising that the occult became, alongside combat and puzzle-cracking, one the most basic structuring devices of the role-playing games that followed in D&D's enormously succesful wake.

The collision of fantasy RPGs and the computer was inevitable, spawning online Multi-User Dungeons and a demonic legion of commercial games. Over time, text-based hits like Zork gave way to the more visceral power of graphics found in, say, the popular Ultima games. Though RPGs are hardly the top-selling games these days, sword & sorcery fans continue to keep the pick-ax flying. Strategy games like Warcraft and Myth: The Fallen Lords exploit neomedieval imagery, while games like Diablo, Mordor II, and A Rage of Mages keep the occult kettle on the fire.

You might think this sort of thing would have grown stale by now, but old-school D&D-styled games like 3DO's Might & Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven are still capable of becoming rather sizable hits. Such supernatural persistence can partly be chalked up to commercial inertia: designers interested in graphics engines and game-play are content to stay within existing narrative and character schemes because such proven formulas require little to no additional research or vision. But popular myths were always thus: an inherited body of unauthored stories and generic figures that are constantly reworked and recombined to fit the day. In that sense, cliché is simply another word for archetype.

Moreover, there is something strangely congruent about magical thinking and computers. The computational universe gives us the power to create real change with codes and symbolic actions, which are the fundamental rhetoric of magic. As Vernor Vinge suggests in his classic novella True Names, which partly takes place in a MUD-like network, magical metaphors like sprites, spells, and reincarnation are simply "more convenient" for the online mind to use than dry and atomistic notions like folders, algorithms, and communication protocols.

That may be, but if the legions of Doom-spawned twitch games are any evidence, the most convenient way to manipulate dataspace is to fill it full of lead. Indeed, if traditional RPGs took place in Faeryland by way of Conan the Barbarian's Cimmeria, the new wave of first-person shooters like Quake and Unreal take place in horror-movie hell. One can almost sympathize with fundamentalist Christians, peering over little Bobby's shoulder as he blasts his way through a sea of necromantic gore, slathered with demon guts.

All of which makes the imminent arrival of Cyclone Studio's Requiem: Wrath of the Fallen all the more remarkable. A hybrid RPG/puzzle/shooter game with a hot homegrown animation engine and lots of hype behind it, Requiem requires you to kill soldiers and demonic creatures as you uncover a dark conspiracy to destroy a dystopian futuristic city called Creation. Thing is, you are playing Malachi, an avenging angel from paradise, sent to earth by God in order to vanquish the rebellious angels known as the Fallen. These Miltonesque devils have infiltrated Creation on the eve of human space travel and plan to destroy all human life. To fight them, you must recover holy relics like the Crown of Thorns and the Sword of Fire; alongside the usual "secular weapons," you can also turn enemies into pillars of salt or make their blood boil. Requiem is littered with such Biblical flotsam: a bartender named Jonah, signs for Mt. Sinai hospital, a spaceship called Leviathan. But the allusions are more than skin-deep: the fearful inhabitants of Creation have constructed pumps and levees against a coming flood, and the game crackles with apocalyptic anxiety.

Requiem is not the only 1999 release counting down the end times. The much-lauded folks at Shiny Entertainment will soon be serving up Messiah, another genre-busting action game with an angel hero and a hardcore, cutting-edge animation engine. The backstory is similar as well: Armageddon is almost upon us, and God has sent one of his angels to battle a Satanic agent before the Seven Seals of the Apocalypse can be opened. With its sex-club districts and deformed people, Messiah is both a darker and a more whimsical game than Requiem, and Shiny has already reaped some of the "controversy" they are probably banking on. "We're not actually doing anything sacriligious," says head designer Gabriel Rountree. "We could have been a lot less sensitive. We could have called it Jesus Christ: Resurrection Denied or something."

Still, no-one would mistake Messiah for Pilgrim's Progress. The main action of the game requires the angel hero to temporarily possess the bodies of other characters -- often debauched riffraff like pimps and thugs. Many of these characters must then be maimed and brutalized in order to prevent their subsequent retaliation. "We have hit a certain level of dark gruesomeness," Rountree admits, before ennumerating the joys of Messiah's rocket-propelled harpoon gun. At the same time, Messiah is also more cavalier with its religious myth than Requiem; the angel hero, for example, is a little diapered rookie cherub named Bob.

Cyclone Studio's Phil Co, the main mind behind Requiem, would not goof around with angels this way, although he is more than willing to provide players with copious opportunities for ultraviolence. Like Neil Gaiman, whose Sandman series Co admires, Co wants to take archetypes seriously enough to give the cartoon surfaces of his fighter game some resonance and depth. Co boned up on Milton's Paradise Lost before he wrote Requiem's backstory, and many of the details are drawn straight from the Bible, a book which Co, as a practicing Catholic, knows a bit better than your average Jedi Knight fanatic.

"You know your mind wanders when you're in church," the 26-year-old Co tells me from his studio offices in San Mateo. "You don't always think about what you should be thinking about. I tended to think about Requiem a lot, and you'll see a lot of that in the game." Though Co is concerned about offending people by dropping angels into such a violent setting, he also knows that that the angels of tradition are not those diaphanous waifs you see on New Age postcards, but powerful intercessors and fierce warriors. "We wanted to delve into the character of the angel, rather than just the way people portray them. What does an angel think? Angels don't have souls, and because they are pretty much soldiers, they don't really have free will."

Which is what Cyclone is hoping will happen to user once they taste the addictive pleasures of the game. But while most players will revel in the action and the polygon splash, Requiem proves that the mythic and even cosmological freight of games often lies in the background. (Indeed, if you are like me, you are generally more interested in the world pictured than in the gameplay.) By the end of Requiem, for example, you must enter the Chaos that surrounds Creation in order to battle fallen angels like Lillith, Geryon, and Tryxions. Here souls are embedded in organic, flesh-like spaces, where Escher-like perspectives are distorted and evil stained-glass windows parody the faith that Requiem never quite announces, but which is alluded to in the icon used to signfiy Malachi's fluctuating "essence": a cross. But the struggle between Chaos and Creation goes all the way back to the Mesopotamians, when the city god Marduk had to subdue Chaos in order to maintain the fragile human order.

As CPUs and animation engines improve, games come to resemble B-movie bardo realms, those hallucinogenic zones that Tibetan Buddhists claim await us immediately after death. The lamas tell us that in the bardo, the fears and lusts that lurk in our minds become externalized in glittering 3D, and the consequences of our interactions with these phantasms lead us into different realms of rebirth. In the 13th century, the great Sanskrit scholar Kunga Gyaltsen even made a game out of this Tibetan cosmology, a snake-and-ladders-like pastime called Rebirth.

If you want to stick to Western metaphors, you could think of games as unintentional postindustrial knock-offs of Dante's afterworld, with its fantastic cartography and spectacular violence. Occasionally the echoes aren't even unconscious. LucasArts' weird Afterlife game is basically SimDante, although the faint allusions are draped with nerdy jokes. You play Demiurge, a being charged with constructing and maintaining Heaven and Hell for the souls of an alien world whose faith is a conveniently inoffensive blend of Buddhism and Christianity. In an unconscious parody of medieval Schoolmen, who constructed elaborate memory palaces in their own mind in order to remember the Church's complex array of vices and virtures, you must zone for the incoming souls according to their various good or evil deeds. You also must train and house legions of angels and devils. As in Maxis' various Sim games, the goal is to keep your afterworld bustling and populated.

For the eye, Afterlife is an abstract feast: buildings pop up like Bosch Lego sets by way of Jim Woodring, and the disasters that befall you, like Hell Freezes Over and the Disco Inferno, are colorful and amusing. But the game is a conceptual failure, because the driving force of Sim games like SimAnt or the classic SimCity are the constraints on the system you are building, and the realm of the religious imagination has no implicit limits, no real finitude. It certainly doesn't have the economic constraints implied in Afterlife, where each properly processed soul gets you the "pennies from heaven" that you need to continue costly astral construction. Dante did not need to import Tuscan marble into Inferno for the Wall of Dis.

On the other hand, why wouldn't the afterworld take on the contours of our own? This is the amusing supposition of Grim Fandango, a visually stunning LucasArts game that fuses film noir settings and situations with a highly stylized aesthetic you might call Aztec deco. The game takes place in the Land of the Dead, a cartoon purgatory populated by Mexican Day of the Dead figures like Manny Calavera, the shifty travel agent who serves as the game's hero. Manny's job is to sell packaged tours to newly arrived souls as they make their way to paradise, and he has to get premium clients if he is ever to pay off his purgatorial debt. Grim Fandango's underworld is our underworld, as demons jostle with gangsters, and everyone lies, cheats, smokes, and complains about their dead-end jobs. Indeed, Emmanuel Swedenborg and other spiritualists argued that the afterlife basically resembles this life, so much so that the newly arrived dead must be told that they have actually kicked the bucket. But in the future, the real task may be convincing incoming souls that they are not stuck in some cosmic video game.