Page - 146 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/01

146 | Frank G. Bosman and Archibald L.  H.  M. van Wieringen www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/1, 145–171 In the game Far Cry 5 (CA 2018), developed and published by Ubisoft, the player’s avatar is tasked, as part of a side mission, to destroy a giant concrete statue of Joseph Seed, the violent leader of a cult called “Project at Eden’s Gate”. Joseph and his cult have taken over fictional Hope County, Montana (USA), in preparation for the dawning End of Days. On top of the statue, the player’s avatar, a nameless junior deputy sheriff, finds a half-destroyed shrine with on it a copy of The Book of Joseph, the official “Holy Scripture” of the Pro- ject at Eden’s Gate. This specific copy belongs to Faith, one of the high-ranking members of the cult and responsible for the production of The Bliss, a drug used to brainwash the cultists. The deputy follows the suggestion of his fel- low resistance members to burn this symbolically very important copy of The Book, tossing it aflame from the top of the statue, never again to be seen in the game. In the game, the content of The Book of Joseph remains a mystery for the deputy and for the player. In two instances, discussed below, the player can interact with the book, but only in the context of scripted events. The same uncertainty applies to the second of two narratively interlinked live-action trailers, The Sermon (CA 2018) and The Baptism (CA 2018): the book appears in the latter, but its contents again remain hidden for the viewer. However, the content of The Book of Joseph can indeed be accessed, although by other means. In 2018, Ubisoft published a physical (and very limited) edition of The Book of Joseph, serving as promotional material for the first 2,000 buyers of the Mondo edition of the game.1 Rhetorically, this version of The Book of Jo- seph combines multiple genres such as autobiography, sermon and prophecy, while aesthetically it maintains a middle ground between a traditional Chris- tian Bible (exterior) and an Evangelical study book (interior), combining texts with pencil drawings of apocalyptic scenes. Across all three objects – the game, the trailer and the physical book, in both their texts and their images – the materiality of The Book of Joseph differs significantly, influenced by the intertextual and intermedial relation- ships between them. To analyse the differences and similarities between these texts, we will utilize a communication-oriented method. Intertextu- ality is a form of synchronic literary analysis focussing on the relationships between texts, enlarging the traditional concept of “text” from exclusively 1 While it is beyond doubt that The Book of Joseph is published by Ubisoft, Montréal (Canada), the book itself bears no bibliographical information other than the name of the fictional author. We will explain this particularity in more detail later in this article.