Flat Earth Atheist / Video Games

• There happens to be an antitheist in Black & White. None of the godly power you throw at him can persuade him. But that's all right, tossing him about is quite amusing. What's rather interesting is that he was a significant source of belief anyway, if used properly; while he claimed not to believe in you, you could pick him up anywhere he was — even if he was outside of your control, which is something you can't do for anything else in the game, except for your creature. He also extended a small radius of influence around him, so in effect, he was a believer, he just didn't like you.
• Demon's Souls: Patches the Hyena could be considered this. He claims that "praying never killed demons for [him]" when you can directly call down miracles — including "God's Wrath" — at will. He's absolutely right, as the "miracles" are just another form of the Soul Arts. "God" is actually the ancient demon known as the Old One.
• Diablo III brings us Leah, whose childhood was spent following her uncle Deckard Cain, who was trying to research ways to prevent the forces of Hell from bringing about the End Times. In fairness, Deckard admits that things were peaceful the last twenty years, but one would think that she might give her uncle the benefit of the doubt after seeing zombies rise in front of her and experiencing her own supernatural powers. She only decides Deckard might have a point after he is murdered by cultists and then finding out that one of her companions is a literal Angel.
• Disco Elysium runs on enough Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane to make this mostly explicable, but:
  • Kim verges into this, loudly denouncing the existence of the supernatural, even though an entropic force made up of memories is slowly consuming the world. He does eventually learn to respect your character's supernatural abilities (though without necessarily understanding where they come from) and is also willing to believe supernatural events that he sees (though he tries to put a scientific explanation onto them).
  • A particularly amusing example comes during the initiation process for the Remote Viewing Division thought, in which your character begins to decide he has psychic powers ("You are a special man, and you are definitely not imagining it"). La Revacholiere, the Genius Loci of the city, will cut in via a Shivers passive check that the idea of you having psychic powers is "NONSENSE".
• In Act 1 of Divinity: Original Sin II the Player Character can potentially take it to ridiculous extremes if they refuse to acknowledge the gods who they physically meet, multiple times, and are a living avatar of. However in Act 2 this ends up being subverted, as it's revealed the "gods" are merely Abusive Precursors who managed to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, proving the player's potential skepticism completely right. Potential party member/Player Character Ifan even says "So the gods are liars. Can't say I didn't see that coming."
• Arcoscephalean skeptics in the Dominions world are atheistic philosophers who use their acerbic wit to mock belief in the gods. This is quite strange during an epic war between demigods battling to become the one true God. Even worse, the nation of Arcoscephale itself is ruled by a pretender god who can order the skeptics about.
• Dragon Age: Dialogue options allow the player character (in every game) to be atheistic, or at least reject the Chantry faith (despite events in Dragon Age: Origins, at least, reinforcing their concept of Andraste as divine.) The Dalish gods are similarly rejected by many characters, mostly the Chantry (they did exist, although it's revealed in Dragon Age: Inquisition that they weren't much more than powerful mages). And while what Dwarves believe is usually down to the individual, they generally focus their worship on Ancestors and Paragons and reject all other faiths as a breach of tradition.
• In Dungeons And Dragons Order Of The Griffon, the heroes are hired by Lord Korrigan of Radlebb Keep to investigate and debunk the rumors of the vampire Koriszegy in the ruins of Koriszegy Keep. He insists that the vampire is a myth and he's only hiring you to debunk the rumors to end the panic. He does tell you that you might meet some minor undead like skeletons and zombies, maybe a ghoul or something. Needless to say, Koriszegy is quite real, and quite dangerous: he nearly succeeds in destroying Karameikos. Somewhat justified by the fact that it's an established fact of the setting that the Thyatian rulers of what used to be Traladara, now Karameikos, tend to hold their Traladaran subjects in contempt as superstitious and ignorant.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • In the backstory, the extinct Dwemer were a played-deadly-serious version of this trope. While they acknowledged the existence of some of the entities that the other races considered "gods" (Aedra, Daedra, etc.), the Dwemer refused to accept their divinity. They were said to especially despise the Daedra, mocking and scorning the "foolish" rituals of their followers (primarily their greatest rivals in Morrowind, the Chimer). They would even summon Daedra specifically to test their divinity. The science and reason-focused Dwemer even extended this skepticism to reality itself, refuting anything as truly "real". It is implied that this belief is a core element of how their technology functions. They devised technology that ignored the laws of reality or outright manipulated the tonal architecture of the Earth-Bones (the spirits of creation who gave their lives to set up the laws of nature and physics) simply through sheer refusal to accept physical and magical limitations. The Dwemer would all disappear entirely from any known plane of existence after discovering and tampering with the heart of the "dead" god, Lorkhan.
    • One Dwemer tale (notably written by an Unreliable Narrator) tells of a Dwemer who tricks the Daedric Prince Azura with a box containing a mirror. After she correctly guesses what the box holds, he opens the box and the mirror makes it appear as if the box was empty,^note It's an old magic trick, the mirror is at an angle ergo when you look in the walls of the box are reflected and look like the other sides, so it looks like the box is empty. proving she is fallible and so not a god. Alternatively, the box contains a rose and through complex machinery it falls through a small compartment, giving the appearance that the box is empty. He dies that night, a smile on his face. The Dunmer tell a different story: Azura sees through the tricks and strikes him down there and then. Interestly, every version of the story ends with Azura reacting angrily before disappearing and the Dwarf dying that same night.
  • Many in Tamriel are this toward the Nine Divines, the Aedra who sacrificed themselves in the creation of Mundus (the mortal world), while acknowledging the existence of the Daedra. Basically every example of the Divines influencing the world are either ambiguous, a matter of legend, very personal incidents that only happens to special people (like Elder Scrolls protagonists), or a combination, while the Daedric Princes influencing the world is a matter of historical record.
  • In Morrowind, the Nerevarine ends up outright killing 2-3 Physical Gods during the course of the game and first expansion while gaining some borderline god-like powers him/herself. Some NPCs even seem to believe you are a god, but the circumstances around these events can lead the player to believe that this is not the case.
  • Oblivion:
    • Else God-Hater appears to be this at first. Turns out she actually worships Mehrunes Dagon and doesn't want anyone to guess.
    "The gods don't do a damn thing. Do they even exist? How could anyone tell? Daedra Lords, sure. They exist. They do things. Bad things, mostly, but things you can see. The gods? They don't do a damn thing. So why do we build big chapels and sit around and mumble, and ask them to save us from this and that? It's stupid. And chapels and priests and folks grovelling on their knees, they're stupid, too."
    • There's also Ulene Hlervu, castle mage to Count Indarys of Cheydinhal. She scoffs at the practice of worshiping the Nine, stating that worshipping Daedra is more reasonable, though still foolish, because it produces dramatic results.
    • Quill-Weave, an adventure novelist and scholar, doesn't believe that Doomstones have magic powers (they do), despite plenty of powerful magic artifacts and devices left over from precursors being an everyday reality.
    • The Shivering Isles DLC introduces the Heretics, who live on the titular Isles. Their defining characteristic is that they don't believe in Daedric Princes, despite living in a Daedric Realm, alongside Daedra who answer to a Prince. They at least have the excuse that the Shivering Isles is the domain of the Mad God Sheogorath, and everyone there, Heretics included, are batshit insane.
  • In Skyrim the Altmeri (High Elven) Thalmor have banned the worship of Talos in the Empire via treaty because they find it offensive that a mortal man can become a god. This is actually a cover story for the Thalmor's true desires, they know Talos exists, they also believe that he's a Barrier Maiden holding the mortal plane together, if he stops being worshiped, his power will fade and the world will end, which is exactly what the Thalmor want, as they believe this will return Elven spirits to a state of pre-creation divinity.
• Fallen London has an equippable item called "A Firm Conviction of the Absence of the Supernatural," which lowers your character's nightmares when equipped. For context, Fallen London is an extremely bizarre setting where London has been relocated to a massive underground cavern by bats and now devils, clay men, squid-people, and talking cats are all mundane and commonly occurring facts of life.
  There's always a rational explanation - if your system of logic is expansive enough.
• Fear & Hunger: Termina: Karin Sauer, a journalist, is constantly searching for a rational explanation to everything. She is dismissive of religion and magic, even though the gods and their powers are undoubtedly real, and you can cast magic right in front of her (or even teach her magic).
• Final Fantasy:
  • Wol in Mobius Final Fantasy refuses to accept that gods exist in Palamecia because they would have stopped Chaos from appearing. This, despite the fact that he was brought to Palamecia from his own planet by a near-omniscient, all-powerful astral being attempting to find the Chosen One able to stop Chaos. The setting he admits this in is a part of the world created by the Warring Triad, to boot.
  • In Final Fantasy Tactics, Faith is a stat that can be raised or lowered semi-permanently on each unit. High-Faith units deal and take more damage from magic, while low-Faith units take less, and zero-Faith units are completely unaffected by magic. What makes the latter this trope is that it also makes them immune to healing magic, including Raise spells meant to save them from Permadeath. Yes, your atheist units would rather bleed out and turn into a crystal than let your clerics save them with their hocus pocus.
• Ghostbusters again! By the time of the Video Game, the events of the two films — including two massive ghostly uprisings in New York, a God of Destruction in the form of a marshmallow mascot attacking the city, the Museum of Natural History being engulfed by goo, and the Statue of Liberty taking a stroll through Manhattan — mean that everyone believes the Ghostbusters are the real thing... except Obstructive Bureaucrat Walter Peck, who continues to believe they're nothing but dangerous frauds pulling an impossibly elaborate hoax. It's implied he might be a Gozer cultist that's just faking it to cover his sinister true motivations. Turns out he's not, and after the events of the game, which include another Gozer attack, a supernatural event at the Museum of Natural History at which Peck is personally present and is actually possessed, an island rising out of the Hudson River then sinking back into it again, another massive ghostly uprising — this time including Central Park turning into a massive otherworldly graveyard, and being personally abducted by the ghost of Ivo Shandor who had been possessing the Mayor and personally witnessing the first half of the Ghostbusters' battle with him... he still thinks they're nothing more than dangerous frauds that need to be shut down.
• In Ghost Trick, the justice minister loudly denies the existence of ghosts, even after Sissel goes back and saves him from dying of a heart attack. Then it turns out he was mostly trying to convince himself, after being manipulated by Yomiel into signing Jowd's execution order and spending the last few weeks covering it up.
• Guild Wars:
  • The original campaign, Prophecies, has a wonderful moment where an NPC rants about how she doesn't believe in any Gods after your latest mission goes awry. This is a bit ridiculous since she's standing next to a person who can revive the dead using the power of faith and lives in a world where praying at a shrine will grant you improved skills. Since the plot of that campaign can be summed up as: "Oh hey, you just made everything worse! Again!" it may be safe to assume that the Gods are helping you just so that they can point and laugh when you fail.
  • In Guild Wars 2, each race has a view on the gods. While only the humans believe in them, the other races are not atheist per se: the Asura simply consider the gods as part of the Eternal Alchemy, like everything else; the Charr were so scarred by the Shamans that they decide to not revere the gods, but do not deny their existence; the Norn simply have their own deities in the Spirits of the Wild. As for the Sylvari, since they only appeared a few decades ago, i.e. 1300 years after the Gods left Tyria, they just want evidence, making them the closest example of this trope, considering that, y'know, humans are able to summon Hounds of Balthazar and stuff like that. The Sylvari have the innate ability to bring huge trees to life, so they aren't completely unreasonable in wanting proof those hounds come from a higher power.
• The Pretentious Artist from Kingdom of Loathing is one of these. You only find this out if you show up at his place decked out in all of the Bad Moon rewards, and he states that he isn't sure whether he believes in Hey Deze, "even though people go there all the time and bring back souvenirs."
• Metal Gear:
  • In Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Ocelot loudly decries the existence of the supernatural, despite the fact that he used to work with an Ax-Crazy floating psychic, a shaman with flying tattoos, an arguable vampire who could pin people to their shadows, a ridiculously old man who only comes to life in battle and can communicate with forest spirits, a man who could shoot bees, and a ghost; once manipulated an elaborate chain of events involving two (arguably three) non-floating psychics; and is routinely being possessed by a ghost living in Ocelot's transplanted arm. However, this line was added by the translator; in the original Japanese, he only says that technology can replicate the supernatural. See also Doing In the Wizard and Voodoo Shark for more discussion of the possessed arm and the vampire, among other things.
  • Solid Snake denounces the supernatural in numerous occasions, doubting and mocking Mantis's extremely potent psychic powers (as well as Alice Hazel's in Metal Gear Ac!d) and refusing to accept Fortune could really be a witch. He's proven wrong about the latter and admits it, but in 4 belligerently tells Otacon that Vamp's powers can't be real. On the other side, he's reasonably respectful of Vulcan Raven and his magic, if not of Raven himself.
• The atheist conduct (a voluntary extra challenge) in NetHack is particularly ridiculous, where you can play as an atheist (never praying for help, making use of altars, or even talking to priests) even though your mission is to perform a sacrifice to your god in the astral plane.
• Neverwinter Nights 2: Gannayev from Mask of the Betrayer adamantly refuses to believe that gods exist and has been known to get into massive bitchfights with the priests of Kelemvor over it (one of which you get to jump into. We suggest you don't try to prove Gann wrong, if you value your relationship-related stat boosts). He persists in this delusion even after he meets not one but two gods in person (or switches to Nay-Theism, he doesn't clarify which). The only thing he doesn't believe in is the wall of the faithless, which, considering the horror it represents, is fairly logical when supposedly good gods are involved in its preservation. It's obvious well before the assault on Kelemvor's domain that he thinks the gods are hypocritical assholes.
• In Persona 4, Detective Dojima refuses to believe his nephew when he tells him that the murders were committed by supernatural means, even though the very-much supernatural Midnight Channel-rumor, which can be easily observed, proven, and linked to the murders (and that the police was actually quite aware of, as several other characters' knowledge of it, such as that of Naoto Shirogane, proves). This is averted in Persona 4: Dancing All Night, where Dojima is a bit more open-minded to Kanami's claims that several people were kidnapped by demonic ribbons from an inter-dimensional portal, due to his experiences in the original game.
• Planescape: Torment has the NPC Fall-From-Grace who, in a world brimming with gods and monsters and other such things, is agnostic. She's the party cleric. She's also a chaste succubus and proprietress of a brothel that doesn't involve sex. Planescape, as mentioned above, is a Clap Your Hands If You Believe setting, where belief shapes reality (and clerical magic is just one form of reality-shaping). Grace draws her power from the Sensate Philosophy.
• Prince of Persia (2008) featured a protagonist who didn't believe in either of the two gods, despite all the demons he fights and seeing one of said gods try to escape from his prison. When you see inky blackness spilling into the sky and corrupting the planet, and then deny that your antagonist is real, you're just being thickheaded.
• The science teacher in Princess Maker 2 believes in miracles, but also believes that they can all be explained away rationally by science. Despite living in a kingdom that was at war with the prince of darkness Lucifon just a few years ago, and gods, demons, and fairies all exist and are well-known about.
• In Quest for Glory IV, Dr. Cranium does not believe in magic, insisting that any claims are merely the result of superstition and that everything can be explained by science. The game even suggests that there's probably magic involved in the healing potions he makes for you, but advises you not to point that out to him. If you're a Wizard, you can try to debate him, at which point he brings up Clarke's Third Law, and he can give you a magic scroll that he claims is full of illegible scrawlings: when you read it and learn the spell, prompting the scroll to vanish, he points out that it was a particularly shoddy piece of parchment to "fall right apart" like that.
  • The same "ignorance" pops up in Quest for Glory V. It seems to be a core feature of the scientist subculture that Dr. Cranium is a part of. However, towards the end, it is revealed that this subculture has been well aware of magic all along. Their denial of magic is not ignorance, but instead a dogma about magic being a heinous crime against reality itself. If you're a Wizard, they even try to assassinate you for your crimes.
• Though we don't see them, they do exist in Skullgirls. Unlike most examples, it's not so much that they don't believe the goddesses exist, but that they're mortals with extremely powerful Parasites rather than divine beings. Considering that one playable character - Eliza - is exactly that and incredibly long-lived, it's a lot more reasonable than you'd expect.
• In Star Ocean, after you've visited the king of Van and been told the legend of the Demon World, Iria and Ronixis (your two teammates who are from a scientifically advanced Earth) have a private talk about gods and demons and superstition, and why they shouldn't just accept the supernatural elements of planet Roak and instead look for logical explanations. This flies in the face of the fact that Iria can shoot energy from her hands, while Ronixis has put aside his starship captain commission to become a powerful Heraldric mage who calls down lightning and fire on his foes.
• Another one like Han Solo; Tharan Cedrax, one of the Consular's companions in Star Wars: The Old Republic, travels with a Jedi and was acquainted with Master Syo. Yet, he really dislikes anything that smells of Jedi mysticism and overt Force use in his presence (especially the Jedi Mind Trick). It could be explained by the fact that a Muggle like himself cannot analyze, measure, or experiment with it.
• Any Empire with the Materialist ethos in Stellaris have Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions. Yeah, go ahead and tell that to the Extradimensional Invaders, Dimensional Horrors, the Worm-in-Waiting, those entities in The Shroud offering you to make covenants with them (which materialists will technically never encounter), or any Spiritualist Empire wielding Psionic techs. Of course, thanks to the research bonuses that come with the ethos they can do so with gusto.
  • Materialists actually have easy explanations for these things, since sufficiently advanced technology is literally everywhere and alternate dimensions and realities aren't much less common than that so what's one more? There are even late-game events that hint that the materialists might be right after all. The game does a decent job of keeping it ambiguous.
• Touhou Project: The plot for the tenth game, Touhou Fuujinroku ~ Mountain of Faith, involves a god attempting to collect the faith of everyone in Gensokyo because she believed the dwindling faith its inhabitants had in its deities would cause massive chaos (that said faith would be an enormous boost to her power was apparently just a bonus). Considering gods in Gensokyo not only have human-like forms but regularly chat with humans and youkai alike (or pelt them with danmaku, whichever seems more fun), either its inhabitants are this trope or don't find it necessary to have faith in beings that are readily defeated by a Cute Witch and a Miko or are Nay-Theist. Reimu's shrine famously never gets donations. However, this is explained as being less that the people have no faith in the god, and more that they have no faith in the miko.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines:
  • Dr. Aleister Grout, the Malkavian Primogen firmly believes there's a rational explanation for the fact that he's a vampire and all the obviously supernatural things they can do. It's somewhat implied that this is actually the manifestation of his Malkavian insanity. Also implied to be his insanity is his methods. The good doctor is a clinical case of antisocial personality disorder taken to eleven.
  • Beckett is a vampire Adventurer Archaeologist dedicated to discovering the origins of vampirism, however like Grout he refuses to entertain the idea of the Cain and Abel legend or other aspects of vampiric lore and is a staunch atheist despite being (un)living proof of the supernatural.
• In Wolfenstein, after the mission where BJ receives the Thule Medallion and first learns of the Golden Dawn (a benevolent order of mystics), he can talk to the La Résistance radio operator who claims that the Golden Dawn's leader seeks to "save the world from black magic. Which means he's either insane or an idiot". You could interpret that as BJ keeping the Medallion's powers a secret...if not for the fact that completing the aforementioned mission also causes black-clad Nazi sorcerers to fight openly in the city they are in.
• In World of Warcraft, Gnome characters were initially limited to classes that practice mundane martial arts (warriors and rogues) or arcane magic (magi and warlocks). The reason? They are a race of primarily atheists who can't play any class that requires faith in a higher power, such as the Light or nature spirits. Despite living with and fighting alongside priests, paladins, druids, and the like. Even after the introduction of gnome priests, Word of God clarified that they were just doctors and medics who believe that the healing powers of the Holy Light are just another science they can use to their advantage.
  • Which they aren't entirely wrong about. Besides which, this is frankly a healthier attitude towards the Light than some of the other races have. Worshipping the Light doesn't do anything directly: actually using the Light only requires being willing to sacrifice for one's cause. That cause can be anything, from the social or political to the personal. Belief in a higher power of some kind or worship of anything in particular. Though higher powers definitely DO exist in the setting (but seeing as they tend to be Jerkasses as often as not, worshipping them is not always the best idea).

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