But you can say the same about anything--politics, sports teams, competing sports (consider the tribalism of gridiron vs fútbol), brand loyalty, competing fiction franchises (consider the B5 vs DS9 brouhaha), anything with a tribal character. Religions and politics tend to be about deeply-held beliefs regarding the nature of things, people, and the world. Sports, brand loyalty, and fandom tend to be about much more lightly-held preferences and taste. Maybe if we're going to make comparisons referencing tribalism, it is more respectful to reference things that are about preference when talking about games, which are by definition a leisure-time activity, than about things that at least should get to the heart of a person's ethical judgments.
Particularly when religious tribalism is such an incredibly serious issue in the world right at this very moment, so making a comparison to the tribalism of geekdom runs the risk of sounding like one is trivializing religion and its importance to real, living humans, rather than elevating gaming to its level (which I think most people would consider a fairly ridiculous notion.)
I don't know how far Edwards intends his comparison to "folk religion" to be taken. But the analysis of non-religious phenomena using the analytical tools of anthropology and sociology of religion and ritual is not uncommon, in my experience as someone who researches and teaches in social and political philosophy.Everything is fair game within the haphazardly cast net of rhetoric compared to the purposefully wound rope of philosophical inquiry.
Sometimes it can be useful, sometimes not.
But for instance, if it was deemed off-limits to compare (for instance) the social function of football-team identification in contemporary Australia (or Britain or the US) to the social function of religious identification in pre-modern societies, then one wouldn't be able to address questions about the role of sports-as-entertainment in supporting social solidarity and integration (which might be interesting from a broadly Durkheimian point of view) or the role of sports-as-entertainment as ideology (which might be interesting from a broadly post-Marxist point of view).
And my own view is that these sorts of inquiries don't need to involve dismissal or trivialisation of religious adherence. I believe this on the basis of my own experience teaching social theory, jurisprudence and Holocaust studies to many students, including many religious students, over the years.