The newest issue of online gaming publication The Escapist focuses on religion and philosophy within gaming. The articles vary from thought-provoking to curious to strangely silly. The two articles that I found the most worth reading were “Jesus was not a gamer” by Joe Blancato, and “A Lack of Faith: Why Christian Games are Doomed to Fail” by Lara Crigger.

“Jesus was not a gamer” pokes a bit at the tendency we have to pray to whatever god/God we know of for help in winning games, and then dives into a survey of how religion and games have mixed historically around the world. The article gives some fascinating examples. I finally have some clue as to what a dreidl is, and while I had heard of the ancient Egyptian game of Senet before, I didn’t realize that the rules had actually been reconstructed. (The article links to a Flash version of the game, but at the time of writing this it seems to be down.)

Interestingly, Blancato looks for a gaming connection to Christianity and finds that there seems to be none. He attributes it at least partially to Christianity’s underground beginnings, but isn’t that the exact circumstances in which he says that Judaism invented the dreidl? I don’t know how deeply the two situations are parallel, though, so maybe I’m misunderstanding.

“A Lack of Faith” is, initially, a pretty harsh criticism of the current state of Christian games. But looking past the nasty subtitle and the Left Behind: Eternal Forces abuse, Crigger actually dives into what I believe to be a fundamental challenge for Christian games, or faith-based games in general. Are Christian games willing and able to create a deep and meaningful look at what it means to have a crisis of faith? The article takes a close look at the story of Job as an example of what a truly challenging faith story looks like, and holds that up as a measure. Ultimately, Crigger is advocating what (I think) I’ve been trying to cheer on via this blog all along – for games to create a deeper and more meaningful representation of what faith is, how it turns your life inside out.

One thing I’d mention is that I think the article doesn’t do justice to just how hard that goal might be to achieve, especially in a Christian context. Crigger brings up this core question from the look at Job:

If by being good, you can entirely avoid misfortune, what distinguishes righteousness from commerce, a mere business transaction between you and God?

Certainly struggling with this question is what makes the book of Job so challenging. Unfortunately, in a slightly different light it’s also what makes creating a compelling Christian faith story so challenging as well. Both game rules and computer systems are excellent at creating representations of predictable, mathematical relationships. But if we try to embody a story of faith with a living and incalculable God in the rules of a game, how do we distinguish righteousness from commerce? How do we keep our representation of prayers from being “mere business transaction(s)” in an economy of game mechanics?

I’m back from a nice Christmas spent with family, and I finally tried out the Left Behind: Eternal Forces demo. I guess it felt like an obligation at this point to at least try it, but the demo didn’t seem to pull any surprises on my point of view.

The prayer mechanic worked as I’d heard, and I have mixed feelings about it. It’s a simple model of both prayer and the effects of prayer, which manages to convey some interesting messages. Units need to pray regularly to keep from falling away into neutrality, which expresses how a Christian needs to keep in active contact with God to maintain their faith. (I like this.) On the other hand, prayer never actually does anything external to the unit in question – ie. no healing prayer, no asking for divine intervention. Admittedly, this is hard to map into game rules without turning prayer into a magic-like guaranteed divine action.

(A whole lot more below the break.)

Similarly, the ways you influence other units’ “spirit” value are sometimes good, sometimes weird. From an RTS game play perspective, I’ve always been a fan of having the ability to convert or steal enemy units. But having a small army of worship leaders standing outside of a church to neutralize attacking enemy soldiers is just, well, surreal. Is this because it’s an implausible portrayal, or am I simply unable to process the inclusion of peaceful resistance as an effective RTS game mechanic? Frankly, it’s hard for me to tell right now. Perhaps it feels like it fails to convey a plausible model of the world because of the lack of character emotion. Peaceful resistance turning away an attacking soldier feels like it should have an emotional impact, whereas these soldiers simply stop and drift away randomly.

The general model of having musicians exert spiritual influence is an interesting way to express how music and spirituality combine in the Christian faith. The use of music to align people in worship to God is both a tradition in modern churches and in the Bible. Musicians often led the way to battle, and were called on to prepare a prophet to inquire of God. So I appreciate music having a spiritual effect, but the degree to which it affects people just seems odd to me.

Converting units one at a time through one-on-one evangelism in the game is a bit more clearly mappable to real-life Christianity. Again, though, there’s a sense that this isn’t so much about encouraging people to make a choice so much as coercing them to your side. A neutral character who is being actively recruited will, as far as I’ve seen, never say no. What does this say about Christian evangelism? Is successful evangelism simply battering away at people with The Truth until they give in? It seems like more of the usual guilt / responsibility complex that evangelical Christianity has in general, where one is led to feel responsible when unbelievers reject the Gospel. (Doesn’t really fit Jesus’ advice to “shake the dust from your feet” afterwards, in my opinion.)

A common thread running through my mixed reactions seems to be the all-encompassing “spirit” stat. By taking all spiritual effects and reducing them to a single numbered stat, different concepts are being lumped into the same category which perhaps should have been kept distinct. The effects of musicians makes sense when you view “spirit” as an indicator of the character’s emotional or spiritual state – are they bogged down with anger, fear, etc expressed by the music of the bad guys, or are they being emotionally and spiritually lifted up by positive music that draws their focus on God? However, that same spirit meter is being modified by preaching, and is the deciding factor in whether or not a character believes your message. This conflates the usual definitions of “spirit” with one’s rational worldview, something that is affected by one’s spirit but is certainly not identical. I’m not sure what the answer to my concerns is. Splitting the Spirit stat into Spirit and Mind, maybe?

I think the best way to sum up the impression I get of “spiritual warfare” through these mechanics is, unfortunately, nothing more than psychological warfare. Prayer is an internal, psychological improvement without any external effect; singing and preaching can affect others, but these mechanics map just as easily onto a psychological explanation as a spiritual one. Why is a rampaging demon in bad-guy multiplayer the only sign of a distinctly spiritual reality in the game design? Why can’t you pray for people who aren’t within earshot? Where’s God in this game?

The violence aspect is weird-feeling as well, but I don’t feel I’ve played enough of the game to say a whole lot on it. Playing only a small subset of the overall single-player game makes it hard to tell if the game’s plot does a good job of justifying why this Tribulation Force should have soldiers on its side. The juxtaposition of worship leaders and trained soldiers feels weird and off, but that might just be a side effect of the game portraying an end-times fiction which I’ve always found to feel weird and off. Is this sort of “fight to defend the last remnant to keep the Truth alive” stuff just as present in the LB novels as it is in the game?

An article from USA Today sums up some of the controversy in Christian circles over Left Behind: Eternal Forces.

It’s hard to pick a quote when there’s so much verbal sniping going both ways, but my favorite has to be this one from The Tim LaHaye himself:

“These groups don’t attack other violent video games. Their real attack is on our theology,” says Tim LaHaye, co-author of the novels, who endorsed the game.

I think this is a case of him saying something true that implies something completely untrue. Give me a second and I’ll try to make that statement make sense.

Do these groups attack other violent video games? Well, let’s just assume that they don’t for now, although that’s probably not true of all the groups involved. Is their real attack on the Left Behind theology? Okay, sure. But does that mean that their real objection isn’t to the violence? Nay, says I. The issues of violence and theology aren’t independant here – the way that violence is used as part of gameplay is a theological message.

LeHaye has a good reason to try and deflect the notion that the objection to this game stems from the general issue of “Violent Video Games”. For some, it probably does, but the reason that Christian groups are placing this game higher on their moral agendas than, say, Dawn of War certainly isn’t because Left Behind is more violent. But the fact that this is an attack on theology certainly doesn’t mean that it can be brushed aside, thinking, “Oh, that’s one of those academic theological differences that Christians don’t agree on, anyway.”

The theological topic is incredibly relevant: when does our faith justify violence?

Don’t try and tell me that issue is purely academic in our world today. I’ll laugh.

Via GameSetWatch comes news of what looks to be a very balanced and informative book about – as the title says – What Every Parent Needs To Know About Video Games.

The book is published by a Christian publisher, and its website includes an except from the book. Judging by the glowing review from GameSetWatch and from the introduction, it looks like exactly the information I’ve wished I could hand to parents who don’t know what to do with these video game things their kids are spending so much time on.

The author brings to light both sides of the current video game law controversies without slighting either side. He describes his own passion for gaming with brief glimpses of the game worlds he visits regularly. In short, it looks like exactly the book I would have felt driven to write, had someone else not finally done a good job of it!

This will end up on my To Buy list; if it ends up in my hands, I’ll give a fuller review then.

GameSetWatch has an interview with Adventure International’s Scott Adams, who you may (if you’ve been around a while) remember as being the author of the first commercial text adventure, Adventureland.

Scott Adams’ current project is The Inheritance: SAGA Bible Adventure #1, a new title based on the Old Testament.

What can you tell me about your newest project, The Inheritance: SAGA Bible Adventure #1?

I have the prologue done and have not worked much on it in the last few years. Just in the last month have I picked it up again.

Not much more detail is known than that, as far as I know, but count me as intrigued.

Kotaku’s Brian Crecente has taken a brief hands-on look at the gameplay of Left Behind: Eternal Forces.

Stow the pitchforks, turns out all of that talk about Left Behind: Eternal Forces being a disguised hate-game is a bunch of crap. I just spent a few hours meeting with some of the Left Behind Games folks about their religion-themed real-time strategy title, and while it’s chockfull of subtle Christian messaging and even some overt proselytizing, it’s not at all about running around killing heathens and metrosexuals.

It looks like there are some interesting messages in the gameplay itself.  For the good guys, killing anyone (including the ‘enemy’) will actually cause spiritual harm to themselves, whereas converting enemy units will enhance your spirituality.  The spiritual harm done can be managed, so you can still use violence to stop the Antichrist’s minions, but it certainly isn’t the “kill the infidels!” message that some people had assumed.  There are some other interesting details worth checking out in the article.

Now I’m conflicted.  I still don’t like the overall theology of the Left Behind fiction, but the game sounds like it’ll be more interesting than I had expected.  An actual anti-violence message in an RTS?  Who do I have to shmooze to get a review copy so I can make up my mind whether to like this thing or not?

Kotaku, the game news blog of offensive colors (and often, language; don't say I didn't warn), points out news of what they refer to as "spyware" in Left Behind: Eternal Forces.

More after the break on why I think that's stretching the terminology a bit far.
The 'spyware' label actually is being shouted out by our good friends at Talk to Action, who I will not actually link to because they don't make sense. You can follow the link from the Kotaku piece if you really want to wade through their lengthy article.

Streaming ads in-game is a controversial new bandwagon in the game industry, although static in-game ads negotiated into specific titles have been around for over a decade at least. However, reporting the tracking of ad exposure and in-game player behaviour as spyware seems inconclusive. The first obvious question is whether any of the data being collected is tracked at an individual level, or whether it's simply stored as a pool of demographic and statistical data which can't be traced back to individuals.

But, even if the info is tracked to individual accounts, is tracking information about someone's in-game actions a privacy invasion? If you want to argue that, so be it, but then why hasn't anyone been up in arms against Valve? Or look at Battlefield 2, where stats are not only collected on how much time an individual spends playing different maps, when they've logged in, etc, but it even allows that information to be shown publically – talk about an invasion of privacy! Except, wait, most gamers saw that as a feature. Wait, isn't that sort of privacy invasion a major selling point for a next-gen console?

It's too bad that Talk to Action is so eager to put Left Behind in disrepute that they leap onto the most extreme conclusions they can reach. There are real questions here worth considering: should a Christian game incorporate advertising? What effect will that commercial message (or message promoting commercialism) have on the overall message of your game? Does that message contradict the message of the Christian Bible? (Many would argue it does.) It'd be nice for some real discussion to rise up above the noise.

No, this post's headline doesn't make sense. But neither does this article, and yet for some reason it's migrated from blog to more-notable-blog as though it's actually sane. I had seen the original post come up on GameSetWatch, who realized that perhaps this article is jumping to some wacky conclusions. But that was weeks ago, so I was pretty surprised to see it continue to pop up unexpectedly.

I'm not sure why so many people are jumping on this bandwagon of claiming that LB:EF sets up a "convert or die" scenario. As far as I know, the game does encourage you to convert other citizens, and you also fight back against the Evil One World Order government's army, which is actively hunting you down to kill you. So, okay, you kill "infidels" (a term I'm pretty sure the game itself doesn't use), but basically in self-defense.

And from what I've heard, the game punishes you for killing civilians, which is a far cry from the "you might as well kill 'em, they're going to hell anyway" mentality that Hutson's article describes. And for what it's worth, most RTS games I've played simply ignore civilian casualties, so one could easily argue that they're going against genre conventions and placing a greater value on human life than many other games do.

And honestly, I don't even know what to say about the effort Hutson makes to associate Rick Warren with this game. Frankly, who cares? I'm not a fan of megachurches, I read The Purpose-Driven Life and didn't see why it was worth the hype, but I don't see any reason to demonize Warren to the point that some hazy connection-by-degrees-of-association merits writing about.

Via Serious Games Source:

Catholic publisher Silver Burdett Ginn Religion and Third Day Games announced that the companies will hold national training sessions to introduce Catholic educators to the The Gospel Champions series of educational computer games that use action adventure gameplay to educate children by recreating the Gospel stories they hear in Mass.

Gospel Champions is a series of 3D action / adventure style games that, apparently, recreates popular Bible stories. I'm grabbing the demo as we speak, so maybe I'll give it a mini-review later on. I think it's an excellent concept that has the potential to give kids a deeper awareness of the context and the emotional impact these stories have, which is easily missed when reading a writing style that seems terse and undescriptive to the modern ear.

It seems the game is being promoted via training sessions because they've chosen a purchase-per-parish sales model, where a parish or Catholic school buys a license to distribute the game freely amongst kids who attend there. While it might seem like an unusual sales model from a mainstream perspective, this is roughly equivalent to the way that other non-digital curriculum materials for Christian children's ministries would be sold. I've also seen this same approach used by Kidzap, a Christian kids website / portal. However, Kidzap scales the price based on the size of your church; it looks like Gospel Champions is a flat rate.

(Kidzap is interesting in that they feature an emphasis on providing safe web-based games for kids to play, and frequently add new games. However, most of the games aren't specifically Christian in content or designed with an integral message in the gameplay itself, from what I saw demoed a couple years ago.)

Update: Well, I played the demo, and it looks like another in the long list of, "Great for really young kids, far too cheesy for anyone older than 8."  Highly colorful and cartoony, there are coins to collect for no particular reason and more jumping puzzles than contextual realism.  Side goals generally involve finding and collecting items for people and delivering them, which is at least good in that you're playing out charitable acts.  All in all, it felt like a slightly awkward 3D platformer with a child's version of a Bible story overlaid onto it.

As a learning tool for younger children in a Catholic environment, this is worth looking into.  For kids around 10 and up, they might still have fun playing the game, but I don't think this game has enough substance to deepen their understanding of the Biblical stories represented. 

Since it feels like this site hasn't dealt with a faith other than Christianity yet, I thought I'd link to an old post from Water Cooler Games on a group making Islam-themed games. The Islamgames site seems to have disappeared, and I didn't get to play the games, so I can't offer any new opinion on them other than to refer to Ian Bogost's take on things.

It's interesting that one commenter felt that the Islamic theme was superficially added after the game was made – it had no real relevance to the gameplay itself. It sounds similar to the phenomenon I've seen before in some Christian games.

(Big dump of personal opinion on how this comes about after the break.)

It's a phenomenon that I think I can relate to, in some degree, looking back on my upbringing as a Christian and my friends at the time. It's not uncommon for a young Christian kid to at some point feel convicted (or perhaps just pressured) to get rid of media such as music, books, movies, or games which are seen as a bad influence. I won't suggest that this is either good or bad, as it can go either way and it's pretty relative to one's personal situation.

So what do you do if you've listened to a certain style of music, or played a certain type of game, for months or years and really love it, but suddenly are trying to clean out bad influences? For many, the answer is to find an alternative which is stylistically similar but with a positive message. But if that alternative can't be found, the next step for those who are ambitious enough can be to create your own alternative. Unfortunately, what this often means is that the person trail-blazing new ground in Christian media isn't deeply interested in creating art for art's sake, or even for the sake of exploring how to express their beliefs and thoughts sincerely, but rather how to get a "safe" version of what they used to enjoy. The result of this is a carbon-copy of the original influence, but with only the superficial elements changed.

It's sort of the artistic equivalent of knowing that someone is being your friend only because they want you to "get saved". The result, even if they're a really nice person, is that you feel like a project. And Christian music and book stores have seen a lot of missionary "projects" pass through their doors.

This is why I often find myself battling cynicism when I look at the current state of Christian gaming. I know there are good people out there making these games, people who I view as brothers and sisters through a shared faith, and I want them to do well and continue creating and exploring new ground even if their methods aren't mine. But as a gamer, as a music lover, as a bookworm, I don't want to feel like a "project". Make something because you love making it, because you believe that it's something worth making even if it never leads to a single person converting to your belief. Make something because it's in you and you know that it's meant to come out. I know I've seen the results of this in the work of my favorite Christian musicians and writers, because it shows. I want that same creative integrity to show itself when I play a faith-based game.