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?

Associated Press’ ASAP has more coverage here on the upcoming Left Behind: Eternal Forces game. It discusses some apparent controversy on the game’s violence levels, which are interesting but not really my biggest concern. Sadly, they quote Jack Thompson about the issue, which has roughly the same effect on the debate as Godwin’s Law has on Usenet threads. So let’s just skip that part and continue near the end of the article.

However, enticing believers with movies, books or video games is only half the picture. Great sales or high numbers could mean people just like a good game.

“Whether it helps them actually live out their faith is a different question,” said Lynn Schofield Clark, an assistant research professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who wrote an upcoming book called “Religion, Media, and the Marketplace.”
…
Lyndon, the Left Behind Games CEO, said parents who have seen the game are thrilled. They say it will instill good Christian values in their children — and they’re especially excited about the “pray” button.

The “pray” button, part of the spiritual warfare aspect which I had been curious about earlier, is apparently used “to strengthen your troops in combat”. From the sounds of things, I guess this means I’ll be disappointed. It sounds roughly equivalent to the traditional CRPG “prayer of blessing” mechanic that’s been done in the past. Prayer becomes a generic bonus to skill rolls that gives you increased luck in doing whatever it is you happen to be doing, with no sign of actual communication and no chance that God might disapprove and withhold that +1 to attack.

Now, as much as I dislike the Rapture Wars theme, I’m not denying that prayer and combat come together in the Bible, or the stories where God would bless Israel’s forces to win. But nothing about the usual “blessing” mechanic captures, for me, the active role that God played in the Biblical stories. God didn’t just bless whatever David (and other notable O.T. warriors) felt like doing in battle – David waited until the Lord guided him, and David obeyed those plans even when they were counter-intuitive. (Who waits for a sound in the trees before charging into battle?) And in those times when Israel went to battle against God’s wishes, no amount of “Bless Troops” would help them.

This is still partial information, so who knows, maybe there’s more to it than it sounds. But I have my doubts that “pressing the ‘pray’ button makes young people feel closer to God,” as much as it could if it were given more meaning.

(via) Link

So lately I’ve been playing this game with a built-in theological simulation system. It’s a fantasy turn-based action-RPG, with the stereotypical fantasy polytheistic worldview. However, this game goes into a lot more depth than your average D&D-style, “my god is a miracle vending machine and I get 8 quarters to spend,” sort of game mechanic.

The game allows you to offer sacrifices to your deity on altars which appear at random throughout the game. Sacrifices of monster corpses are consumed by a burst of flame, granting luck, blessings, or sometimes even weapons of mythic quality! Be careful though, those altars are aligned as either lawful, neutral, or chaotic. If you sacrifice on an altar that doesn’t match your deity’s alignment, you’ll tick them off.

And that matters, because the game keeps track of your deity’s opinion of you. At any time in the game, you can choose to ‘pray’ as an action, and you’d better hope your deity is smiling down on you. If they like you, prayer can get you out of a tight spot by healing you or filling a starving stomach. If you’ve done something worthy of divine wrath, or if you’ve simply been harassing them too often with prayers, you’ll get ignored, or perhaps even punished with a ball and chain!

Those who have been sucked into its addicting (if frustrating) gameplay will already know that I’m referring to Nethack, a very old-school game that’s entirely text-based. (You can get graphical clients for it – I find that the standard Windows graphical client is pretty usable – but it’s still just mapping graphical tiles to what would otherwise be text characters.) The game implements everything you could imagine and then some – throwing random items as weapons, water traps that rust swords and armor, and nearly every fantasy monster you can think of. (Oh, and consider yourself warned – it’s maddeningly hard. Did I mention that you can’t load a previously-saved game when you die?)

So why haven’t newer RPGs implemented some sort of deity-simulator like this? There are some plausible reasons – keeping the game’s interface simple, or too much effort for a low-value feature. But it seems odd for there to never have been an exception to this.

I guess it’s arguable that games with a “good / evil” metric on your behaviour are related, but there’s something deeper than that going on in Nethack. Sure, evil behaviour (cannibalism, murder, etc) will tick off a good deity, so your behaviour factors in. But it’s not just a behaviour meter, since you can buy the gods’ favor with sacrifices. It also reflects some level of personality in this divine being – they don’t like getting hassled with repeated requests for help, and they aren’t above punishing you for it (even when you’re about to get mauled by beasties).

Perhaps more importantly to me, it differentiates prayer from the magic-like working of miracles that is prevalent in fantasy RPGs (both digital and otherwise). Most games just integrate priestly divine deeds into their magic system, and leave divine will out of the picture. Here we have prayer modelled as a request for action, not a cause of action. Naturally, this is a lot easier to do without harming gameplay when prayer is essentially just a last-ditch request for help, rather than a primary course of action. Imagine a World of Warcraft where every Priest character had to follow the morals of their assigned deity, or lose their ability to heal! I can see it now – Troll priests being forced by their minmaxing guild leaders to kill at least 200 fluffy bunnies before they get to join the MC raids.

Anyway, while none of this is reflecting a spiritual reality that I’d actually want to promote, it does present a good case study of how prayer can be integrated into gameplay. The question I’m left wondering, though, is where do you go from here when you want to represent a God who is far more loving, far more just, and far less predictable than the rowdy pantheon of Nethack?

p.s. For the curious programmer, here’s the sourcecode to the divine aspects of Nethack. (The entire game’s source is freely available.) Also, Dylan O’Donnell has spoilers over here, including a list of Nethack’s pantheon.