Looking For God In Videogames

Thanks to MSNBC.com for their article discussing the use of religion in videogames, both overtly Christian titles and those just addressing the subject indirectly. As the article comments, "Before 'god mode' or 'god games' there were 'God games' -- low budget, PC floppy disks that married evangelical Christian thought and scripture with simple game play. The boundaries between the holy and the secular were simpler then... Today, the lines have grown fuzzier." The piece also points to religious overtones in MMORPGs: "In EverQuest, the massive online multiplayer game, new players are asked to pick from among the religions native to the land of Norrath. One of Norrath's deities, 'The Nameless' has triggered talk on discussion boards over whether 'Nameless' could be understood as the Jewish Yahweh. Some [Christian] evangelists have even used EverQuest to proselytize to fellow players."

Comments

Why the word"YAHWAH" is not what you mean

[Zachary Kessin]

Please don't use it, "G-d" is a perfectly good word. That is not a good translitteration of the four letter name of G-d into english. We don't know how it was pronouced as the name was only said once a year by the Kohen Gadol (High priest) on Yom Kipor in Temple days. It should also be pointed out that there is no "W" sound in hebrew, nor is there a "J".

Re:Why the word"YAHWAH" is not what you mean

[Henry V .009]

On that note, Jesus was almost certainly not pronounced as we do today, nor are any of the names from Biblical times. In fact, Jesus is derived from Joshua which shows they were pronouncing it wrong even in the first century.

Christian writers have a long tradition of using both Yahweh and Jehovah. Do not worry about it so much, but understand who it is that you are going to offend. To observant Jews (and others), seeing it in print or hearing it pronounced is offensive in the same way that a pornographic picture would be. The prohibition against taking God's name in vain is taken seriously. That should not be laughed off. Faith is a scarce enough commodity in public discourse these days that a little respect for it is not going to hurt anybody.

Re:Why the word"YAHWAH" is not what you mean

[Zachary Kessin]

I am an orthodox Jew, and it does make me twitch, but it could be worse, at least with this version i know that it is wrong. As for names from biblical times, it depends on the name and the langauge. I know lots of poeple with bibilical names who use the biblical (hebrew) spelling and pronouce it as such. Most of the guys I know named Joshua use Joshua not "Yehoshua" but my friend Jon is at least some of the time "Yonaton" or "Yonason". And I've know a few Shlomos (Solomon), Yaakovs (Isaac) as well as more than one Devorah and Rivka (Rebecca).

Ok I hang out with religous Jews.

Re:Why the word"YAHWAH" is not what you mean

[BTWR]

"Yo-hay-va-hay," roughly translating to "I am that I am."

I'm fluent in hebrew, and that's not even close to the translation of the hebrew sentence "I am that I am" (but that's still a nice theory)

My favorite theory I have heard (and the one i lean to) on YHVH's name is this. Take a look at these 3 hebrew words (and how to spell them in phonetic english)

HYH = Past
HVVH = Present
YHYH = Future

Therefore, YHVH, or G-d, is a combination of the 3... a code for "Past, Present and future." Those who have studied gods and mythology will understand that the G-d of the Bible is a "Gd of time" as opposed to Zeus, Ra, etc, who were "gods of nature," thus making the YHVH (G-d) name a good candidate for some sort of time-relevence.

Re:Why the word"YAHWAH" is not what you mean

[superyooser]

"G-d" is a perfectly good word. That is not a good translitteration of the four letter name of G-d into english

[Zachary, I'm talking mainly to my fellow Gentiles. I know you know all of this. I hope you're not too offended at all my uses of the Almighty's name. My only intention here is to promote interest in and knowledge of the Father among the goyim.]

The name of God, which is not the same thing as "God," appears in the original Scripture as the Hebrew letters: yud heh vav heh. These are all consonants, as the Hebrew alphabet does not have vowels. The vowels are implied. As Zachary alluded to, nobody remembers what the vowels are supposed to be.

Therefore, transliteration is really not the best way to derive a pronounceable word for God's name. If you insist, Yahveh, not Yahweh, would be the best guess. Word substitution has been much more popular throughout the ages. Christians use "the LORD," while Jews use Adonai ("to be" in Hebrew, I think) or HaShem ("the Name"). I'm surprised Zachary didn't suggest Adonai since it's used in both Jewish and Christian circles.

As I touched on before... The word "God" does not linguistically derive from YHVH (Yahweh/Jehovah/Lord/Adonai/HaShem), but from Elohim (pronounced Elo-HEEM). But yes, semantically, we can say that Yahweh = God, since Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai echad -- the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.

proselytize

[Andy Smith]

Some [Christian] evangelists have even used EverQuest to proselytize to fellow players.

Dictionary.com will be getting a load of hits around now...

Re:proselytize

[The Munger]

Don't be stupid. Everyone knows proselytize means To induce someone to join one's own political party or to espouse one's doctrine.

You're not meaning to say you had to go to a web site to look it up and copy the definition into a post you're making about someone joking about you needing to look it up are you?

Cool

[OneIsNotPrime]

I'm sure this thread will be full of mockery and scorn, but I definitely prefer this kind of thinking to throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

There's a clear trend of online communites, especially MMORPGs, beginning to mimick regular society more and more closely. I see missionary work in virtual communities as a natural progression of this.

OK, so I'm a mildly tolerant atheist...

[slaker]

OK, so I'm a mildly tolerant atheist (actually, I'm not. Tolerant, particularly, but we'll pretend), or maybe just not a christian, and hypothetically, I'm paying to be involved in an MMORPG.

Some jerk starts following me around blathering about his god and how I'm not going to his heaven and basically talking about his personal relationship with Jebus.

At what point do I have recourse in this? I'm going about my business, and PAYING to do so, and I don't want to hear it.

Can I complain to the operators of the service? Can I smite the moron for annoying me? Or is my only option to log off or leave because some dumbass is ruining my time online?

Re:OK, so I'm a mildly tolerant atheist...

[Henry V .009]

That sounds like about the least offensive behavior that I have ever heard of on a MMORPG.

I have noticed, however, that there are a lot of people in whom any mention of God or other religious topics leads to an instant feeling of revulsion. As a fellow atheist, I blame it on our hard-wiring. It is something that is terribly important to overcome. It is easy to lose out on a lot of life that way.

Re:OK, so I'm a mildly tolerant atheist...

[slaker]

I have other perfectly valid reasons to miss out on a lot of life. In fact, life is basically one long thing that I miss.

Seriously, though. How can this be tolerated behavior?

If someone walks up to me on a street that we each have an equal right to use, that's one thing. If I'm paying for the right to be there, doesn't that also (er, at least in the case of most reasonable services) give me some recourse when something as off-putting as THAT happens?

For readers who can't empathize, I guess a decent analogy, since a lot of /.-ers were at least raised xtian and are at least nominally heterosexual males, would be a situation where you were paying for an MMORPG and every time you got online some scary gay guy wouldn't give up hitting on you (yes, like the oldmanmurray article). That's what being an atheist around rabid xtians is like.

Re:OK, so I'm a mildly tolerant atheist...

[slaker]

I've been hit on by members of my own sex. I've been told I need to become a mormon, a pentecostal, a baptist, one of those watchtower-carrying bastards and a catholic.

In my experience, there's a similar level of distaste.

Actually, I take that back. The first time a guy tried to hit on me, I was kinda flattered, which is something I've yet to experience with those who feel compelled to give witness.

Re:OK, so I'm a mildly tolerant atheist...

[IIRCAFAIKIANAL]

Speaking as an athiest as well, when someone decides to proselytize to me I usually just do it back. It's really fun when you tell them that they are 99% of the way to being a total athiest, just like me, and they get all shocked. Then I tell them,

"When you understand why you deny the existance of all gods but the one you worship, then you will understand why I deny yours as well."

(Para-phrased quote by Stephen F. Roberts)

I try not to be smug when I say it... =]

Re:OK, so I'm a mildly tolerant atheist...

[PainKilleR-CE]

Christians have a world view that they (we) believe is real. The simple belief is that if you do not have a relationship with Jesus, then you will go to hell (a very un-fun place). By telling you about Jesus, they are actually trying to HELP you. For them to do otherwise would go against their world view.

I have a world view that people should leave me alone when I tell them I'm not interested in listening to them. For all the random people that walk up to me when I'm waiting in line to see a movie or knock on my friggin door on a weekend morning to assume they know anything about me based on the simple answer that I'm not interested in listening to them is offensive. For all they know, I could be a Biblical scholar with no interest in discussing the matter at the moment, or a firm belief that people should study the Bible on their own and not allow themselves to bend to my beliefs just because I may have studied more thoroughly than they have (not that this is necessarily true).

But I do freely admit that a lot of people go about it in completely the wrong way.

And bugging me about Christianity while I'm playing Everquest, an RPG based in a world in which Christ certainly did not exist, is at least as annoying as people running around going 'D00dz, did j00 c the Simpsonz last nite?'. Never mind that I have to pay to play the game.

Also, keep in mind that religion is all about the truth. You believe that there is no God. That is your choice. I believe that Jesus is part of the trinity. That is my choice. BUT we both cannot be right at the same time. Either there is a God or there isn't. It can't be both ways.

That's the difference between you and me. I see religion as a system of beliefs, each person holding to a different system (this being true even if all of those people attended the same church through the same time period at the same age and devoted the same amount of time to studying their religion). It can be both ways, or it can be neither way.

So, the essence of religion is the search for truth, not personal preference. I can have a belief that watching TV and eating potato chips and ice cream is the best way to stay healthy, but reality doesn't really care what I think no matter how much I believe it (if you don't believe me, I can e-mail you a picture of myself). God is the same way -- he either exists or does not exist no matter what you believe.

The last sentence is certainly true, but your analogy is not the best. With most religions, you're dealing with things that are at best hard to prove, and therefore it is not so much the search for truth that is important in religions, but faith and belief, and the search for meaning. People want to know why they are here and what happens when they die, this is the primary focus of religion. The secondary (and what I believe is more important, even though it seems overlooked by some) focus of religion is morality. No one can easily prove that morality is truth, nor what happens when we die, because in the case of morality it is subject to what is taught and in the case of when we die all of the observable functions tend to cease, what we can prove to be life is gone, and no one comes back to let us know.

Before you entirely dismiss Christianity, you should read the book "The Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel (available here [amazon.com] -- The author is a former newspaper reporter, and is the one who exposed the whole "exploding Ford Pinto" story). Since religion IS the search for truth, you should at least know about the evidence in favor of Jesus being God before dismissing it.

Personally, I'd rather read the actual texts (or as close to them as we can get given age and language barriers) instead of someone's interviews with Christians and interpretations of what those people have said. Most of the Christians I've run into (doing their little conversion game) have too little understanding of the Bible itself, and instead rely heavily on what they are told by the church. It could be said (and the case could be made) that this in itself goes against the teachings of Christ.

stories

[Anonymous Coward]

I think God in video games is a completly ignored subject. There is so much subject matter that could be used for material. It's amazing in these days where most people complain about storylines in games that they don't just use stories from the Bible? After all there is a lot of stories in there that many people don't read. Such as the political actions of the kings of Israel and Judah are complex. And what about the prophesies and visions that are in the Bible. And talk about complex characters, WOW. I really think that if most people get past there own bias and unfortunatly sometimes hate they would really like the Bible even if they don't chose to beleive it and I think they would really be impressed by any game that you could make from the history in it. History based or fictional.

-Emperor Alikar who for some reason can't rember his password... *sigh*

Um...

[Anonymous Coward]

...no offense to Mr. Loftus' article, but it is practically IMPOSSIBLE to mention religion and gaming without bringing up Xenogears (as well as Xenosaga), as well as a couple other notables. I understand that it wasn't exactly the point of the article, but he could've easily included religious (not necessarily Christian) influences on gaming (perhaps in part 2?).

http://www.toastyfrog.com/features/features/reli gi on_01.shtml

So-called "Christian games", bad journalism

[jensend]

Most games which are supposed to provide Christian entertainment are neither equipped with a meaningful Christian message nor entertaining. (See my comment in a previous discussion.)

The last part seems like another instance of somebody finding an arcane way to state the obvious and meaningless, prepending the phrase "existential analysis" in front of their banter, and pretending that they have therefore stated something profound and rich with meaning. Kierkegaard et al must have turned in their graves at that. Overall, the writing of the article positively reeks of "I'm on deadline for my column and thus just spouting out the following crap; I hope it gets by our editor and that our readers find it either funny or profound." I mean, is "Will firing up the game console ever be considered a sacred act?" supposed to be funny? It's positively moronic.

Re:it's too bad about the obnoxious minority...

[Dave114]

Authors like CS. Lewis express it best when he says through his writing you don't have to even believe in the same God to go to heaven.

I've read a fair bit of C.S. Lewis, but I've yet to come across something along those lines in there. What (book, chapter, page?) specifically are you drawing this conclusion from?

Buddhist concepts

[The Munger]

There's a discussion going on flipCode about Buddhist Concepts in games.

The devil

[stardeep]

"There have been too many games," said Bagley, "Where the devil always wins or is one of the strongest characters."

But surely if this guy is a Christian, he will have to admit that according to his religion, the devil is one of the strongest "characters"? I mean, he's possibly the second-strongest being in the universe, second only to the Big Guy in the Sky.

I have nothing but contempt for these pick-and-mix religious types.

(Although the thought of fighting for the soul of a "troubled teenager" kinda turns me on...)

Re:The devil

[tiled_rainbows]

Although the thought of fighting for the soul of a "troubled teenager" kinda turns me on...

Tried that, been there. She dumped me.