Game with God

Andrew writes "GamerDad has an article up about how religion is handled in computer gaming, titled 'Game With God'. The article features quotes from Sid Meier, Jane Jensen, Will Wright, Peter Molyneaux, Phil Steinmeyer, and Richard Garriott. Here's a snippet: 'While religion and spirituality add a lot to a game world, they often aren't used effectively. 'I don't think there are any games that treat religion at anything more than a superficial level,'; says Firaxis founder and Civilization creator Sid Meier. PopTop Software's Phil Steinmeyer agrees, noting that 'Religion is ignored in gaming, or if it is portrayed, it's wildly caricatured.'"

Comments

uh,, Black and White anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

"don't think there are any games that treat religion at anything more than a superficial level,"

In Black and White you ARE god.
The game covers everything from how many ppl warship you to weather they build you a temple...

Plus being god, you get toset the rule or "morals" of your ppl.

Re:uh,, Black and White anyone?

[KDR_11k]

That's what the press releases said. In reality your influence on people is limited to issuing commands (chop tree, worship, build house, ...), making them love or hate your titan and blasting them with diverse spells. No such thing as defining morals. The temple is built in the beginning (doesn't require any moral fiddling, you just get there, pluck some trees and drop a few workers at it, finished) and any building is ordered by you as well. People can love or hate you, but that just determines the look of the temple, they never ran in fear or something even though I used christian conversion methods (believe or die!).

Re:uh,, Black and White anyone?

[It'sYerMam]

"Believe or Die?"

Jokes aside, when have you heard any non-fanatic religious person say "believe or die," or something to that effect? Perhaps it is the superficiality of religion in games and popular culture that gives people misconceptions such as these.
Unless of course you're referring to the "true life" offered by Christians, but I think that's supposed to be an offering rather than a threat.

In my experience, most people's opinions of religion are invalid - based on inaccurate/biased sources. Although I'm not religious as most people would understand it (it's complicated) a lot of my Christian experience has been interesting and worthwhile - not boring, irrelevant and "burn the heretics/witches/computers."
Basically, I'd like to say "Don't insult religion until you have hard evidence that that insult is valid." Otherwise you'll unnecessarily piss off a lot of people.

It exists for shock value.

[Lethyos]

Using (or abusing) religion in certain ways manner way adds significant shock value to entertainment. People (in the US at least) are generally taken back by what they perceive as evil religious symbols or inverted ones from the mainstream. A prime example of this is Doom. I think most people feel more freaked out when they walk down a hallway and see certain symbols on the walls. Anime does this a lot too. Evangelion, for example, draws from mythology that is very recognizable to most Christians and it can be very disturbing for some.

Whether any of this is good or bad is not my concern, but I will say that it is getting very annoying. Religious nerves have been plucked far too much by a lot of entertainment and usually it's use just signals a great lack of creativity. If you really want to unsettle or disturb your playing or viewing audience, try to come up with something new.

Superficiality

[Ra5pu7in]

Why is it any surprise that games only portray religion on a superficial level? The vast majority of people I know are only superficially religious. Christians may say they are such, but they don't live every day as if they were following the path Christ laid out for them. Rather, they attend church once in a while - usually on major holidays - and wear crosses. At most, they slap a bumpersticker on their car or a sign in their window proclaiming their faith.

Many games include an aspect of religion or spirituality - though it is seldom Christian. An underlying theme of good vs. evil is spiritual in nature. Most RPGs have the idea of heroes guided by destiny often based on a prophecy. Many adventure games like Tomb Raider delve into the spiritual beliefs of ancient cultures.

Actually, as I read that article I realized that the author is more interested in seeing games that make Christianity the emphasis. That might appeal to some people, but there would be a fairly good-sized market it would turn away UNLESS the gameplay and story were otherwise engaging. Most people don't listen to Christian music for the lyrics if the music and singing are poor. Likewise, few would play a game just because it involve Christian beliefs and activities if the gameplay and story were so-so.

Re:Games?

[abb3w]

Ever notice that bishops and knights don't move straight, and well the king and queen can swing both ways.

I recall once seeing the moves expressed in terms of the powers of state (row/column moves) and church (diagonals).

• Foot soldiers/Pawns make progress through the authority of the state, but may only prevail in battle by the grace of God.
• 
  
  Rooks/Castles, as the embodiment of worldly authority, are immensely powerful in matters temporal, but impotent in matters spiritual. Bishops, as the representatives of the Church, are the other way around.
  
  The King and Queen are, British style, empowered with the authority of both church and state, and may elect to act with either as they choose. If you wonder why the queen seems more powerful, look to Elizabeth and Victoria. =)
  
  And Knights, due to their holy vows to defend the right, must always act simultaneously under mandate of both church and state, thereby transcending any obstacles in their path.

Any resemblance this has to why the rules are the way they are is, no doubt, purely coincidental-- but it's a servicable means to explain the moves to new players.

Re:Yeah, I found that particularly cool

[Lynxara]

What FFT did is actually a bit of a "stock plot" in regards to Japanese video game & anime stories that include a conspicuously Christian-modeled religion. Usually the political organization itself is criticized or portrayed as corrupt while the faith of the most devout worshippers is praised as being good. This is pretty consistent with the Japanese historical experience with Christianity and has a lot of precedent in Japanese literature from the early 20th century.

Religion is suppresed because writers are ignorant

[Znord]

There's been a big vacuum in the world of sci-fi / fantasy with religious overtones ever since the modern age of thought began back in the 1920s with Freud and the concept of "wishes" as a basis for fiction and dreams.

C.S. Lewis and (to a point) Tolkien did much to show that religious themes can easily coexist with fiction. The endless "let's try it from scratch" 60s put a bit of a kabosh on that... experimenting in ideas of myth-religion without knowing how much they repeated in old fiction.

Frankly, I see "religion" is actually present in many many spheres... but a new establishment has arrived. It's just the pop-psyche (i.e. Oprah) plus bits-of-new-age psuedoscience that we've had tons of in the 20th century. (practice X does Y for your spiritual Z condition, take two and call me in the morning).

Religion in Babylon 5, for example, was one of the first beginnings of a good treatment in mass media... because believers at least showed some positive though vague devotion as part of a plot (monks at one point, and the Minbari otherwise).

Most scifi religion is incredibly shallow and made for outsiders, with the constant drum of "Hey man, don't get all religious about stuff cuz it all looks the same to us." moral-of-the-story.

Even that only started from the 50s and earlier when tons of minor religious divisions mirrored ethnic/cultural ones (i.e. blacks, whites, immigrants etc..). I knew one old lady who declared the One thing she knew about her Presbyterian church was that she wasn't Baptist. Yikes. That has always scared authors.

Anyway the writing can only occur when religion is handled in a fashion that doesn't get everyone spooked about the loudest minorities involved. Someone's got to stop caring about Pat Robertson and yet still know who Jesus (or Bhudda) was without a minor "survey of religions" class.

Besides, atheism/materialism keeps framing the discussion (e.g. Babylon 5 came down to assuming all "gods" were advanced races) and that forms a rift on how much you're even allowed to describe beliefs. It's tough to write plot about followers of God X or Y when the author makes clear that they're idiots doing something for no purpose or reason except the cuteness of "blind" idealism.

What's gotta happen is that some story writer somewhere has to first avoid the swashbuckling loot-and-horde-and-kill plot. Secondly they need to leave mystery about something Bigger having a role in the story instead of mere science-and-discovery explaining it all by the last 5 minutes.

If it's "universal harmony" that someone deals with (i.e. Ultima V) so be it, but if its God in any fashion it makes the plot and reality of behavior much richer. Yes it makes NPCs *much* more complex... and a score isn't just "gold" or "life" anymore. Deal! I want to see that happen.

We're at the effective top for polygon counts anyway. Someone has to *THINK* that fiction matters someday in a game.

Re:Yeah, I found that particularly cool

[Lynxara]

While many Japanese games and animes often have some Christian symbolic elements and the like, outside of Evangelion I can't think of any such case that has as strong of Christian elements, and none have as close of a parallel to real Christianity and its history as Tactics.

Presuming you're allowing both anime and games, this is just off the top of my head:

• Both of the classic SNES Shin Megami Tensei games, but especially Shin Megami Tensei 2. I strongly suspect somebody on the Evangelion team played SMT 2, a lot of the material is remarkably similar.
• Fullmetal Alchemist
• Xenogears (although XG is a pretty straightforward Evangelion clone, I will admit)
• Rurouni Kenshin (and, to be honest, a lot of anime & manga with a "feudal" setting will end up doing stuff with the arrival of Portuguese reformers and the subsequent political and cultural upheavals the introduction of Christianity to Japan caused)
• The various anime adaptations of Bible stories. (there's also a lot of anime adaptations of Buddhist fables, too!)
• Tetsuwan Atom. No, I'm serious; the material concerning this had to be censored out of Astro Boy.
• A fair portion of Matsumoto's Captain Harlock stuff brought in Christian themes very tastefully, but subtly. It was usually done so in pure allegory, but hey, that's what Tactics did, too. Tactics just made itself very obvious.
• Final Fantasy X. Though, really, a lot of the modern FFs seem to draw on it to more or less of a degree... it's not always very important to the storyline, though in FFX it pretty much was the storyline.

Pretty much all anime/game/pop-culture works I've seen that deal with Christian themes have struck me as heavily derivative of the works of Japanese novelist Endo Shuusaku, who wrote very concretely about the Catholic Church's operations in Japanese history and Jesus himself. Some of his works are available in translation and I would suggest checking them out. A lot of other of his literary contemporaries also dwelled on Christian themes at great length, and the effects that the appearance of Christianity had on Japanese thought. Games like Tactics draw very heavily on this literary tradition... so I tend to think of them as using stock plot. Not necessarily a bad plot, but nothing I (or the intended audience) wouldn't expect.