Slashdot Mirror
How Games And Religion Could Mix
An anonymous reader writes "The Passion of the Christ brought in $370 million at the box office. The Left Behind book series have sold over 63 million copies. And Christian Rock is growing more and more popular. But the video game industry has so far ignored the topic of religion. CNN/Money's Game Over column talked with game developers (including id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead and Diablo co-creator Bill Roper) about the reasons behind this - and asked them what sort of game they would make if they were creating one with a religious theme. The answers ranged from a Moses RPG to a faith-based MMO."
Nobody wants to play a religous game, just like nobody wants to listen to religous music.
Here's an example. And another.
The thing with religion in the US is, people will attend services but are embarassed to say so.
By "but the video game industry has so far ignored the topic of religion," the submitter obviously meant "but the video game industry has so far ignored the topic of serious Christianity (as opposed to the silliness found in Xenogears et al.)." And of course that's incorrect too, if you consider such examples as Wisdom Tree (which was actually mentioned in the article).
Rob
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
Mod parent up! The original poster obviously looked in the store, saw no games dealing explicity with Christianity, and said that there wasn't any. This is a sweeping generalization. Many games have religion in them, even if it's not necessarily retelling a religious story. Xenosaga is one (bad game, but that's beside the point), and I'm positive there's others. Just because they don't deal with the poster's religion doesn't make them non-religious games.
Even GTA has religion. The mission for Jizzy the Pimp that has you trying to save Jizzy's ho from a priest in a limo... well... a priest is religious, right?
-Dizzle
"I most likely AM so interested in myself."
The religion gets stripped out, but if you look at the Homeworld RTS games, they're pulling pretty strongly from middle-eastern religious themes (and music) -- the jewish diaspora, the hebrew/arab relationship, the trinity (christianity thrown in?), the struggle to find a home ... but it's not really approached from a religious perspective. It's much more "the story of the jews, but without god, and in space".
... there's just nothing left. Random background noise, probability-wise? You can't "play" that -- there's no technique, no challenge. If anything, the game would teach you that you can do just fine without religion helping you. Oops.
... which really isn't about religion, it's more like slapping a theme pack on top of a game like Tetris -- the artwork can be religious, but the game isn't.
Besides -- you don't 'game' religion. Nothing about religion is predictable from a scientific point of view. If it were, people would be using prayer tactically to their advantage. Coding a game in which no results are ever guaranteed, nor even terribly predictable (don't even want to introduce the concept of probability that your prayer will be answered vs. the cost of praying)
So it winds up always being story-oriented. And you're not very free to change the story. So you wind up with games like "go find the animals for Noah's ark"
For a Christian game to be successful, the first two thing it should NOT do is preach. The second thing it shouldn't do is educate. Kids will sense both of these coming a mile away and run in the opposite direction.
And that's the biggest problem with most Christian entertainment, a total lack of subtlety. It doesn't have to be about hitting you over the head with the message. IMHO the best Christians live by setting an example, not by brow-beating you into submission.
Take Peanuts by Charles M Schulz and BC, for example. Both artists are/were extremely devout Christians. In the former comic, Schulz focused on making the comic funny first, and he uses his beliefs as a springboard towards a joke or a humorous situation, such as one comic where Charlie Brown's baseball teammates are babbling theology while Charlie Brown himself is standing on the mound, physically above them all, mentally below them, and with a "good grief" expression more accurately saying, "Uhm... can we get back to baseball?"
In the latter case, you see the comic used as a podium for lectures, for example a recent comic where Wiley's writing under his tree and writes how Darwin "made monkeys out of you and me."
Now in games, I think we've already seen religion done right: Ultima IV. Being "moral" within the game is not just context, but the end of the game itself, and in that case, it made for a better, more interesting and (most vitally) more fun game than its hack-n-slash predecessors in which the goal was to defeat the murderous villain by being more murderous than him/her. Its religion is not specifically Christian, but the Ultima series shows the general principle that you can make a fun game based on religion. Making a game fun for a different set of beliefs is just applying the Ultima IV-VI design principles to different specific dogmas.
Of course, it's all easier said than done, but that's why good designers make the big bucks.
What? Oh, my mistake. You're not talking about games with religion. You're talking about games that evangelize American Protestant Christianity. Well, no, I don't want to play a game that is trying to convert me or get me "fired up for Christ!" or any of that. It's nothing to do with the fact that it's religious. PETA likes to produce "activities" that evangelize their viewpoint, and I don't want that junk either.
I will go out on a limb and suggest that the only people who want a game that promotes a moral viewpoint are the ones who are already zealots.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Yeah, there have been religious video games since the 8 bit days. And they pretty much all suck. Oftentimes technically, but they're usually just really, really, really lame.
... ... evil?"
... "but Todd, Green Day blows, why would I want to listen to a bad Green Day clone with lame, non-subtle jesus-is-lord lyrics?"
Imagine my shock as a bright eyed and bushy tailed 8 year old:
friend: "Hey Aaron! You coming over and play Nintendo after school?"
me: "Yup, my mom said I could. Let's play!"
friend: "Check out this game! It's called Moses and the Trees of God and it's just like Super Mario Brothers, but it's not evil!"
me: "Mario Brothers is
friend: "Yeah! Nintendo is a tool of Satan, you know, there are angels of God and demons constantly fighting over your soul... AS WE SPEAK! So, every time we choose something godly, we are fighting Satan! Cool, huh?"
** 4 minutes into playing, the game freezes **
me: "hmm... that's no fun!"
friend: "Yeah, but it's christian! SO it's better than Mario!"
I knew that crazy mofo for a longtime after that, and had the same discussion for so many things- "Hey! This sounds just like Green Day... but it's CHRISTIAN!"
No answer for that.
Man, that kind of childhood whacks a person out. I'll never forget the look on his face as the automatic garage door closed, his 12 year old face staring out as he started taking his clothes off. Standing on the concrete floor at the inside door to the house, his parents surrounding him, looking stern. They caught us listening to another friends copy of some Adam Sandler CD. "Todd! You will strip down into your underwear, and you are going to get a spanking for your sin." I found out at school the next day that the parents made him burn the CD, wanting to rid the world of such vile and evil filth, with no regard to the fact that the CD was owned by some other kid...
OK, sorry about the flashback! The moral? Just say no to poorly done, lame christian video games. Which is to say, there exists some decent so-called christian music, but mostly because it's music made with "christian values" in mind, rather than singing about naught but jesus and god, in the most annoying fashion possible.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
I'm assuming, as most of us seem to be (and as the interviewees do), that what they're really talking about is not a religious game, but a Christian game.
On the one hand, it is indeed easy: because so much of the Bible is inherently story-based, it's quite easy to come up with ideas for games. Noah alone provides a lot of gaming fodder, from a "Concentration"-type game where you pair up animals for saving on the Ark all the way to an Ark simulator where you have to lay out the pens for the animals and keep them fed, sort of like "Zoo Tycoon" in a very small space.
On the other hand, it is not at all easy. Designing a game that will appeal to Catholics and Protestants alike would have to be tricky. Also, and this is something that they touch on in TFA, you have the problem that evangelicals will condemn you to hell because a game by its nature will either glorify the individual over God, or will be outright blasphemy by making you play AS God. It's the same problem some Christians have with Christian rock: giving glory to the performer, rather than to God. Books and movies are okay for them because books and movies can directly praise God without too much emphasis on the writers and performers.
Then there's the whole issue of "thought equals deed" that a lot of fundamentalists and evangelicals espouse--the same idea that they use to condemn D&D and other paper-and-pen RPGs, the idea that if you conceive of it, you are just as morally responsible as if you have actually done it. It's philosophically bankrupt, and totally destroys any notion of free will, but there you have it.
I think that ultimately, the reason that there aren't a lot of Christian video games is that there's no need. The target audience doesn't buy video games, and non-evangelicals who do buy video games would buy mainstream games that don't actually suck.
The problem with a Christian video game is that all the parts of the Bible that would make a good video game are the parts that Christians like to ignore.
They pick and choose passages of Jesus going around being a hippy, feel-gooder and ignore the incest, barbarism, anti-semiticism (in the New Testament), brutal phrophecy (unless they're holed in in a compound in Waco), etc. And that is the stuff that might actually make a good video game.
You could actually make a pretty good game called "Conquest of Judea" where you start out with as the Hebrew tribe and must conquer the Caananites, Phillistines, and other tribes to ascend to power in Judea. The battle scenes could be absolutely brutal.
The game could even start out with one of the most disturbing cutscenes in video game history--The God of Israel's angel of death slaughtering every first-born of Egypt (how many times do you see kids and babies slaughtered in a video game?).
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.