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."
Already been done.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Choose Your side!! Christian or Pagan, the Choice is Yours!!
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Both games and religion are make-believe, it only makes sense that they merge. Jesus with a BFG-900 taking on a 50M tall Ganesh with glowing laser-tusks could be fun.
Trolling is a art,
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.
:plx i need grp
:i wont tk guys rly
There is truth in humor.
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
I remember when i was in high school. Our church youth group went on a trip somewhere, and they brought a projector and an NES. They actually had these kind of games with them.
There was one I remember where you were Noah, you had to pick up animals and throw them in the ark, but none of us could figure out what the controls where to actually get them to stay in the ark.
Seriously... It was something right out of the Flanders' household...
-FL
One of the problems with doing games based on historical contexts is that, like it or not, events happened a certain way. No retrying until you win. Purists--and there are a lot of outspoken purists when it comes to religion--hate it when the apparent outcome of a historical event can be changed by human interaction.
However, I can see games being written that take religious values into account, and set the player's goals in line with those values. I'd probably even play a few.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Imagine a Scientology MMORPG..
:)
You'd start out with quite little, and have to work your way up through various 'levels', while either having to live in the game or by spending tons and tons of real life money just to get cool stuff in the game. You'd get addicted to the game, and they'd keep adding things to it to make sure you don't leave. The game would be set in a weird sci-fi world where things are totally ridiculous, but you don't realize so at the time.
Oh.. hang on, that describes, um, almost every MMORPG that's out now
...hate it when the apparent outcome of a historical event can be changed by human interaction.
You obviously missed out on FF7. No part of the outcome of that game could be altered by human interaction, and it was one of the bestselling games in the world at the time.
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."
Religion is a theme in NetHack. Haven't you ever #pray'ed to the RNG?
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
Yeah, I'd think the purists would be rather upset if you prevented Jesus's cruxifition or altered the timeline in which Jesus was never born.
You could however have fictional characters living in that time frame who interact with the main characters in cutscenes and then go off and do their own thing. Like Bob, who hears about Jesus and must make his way to Jeruselem and encouters mini-quests on the way.
However, I will always be highly suspect of any group that sells Religion for money wheather it be music, books, or video games. Most motivation tends to be with money rather than actual salvation.
If someone were to give these games away for free out of a labor of love then you have a bit more moral highground.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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"
A game where you hunt down all forms of religious zelots/fundamentalists, be they christian, muselum, etc... and pop a cap in their ass. You could hunt down the suicide bomber before he blows, or track down the nut before he starts killing at an abortion clinic.
Heck we could even have it Deathrace 2000 style where you just run down all religious types you see when you're driving, like those "two guys on mountain bikes" types... Bonus, if you get them both in one shot.
Wow... this could be a whole new game "GTA: Down Wit' Religion" (pun intended).</sarcasm>
Sigh...
So they enter the promised land, call upon the power of Yahweh to do miraculous stuff (Walls of Jericho, battle at AI where the sun & moon stand still), and take over the land. Traditional RTS elements using real geograhical locations and a Biblical back-story. Age of the Promised Land, anybody?
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
One based on Paradise Lost, by John Milton.
An all out war between heaven and hell, and the adventures of Satan to tempt humankind.
The main character is Satan, of course!
Religious!
"I'm here to preach and chew bubble gum, and I'm all out of gum..."
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
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.
Bart: Whaddya got?... "Billy Graham's Bible Blaster?"
Rod: Keep firing; convert the heathens!
Bart: Got him!
Rod: No, you just winged him and made him a Unitarian.
Todd: Look out, Bart! A gentle Baha'i!
Bart: All right! Full conversion! Thanks guys, this really cheered me up.
Video: Second Coming! Reload, reload!
http://www.snpp.com/episodes/BABF10
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
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.