Religion in Video Games

The Opposable Thumbs blog recently took a look at how religious themes are handled in video games. Most makers of mainstream games are hesitant, given the strong feelings of most consumers on the subject, but other companies are trying desperately to bring religion into the spotlight. Quoting: "Part of the problem is that the game industry is often touted as being a corrupting influence for the youth of the world. Criticism against the game industry has come from leaders as high up as the current Pope, and many of us who have been exposed to sermons bemoaning the influence that games and movies have on kids. Even when groups like the Christian Game Developers Foundation put out a video encouraging developers to create wholesome titles for kids, the attitude conveyed towards current members of the industry was contemptuous at best. Needless to say, games with heavy religious content are usually fringe projects, independently created and oftentimes sporting dodgy production values, because publishers wisely don't want to risk boycotts from legions of the faithful."

Comments

First, make a good video game

[Hawthorne01]

Then worry about the religious content. If it's not a good game (or movie, or song, or book) you can stuff it to the gills with religious messages, and no one outside of your particular religious community will ever buy it. Build a better game (or movie, or song, or book) and the world will come to you. (See: Sufjan Stevens, C.S. Lewis, VeggieTales, etc.).

Re:First, make a good video game

[MightyMartian]

But the whole point of these Christian "developers", like Christian "rock/pop musicians" is not to put out a quality product, it's to get the faithful to fork over money. Obviously these kinds of products are not going to be marketed at the mainstream, because the mainstream could give a shit about a bunch of whacked-out Evangelicals and snake-oil dealers.

Re:First, make a good video game

[Monsuco]

But the whole point of these Christian "developers", like Christian "rock/pop musicians" is not to put out a quality product, it's to get the faithful to fork over money.

In other words, rather then being the "snake oil" dealers you claim they are, they are just simply like every single business on the planet. They identify a market, then they look for a way to make money serving that market. There is clear demand for Christian Rock, and the customers obviously buy the music because they enjoy its message, just as one might buy a regular album (or especially a concept album) because one enjoys its message.

The only problem with video games is they are expensive to produce and to buy. A series of Christian games might work, but it is a gamble. Books and songs require relatively less staff than a video game. Of course, a game with an underlying religious message could very much stand a chance at success, but an expressly "Christian Game" might not.

Re:First, make a good video game

[timmarhy]

the only thing that you got right is that religion is a business like any other.

Re:First, make a good video game

[bertoelcon]

Like Dante's Inferno? Even though it isn't "canon" it would be good bits of Christian mythology. God of War has bases in Greek mythology. Stuff like that is probably as close as many companies would dare to get today to real world religions.

Re:First, make a good video game

[paiute]

A video game based on the Bible would be more violent than GTA and have to be rated M++ for all the sex.

Re:First, make a good video game

[Anonymous Coward]

Coming soon: Grand Lot's Daughters! Live in the Biblical town of Sodom! Get offered by your father to be raped by gangs of men! And have them turn you down!! After which you flee and get your father drunk and rape him!!! Preorder today from your nearest Christian Gamer store.

Re:First, make a good video game

[Sycraft-fu]

The rating you are looking for is AO, adults only. It's a real ESRB rating. It is more or less the "anything goes" rating. The reason you don't see much of it is because most retailers refuse to carry games with that rating. It's a real rating though and there have been a few games with it (Sim's Singles being one of them). An accurate depiction of the Old Testament would most certainly qualify for that rating.

Of course that's not what the fundie Christian types want. They are rather... selective in their knowledge of the bible. There are parts of the OT and NT they like and would want in a game, there are other parts they like to forget about.

Re:First, make a good video game

[darthdavid]

Man I fucking hate that phrase. There are plenty of nonreligious people in the military and plenty of people who don't turn to god just because they're in a life threatening situation. I know you were making a joke but every time that old chestnut gets dragged out it makes a mockery of those who are willing to put their life on the line for country and kin knowing that if they're right in their beliefs then death is nonexistence and if they're wrong then it's probably some sort of hell (most religions take a rather dim view of non-believers...). Seems a hell of a lot braver than someone who goes into combat expecting to go to heaven if they buy the farm...

Re:First, make a good video game

[mmarlett]

Actually, my grandpa was at the real Normandy -- on Omaha Beach and through the front lines of the European invasion. You should see his reaction to my brother playing Medal of Honor. He just shakes his 90-year-old head and walks away.

Re:First, make a good video game

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Wait a second. Christian rock is bad because it doesn't have the macarena ?

Check again ... bad ?

Boy, I'd heard tastes differ, but I had no idea.

Given that as little as a century ago a (very) large majority of music was purely religious, I'd take that "tools the 'other side' has used for centuries with a hefty helping of salt).

Most of those "brilliant" themes you refer to being used in songs, imho, sound suspiciously familiar to someone with a decent knowledge of, heh, 16th century music. Very familiar indeed. One regularly recognizes long parts of those symphonies. Using strategic silences for suspense and dramatic effect has been done in operas since before the first letter was written in the bible.

The fact that those themes are repeated is logical in a way, since that old music is still how music is taught even today. Which, honestly, is a good thing. You can't teach someone more than 2 notes or patterns longer than 5 seconds with any recent song.

The "successful music" you refer to is merely the "big mac" version of last centuries' game feast. Yes they take very little time and effort to "enjoy to the fullest" (most take me less than a second to do that), but they're lacking in every single department. They're not satisfying, you cannot listen to them for even the paltry 2 minutes they last, most are rightfully identified as "noise", they're bad for the ear (and for the stomach if played at the "advised" volume), they lack depth, it is a rarity to have any kind of message in there, and ... They're "big macs". There's loads of music out there that you can listen to for 2 days continuously and still not be revolted by.

Re:First, make a good video game

[c_forq]

I think you are missing the point of the phrase. At my place of work we recently had an employee collapse and be rushed to the hospital, after returning he stated "man, it is amazing how religious you can become when you have no control over your fate". He was not religious, but found himself praying almost constantly while he was in the hospital. The no atheist in the foxhole refers not to bravery or willingness to fight for something you believe it, but rather the reaction people have when their fate is taken out of their own hands in awful, grim situations. It's not about wanting heaven, it's about hoping to live.

a game that tells the truth about religion

[Anonymous Coward]

How about someone create a game that occurs during the inquisition when the ignorant Christians killed thousands of people who wouldn't convert to their religion?

Re:a game that tells the truth about religion

[Artifakt]

The Crusades resulted in the deaths of roughly ninety to one-hundred-eighty thousand non-combatants (nominal civilians, over a multi-century period. This was the 28th most severe invasion of the fertile crescent after all, falling behind only such other invasions as the Califate, The Hittite expansion, Assyria, Alexander the great, and 24 other wars with higher death tolls.
If you include crusades not directed at the holy land, such as the Fourth Crusade versus Constantinople, the Albigensian Crusade versus the Cathars and the Northern Crusades, a Million is not an unreasonable death toll. That's both ways of course, not just the 'Christian side' body-counts, and includes wars where both sides claimed to be Christian.

The witch burnings were really post middle ages (about 1480 to 1700) spanning the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, resulting in a problem of figuring out which executions were witch related and which were of Cathars, political and nationalist based population obliterations and so on. Best estimates for a death toll definitely cross the line into the 100,000-110,000 range. but still taking over 200 years total to do so, and falling behind not just the rest of the thirty years war, but the hundred years war, maybe the English civil war, the Armenian atrocities, and a couple of mid 20th century events I won't bother to mention in the same areas. It's even possible that what Vlad personally did to combat the Muslim invaders of Transylvania resulted in more civilian deaths than the witch trials.

The best estimates for the Spanish Inquisition come from the church's own records, and thousands of people who wouldn't convert is quite accurate, in fact the best guess is around 32,000. I wouldn't mind seeing a game in this setting, but if it's a typical first person shooter, The Player will probably have to gibe that many personally to get a high score.

Re:a game that tells the truth about religion

[Anonymous Coward]

But I'm sure it makes you feel better that atheists did it because they didn't want to "spread their religion". Even though I'm rather quite sure the USSR persecuted Christians in order to, you know, spread atheism.

"Spread atheism," my ass. They encouraged fucking pilgrimages to observe the corpsicle of Lenin! Know what they didn't encourage? Skepticism, rationality, or reason! The three cornerstones of atheism.

  They created a goddamn religion around themselves and the state, complete with holy relics and faith-based "science." That's not atheism, so stop repeating that drivel. I'm guessing you're American, since American schools are so damn terrified to teach anything related to politics, that it churns out countless poor saps who don't understand that the label a politician slaps on himself usually has nothing to do with what he is.

For example: The "Union" of "Soviet" "Socialist" "Republics" was actually an Empire(1) of Anti-soviet(2) State-capitalist(3) Dictatorships.(4)

(1) - The satellite countries were generally added by military conquest, not some polite handshake, so it was Empire, not Union.
(2) - The Bolsheviks first borrowed the anti-Bolshevik slogan "All power to the soviets!" for themselves to confuse people like you, then when they had seized power, they disbanded the soviets (which were independent democratically run worker's councils) and told everyone that they were no longer a necessary component for the workers to control the means of production, because the will of the workers was now somehow metaphysically embodied in the premier. (Another religious theme!)
(3) - A socialist economy, where the workers actually controlled the means of production, was never anything more than a vague promise to be fulfilled, maybe, someday in the USSR. A rationed "command economy" was put in place as a "temporary" measure only for wartime. It never ended, because it gave the party too much power to skim and control. The whole system operated like one huge corrupt mega-corporation, except that the middle managers had guns and the cubicles were prisons.
(4) - The last is self explanatory. With only one candidate to vote for you don't even have the choice of the lesser of two evils, and you can't honestly call it a Republic.

Re:a game that tells the truth about religion

[name*censored*]

There's an obvious difference here. The Christians persecute others to spread their religion. Atheists persecute others for other reasons. In this case, it was to spread political ideas rather than religious ones. Religion is a direct cause of many murders while atheism cannot be blamed for it because there's nothing in the ideology about committing murder in the name of any superstition.

... Unbelievable. You come within a hair's breadth of the astonishingly-obvious-yet-no-one-sees-it fact that the problem is not religion, it is extremism, of which religion is only a subset (though when I say subset I should say intersection, since at least one religious person doesn't want to go on a killing rampage). Yet you suddenly take a 90 degree turn and start rambling about how religion encourages murdering, even though it's explicitly banned in many (perhaps most) major religion and is only justified by twisting the words and intents of said religion (which is easy if your audience are uneducated peons, as they were during the Crusades/Inquisition).

Besides which, this should have rang alarm bells:

Atheists persecute others for other reasons

Quite frankly, I don't care if they're persecuting others to spread religion, spread ideology, or to sell chocolates. I don't care what they call themselves. The whole damn problem is the persecution. The reason, by comparison, is unimportant and interchangeable - that's the whole friggin' idea behind Skub vs anti-Skub.

Re:a game that tells the truth about religion

[NeutronCowboy]

"Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby."

Re:a game that tells the truth about religion

[ChromeAeonium]

It is a hobby if you go around talking about how great it is to not collect stamps, and join not collecting stamp clubs, and read Not Collecting Stamps Monthly. I get where that sentiment is coming from, I really do, and have to say I agree with it, but I don't think that it is always the case anymore.

Re:a game that tells the truth about religion

[roca]

> Skepticism, rationality, or reason! The three cornerstones of atheism.

The cornerstone of atheism is what the word means --- to believe in no god. Mao and Stalin may not have been the sort of atheists you like, but they were certainly keen on spreading their brand of atheism.

You are committing the "no true Scotsman" fallacy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Re:a game that tells the truth about religion

[yndrd1984]

Worst case - converting to Christianity from Islam - can get you killed in many countries.

To be fair, converting to anything from Islam can get you killed in those countries - it isn't really Christian-specific. Can you name someplace where Christians are hard-core persecuted significantly more than atheists or Jews?

Re:a game that tells the truth about religion

[LS]

If there were people killing each other over stamps and forcing others to be collectors, then I promise you there would be not collecting stamp organizations

Re:a game that tells the truth about religion

[yndrd1984]

How many people have Christians persecuted since, say, 1800?

Where to begin?

Dark skinned people can be used as work animals because they're "Hammites" - cursed by God for the sins of Ham after the flood.
Plenty of US states' constitutions barred non-believers from public office.
Some people are still trying to enforce them.
Catholics and Protestants in Ireland.
Some states won't allow single people to adopt kids - solely because that's the only legal way to bar gays from adopting.
Then there's the whole gay marriage thing...
And that's what I can come up with in two minutes while sleep deprived.

But I'm sure it makes you feel better that atheists did it because they didn't want to "spread their religion".

Killing people to spread Communism isn't the same thing as killing to spread atheism, atheism alone doesn't tell you to kill anyone (nor does it endorse any other moral stance). Christianity is based on a book that bluntly says to stone certain people to death, that repeatedly discusses the proper way to practice slavery, that says God approves of some kids of genocide (yes, in order to spread His religion) - you have to add something else (like a specific interpretation) to avoid endorsing the bad stuff.

Religion isn't needed in video games

[Darkness404]

I don't really see how religion is needed in video games. Plenty of games have used religious influences heavily. Fantasy games often use elements of Norse, Egyptian, Greek/Roman, and Christianity/Judaism in their games and that hasn't been a problem. People don't like being fed propaganda from any religious group so games based on any particular religion usually will fail (the fact that they are usually done by second-rate developers and are low budget doesn't help them either). But more than anything else, there is no need. Look at some games, either A) They are done in a fantasy setting and therefore having a real-world religion as a major theme is simply unrealistic or boring B) The focus is action rather than storyline development, most gamers don't care if the Spy from Team Fortress 2 was an agnostic, Buddhist or a scientologist. C) Religion would take away key parts of character development, for example Fallout 3, choosing a religion would effectively either make your character a hypocrite, unrealistic or would make decision making too simple.

In the end, I don't think there is a need for religion in video games. While it will always and has always been referenced, theres just no good reason to put it in.

Religion

[Renraku]

Religion does exist in video games. They aren't usually the same religions as we have meatside, however. I think that's what people are complaining about. The problem is if you let, say, World of Warcraft priests worship the Christian god, then people will automatically boycott when it doesn't follow a particular sect's beliefs. In fact, they'd have no combat skills at all if they followed the word of the Bible.

Instead, religions are made up, relatively shallow, and may be based on the history that took place in the game. Sounds a lot like real religions, doesn't it?

Modern Warfare: The Return of Christ

[copponex]

Christ is risen, and boy, is He pissed.

After receiving the authority to smite the tribes of Islam, Christ joins the eighty deuces and gets his revenge on vegetarians, homosexuals, eaters of shellfish, and of course, unbelievers and blasphemers. Armed with a robe and the wrath of Yahweh, step into the sandals of He Who Is Righteous as he transforms from the Prince of Peace to the Prince of Blowing Motherfuckers to Pieces. Use conventional weapons to kill the wicked or send plague upon plague to the unfortunate souls dumb enough to defy you. Raise past holy warriors from the dead to join your army of brutal goodness, and get bonus points for killing Arab leaders and sending them to Hell.

Feel the rage of the righteous! Coming Spring 2010...

Ahh see they are being disingenuous

[Sycraft-fu]

They say they are interested in religion in games. Well, in fact there IS religion in quite a few games. In some cases a religious mythology forms the basis for the game's world, in other cases there are various religious characters who influence things and so on. That's not what they want. They want a game that evangelizes their religion. They want one that shoves it in your face, that tries to show it as The One True Way(tm).

Well, games like that are basically always going to suck. Evangelism isn't fun. What's more, it turns off most people so major developers won't do it. When you have an inherently shitty premise and combine that with a shitty developer you are going to get a total crap fest.

In terms of mainstream games, religion will continue to be a role in them as it always has been. Often it'll be fictional religions, since they are often set in fictional worlds. However you'll continue to see religious characters of one sort or another in games where such a thing is useful to the story. However you aren't going to see games designed around pushing a religion. Those aren't fun, and they won't sell well, so major publishers aren't going to fund them.

SimChurch

[Animats]

If religion in games was done right, it would make kids too cynical. Imagine this game:

"SimChurch - start your own religion, gain adherents, build a church, advertise, and grow. You can tweak your theology - too loose, and your people lose interest; too strict, and your people backslide. You can ask your followers for financial support, but ask too hard and they'll drop out. You can train fanatics to help you expand, but they may turn against you."

"In multiplayer mode, you can try to convert people from other religions to yours. Become strong enough in an area, and you can convert your country to a theocracy. Then you can have wars with other theocracies."

"If your theology calls for miracles, they might just happen. But they won't always help you. You can also fake miracles, once you have enough assets, and gain adherents that way."

This would teach kids way too much about how religion really works.

Re:SimChurch

[ShakaUVM]

>>This would teach kids way too much about how religion really works.

Sure you don't want to call it Church Tycoon?

But honestly, having worked with/on church councils, while you see a lot of the politics you see in, well, all social organizations, churches are actually filled with good people who are trying to make a difference in society. Perhaps your game could actually encompass some of that, instead of just focusing on monetary issues.

Re:SimChurch

[hackel]

This is probably the most brilliant "Sim" game I've heard of since SimCity! I would buy this in a second, it is really a brilliant idea! And it would be GREAT education for kids!

maybe the problem is

[AlgorithMan]

maybe the problem is that religious games (I don't know even one counter example) focus to much on conveying the religion and to little on stuff like A STORY, or GAMEPLAY... they're like most educational games, they just AREN'T FUN TO PLAY.
http://www.cinemassacre.com/new/?p=3878
http://www.cinemassacre.com/new/?p=4069