Left Behind Games has been sending out letters that threaten legal action against sites and writers who write “false and/or misleading” information about their Left Behind games, based on the best-selling dispensationalist fiction series. They even want bloggers to remove comments that are made in light of the “false and/or misleading” information.
The letter is unclear about what prompted this sort of legal action or what exactly they mean by “false and/or misleading”. And the company claims that they “generally support free speech in the media.” Good to know.
Thankfully, my position that Left Behind: Eternal Forces is poorly designed, boring and as offensive aesthetically as it is morally is not just legally protected – it’s something I can probably demonstrate with more scientific certainty than the company’s End Times theology.
Hmm, litigation against reviewers who don’t like your game. Damn, why hasn’t anyone else thought about this before? :)
Out of curiosity, what’s Left Behind‘s Start-to-Crate time?
I think post-Rapture NYC has boxes in some of its alleys. Do those count as crates?
Hmm. Seems like Left Behind would be a wee bit closer to practicing what they’re preaching if they targeted lies about the Scriptures rather than lies about… a video game. Yuh’d think, wouldn’tcha?
Ah well.
How is this any different from any other company protecting their products from false smears? Would it be wrong for a food producer to threaten legal action against people who hate them and their products for spreading falsehoods about the company deliberately poisoning their products? All the claims that LB:EF promotes converting or killing non-believers are patently false and are financially hurtful to the company.
They absolutely have a legitimate right to protect their game against patently false claims. But they have to outline what they mean by this. What are the specific complaints? These are nowhere in the letter. It’s hard to make redress when you don’t know what you did wrong. One blogger asked his readers to go through his back posts looking for where he might have screwed up because he had no idea.
Anyone who has mentioned the game to me (whether in email or person) and described as “ultra-violent” was immediately corrected. It is ultra-bad, but not ultra-violent.
Note that these letters, as far as I can tell, are not targeting the mass media, though CNN or ABC or Fox were much more likely to get the game wrong. This is also the company that spammed dozens of blogs that mentioned the game with a defensive comment, even those blogs (like this one) that treated the game as a bad example of game design, not a weapon in some culture war.
The timing is odd, too. Is this part of the marketing strategy for their expansion pack? An attempt to repair their image after the Defense Department cancelled the care packages with Eternal Forces in it? The game is almost a year old. The financial picture at LB Games is bleak, but it’s really too late to hope that editing blog posts will bump sales.
Whether or not the game “promotes” converting non-believers, it absolutely is one of the essential mechanics of the game. You can’t win without converting non-believers. They are often “neutrals” – not allies of the Antichrist – and sometimes have names associated with non-Christian faiths (Judaism, Hinduism or Islam). I have no problem with this as a game mechanic, by the way. It’s a free speech thing.
And, though violence against non-believers is absolutely not a winning strategy on its own, you can succeed in missions by killing non-believers. Not too many, of course, because then your faith bottoms out. But they give you soldier units for a reason.
Troy, last time I checked, ignorance of wrongdoing is not a defense that any court in America will accept. If you or anyone else doesn’t know what statements are false or misleading, perhaps you should do more research and check out reviews from neutral sources instead of grossly biased ones.