{"id":158,"date":"2005-06-11T15:25:00","date_gmt":"2005-06-11T19:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=158"},"modified":"2006-08-19T20:03:37","modified_gmt":"2006-08-20T00:03:37","slug":"games-and-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2005\/06\/11\/games-and-religion\/","title":{"rendered":"Games and Religion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christian Game Developers<\/a> will be holding a conference in Portland, Oregon at the end of the month. Their “three-fold mission” includes the usual exchange on game development and making contacts with developers with similar interests as well as the not-quite typical prayer session for the industry at large.<\/p>\n

Given the secular nature of popular entertainment at large, the lack of obviously Christian or religious games on best-seller lists should not be surprising. Given the reluctance of most game developers to deal with Ideas at all, their unwillingness to include messages of faith (or lack thereof) is standard operating procedure.<\/p>\n

So, we have role-playing games with clerics who pray, but their faith is usually unmentioned. We have cultural distinctions based on religion in grand strategy or even Crusades, but the player never really engages with the religious issues that surround them. Religion, when present, is either an historical curiosity or a route to a flamestrike spell.<\/p>\n

Probably the most famous Christian game is Catechumen<\/i>, an odd first-person shooter that had the player converting enemy soldiers by zapping them with a magic sword. But there was no real religion or faith there, so even Christians don’t know how to make really Christian games.<\/p>\n

Civilization IV<\/i> will include historic religious faiths, and this idea is rife with peril. The religions will have to have “bonuses” of some kind, but this risks reinforcing preconceptions of what religions are like. Not to mention that, in treating historic religions as interchangeable parts of a society, they miss the fact that many people take their religions as truth, not cultural constructs. I don’t subscribe to the idea that this is another example of Sid Meier’s insidious leftist agenda<\/a> (if anything, the Civ<\/i> games privilege conservative realpolitik over internationalist ideas), but it does just place religion into the scale as just another part of a civilization – something all cultures have, but no more.<\/p>\n

And there is nothing wrong with this. Even Christians like myself can appreciate alternate views of the place and purpose of religion in the development of humankind. As a mainstream Protestant, I probably have an easier time with this than my evangelical brethren.<\/p>\n

But there is a great challenge to be taken up here. How do we communicate values in a game? Role-playing games seem to be the obvious avenue for this since they require the player to make choices. If the trade-offs are meaningful – if there is a sense of temptation to follow a certain path – the player could get a window into their own souls. Bioware’s dark\/light role-playing system in Jade Empire<\/i> and Knights of the Old Republic<\/i> is a very crude version of this, since “light” inevitably means healing and “dark” means all the cool pyrotechnics. Apparently the good doctors at Bioware never read Genesis.<\/p>\n

As I said above, the inability or unwillingness of game designers to confront religion is just a symptom of a larger reluctance to have their games confront anything beyond frame rates and unit balance. Games aren’t messageless, but what they communicate is more by what they don’t address than by what they do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christian Game Developers will be holding a conference in Portland, Oregon at the end of the month. Their “three-fold mission” includes the usual exchange on game development and making contacts with developers with similar interests as well as the not-quite typical prayer session for the industry at large. Given the secular nature of popular entertainment […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-2y","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}