The Making of a Christian Video Game – Starting Thoughts

Table of contents for The Making of a Christian Video Game

1. The Making of a Christian Video Game – Starting Thoughts
2. The Making of a Christian Video Game – Ethical Dilemma
3. Christian Video Game as a Master’s thesis?
4. The Makings of a Christian Video Game – Facebook

I’ve been thinking for a while now about making a Christian video game. After all, I’ve always claimed that it would be my ultimate goal in game design – merging my ministry and my work into one – designing Christian video games for a living. And even though I’ve sort of put it on the shelf for now until I get more experienced and more mature spiritually, I’ve decided it’s probably a good idea to write down some of my early thoughts on what I expect to be making.

First, let me define some starting points about the game I want to make:

• It will focus on Christian practice, not just Christian themes.
• My target audience are casual gamers / Christian parents.
• The game will be a serious game, used for teaching and training.
• The game is not to be primarily used for evangelism.

More in-depth thoughts after the break.

It will focus on Christian practice, not just themes.

Many of the Christian games published so far, and many of the people who I’ve spoken to, seem to believe that if you just take a conventional game genre or game mechanic and “Christianize” it by using Biblical terms and Biblical imagery, it would become a Christian game. I have heard and seen game ideas which adapt the conventional game genres of Role-Playing Games, Real-Time Strategy, Adventure/Puzzle, Trivia, Action/Adventure, etc. and just use “demons” or “unsaved people” for the opponent and “Bible verses” for the weapons/answers. Well, I can’t say they’re wrong. I do believe that what they are doing or have suggested are, inasmuch as God has been leading them, Christian games.

But I want to aim higher. Many of these games are focused on conveying the Truth of the Gospel/Bible. But Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life. I want to focus on the Christian Way. In other words, while I will likely also have Christian themes in my game, I want to also inculcate gameplay that lets players experience Christianity in practice. I want to convey the life of a Christian – the Christian philosophy and way of life, not merely the message. Which is a lot harder. It is far easier, I feel, to make a game that’s “like Warcraft, except that your soldiers are evangelists and the enemies are unsaved people, and you have to send your people to preach to them instead of killing them.” That’s basically taking a war game and putting Christian themes on it. (Not that I’m against violence in Christian games, mind you… after all, I’m named after the Israelite general that led one of the most violent genocidal wars in the Bible. Righteous violence is Biblical.) But how do you make a game that’s about the concept of “faith”, for example? How do you teach players, through the game, to “trust and obey God”? To make them practice daily living by faith throughout the game, until they bring the principles into real life as well? That’s the sort of game I want to make. I don’t think it’s ever been done before, and I don’t imagine it will be an easy task.

My target audience are casual gamers.

Because of the above, I don’t think I’ll fall back on any of the conventional hardcore game genres. I’m deliberately going to aim for the casual market (probably PC). This means that my audience is going to be very different from the current Christian games out there. The casual PC market is predominantly female, usually in their middle ages, mostly housewives. (Although this trend is now changing, and demographics are now skewing younger, and slightly more gender-balanced as the definition of “casual games” is becoming wider). Most of the hardcore game genres are targeted at young adult males, teens and tweens, who focus on adrenaline rushes and tend to like the acquisition and demontration of power as part of a game (which is why the power to destroy, i.e. violence, is so prevalent among games catering to that audience). And why many current Christian game developers are focusing on trying to reach this harvest field by building a bridge between Christian themes and adrenaline-pumping violent games. And getting lambasted on both sides from Christian parents who can’t understand why they won’t build “nice, safe games” for their young boys to play, as well as from their teenage players for not offering as much value for money as, say, God of War or Gears of War, both of which offer much more exciting, heart-pumping action than “that wimpy Jesus-game that my mother wants me to play.”

Nope, not for me. I’m staying far, far away from that controversy. Both because I myself am not attracted to those sorts of games myself (for a young adult male, I’m surprisingly pacifistic as a gamer), and because I don’t believe it’s worth the battle to defend my first Christian game instead of creating another one. I’m going to target the Christian housewife who wants to play a simple, Christ-centered game that she herself can find fun. In other words, I’m not aiming at the son, I’m aiming at their parents, and the parents that they will eventually become. It’s a different approach to the problem, I think. As more and more gamers grow up, I believe they are one day going to become parents themselves (in fact, part of this generation already is). And they may still enjoy gaming, but will not have time to play hardcore games anymore, and they might also want to have Christian games in the house. The best way to transmit healthy appreciation of Christian media to their children is to model it themselves. Just like how parents who love to read tend to pass on a love for books to their children, so too parents who love to play Christian games would be happy to pass them on to their children. Which is why NOW is the time to build games for those parents, who are raising toddlers or young children who will eventually want to “play Daddy’s games with Daddy”, or “want to do what Mummy’s doing”. If the games that Daddy and Mummy are playing are Christian games, all to the good. Children don’t want to play games because their parents tell them to “play this game”… they want to play games that they see their own parents enjoying.

The game will be a serious game.

By serious game, I mean that it will not purely be for entertainment (although, of course, it should be as entertaining as possible within its’ scope). But rather, serious games are those that teach, train or otherwise motivate to action. Any game about Christian practice should have the aim of eventually motivating the players to follow that practice in real life. Otherwise, there’s no point to it. Christianity is a way of life, not an escape from reality. It transforms characters, not merely comforts souls. I’m not saying that Christian games that are just entertaining escapes from reality are bad… just that I don’t think that’s what I’m called to make. My game must have meaning and purpose beyond just entertainment.

And yet, here we must also be careful about the limits of the medium. Ultimately, it is Christ and the Holy Spirit who is responsible for all change in Christian character. A game, by itself, can do nothing… just like a Christian book, by itself, can do nothing. It may teach, it may inform, but it will not change lives unless the Holy Spirit brings to life the message of that medium of instruction. I can, at best, impart head knowledge about Christian practice through my game, and hope and pray that the Spirit will use it to inspire people to be curious or convicted about its’ message… enough to seek God personally to find answers. My game needs to point people to God for answers, not teach people a Christian formula to get God to do what they want. But this is not an easy task, as it goes counter against many established trends of game design. Games are almost always a practice of some skill, which gets better as you play the game more. (eg. swinging a tennis racquet correctly, managing resources carefully, matching 3 pieces of the same colour, etc.) How do you build a game which teaches people to practice going to God for answers? I think this may be a difficult challenge which I may have to make some tradeoffs or compromises with in order to get a workable game.

The game is not to be primarily used for evangelism.

This is going to cause the most controversy, I think. Many Christians believe that the only good use of a game is to reach out to the unreached people who are gamers. That’s the only reason they think games might be worthwhile. Otherwise, they’re just senseless, violent wastes-of-time which are addictive and drag the young people away from the things of God. Dangerous assumptions, in so many ways. But that’s the reality of the situation I will face. If I say I am going to make a Christian game, almost 90% of the NON-gaming Christians would say “Great! We can use it to reach out to the lost.” I think, to a large extent, this is just because of unfamiliarity with the medium. And so I don’t blame them. It’s fine if they don’t fully understand as yet, because I don’t expect non-gamers to understand the other purposes of Christian games besides evangelism. But a good analogy would be if I were going to say, “I want to write a Christian book”, would the response be automatic assumption that the book will be a Gospel tract or apologetic defense? No, of course not. There are plenty of types of Christian books out there, a reflection of the maturity of the medium of books. The medium of video games has come a long way since its’ beginning, and yet I feel it’s still in the equivalent of its’ teenage, adolescent years. The signs of maturing are starting to show, but there are wild swings in different directions, veering from extremely mature at one end, to childish infantile games at the other.

I intend my game to be used for edification of the Body of Christ, the church. In a sense, I’m not creating a game for evangelism. I’m creating a game for discipleship. I’m preaching to the converted – not about repentance and the Gospel, but about sanctification and daily communion with God. This is not the game you want to give your non-Christian friends, or your kids to play. This is the sort of game you want to play yourself, as a reminder of things that you had best not take for granted. While I don’t doubt that it CAN be used as a tool for evangelism, given the right situation and right people, I’m not intending to build it as such. I’m aiming to create… hmm… about the gaming equivalent of a devotional guide, maybe. Not a perfect analogy, but somewhere around that level. Not deep theology, nor hammering of Bible verses into your head through trivia questions, nor basics of the Gospel, but rather… how to walk the Christian walk and live daily by faith. An introduction to Christianity in practice.

Concluding Remarks

Well, I guess that will do for starting thoughts. I already have some vague impressions on what the game should be about, and what sort of core mechanics and themes to use, but I want to spend more time thinking about it first, and asking God whether this is really the right thing for me to be doing.