So it appears there’s to be another Left Behind game. Despite the best efforts of an apparent misinformation campaign that set out to destroy the first of the Christian RTS series, they have risen like Lazarus and are back with… What, you’ve never heard of the Left Behind game? That might have something to do with the information campaign that observed how absolutely astonishingly awful the first one was. But you can’t keep angry multi-millionaires down, and Left Behind: Tribulation Forces is announced for the masses this Christmas. Announced in one of the most incredible press releases I’ve ever seen. Read on.
I tend to think the notion of Rapture is quite an appealing one. All at once all the loony fundamentalist Christians in the world would disappear, forever. (“You’d never say that about Muslims!” It would be nice if all the loony fundamentalist Muslims went with them.) Anyway, it’s this daft Rapture idea that forms the core of the multi-billion dollar Left Behind business, that began with a set of books.
Declaration of interests: I’m a Christian. Church-going, Jesus-loving, God-botherer. And yet somehow, at the same time, I’ve managed to keep a grip on my critical faculties. So when someone makes a “Christian” version of something, I don’t immediately declare it a bonus chapter to the Bible and build it a shrine. I also promise I’m not part of a malevolent campaign paid to badmouth the Left Behind games, spreading lies and misinformation about them into the evil liberal media. (I was, however, paid by PC Gamer to write about the first game, and reported how utterly bloody terrible it is, and you can read the result here.) Why would I suggest such a strange thing? From today’s press release for Tribulation Forces:
“Public Relations Director, Tammy La Barbera, says, ‘The original game ‘Eternal Forces’ became one of the most highly publicized games of 2006, as politically motivated groups launched an all-out war against the game, by making false claims that the game included conversion to Christianity as a requirement or gave points for killing Muslims. The media frenzy resulted in feature stories on ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX NEWS, MSNBC, CNN, BBC, and numerous other worldwide networks and in print in the San Jose Chronicle, Newsweek, Wired and many others. After more than two years and a third-party investigation, it was determined that the Tides Center, a taxpayer supported non-profit, and others, launched and paid for a campaign to smear the game and Company, which may have resulted in a $200 million loss in shareholder value as the stock plummeted as a result of their misinformation campaign. Left Behind Games is a publicly traded company.’”
There are no links to any examples of this worldwide misinformation, and we’ve approached the Tides Center for a comment regarding the accusations. From our research many of the original accusations that were made at the time have since been removed, however a recurring theme in detractors’ statements was that the game promoted violence against non-Christians. There’s an example here on Game Politics. This is certainly untrue, and it was this theme that created the media frenzy. The reality is the game’s propaganda is more insidious, but in no way does it ever suggest that non-believers should be killed. While we’ve no way of knowing who was behind the spreading of this information, it’s certainly the case that there was a great deal of press reporting these false claims.
I’ve found what appears to be the only BBC article on the subject. The article reports the (sometimes inaccurate) accusations made against the game by various other Christian groups, and then gives a lengthy right of reply to Left Behind Games co-found Jeffrey S Frichner, putting this right, in which he makes some odd statements. One being:
“The game itself is just a great game. People of other faiths could play it and not know it’s Christian. [The game evangelises] but it is doing it in a way which is very respectful, not Bible-thumping.”
Well, aside from that it’s anything but a great game – it’s really quite impressively badly made – you have to wonder at a game that a player might not realise is Christian, but at the same time is attempting to evangelise. You’d imagine it wasn’t doing a very good job at one of those tasks. However, it’s utter nonsense to pretend for a second that there’s some sort of ambiguity as to its messages. Between levels you’re given screens full of text espousing fundamentalist viewpoints, implying evolution is a myth, or stating why the Bible is authentic, while it plays Christian pop at you. Well, take a look for yourself: evolution denounced, and archaeological evidence. (”Let this encouragement move you to dust off your Bible and dig into the evidence for yourself!” – Nope, no way to infer that this is Christian at all!)
So what is the reality of the games? Well, it’s true that you can kill people. However, to do so loses you morality, and lose it all and you lose the game. The suggestion apparently made during its original release that you were slaughtering unbelievers were wholly untrue. There’s definitely a moral consequence to harmful behaviour, and murder is condemned. However, regarding the claim that there’s no converting – I can’t see how this could possibly be argued. The core point of the game is to recruit believers to your army. You either win people over to your side, or you don’t. You convince them to join you by playing music at them, by evangelising to them. Once they’re with you, you need to have them pray regularly or they go back to their sinful ways. Just how exactly can the claim be made that this is not conversion? And brilliantly – by far my favourite thing about the game – if you have your troops spend too long in the vicinity of heathens playing their rock music, they lose their faiths too. Convert them and they’ll shed their black gothic clothing and put on a nice pullover instead!
It’s a deeply sexist game. Only men can be trained to be Builders and Disciples, while only women can become Nurses. Also very strange is the game’s decision to refer to male converts as “Friends” and female converts as “Women Friends”. It’s an unsettling misogynistic streak, and is clearly very deliberate.
The inclusion of in-game advertising is another odd ingredient. These aren’t the plugs for megachurches or Christian literature you might expect, but billboards for Gamestop and EB Games, and other corporations who sell the games the Left Behind people are so publically upset about. It’s hard not to read this accepting of the secular buck as a hypocrisy.
Also, rather brilliantly, if you play in multiplayer you can control the Antichrist’s forces and attack and kill the Christians, which does seem to ever-so-slightly go against the game’s purported intent to provide a non-violent gaming experience for all the family.
It’s important to recognise that Left Behind: Eternal Forces is a dreadful game separately from any of its religious themes. Strip out the Christian fundamentalism and you’re left with an embarrassingly poor, extremely buggy RTS, in an engine that’s comically awful. It’s Metascore is 38 (even IGN US gave it below 6!), and the majority of these reviews say the same thing: ignore the Christian message, it’s a bad game anyway. No conspiracy, no agenda, just the tradition of reviewing outlets reviewing games.
Anyway, that’s the past, and Tribulation Forces (also the name of the second book in the all-conquering, millions selling series) is already available via Christian outlets. It will be released to the masses later this year, and feature a few changes.
“This new second chapter in the LEFT BEHIND PC Game series includes significant new features, improvements, maps and missions. The game includes 45 single player missions including tutorials and an all-new skirmish mode allowing players to play against the computer by themselves or with up to 7 friends online. There are 39 skirmish battle multiplayer maps and 3 different multiplayer modes of play.”
We’ve not seen a copy of the new game, so we don’t yet know how the skirmishes and multiplayer modes adapt to the morality, nor whether they’ll have fixed the completely useless camera, or have incorporated an engine from the 21st century. Looking at the minuscule screenshots (and those at Just Adventure), we’d suggest they certainly haven’t.
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Anyways, I did enjoy the actual Left Behind series, despite all the criticisms. Seeing as it’s a work of fiction, I can suspend my disbelief on some of the more tenuous plot elements. I saw it as an exercise in creative thought, speculating how the world would end, just like any apocalyptic novel; I didn’t realize that some people actually believe it, let alone the authors!
I read the Da Vinci Code, and Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown, and enjoyed them both immensely, as they are fairly good fictional novels.
I started wondering what kind of person could see any literary merit in the Left Behind series at all, then you qualified it with this. I can rest easy now.
@meat circus
Nathan Barley was one of the best things brit TV ever produced, it was MEANT to be horribly painful to watch with only the occasional glimmer of humour coming from contemptible idiots banging against reality or their own callous disregard for each other or themselves – That’s what living in Shoreditch is like; a grime purgatory of over privileged, posturing thirty something children, using each other as disposable scratching posts, producing crap and worrying whether people will understand the irony of their shoes.
Dolphan: Well, games where you’re encouraged to do things within an ideological framework that isn’t your own. Many first-person games are deliberately set with you saving the world or defending the American way of life. If they’re not, as with, say, Red Alert, it’s a bit slapstick (even with the original, which was still pretty dark).
One example would be, say, defending Russia from America as an aggressor (perhaps WiC: Soviet Assault is this?). I’m not sure if this is a good example.
The thing I was getting at was whether or not a game that evangelised would be good in general. It would certainly polarise opinion, but then games do this for other reasons. The debate about The Path kinda falls into this, where John Walker described how he didn’t like what he perceived the message of the game to be, which was a negative, nihilistic portrayal of growing up.
Well, in the recent few weeks I’ve played a lot of quick indie games that had a lot of emotion in a small amount of play, some of which were shown here. One was Today I Die and the other was Fathom. I think these kinds of small games could be a way for people to express various ideologies in an effective way without being quite so… in your face about it. Or, maybe they could just make Left Behind 4 Dead.
I remember reading that most art in nearly every medium is about sex and death. I assume that religion is a close third, shame that more games which philosophically and religiously challenge us don’t exist. That said, this is coming from an agnostic, not everyone likes being challenged.
But I loved it when Braid touched on determinism, or that RTS with non linear time. As ham handed as it was, the (apparently butchered) Ayn Rand objectivism in Bioshock was something I’d never before heard of.
Just as Portal challenged relativity of space I’d like to play games where other philosophical areas are challenged. Personally I feels games are suited to this observation of foreign (to yourself) philosophy as games are about understanding and using and subverting rules.
@Sparvy:
Ah well, you’re showing up the fact that I know relatively little about Norse paganism. But I’m pretty sure you were expected to have a big old scrap every day, ready to be ressurected the next day to do it all again. In preperation for Ragnarok.
Of course, my chances of dying in battle are relatively slim, on account of my being a massive pussy. On the other hand, should I somehow find myself in a battle, my chances of dying go up relatively dramatically.
(now that I think about it, my principle sources for Norse mythology are a Horrible History book and Tomb Raider: Underworld. And that’s terrible)
Jeremy: Left Behind 4 Dead would be a wonderfully subversive idea. Even just reskinning all the zombies to have clean haircuts and sweater vests.
I’d like to second Jam as CM’s opus. Its patchy at times to, but awesome nonetheless. Best watched on DVD from start to finish in one sitting IMHO. It makes you feel pretty special afterward, and makes you think that ANYTHING you see on TV immediately after it is some kind of absurd dark satire. This feeling that everything is cynical satire can be hard to shake.
I love the guy who has himself buried alive because he is so happy with his life, and the guy who jumps out of a 1st floor window 20 times rather than a 20th floor window once, and the doctor who blinds himself to get out of treating a patient – for no apparent reason. Good times!
IN JAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMM
Evangelical works are interesting, and to be honest, I think there’s nothing wrong with them, so long as they’re not stuffed full of lies presented as FACTS. I’m an atheist, but not one of the scary kind. Without the evolution of ideas of religion and spirituality our societies and lives would probably be nasty, stupid and short.
But yes, evangelism. Narnia’s evangelism, and so arguably is Beowolf. Because the pre-christian Irish legends were written down by monks, they’ve been changed to include strong Christian themes as well, the classic example being the return of a pagan warrior to Ireland from the Land of Eternal Youth, where he promptly starts to die and is hurriedly baptised.
Tragically (ironic usage here folks) the crude evangelism that seems to be put forward here can’t compete in the mass media, although it’ll probably snare a few souls. An evangelical religious game would need to focus on the practices of the religion, rather than the trappings. It doesn’t matter if your game is about a Space marine fighting aliens or a messed up teenage girl in a fantasy world, so long as the game is based around the tenets of the faith.
A good example of direct religious-based games for a Christian perspective would be something like SimChurch, where you start out in a rented hall and can grow your congregation through meeting the spiritual needs of your parishioners, helping out in social work, etc. A Muslim one could center around the pilgrimage to Mecca, one long complicated RPG quest to get to your destination without compromising your ideals.
Game ideas like this have the potential to be good, effective ways of spreading the central message of your religion by making a fun game that just happens to be about a religious concept. More challenging ideas could be introduced to steer away from edutainment, such as in the SimChurch concept having the rich parishioners yu’d started to attract disapprove of your homeless shelter and become a lot less generous with their funds, or devil’s bargains from corporate charities or superiors within the church.
Black and White had some interesting concepts built into a spiritual model. Having people designated to worshiping so you can build your miracle gauge faster, being able to use a gigantic lion, bear, turtle, etc. to inspire fear and awe in others. Too bad the game wasn’t much fun to play, because it had some really cool ideas involved. They needed to have a more open ended sort of game rather than a very focused goal oriented game. I wanted to play that game to make my Tiger grow and be awesome and get more followers, not so I could do all of these little menial tasks. I should not be using my miracle powers to keep up with lumber and grain deficiencies… not ever.
Wow, this has been a very interesting yet surprisingly civil thread.
Kudos to the RPS community!
I’m kind of coming in late to the party now, but thought I’d chip in on ‘Christian games’.
Basically, I’m not sure ‘Christian game’ (or, for that matter, ‘Muslim game’ or ‘Hindu game’, etc) is a useful description nor a useful target.
To follow on from John and others, I’d absolutely agree with comments about a Christian Media bubble in the US.
It seems to me, speaking as an evangelical Christian, that it is more about a consumerisation of American (or part thereof) culture as anything to do with the Christian faith.
I can certainly understand the desire to create a sub-culture entirely removed from the wider world but it does rather seem to miss the point of evangelical Christianity.
The Left Behind game (as with most every other ‘Christian game’ I’ve seen) seems to just take a standard game formula and then adorn it with overtly ‘Christian’ paraphernalia.
While this might help it sell to the Christian media market, I’m not sure it really makes it a Christian game (at least not in any sense stronger than we might describe a game as a ‘Zombie game’ or a ‘Space game’).
This seems to be entirely the wrong way round to me.
Rather, I would think a Christian game should in some way fuse a Christian message with the core of the actual game in a meaningful way without needing to appear ‘Christian’.
Now, as a Christian, I believe my Christian faith should influence my daily life.
If I were then to make a game, it would presumably be influenced by my beliefs but does that make it a ‘Christian game’?
(Likewise, does a game made by an Atheist become an ‘Atheist game’, etc?)
So I’m not sure a tag like ‘Christian game’ is helpful.
I think it would be more helpful if people focussed on making good games that actually made you think about a given issue than producing a poor but cosmetically ‘Christian game’ (or ‘Buddhist game’, etc).
It might be you don’t agree with the game’s message but a good game will at least make you think about it and hopefully entertain you as you do.
I boosted my magic power by sacrificing babies while having a half dozen men impregnate all the womenfolk… I also sacrificed old people, they are useless.
I Had enough magic power to build anything the god way, starvation was limited as I didn’t need worshippers. Shame you could never train your creature to exclusively eat old people.
My creature was actually very holy, despite eating people he casting healing spells all the time on the people. Like I’d trust that thing with fireballs.
edit: I’d play that Sim church game, sounds like it’d likely just get white washed if the developers were fundamentalists though. Its the contrasts and complexities that are interesting.
A British friend recently introduced me to Brass Eye, and while it is very brilliant, the problem with watching it as a non-Brit (I’m Swedish) was that it took me a whole episode before I realized that the people in the “interviews” were actually real celebrities, since I didn’t recognize half of them. Still brilliant though :)
Squirrels are not ninjas, we should all know by now that they’re parachuting suicide bombers, eh? ;)
I would love to play a good Christianity-themed game, an adventure/RPG made by groovy people with the guts to challenge your moral compass could be awesome. I think the most interesting theological ideas I’ve seen in a game are the ones in KotOR2, which is kind of sad as the world is so removed from our own. Or maybe not, I dunno :)
Imagine a world where you didn’t know who Noel Edmonds was. I envy you more than you can imagine.
@Helio: Ayn Rand’s Objectivism was always pretty ham-handed. It has a certain following in the US and some evangelists on the net, but is generally largely ignored by academic philosophers. The Objectivists cry snobbery, of course, but the reason is simply that Rand’s arguments were largely old ones that have long been replaced by more sophisticated versions or refuted altogether. Her criticisms of previous philosophers like Kant are particularly bad, since they tend to manifest a lack of understanding of the thinkers she criticises (when I read some of her stuff I found it hard to believe she’d actually read Kant).
It’s not that there aren’t mainstream philosophers with views close to Objectivism in various areas – it’s just that they tend to be a lot more in touch and less dogmatic than followers of Rand.
@Evanzan
I completely agree with what you said about slapping a label on a game. It is really frustrating as a Christian to see someone produce a game that really reeks and just throw some Christian words and imagery on it, then push it off to the fundamentalist market. It definitely gives off the wrong impression. For far too long, people have been willing to push out terrible literature, movies, games and music just to put the Christian label on it (edit: or any label for that matter, this doesn’t just apply to Christianity), and it seems to me that if you’re passionate about something.. anything, that you should want to make it with a certain level of excellence.
@Jeremy: True. This is why I really respect those in the media arena (music, literature, pictures, whatever) that stick to their principles and continue to excel. Andrew Eldritch, former Sisters of Mercy frontman and outspoken Christian, being one.
Freaky fundamentalists need to fake controversy and manufacture schisms to create an Us v. Them scenario. Without it, they would just sit there sucking with no excuse.
I’d just like to belatedly add that despite Chris Morris being the only real satirist of the late 20th/21st century, and despite Charlie Brooker being a huge inspiration of mine and a hugely funny writer, I found Nathan Barley utterly awful. Just a horrible, lazy mess of mocking a stereotype that had long since faded (imagine a man who’s always on his mobile phone! Who even HAS a mobile phone?!) and worn sitcom cliche used without irony.
I like to pretend it never happened.
Nathan Barley is alive and well and living in Shoreditch. And making all television programs. And most radio. The NB TVGoHome strips were great, the TV less so, but still good.
Also – Chris Morris and Peter Baynham on Radio 1 were superb, too. In a different way, but still good. Erm, that is all.
Exorcism is (still) an official part of the catholic church. So how about an exorcism game? Like Psychonauts with demons and such.
Good points about the difficulty in defining what is a ‘christian’ game…
When you ignore all the pointless rules and exhortations to kill infidels, most religions boil down to “be excellent to each other”; that, of course, leaves you with no conflicts to explore, and thus some really boring fiction (hell, it’s practically Bartledanian). Posit demons, though, and you’ve got a built-in source of discord.
Or you could just say ‘[religious] themes’, where [religious] is replaced by your faith of choice. But then what are you left dealing with – love and redemption and justice? Sex and death? That’s what all fiction’s about anyway. But then there’s always that bizarrely Christian idea that suffering is somehow righteous…
Wait! I get it! That’s what Left Behind the game is about! It’s so bad that trying to play it is penance of some sort! Self-flagellation in video game form! It makes so much sense…
Um, and good on us for maintaining a civil discussion, yeah? I can just picture all the RPS readers peering at ye fora over our monocles…
John Walker:
Surely the phone thing was more of an attack on those who would see their phones as a status symbol, and upgrade them every 6 months to stay fashionable. And using the scratch decks and jabbering away in public just shows these people’s disregard for civility and others.
Plus I think ‘having a massive ‘5′ button ‘cos it’s the most commonly used number’ is genuinely funny.
It’s well weapon.
I should point out that -of course- there are games out there that are explicitly or implicitly influenced by Christian themes and/or mythology, just like there are for many other religions. But there’s “has religious themes/storylines” (Xenogears, for a sadly console-centric example), and then there’s “Christian Game”. One thinks religion makes an interesting story element. The other is presenting The Truth. With caps. I don’t see the latter kind ever succeeding as a game, because the game bit is inevitably a far second or third place to The Truth-pushing. And I don’t see them having much success convincing people, either, because a) they’re awful, and b) they usually lack any real skill with argumentation.
Same goes for Christian Fiction (as opposed to fiction written by Christians).
Weirdly enough there’s some okay Christian Music out there. Very little of any genuine -excellence-, but a far cry better than things like Zoo Race or Left Behind. I wonder what the difference is.
It’s almost impossible to make out and out bad music, unless you’re deliberately trying, or a rapper.
nah son rap owns
Most Freud fans would file religion under death (with some overlap in sex, how much depending on the religion). Religion is just one big repressive matrix yasee.
And I reckon Bioshock took Rand to task quite well (not that I’m particularly well versed). To please Rand fans you could not portray it in any way that could be construed as negative. They’re quite religious like that, a lot of the time (it is mainly a riff on Atlas Shrugged though, and that’s not the whole story).
The problem is mainly that its telling criticisms of the Atlas Shrugged mentality and idealism in general are all between-the-lines in the backstory. The main narrative only really deals with the aftermath.
Incidentally, pointing out Christian parallels in much of storytelling is a little ‘well duh’ given its place in western history (some said this way up above there).
A Christian game is elusive because games have a certain component of will to them. I’d say evangelical types only really understand mantras and discipline. They couldn’t easily concieve of ways to spread the word without holding your hand and making sure you get it ‘right’.
However, the themes of ritual, repetition and social understanding of invisible forces as well as individuals following thin threads of clues through inference and hermenutics to an elusive life changing “truth” that are fairly common in religious… stuff, the place for religious gaming is clearly MMOs and ARGs.
Note: Not saying that all or most ‘Christian music’ is any adjective aside from the mysterious one.
Anecdotes!
At one point in University, I drove across the state – five hours one way – on a roughly fortnightly basis. This resulted in a lot of driving into and out of a wide variety of radio stations’ areas as my creaky radios hunted for signals. One incident really stands out in my mind – a couple of minutes after one station had faded out to static I got bored and hit scan. I caught the next song on the new station right at the beginning. After a few seconds of silence, I heard six drumbeats and one guitar chord and my brain lit up – ‘this is a Christian rock song!’ And it was right; this particular song eventually attempted to make a peppy bridge out of the line ‘O Lord, I am worthless without you.’ To this day I wonder just what it is that permeates the genre so thoroughly that before vocals or even a melody or rhythm came in, I could so surely identify an example. Maybe they all use one kind of amp, or something.
My cow in Black and White was a wonderful cow. It spent every minute of all its days planting and harvesting wood, entertaining the children of my villages, casting non-violent miracle spells for the less enlightened and pooing in and watering my people’s fields. It stated that it was happy and loved me and my 80% or whatever good rating. It was also hunched and covered with smoke which wavered before its malevolent glowing eyes, since it was rated as 95% evil.
The board is so popular we’ve been hit by bots – surely a mark of success.
Also, @John W, “outdated” stereotypes in Nathan Barley? Hardly, half of Old Street use the series as ironic inspiration, the other half just dive into the £20 racks at Beyond Retro, wear whatever sticks to them, then come out looking like a series extra anyway.
@Mssrs Circus & Walker: I must beg to differ on the quality of Nathan Barley. Perhaps it helps to be down here in the colonies, so that the stereotype is less familiar to me? I found some of the detail quite entertaining (Ashcroft’s ear-hurtingly nasty ringtone, Barley’s description of himself as a “self-actualised media-node” and so forth), and the terribly pre-destined nature of the winning of ‘The Idiots’ to make for lovely black comedy (particularly the ‘Preacher Man’ episode where Dan’s protestations against the spectacle he has been dragged into being mixed seamlessly into it) as well. As someone with a lit degree though, I know from bitter experience that these arguments cannot be won. In any case, I agree wholeheartedly about Brass Eye and The Day Today.
“Pfeh! I prefer my games about more realistic topics like Space Marines or Kobolds.”
Best comment I’ve seen on RPS, which says a lot. Congratulations – right now my coworkers are possibly wondering why I am grinning like an idiot.
I’m a follower of the Big Guy Upstairs… but attempts a PR wrangling for a HORRIBLE game make me sick. I read a few of the books until they just started milking the fans for money by taking what was supposed to be a 3 book series and covering a weeks worth of time in one book to extend it to a like 18 book series (exaggeration… I stopped counting at 7).
The game was SO bad. Just… bad. Christians need to quit trying to make games. Brothers, it just isn’t our landscape… try gaming ministries like server hosting or something, because a game about coverting people is just lame.