Virtual Guns For God! And other stuff...

[elfs]

Here is your gun and your Bible. Your mission is to cleanse the streets of New York, to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state - especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is to conduct physical and spiritual warfare, and to take out all who resist with extreme prejudice.

That is the absolutely ridiculous premise behind Left Behind Games most recent release, Left Behind: Eternal Forces, and the director admits that while the game might deserve an M rating, he hopes teenagers play it.

Talk to Action has a lovely article (yeah, I cribbed a bit from them, too) about the relationship between this God-and-Guns love story and The Purpose Driven Life people. At first, I was annoyed at how he kept using the term "children" to describe the players of what will clearly be an Older Teens game, but the article quotes people from the production house at length who are clearly aiming at the Young Teen market.

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And if that wasn't weird enough, how does this blurb catch your attention:

Members of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice received a call of a suspected African "sorceress" in the holy city's Al-Seeh neighborhood. Members of the committee along with police went to the suspected den of the black arts to find a naked African woman. Embarrassed about busting into an apartment containing a naked woman, police paused just long enough for the woman to attempt an escape, still naked, through the window of her flat.

A den of the black arts? Quick, someone call Professor Gilderoy Lockhart!

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And, playing on a theme nobody understands, I realized yesterday that the hero and heroine of Speed were named "Jack" and "Annie." The mind boggles.

Comments

[woggie.livejournal.com]

Jack/Annie - huh??

[elfs.livejournal.com]

My younger daughter is addicted to a fun little kids series of books called The Magic Treehouse. In it two children, Jack (age 8) and Annie (age 7) go on a series of adventures through space and time, meet magical creatures, become Senior Fellows to the Library at Camelot-- basically, take every schtick you can think of to get kids to read, and M.P. Osborne has tossed them into her books. They're cute.

The formula becomes obvious after a while: Annie is impulsive, Jack analytical. Both get into trouble, but for different reasons: Annie because she's trusts too much, Jack because he wants too much to learn. In almost every story, the children are threatened with physical harm and even death, but always escape in the end, sometimes via a deus ex machina.

Somehow, a mash-up Jack and Annie from The Magic Treehouse and those from Speed appealed to me. I suppose The Speeding Magic Schoolbus would not be taken well...

[woggie.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, in Speed, Jack was the impulsive one and Annie wasn't precisely analytical either, though she was obviously more analytical than Jack was. :)

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

Left Behind Games?? Oh, that's hideous.

And...there, there, I understand.

[rapier.livejournal.com]

Parody? Yes? Please?

[wednesday]

SQUEEE. At long last, more coverage of the LB RTS. You've no idea what a pain in the ass it's been to learn more about this game; the secular press just isn't interested, or is derisory in all the most superficial ways (for pity's sake, people, well-researched antagonism is essential here) and the mainstream Christian press isn't engaging with it very well. I'm almost at the point of playing a game in order to do my own damned research. I don't play games, I read about them.

I'm not convinced that this article isn't missing the point, though. Inasmuch as an LB licensor has to be visibly bound up in a certain strain of evangelical pedigree to get the license to begin with, should our concern rest with that pedigree's agenda, or should we wait until the game gets played and reviewed?


The whole situation is frustrating. Post-Rapture North America, with emphasis on US urban centres, is just about the ideal place to set an RTS or MMORPG (or even a tabletop RPG), but no one seems to be doing it properly. Hell, pre-Rapture spiritual warfare alone has all kinds of potential for your choice of immersive fictive environments. There's a reason why there's a whole subgenre of independent horror cinema devoted to this sort of thing, and why novels along these lines have so much commercial potential when they're timed and positioned properly.

So far, the core LB novels have provided the only usable license for such an endeavour. Thief in the Night would be too inconsistent, Kirban's 666/1000 too incoherent, Omega Code too turgid, and the Cloud Ten films too character-driven (even -- especially -- in the case of their own LBverse).

I'd like to see a secular-owned property come up from scratch, because I want this to be a creative field exploited out of passion for the scenario instead of for the mission -- but I'm losing hope. On the tabletop, Rapture d20 spends too much energy on secret societies, and Armageddon feels like an ecumenical World of Darkness. One could generate an appropriate In Nomine scenario, but it'd take some serious doing -- and too much ecumenical ground has been put down to do a cinematic, canon Rapture properly at this stage. And if the tabletop isn't getting there, I can't hold out that much hope for any form of computer gaming, short of some secretive MU* -- the commercial stakes are just too damned high. (--more--)

[wednesday]

In spite of the huge mess surrounding the LB films, Tyndale just weren't going to give this license to anyone but a Christian-affiliated team, preferably one with a visible, socially-vetted pedigree. Tim LaHaye's been vocal all this time about wanting LB-novelverse licenses to be message-driven. He's never wanted LB products to exist for the sake of pure recreation. (Damned shame he has fans like me who see this whole field as recreational.) The company at least has to pay lip service to that ideal. Unfortunately, it's going to hamper the game's perception outside the Christian ghetto. Fortunately for them, that ghetto's pretty big. There's also just enough crossover from the alarmingly high percentage of nonreligious and/or nonChristian LB readers that this is the one Christian game which might see breakout.

Nothing's sacred insofar as computer gaming's concerned, really. We have the GTA games. We have games set during any number of real historical wars, up to and including Vietnam, which aim to be immersive and reasonably accurate. Map Starcraft, Warcraft, Leisure Suit Larry to real people and you've got a raft of fears to carry round. I'm fine with an LB game so long as it's a fine example of a game, just as I'm fine with anything else that hits the market so long as it's well-crafted and it can be taken for what it it: immersive, interactive fiction. There are just as many hooks for escapism, fanaticism, and destructive behavior in the name of an agenda in any vaguely escapist, pseudorealistic game you or I or anyone else can pull out of our asses.

Christian media -- games, cinema, music, novels, whatever -- struggles with the same constraints as other genres. Erotica, SF&F, mystery/crime, &c., &c.. Its works can't just succeed on one level to garner respect from broader audiences. To succeed completely, they need to work independently from their genre, they need to appeal to the choir, and they need to bypass or exceed the expectations held by outsiders for the genre in question.

If the LB game isn't fucking fantastic, it's going to get buried, and no one else is going to try and play in this realm. I think this is a shame. I really want to see the mythic resonance of the pre-trib Rapture and the sheer earthly chaos it would hypothetically cause given its due, and I wish there was some way to do this without alienating exactly the sorts of gamers who would find the environment absolutely eating their brains if they could get past the baggage.

Sorry. Total stranger rambling in your space on not enough sleep. ex-asb lurker bla blablabla. Not actually Christian, just morbidly fascinated with Christian media.

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

I never thought 666/1000 was too rambling. You want rambling (and gross) try Raptured> by Ernest Angly. There was another, where I've forgotten the title. The Antichrist's men were called FML men, "Feed my Lambs."

But I'm not surprised by the game

[velvet-wood.livejournal.com]

Personally, I don't think much of the "Talk to Action" article. It was way too _blatantly_ biased to be useful. Not saying the game itself isn't a repulsive little thing, but the article repeatedly saying that it does X, Y, and Z to 'children', that 'children' will do this in the game, and that in the game, when the game _does have_ an M rating strikes me as intentionally misleading words designed to produce (manipulate?) a certain reaction because they weren't sure that the straight facts would do it on their own. By doing that, they're showing as much of a bias as any right-wing Christian group, and reducing themselves to the level of the frothing fundies. Unneccessary, and ultimately purpose-defeating.

I also went to the website of the game and looked around... I find it really distasteful, but I don't honestly see anything to back up your paragraph up there. The "Forces of Darkness" aren't automatically peaceful Jews, Pagans, Athiests, etc. They could mean more realistically 'bad' bad guys, like, say, toothy demon types.

My first reaction to reading your post and seeing the article was "My god! An idiot nipple hack for Oblivion gets tons of attention, and this gets none?!" But after reading everything... eh. I'm not convinced there's really anything there that deserves a huge panic. I can't trust the article to give me _facts_ rather than their own bias, and I can't find anything all that horrible (I find a lot of video games offensive. So? I don't have to buy them or allow them in my house. I enjoy a lot of media that other people find offensive, too, so it's not my business to tell them what to produce) or shocking. Stupid, yes. Tasteless... _oh yes_. But teaching good little christian kiddies to gun down heathens in the street? No, not really.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

They could mean more realistically 'bad' bad guys, like, say, toothy demon types.

What did you think they'd make the Atheists look like? Rule number one about propaganda: demonize your enemy. (http://www.superdickery.com/propaganda/53.html)

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Your mission is to cleanse the streets of New York, to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state

And to think that he was probably first in line to demand that Doom get banned, way back in the day. Maybe others in his congregation will rail against him for the images of sin and depravity in the game.

But really. Why use a gun at all? Why not use nukes? Because that pretty much covers everyone in New York. I think there might be about 8 baptists in the whole city.