Elf Sternberg

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.