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

[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. :)