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??

[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--)

[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]

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.