Christian Video Gaming -- the muse thread.

Okay, let's see if I can knock down some of these solutions:

Scope
As I mentioned above, the problem with many turn-based RPGs (Fire Emblem, FFT, etc) is that they claim to involve wars between a huge empire and the "rebels," but you pretty much never see any evidence to suggest that either nation has an army. One solution is to invent a reason for smaller battles, such as Final Fantasy Tactics Advance's "Clan Warfare" motif. This would work in a futuristic role-playing strategy game, I think, where you call it some sort of sporting event (see:Unreal Tournament.) In fantasy, however, I think you need some sort of Empire clashing.

The other problem, however, is that empires of hundreds of warriors make for very long turns. Think end-game on Alpha Centauri. Nobody wants to wait for 200 units to each take their turn.

It becomes a question of real-time, then. Unfortunately, realtime strategy games have nothing of the complexity of their turn-based cousins. I've played Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, and while it is like Final Fantasy Tactics, I can't plan out my moves with any real detail; casting a spell manually is something I can only do once at a time, and when I do I lose all real control over everyone else. I suppose I could play pause city, but I really don't want to.

The other option, the one I favor (at this time,) is to make the game turn-based and real time. Players spend "turns" planning out their actions and then watch the next 15 minutes happen in real time, with limited control of on-the-fly actions (say, only in a certain range of your command units.) This would eliminate the process of waiting for a hundred individual moves while allowing a superior amount of planning.

Secondly, nobody wants to plan out the moves of 100 troops every turn, in minute detail. For this reason, I think that a player should only control a small amount of player characters, while the rest of his allies are computer-controlled drones. See the "Dawn of the Ancients" mod for Warcraft III, for an example of how these things work. Two huge armies cascade down either side of a ravine into each other, while the player controls a hero who can, if carefully guided, shift the balance of power so that his or her army defeats the opponents.

So, the game would play like DOTA (with some major tweaks... harder levels would probably not have so much "balance," and missions would not necessarily be about killing the enemy forts... survival, messages, etc. would be possiblities.)

Also, success and failure on these battle lines would actually be important. The DOTA-type gameplay would actually imply a larger battle-line, like the kind found in WW2, where each "flash point" makes up a piece of a much, much larger overall DOTA-type war. Losing would actually put you in a bit of hot water, as the line slowly advances towards you. You might lose entire towns, regions, or even the game, as the storyline becomes impossible to achieve. On the flip side, you may make the game easier by your relentless destruction of enemy troops, as the opposition forces are not in a region that you need to travel to (anymore.) The combat actually means something other than "this is a pre-programmed hoop you need to jump through" or "you bullied the kid next door."


Meh, I'm going to post this right now and get back to the rest later. I have a huge assignment of doom this week... man, it's bad.
 
/bump

Any more to share, Neirai? :)

And can we print and bind the posts from this thread in novella form? I remember looking at printing this thread and I think it would have taken about 35 pages.

Wow.
 
You know, I have to go back a long ways on this thread, through out the game idea for now, it's too specific. I really need to talk about What I've learned this year and Video games as missional and Missions that work in the 21st century.

Which I will.
 
Bam
He's back again, really totally necroing this thread and scaring you all.

I actually have something to contribute to this thread, now that I've had a year again to work on it.

What happened to this thread?

Basically, my thoughts got hit in the head by a really great book on missions that caused my whole theology and view of games and missions to be destroyed. It's taken me a year to make it back up.

Today I'm going to talk about Compensation Structures, Positive Pagans, Reaching the Lost, and D&D (Dungeons and Dragons.)

Warning: as with all new-wave theology, this may look like heresy or universalism at times. Bear with me, Jesus is Lord and I believe that God raised him from the dead, so I'm not a heretic.



Compensation Structures: Religions, Jobs, and Entertainment
To coin a term, "compensation structures" are religions and things that fill the role of religions in our lives.

Compensation structures because people are aware of a basic universal condition known as "the human condition:"

There is a supreme good.
There is evil.
There is lostness.
We can't make it better.

In a more theistic sense:

There is a God.
We screwed up.
The world is screwed.
We can't get to God.

All religions function is this basic way: they compensate for the fact that we can't be with God by making us work really hard in order to win back God's favor in the hopes that somehow he will fix everything.

All religions do this, whether they are Temple Judaism, Evangelical Christianity, Islam, or some obscure tribal beliefs.

Some things that aren't religions do this too, such as atheism or sports or video games.

Video games postulate worlds where we can fix the brokenness.
They also provide escapes from the real world, where we can't.

I call the collective ways that people attempt to fix, avoid, circumvent, or overcome the brokenness "Compensation structures."

Compensation structures don't work, because they are missing something. The Apostle Paul refers to this something as "the Grace of God through our Lord Jesus Christ."

The Apostle Paul calls the solution to brokenness by this name because that's its name. Grace is the only solution; Christ is the only true bearer of grace.

Above I said that Christianity is a compensation structure. It's true. Without grace, Christianity become legality, desperately trying to build bridges to God built out of blood, sweat, and tears. With Grace, Christianity becomes much better.

Each culture in the world comes with its own compensation structures. They are cultural, based in mythology, history, and collective imaginations. Basically, each culture has its own understanding of lostness. Of God, failure, and of the world being screwed up. What cultures lack is a way of fixing the problem. So people create ways of compensating for the lack of solutions. And call them religions.

Or jobs.

Or entertainment.


Positive Pagans and God-fearing Romans
In each culture you have two kinds of people: those who care about pursuing God and those who do not.

In Christianity, we call these people "Christians" and "Atheists." In paganism, these people are called "pagans" and "people who don't believe."

Now here's a thought: those people who are pagans are pagans because they care about pursuing God.

Paganism is a good thing. It means people care about God.

It might mean that they are totally misdirected, but it means they want to know God and want to have the world fixed and think it might be able to be fixed. It means they are thirsty for grace.

We call them seekers.

In the early church days, there were three kinds of believers.

First, there were Jews. These people grew up in the synagogue, were circumcised, and followed the Jewish religion. Then they believed in Jesus and became Jewish Christians. So now they followed the Jewish compensation structure, but put the person of Jesus Christ into it. In Romans, Paul claims that what they did what put Jesus into their compensation structure, fulfilling it.

Secondly, there were God-fearers. This meant Greeks who followed the Jewish religion, i.e. prayed to YHWH, observed many practices, but didn't want to be circumcised, largely because it hurt a lot. Peter caused a scandal in Acts because he let God-fearers become Christians without being circumcised, but the Holy Spirit kind of did it first. This caused a scandal because the God-fearers didn't follow the Jewish culture and practices (the whole compensation structure thing.)

Thirdly, there were the Gentiles that Paul converted. These people didn't follow any practices of Judaism. They had totally different Greek and Roman ideas of lostness and good and evil and the meaning of life. Their compensation structure was alien to the Jewish one. Paul spent his entire life dealing with the scandal caused by the fact that he insisted that these Gentiles did not need to know anything about the Jewish compensation structure in order to be saved. They only needed to place Jesus at the center of their cultural structures.

For Paul's detractors, the thing they could not stand was the idea that these Greek Gentiles didn't follow Jewish cultural laws, ideas, mythologies*, histories, and rules. They tried to get Paul to force the Jewish structure on the Gentiles. Instead, the Church ruled that the only thing that was important was that the Greek-based-Christians abstained from sexual immorality and possibly from the following of multiple religions simultaneously (they also said to not eat meat offered to idols and not to eat blood -- but Paul later says "don't bother, it's because they just could not see past those two hangups.)

So. Back to pagans.

Pagans or religious people of all sorts have compensation structures that they maintain because they feel that they need to. The Greeks that converted to Christianity did it in the context of their own beliefs, because they took those beliefs seriously. Those who did not often did not because they already didn't take those beliefs seriously.

In our own cultural times, people who believe in a mishmash of things do because they take their beliefs seriously.

Those who play video games often do so because that is how they compensate for lostness, because they take that lostness seriously.

Those who play video games because "it's just a game, dude," don't take it as seriously, and they're harder to reach.


Reaching the Lost: The Harvest Paradigm
Here's a monkey wrench to throw in the middle of the discussion: When Jesus was on Earth, he sent his disciples out on a mission of euangelion. We get the phrase evangelism from it. Jesus sent them out to help people put the good news (grace) into their structures.

When he sends them out, Jesus tells them, "The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field" (Luke 10.2). This is the basis for a lot of our evangelical efforts.

I need to ask this question: what do harvesters do?

They certainly don't plant. They don't plow, they don't water. They harvest.

Much of our evangelical language sounds like we've mistaken this idea. We speak of planting the seeds, watering, growing.

Of course, so does Paul. Keep that in mind when I say this.

Most evangelicals believe that salvation is impossible without the preexistent work of the Holy Spirit. Some of this work is done through Christians. Some of it is worked out by the Spirit by itself.

Cultural compensation structures aren't bad. They're evidence of the Holy Spirit's work and while they contain human mistakes, they are the seeds and maybe even the plants.

We need to harvest. I don't know how a harvest-oriented mission looks, but I'm trying to find out.


Dungeons and Dragons
I have a friend, a Christian, who's really into D&D. Today I asked him, "how do you convert D&D players?" In other words, "how do you put Jesus into a D&D player's compensation structures?"

Let me give you a rundown:

D&D Players (the seriously "religious" ones) play D&D because:
They believe the world is screwed up.
They believe in good.
They wish to be heroic and to make the good happen.
They wish to escape from a world where they can't be heroes into an environment where they can fantasize about being heroes.

How do you put Jesus into a D&D player's world?


So, you readers, how do you put Jesus into the structure of a video gamer's world?
 
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I should throw in a quick addendum to the previous posts.

At one point the focus of the game I was sketching out was "Forgiving yourself for what you've done."

The Holy Spirit has moved past that point in our culture; now if I have to make a stab at what He's doing without a ton of research I would say:

Moving past your offense with God (it is possible to be offended, albeit wrongly, with God. You hold a grudge against God for a perceived thing that God did.)
Rejecting and abandoning false ideals.
Accepting God in the midst of your pain and suffering.

So any game I'd design right now would involve these themes.
 
Alright, it's time for a bit of a recap and recant time. When you come back to something after nearly a year, there's some things you want to clarify and some things you want to take back. Actually, there isn't a lot of what I've written that I dislike, but a number of attitudes need to be rehashed and repented of. Today I will talk about the three enemies of Christian media creation.

Over the last number of years, I've had a fairly bleak attitude towards Christian developers, because of the lack of quality creations that they exhibit. I believed that Christian developers were lazy, or greedy, or had falsity and double-mindedness in their quests to create games.

Really, this was an immature view hatched by a six-year old and held for nearly 20 years until challenged. It has been challenged, and it needs to go.

One of the major things that challenged my view (and lead to a year off of this thread) was the arrival of Christian developers, such as "Developer" and Soma Games, both of who are truly trying to create quality Christian games. Shouts to them.

With the arrival of these developers, I found I could no longer continue writing from a spirit of cynicism. I might harm these developers by including them in unfair generalities, when they are indeed following their passions.

Nowadays, I believe I have a much more mature, balanced view. I don't paint Christian developers as being this enemy for me to avoid. Instead, I believe that Christian developers face real challenges that can lead to the negative results that caused the younger me such ire.

And now, three challenges that can inflict Christian developers.

The Messiah Complex, or, the Unsung Hero Problem
I think this is a problem for anyone who feels called by God to do something that doesn't fall right into the middle of the public church imagination. If God calls you to be a lawyer, or a politician, or to work for the U.N. or for an insurance company, you might get flak from your churches, saying such jobs are the jobs of thieves and tyrants and good people ought not to do that. But you're not likely to agree with them.

If you make video games, you might hear that you are working for the devil making the devil's tools and playing the devil's games in the devil's playgrounds and the devil's arenas or the devil's league. And while you're not likely to believe them if you have a real call from God, you might have another problem or challenge that results from their opposition: you may start to believe that you are the only one who has this call, or that you're called to be the man against the empire, or that you're the only one who can serve God in this way, in this industry...

This happened to Elijah, the super-cool prophet in the Bible. After he "singlehandedly" defeated the evil priests of Baal with fire from the sky (actually, after God saved Elijah's butt with fire from heaven,) Elijah ran out into the desert and called on God for help, repeatedly saying that his life sucked because "I have been very zealous for the LORD God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, broken down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too." 1 Kings 18-19, a lot of times.

Many Christians can feel this way. They believe they have a call. They are very passionate about that call. The others reject that call, and do their best to oppose the people with that call, and maybe even try to snuff out the call in young people before it can come to fruition. And I am the only one left.

Elijah, by the way, was wrong.

The Lord replies to Elijah in 1 Kings 18-19: "I reserve seven thousand in Israel—all whose knees have not bowed down to Baal and all whose mouths have not kissed him."

Elijah felt that he was the only one in the prophet industry. God had 7,000.

Not "7,000 who have turned back to me because you showed up the priests of Baal."

7,000 who didn't turn to Baal in the first place.

Many Christian media folks feel alone, like they have the only call and the only passion to pursue God's work. God has the 7,000.

Places like this one exist to help Christians feel like they are not alone. But Christian media folks often act they they are. And this perception leads to the other challenges facing the Christian media designer.
 
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