After scouring the interwebs for opinions on Christian gaming, I've found myself pleasantly surprised. The Christian gaming community is huge, and it's doing some great things.
First, I suggest checking out Jordan Ekeroth's site, Follow & Engage, which has resources for gamers that include devotions, articles, and opinion pieces. More importantly, Jordan is spearheading a movement to evangelize through video games. No, I don't mean more of this business. Let me just quote Jordan's About page:
"Video games have become one of the greatest cultural touchstones of this generation, recently surpassing Hollywood in terms of annual revenue...what I want to create is a resource to equip and inspire the church to be prepared to engage this arena of culture. If you don’t care about games, I aim to show you why you should."
At first, I was skeptical of using video games as a way to start conversations about Jesus. I wondered if Christian gamers were trying to justify playing inappropriate video games by calling them an evangelism tool. I've since changed my tune, in part because of a recent experience I had.
I was playing Dragon Age: Origins and talking about the game with a friend of mine. DA is a BioWare franchise and, as I've mentioned before, BioWare's games are fraught with sexual encounters. My friend and I were discussing the choice to romance a certain character in the game and how, as I've mentioned, your character must sleep with another character for a romance to be "complete" by BioWare standards. I told her that I was going to forego the romance trophy. She didn't understand why. I had the perfect chance to tell her how I feel about free love and how it relates to my faith, but I copped out. Instead, I told her that it was poor writing on BioWare's part for this particular character to be demanding sex and that the game was forcing a ridiculous relationship. As soon as I said it, I regretted it. While I wasn't lying, I wasn't telling her the real reason that I felt the way I did.
So much for no opportunities to tell people about Jesus through video games. I had a great opening and didn't take it.
Needless to say, I now see where the Christian gaming community is coming from, and I'm absolutely behind the movement.
Another awesome site is Game Church. I particularly enjoy this article that mentions my favorite romantic video game pairing (and also comments on the problem with BioWare romance). And here's yet another article that mourns the death of video game romance.
The Cross and the Controller is a pretty popular site as well, but I must admit that I've not read much of their stuff. Here's why: when I had my original existential meltdown over Dragon Age II this past Christmas, I went to the internet to see what other people were saying. The first place I checked was TCATC, and I was...disappointed. Their review focuses on gameplay/sound/technical aspects. Yes, I know: that's what a review is supposed to do. But you can get that kind of review from anywhere: IGN, GameSpot, every single retailer's website, etc. I was looking for opinions about the deeper aspects of the game. The review touches on theological and moral issues presented in DA II, but it never asks the big question: should we even be playing games like this?
I'm going to leave this subject alone for now. Three blog posts is a lot. I'll be playing Final Fantasy XIII-2 over Spring Break, however, and Mass Effect 3 early in the summer (hopefully). You can expect more about Jesus and gaming then.
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