Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Vincent Gonzalez
A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in
partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Ph.D. in the Religious Studies
department in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Chapel Hill
2014
Approved by:
Yaakov Ariel
Jason Bivins
Jonathan Boyarin
David Morgan
Barry Saunders
Randall Styers
©2014
Vincent Gonzalez
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ii
ABSTRACT
Evangelical Christians have been creating video games for over thirty years, outpacing
the efforts of all other religions. By the count that guides the present study, 773 games were
made for religious audiences through 2010, of which 474 identify their affiliation as only
“Christian,” or “biblical.” Like other artifacts of digital religion, these games allow us to see the
entanglement of people’s theological and technological universes. However, unlike many other
aspects of digital religion, religious video gaming’s novel artistic forms, cultural critiques, and
theological possibilities largely blossomed beneath notice. Evangelical video game culture, thus,
presents the creative production of a historically significant avant garde whose critical
perspective has been neglected outside its own community. In particular, Evangelical video
gaming transforms the concerns that connect it to other digital cultures – “violence,” for instance,
This study combines the methods of Religious Studies, Science and Technology Studies,
and Cultural Studies to show how the popular artifacts of digital religion can shed light upon
their cultural context. My initial frame orients Evangelical video games through broad theoretical
concerns and a series of cultural histories then focus our attention upon specific telling instances.
video games in terms of the digital, religion, and play. Chapter two considers how groups learn
iii
to live with computers and details the specific stakes of digital religion for Evangelical Christians
in the context of “spiritual warfare.” Chapter three situates my catalog of religious games within
a detailed history of digital religion. Chapter four focuses on the place of Evangelicals in the
debates around video game “violence.” Chapter five then considers how those debates are visible
in seven Evangelical First-Person Shooter games. Chapter six provides a theoretical orientation
to the future of Evangelical gaming by considering the notion of “immersion” in games. Chapter
seven concludes by summarizing findings and offering suggestions for further research. Finally,
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction .........................................................................................................................1
Concerning Dynamism........................................................................................................8
Conclusion …....................................................................................................................38
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………40
Introduction ..……..........................................................................…...............................77
Technologies of Bricolage and Religious Gaming's First Bloom [1990-1998] …......... 105
Conclusion ......................................................................................................................143
Introduction......................................................................................…............................145
Locating Violence............................................................................................................158
Conclusion ......................................................................................................................186
vi
CHAPTER 5: TAKING THE KINGDOM BY FORCE: LIVING AND DYING IN THE
EVANGELICAL FIRST-PERSON SHOOTER
Introduction ….................................................................................................................189
Rev 7 …............................................................................................................................219
Conclusion …..................................................................................................................232
Introduction ….................................................................................................................234
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................255
Introduction......................................................................................................................258
viii
LIST OF FIGURES
ix
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
x
Chapter 1:
Three Fundamental Dynamics:
Digital, Religious, and Playful
“At another seashore between the land of atoms and the sea of bits, we are now facing the challenge of
reconciling our dual citizenships in the physical and digital worlds”
- Hiroshi Ishii
You have been here before. Last time you entered Rome's under-city you survived for
several hours. You walked with your sword out in front of you, down first into Rome's great
network of attached basements, pursued by armed guards. Then further down through sewers,
caves, and prisons, a great single tangle of incongruous architectural styles and building
1
Hiroshi Ishii, “Tangible Bits: Beyond Pixels,” Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Tangible
1
materials. But the demons overtook you. You fired bursts of Holy Spirit from your sword at the
guards, aiming it like a rifle, and when hit repeatedly each of them converted to Christianity. But
So you have come back. You start walking toward the alcove where an angel –a flying
man with a sparkling gold tunic and biceps as thick as his waist– will again give you the Sword
of the Spirit. But this time you notice that just outside there are two guards standing at the
entrance to an ambiguously pagan temple. Because you are not yet armed, the guards don't move
to attack. Walking closer, you find the Romans wearing short, well-fitted, brass skirts over their
muscular legs. Their faces are identical. As you kneel down beside one of them to look more
closely, both soldiers turn their heads to look back at you, their faces rendered in fixed surprise.
They begin to shout, “Whatta you looking at?” “Whatta you looking at?”
….
software in 1999 and marketed as a “high-quality, Christ-centered computer [game] (Phil 4:13)”
“to be enjoyed by Christians and non-Christians,” complete with “many verses of the Bible to be
interpreted by the player as the Holy Spirit leads. (Psalm 68:11)”2 The moment of dialogue with
an in-game entity described above took place as I made my first steps into the field to begin my
dissertation research. I had approached the temple looking for material traces of American
religious life, particularly its popular manifestations in digital media. But at the soft place where
2
Philippians 4:13, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” [KJV]. Psalm 68:11, “The Lord
gave the word: great was the company of those that published it” [KJV]. N'Lightning Software Development, Inc.,
“Mission Statement,” archived by the Internet Archive January 7, 2001, accessed March 3, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20010107205200/http://www.n-lightning.com/corp.htm .
2
religious), accelerated by peculiarities of play, I found more life than I had anticipated. Critically,
“Whatta you looking at?” was not directed to my body in the chair, an analog mass of which the
guard could be at best dimly aware, but to my body in the game, a digital entity with capacities
for action nearly identical to those of the guard himself. We both carried swords, were deployed
into those anachronistic mazes to fight one another, and neither of us could sit down. But most
importantly, we each faced the other demanding an explanation for the intersection of our gazes.
The guard's question, “Whatta you looking at?” is a reminder of the entangled creation of
ethnographic subjects and objects, drawing our attention toward the surprising range of agencies
(including scholars) which emerge from religious applications of digital technology. To answer
the guard's question, then: My dissertation is an historical and ethnographic exploration of the
ways religious communities are coming to live among the new agencies and within the new
models of human life presented in digital media. My primary vantage point in this exploration is
the Evangelical Christian video game, particularly as it facilitates interaction between debates
reasonable to assume that my analog readership would want to know why? The answer is that
digital religion is thriving, but no scholarly effort has yet combined the methods of religious
studies, cultural studies, and Science and Technology Studies [STS] needed to produce an
adequate analysis. It has been sixty years since computers first read text on sacred matters
(Dante, as translated for an electro-mechanical punch card mainframe); from their first moments
in the late seventies, personal computers have been managing church finances and playing
religious video games; by the year 2000, the Internet circulated religious information as widely
3
as it circulated music; and at present, from online kabbalah courses, to Hindu meditation
software, to the papal Facebook application, it has become difficult to find any religion not
developing new ranges of expertise that mingle the domains of programmers and theologians.3
This consistent growth of digital technologies toward religious ends calls for concerted
theoretical analysis, and the diverse efflorescence of this growth requires that any theorization
Within the expanse of digital religion, I have selected video games as a data set, because
it is a field small enough to address comprehensively, but too large to ignore. By my count, 773
religious video games were released between 1982 and 2011, of which 474 entries describe their
religious affiliation only as “Christian” or “Biblical” (71 more name a particular Christian
denomination as their intended audience). And, further, the religious video game is a compelling
data set precisely because it has largely blossomed beneath notice. While computerized scripture
indexes and religious web presences occasionally respond to the judgment of extrinsic
intellectual (academic, ecclesiastical) professionals, the first thirty years of religious video
gaming were evaluated almost exclusively in language that emerged together with the games
themselves. Thus, if much of the theology visible in my opening description of Catechumen (the
Sword of the Spirit as salvation rifle, for instance) seemed quite unlike theologies created for the
pulpit or seminary, this should not lead us to high-minded dismissal, but to sober attention.
Evangelical Christian video games are the creative production of a daring and historically-
significant avant garde. To do them justice will require us to reshape our analytical categories,
3
Genevieve Bell, “The Age of Auspicious Computing,” Interactions (Sept.-Oct. 2004), 76-77. Elena Larsen.
“Wired Churches, Wired Temples: Taking Congregations and Missions into Cyberspace,” (Washington D.C.: Pew
Internet and American Life Project, 2000), 8.
4
coming in the process to new understandings of many other phenomena as well.
entities like programs, viruses, bots, and video game characters.4 To explain and manage these
new relationships constitutes a new kind of expertise, a range of organic intellectual labor that
can speak phrases like “the internet tempts us,” “video games make children violent,” “twitter
challenges tyranny,” and “educational software is the future.” Much research has already been
intervene at this juncture.5 This dissertation shows the place of this expertise in digital religion
network of gamers, developers, parents, commentators, and computers. This network negotiates
the place of algorithmic entities in Christianity by discussing, designing, distributing and playing
video games.
These negotiations usually concern whether and how video games might stop distracting
children from the gospel, and perhaps even teach it to them. However, it is noteworthy that
“violence” has become a key term in these negotiations, even to the extent that it sometimes
sidelines “word,” “truth,” and other long-standing terms of Christian theological concern. While
this word has its own history of theological controversy stretching from the differences between
4
Consider, for instance, a recent study which tried to compare human and automated Internet traffic: Daily Mail
Reporter, “Over 60 Percent of Internet Traffic Now Generated by BOTS that Can Distribute Malware, Steal Data
and Swipe Passwords,” Daily Mail Online, December 13, 2013, accessed March 3, 2014,
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2531021/Over-60-percent-internet-traffic-generated-BOTS-distribute-malw
are-steal-data-swipe-passwords.html .
5
See, for instance, Matthew Scott Hindman, The Myth of Digital Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2009); Martin Spinelli, “Democratic Rhetoric and Emergent Media: The Marketing of Participatory Community on
the Radio and the Internet,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 3.2 (08/2000), 268-278.
5
Matthew 11:12-14 (where “the violent” succeed in entering the Kingdom by force) and Luke
16:16 (where the outcome is less conclusive), to contemporary debates over the relationship
between Christianity and “just war,” these are rarely referenced.6 We find, instead, the
network of computers and humans that constitutes itself by deepening, extending, and sacralizing
concerns it shares with the simultaneously emerging public of worldly computing.7 For instance,
like the Entertainment Software Ratings Board [ESRB], Christian game developers tend to
presume a syntagmatic chain from red spatters to blood, to violence, to viewer imitation, to age-
restricted circulation; but unlike the worldly ESRB, the Christian developers intermittently
strengthen, or challenge, this chain with Biblical mandates concerning art, blood, violence, or
children. In this way, Evangelical game criticism accelerates popular media criticism until it
opens unforeseen ontological possibilities within the ongoing public negotiations on violence,
media and otherwise. This is my study's second “why:” worldly negotiations concerning media
violence (including academic studies, literary and laboratory) tend to obscure their presumptions
about the nature of the human as mere common-sense; by observing the edge where an
critique of the ideological structures that undergird an emerging digital culture. In a word, as
academic media scholars, we should study Evangelical video games and learn from them new
6
George Aichele, “Jesus' Violence,” in Pippin, Tina, and George Aichele. Violence, Utopia, and the Kingdom of
God: Fantasy and Ideology in the Bible (London: Routledge, 2002), 72-91.
7
Michael Warner, “The Evangelical Public Sphere” (presentation, Critical Speakers Series, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, September 22, 2011). Dr. Warner generously gave me his lecture notes, and quotations will
be taken from this document. See also, audio of related lectures at: Michael Warner, “The Evangelical Public
Sphere,” accessed March 18, 2014, http://repository.upenn.edu/rosenbach/2/.
6
modes of critique.
Having briefly addressed what and why, a word on how my study is organized. The
present introduction offers a vocabulary and methodology for exploring religious video games in
terms of the digital, the religious, and play. By seeking out such capacious dynamics to frame the
dissertation’s object, this chapter presents religious video games as evocative objects that
provoke surprising new perspectives for a great range of research. Chapter two presents a
theoretical perspective on the ways particular groups and their digital technologies transform one
another, and focuses our attention on the particular stakes of video gaming for Evangelical
Christians. Chapter three then situates Evangelical video games as historical instances of digital
religion.
Chapters four and five examine game-violence as a matter of concern through which
Evangelical video games locate their counterpublic. Chapter four performs this work by
historically situating Evangelical game critique within game-violence debates. Chapter five then
explores instances of the First-Person Shooter genre as recreated for Evangelical Christians,
engaging eight games in a way that approximates ethnographic field research, documenting the
Chapter six begins to close the study by organizing reflections on the future of
recapitulating the previous chapters and proposing possible areas for research building upon the
present study.
7
Concerning Dynamism
Attending closely to religious video gaming can transform our larger theoretical
understandings of the world. That these curious artifacts have been so thoroughly neglected by
academic research should lead us to wonder what else we miss, and when we apply the tools that
their study requires, we find the world around them quite different than we remember it.
Even a full thirty years into its emergence, the phenomenon of religious video gaming
remains avant-garde. That is to say, its creativity has consistently charged ahead into areas
unmarked by extrinsic evaluative standards. Most of what has been said about religious games
has remained in the communities that create and enjoy them. Every few years a newspaper
discovers an example and writes an exclamatory article on the subject, and bloggers on obscure
games have recently discovered religious instances as a convenient cluster for derision, but
academic analysis has been almost entirely absent. Perhaps we academics have been mostly
silent for the same reason newspapers have been titillated and trolls have been belligerent: the
religious video game is simultaneously digital, religious, and playful. Whatever tentative sense
we make of one category might be able to sustain the weight of a second, but with three, it is
Let us begin, then, by making dizzying complexity our foundational assumption. We can
well situate the problematics of the digital, religion, and play as varieties of what Donna
Haraway calls “contact zones.” She herself adopts the term from Mary Pratt's studies of colonial
interaction: “A 'contact' perspective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their
8
power.”8 A contact zone, then, is a sort of plane, like the surface of the sea, across which we
might say there was interaction, if it made any sense to say the various sides would exist without
Like Haraway's When Species Meet, this dissertation seems to find contact zones
everywhere. This is because both attempt to consistently apply “agential realism,” a relational
ontology developed through Karen Barad's work as both a physicist and feminist historian of
science. From this perspective, “the primary ontological unit is not independent objects with
inherent boundaries and properties, but rather phenomena. In my agential realist elaboration,
phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of observer and observed, or
of intra-acting 'agencies.' That is, phenomena are ontologically primitive relations – relations
without preexisting relata.”9 An agential-realist ontology has no room, then, for “individualism”
(including, but not especially human individualism), the indemonstrable, and finally unhelpful,
ideology that parcels the universe into discrete “things.”10 Wherever it turns, an agential realist
In the context of the academic humanities, agential realism has especially interesting
effects because it cannot locate human beings but only human becomings. Though we are
professionally bound to consideration of the human, this ontology grants us permission to admit
that our instruments cannot locate that creature's independent characteristics. The human is
8
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 6-7, quoted
in Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 216.
9
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 139.
10
Barad, 139.
9
entangled with the world around it, and the researcher emerges together with her/his object of
study. Entelechies like reason vanish, making room for relational practices like reasoning (or at
least rationalization). Our disciplinary focuses become gestures toward specific dynamics.
Ranges of inquiry like religion, digital culture, or play describe immense contact zones between
the human and the various others with which it emerges. From digital phenomena there emerge
algorithms that raise questions about human intelligence; from religious phenomena there
emerge border negotiations and cross-border commerce with angels, demons and other
non-humans; from playful phenomena there emerge lively objects that we cannot quite place as
Readers may freely (and will necessarily) disagree on the initial referent of “human” in
these relational formulas. This diversity is not a problem to be solved. What matters is that
relational statements of this kind are read as describing dynamics of emergence across which the
The opening section already presented a few of the strange tendencies of the humanities
with a contingent human. Above, the brief mention of the awareness of digital entities was not
but only to describe the specific senses in which digital entities like that Roman guard can
process their surroundings. From an agential realist position, awareness is an achievement within
an economy of knowing that does not prioritize the human: “Brain cells are not the only ones that
hold memories, respond to stimuli, or think thoughts… Knowing is a specific engagement of the
world where part of the world becomes differentially intelligible to another part of the world in
10
its differential accountability to and for that of which it is a part.”11
Since this study is concerned with Evangelical Christianity, it describes the space outside that
religion as “the world.” Of course, both “worldly” and “secular” are English cognates of
saeculum, meaning “of the present age,” but locating them requires different ontological
orientations. To locate the secular is to attain transcendent knowledge, to see the age without the
distraction of any particular ontological orientation, a task which exceeds the ambition of the
present study. To locate the worldly, on the other hand, only requires “mimetic skepticism,” a
good faith attempt to integrate the concepts under examination into the study in hopes that the
One does not apply a relational ontology in order to make things more complicated, but
a blurry world. The religious video game emerges at the intersection of three dynamics, where
religion, the digital, and play transform one another and bring one another into being. Programs,
prophets, and players draw one another into existence, troubling our easy conceptions of what it
means to be human. The remainder of this chapter will locate religious video games through
these three dynamics so the remainder of the text can burrow deep into the specifics of
11
Barad, 379.
12
Robert Alter, Yoga in Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
11
Where Does the Digital Begin?
How shall we describe the potentials religious people discover in technology? Bruno
Latour would have you remember the weight of a hammer in your hand. It is not simply that the
hammer allowed you to enact preexisting desires; there are visions of action that only arise while
you feel the hammer's heft. “It is what James Gibson has so well documented with the notion of
‘affordance,’ at once permission and promise: thanks to the hammer, I become literally another
man.”13 Or, in Gibsons's own words, “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the
animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill... an affordance is neither an objective
property nor a subjective property; or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the
of the environment and a fact of behavior.”14 The implications of the subject/object collapse are
clearest when we consider the affordances between similar animals: “We pay closest attention to
the optical and acoustic information that specifies what the other person is, invites, threatens, and
does.”15 But, even when we are considering the affordances at the juncture of very dissimilar
entities, like a human and a hammer, an affordance describes the possibility for action in a
co-creative interaction: driving a nail into wood is a task which neither you nor the hammer
could perform apart, and as you take on this possibility you both become something new.
In this light, we can begin to discuss Evangelical video games as a new possibility, an
13
Bruno Latour and Couze Venn, “Morality and Technology: The End of the Means,” Theory, Culture & Society
19.5-6 (2002): 250.
14
James Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New York: Taylor and Francis Group, 1986), 127,
129.
15
Gibson, 128.
12
affordance that only emerges where the Evangelical counterpublic and video gaming create one
another anew. However, these are instructive subsets of the digital and the religious,
respectively, and we cannot well understand the Evangelical video game without understanding
the greater parallel affordance in digital religion. Toward that end, the following two sections
present working definitions of the digital, and the religious. The presumption that there exists
digital religion can be expanded as follows: digital media present algorithmic models for human
life, and these models may be adopted and adapted, inhabited and inhibited by religious groups,
I place this initial assumption upon the mutually constitutive terrain of the affordance to
prevent it from reading as a chiliastic species of technological determinism.16 Quite the contrary,
I hope to demonstrate that the history of digital religion is a trail of co-emergences that would be
determined. While new models of humanity are at stake, the present study shares little ground
with theorists who announce or anticipate the passing of homo analogicus. Already in 1998,
Nicholas Negroponte asserted optimistically that “belonging to a digital culture binds people
more strongly than the territorial adhesives of geography – if all parties are truly digital,” and in
2001 Richard Stiver fretted that “technology is destroying the human capacity to symbolize our
life-milieu.”17 If credible, either proposition would have profound implications for the
possibility of religion. Yet neither is pertinent to the present analysis. The assertion that, because
16
That is, prediction and theorization on “last things,” including, especially, the world's last days.
17
Nicholas Negroponte, “Beyond Digital,” Wired, June 12, 1998, accessed March 25, 2011,
http://web.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/Wired/WIRED6-12.html; Richard Stivers, Technology as Magic: The Triumph
of the Irrational (New York: Continuum Publishing, 2001), 42.
13
I could approach those guards and hear their question, I have become digital is only as true as the
assertion that the guards became analog, in that their question actually provoked me to ask at
what I was looking.18 When we cautiously seek the break – either the analytical last instance
beyond which the material and economic changes of the information age are determinative of the
human consciousness surrounding them, or the apocalyptic/utopian last instance, the point of no
return (perhaps already passed) of speculative futurists, beyond which humans will be more
digital than analog – we find only hybridities, and never a change in kind. The first thirty years
of the Evangelical Christian video game, and the history of digital religion more generally, give
us little cause to anticipate the sudden arrival of a new age. Religious video games present a
contact zone between the biological and the artifactual, the sacred and the scientific, an
Given the presence of entities like Catechumen's angels, demons, and humans – beings
whose liveliness is so closely bound to the recent possibilities of digital computing – it would be
disingenuous to propose an analysis free of surprising discontinuities. Surely there was a time
when such things did not happen; certainly many worlds emerged and passed away before the
creation of digital angels. The question is where to place this line historically, and to what
material situation it corresponds. Both the question, and its answer, can be well introduced
the digits of a human hand. The ancient farmer used her fingers to transform how much rope she
18
For an enthusiastic and highly speculative account of an epochal shift wherein most humans would come to
consider most aspects of their lives in terms of “bits” rather than “atoms” see, Nicolas Negroponte, Being Digital
(New York : Knopf, 1995).
14
held into how many arm-lengths it was, by raising one finger with each comparison passed. No
part of this process, however, was unambiguously discrete: both ropes and arms have soft edges,
a nail never digs into a palm deeply enough to mark an absolute on/off distinction. But, for the
purposes of memory (personal and transmitted) the simplification was quite effective. Four
fingers and a stretched arm created a compound sign that could reproduce a workable
approximation of that first rope from another. This is the work of discretization (dividing
continuous quantity into countable units or stable ratios, including 1/0, on/off, yes/no). And
beyond durable but imperfect mnemonics, discretization also allows for the manipulation of
quantity through algorithms (finite sets of prearranged categories and commands arranged into
logical chains, or to use a definition that recalls the Roman guard who opened our inquiry, “any
sequence of instructions that can be obeyed by a robot.”)19 But the algorithm long predates the
robot: if asked, the farmer could count off three ropes, each four arms in length.
Of course, if we were to follow certain theorists of the algorithm, like Daniel Dennett, it
would become quite difficult to bound this study at all; the angels would always have been
robots. He argues that sunlight (in producing cracks in clay), waves (in producing grains of
sand), animals (in producing corpses), and brains (in producing language) are always only
performing algorithms.20 But to get to this point Dennett must declare that there is no mind
anyplace, a proposition that requires a God’s-eye-view of the universe, and which seems no less
19
Harold S. Stone, Introduction to Computer Organization and Data Structures (New York: McGraw Hill, 1972),
4.
20
Dennett, D. C., Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1995), 57.
15
one-eyed-god what “holiness” is to the Christian God.
To quote Bruno Latour “The Big Picture is just that: a picture.” Any theory that claims to
offer an image of everything can present only a “panorama,” a closed system whose inclusions
seamlessly connect to one another, preventing the entry of extraneous data.21 So if we instead
join Latour and Nietzsche in abandoning the study of everything-at-once, we might limit our use
world-facing edge. Whether humans claim to have painstakingly extracted an algorithm from
surrounding reality, or carefully imposed it upon matter, this specific kind of algorithm marks a
shifting frontier around humanity, a robosphere where the non-human world seems to scintillate
with intelligence. If there are algorithms neither created nor discovered by humans, we need not
vacuum-tubes, and transistors have each formed artifactual discretizing machines that have
more and more complicated algorithmic processes. For this dissertation, a chain of algorithmic
machines is called “a computer.” And where these machines discretize their own outputs to
binary (on/off) sequences to communicate with one another, they are described collectively as
“the digital.” Everything else is identified as “the analog,” with no presumption that the
processes inside of digital machines (like the flow of electrons in wires) are really discrete, nor
that processes out here (like the leaps of electrons from one atom to another) are really
21
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), 187.
16
continuous.
Here, having provisionally limned the digital, I should take a moment to explain how this
discovered by humans, and if those algorithms communicate in binary, they are “digital.” Within
these bounds, the digital is a historically specific affordance between the algorithmic and the
human –a range of reciprocal interaction and emergence. Secondly, it is noteworthy that this
definition of the digital marks a provocative boundary, at least from the human side. Perhaps
because the digital necessarily includes communication between algorithms, or perhaps because
of some secondary effect of that communication which humans read as confusingly familiar, the
digital seems to provoke questions about the limits of humanity in ways that isolated algorithms
do not. “Do computers have rights?” and “Is Deep Blue smarter than Kasparov?” are provocative
questions, whereas “Does long-division have rights?” and “Am I smarter than rounding up?” are
apparently incoherent.22 In Latour's terms, the single algorithm is already a nature-culture hybrid
that demonstrates the contingency of the division of humans from the world, but its challenge
was long overlooked; the computer, however, as a system of algorithmic machines, is itself a
That computers raise questions on the nature of human intelligence should not surprise
us. The first instance of digital computing was Herman Hollerith's punch card tabulation system
for the 1890 US census, and it was invented specifically because “barbaric” human accounting
22
For a psychoanalytic study of the ways computer usage transforms the human subjectivization, with special
attention to how changes in patterns of dreaming seem to indicate a provisionalization of the boundaries between the
human interior and the world, see Raymond Barglow, The Crisis of the Self in the Age of Information: Computers,
Dolphins, and Dreams (London u.a: Routledge, 1994).
23
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993), 49-51.
17
could not adequately perform the algorithmic tasks of human-counting: “It is to-day impossible
to obtain the slightest reliable statistical information regarding the conjugal conditions of our
people.”24 Sixty years later, an article by Alan Turing established the word “computer” as we use
“The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines are intended
to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer. The human computer is
supposed to be following fixed rules; he has no authority to deviate from them in any detail.”25
This article, further, establishes “the imitation game” as an enduring standard for machine
intelligence. To wit, it asks whether a computer could play a game whose only object is to
imitate a human for a human judge, and whether it could win. “These questions replace our
original, 'Can machines think?'”26 With the ongoing creation of computers that regularly win the
imitation game –as well as chess and “Jeopardy”– the nearness of computer and human
Though the computer cannot be separated from this excitement, it must not be confused
for it. As long as there have been computers, their nearness to humanity has invested them with
mythical qualities. Steve Jobs, for instance, called the iPad “magical and revolutionary,” and
early players described Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985) as “jumping into a TV cartoon and
24
Herman Hollerith, “An Electrical Tabulating System,” The Quarterly (Columbia School of Mines) X.16 (April
1889), 238-255.
25
Alan Turing, “Computer Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind, 59 (1950), 433-460, digital version accessed March
3, 2014, http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html .
26
Ibid.
18
becoming the star character.”27 Historical computers and their attendant myths will inform our
present study. The myths of possible computers – like those which will allegedly replace
interhuman romance, or which contain the entire universe – will be approached as a type of story
that accompanies historical computers. That is to say, if the games we study seem to be diverse
or repetitive, simplistic or complex, or however else, it will not be because they were made on
computers, but perhaps because they were made on those computers. In every instance, the
To recapitulate, this section began with the notion of the affordance, a possibility created
in mutual transformation, and set out to locate “the digital” as half of the affordance well named
“digital religion.” The digital, it seems, is a strangely lively range among the algorithms that
humans have claimed to discover or create. While the apparent intelligence of these algorithms
always problematizes the location of the human a little, their automation and acceleration in
binary computers has provoked startling new questions on who we are with respect to
algorithmic life. Are we leaving our bodies for digital worlds? Are we leaving our lovers for
digital ones? Will computers replace us altogether? These questions are interesting, for a study of
this sort, because they are intimately connected with the entangled emergence of historically
27
Apple, “Apple Launches iPad,” accessed March 3, 2014,
https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/01/27Apple-Launches-iPad.html ; Nancy Mullen, “Nintendo reigns in
Toyland, but parents rule at home,” Christian Science Monitor (Boston, MA) December 5, 1988; Daniel Golden, “In
Search of Princess Toadstool,” The Boston Globe November 20, 1988, Sunday, City Edition.
19
religious, I deploy a definition of the digital which articulates it to religious studies. And,
negotiations concerning the place of humanity among non-human entities as “religion.”28 Within
this frame, I understand the work of religious studies to be the investigation of discourses and
practices that structure commerce across borders of humanity, and/or negotiate that border's
position. Religious studies, thus, might investigate the shrines, rituals, scriptures, and meditations
through which humans and various non-human beings communicate, and the historical processes
This definition is well suited to the study of Evangelical games, first, in that it allows us
to discuss world-making projects shared between Christians, their God, and various other
agencies without reducing any of them to analogies. And second, it allows us to observe
interactions of this sort even when they are unclothed in an aura of factuality, and seem,
ultimately, unconcerned. That is, it allows us to presume religion is real, without presuming that
it is believed. If we frame the religious as a field of quite serious and fully believed notions,
religious video games become unthinkable, but so too does most lived religion, that range of
intrepid ad hoc practice that necessarily exceeds (and frequently transgresses) documented
theologies. Robert Orsi's definition, created to grasp lived religion, and focused on “making the
invisible visible” so it can be “negotiated and bargained with, touched and kissed, made to bear
human anger and disappointment” would have produced an equally viable, though somewhat
28
Authentic Fakes, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), vii-viii.
20
different study of religious games.29 In the end, any definition that frames religion as the
mutually-constitutive interaction between humans and equally contingent others, will work
nicely. I selected Chidester's, however, because it was created to grasp not only the work of lived
religion, but specifically of world-making projects that seem to neither apply seriousness, nor
produce belief.
Let us consider, for instance, Timothy and Titus (Sunday Software, 2007), an Evangelical
game which, like Catechumen, we will want to call “religious,” but which might not be believed
by anyone. Here we have an action-adventure game starring the authors of the eponymous
Epistles as a superheroic duo, traveling the Mediterranean in pursuit of a woman who escaped
with Paul's letters to the churches. At the top of the screen there are meters for resources that the
game calls “faith,” “hope,” and “love,” and which a non-Christian game might call “magic,”
“lives,” and “health.” Thus, if I fall off a ledge, or am attacked by non-Christians, I lose a
pre-arranged quantity of Love; when Love runs out entirely I lose one Hope. But this loss of
Love can be prevented in various ways by expending Faith (it can be spent, for instance, on
healing maneuvers, or to power my glowing-light defenses). That is, Faith, like magic in other
games, is a sort of quantified electricity that can perform an assortment of in-game tasks.
The names of these three quantities seem to have been selected for their prominent place
in 1 Corinthians 13:13, but how does that contribute to this game's religious work? Would, in
fact, the game have been any different if they had been called “magic,” “lives,” and “health?”
Note first how a rhetoric of belief does little to clarify what is happening. There is no proposition
29
Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 73-74.
21
Illustration 2: “Pick up yellow wings to get more Hope”
here to believe. If the player were to learn from this game, for instance, that there is a rigid
economy wherein Faith, Hope, and Love are exchangeable one for another in various ways,
those hoping to defend the game would easily disown the heresies thus produced as the fault of a
player who forgot that this was “just a game.” In some cases this disavowal is offered by
developers - The War in Heaven's (Eternal Warriors, 1999) instruction manual: “Although
spiritual warfare is a very real and serious subject, the War in Heaven is primarily a game, not a
theological treatise.” - and in other cases it is fans who dismiss the heretical seriousness - A
positive review of Left Behind: Eternal Forces (Left Behind Games, 2006): "I have to admit that
it’s a bit unrealistic losing your faith just because you hear cussing or rock music by evil
musicians. Then again, it’s just a game.”30 Likewise, reversing the process, for instance, by
30
Eternal Warriors LLC. “About the Game” in The War in Heaven (ValuSoft, 1999); “Left Behind: Eternal Forces,”
accessed March 18, 2014, http://www.christcenteredgamer.com/index.php/reviews/18-computer/4855-left-behind-
eternal-forces.
22
understanding in-game health through 1 Corinthians 13, while not heretical per se, produces
gibberish (“Health points are patient. Health points are kind”). We can, however, say that these
quantities are religious in that they negotiate the borders of humanity from where the player
stands.
Not every game has variables that we might call “magic,” “lives,” and “health,” but
wherever they appear, these are the constitutive potencies of the player's presence in the game,
quantities which must be managed at every moment of game play. The first empower most
player actions, and the following two are macro- and micro-units of play itself. By identifying
them as “faith,” “hope,” and “love,” Timothy and Titus' design team has established a metonymic
chain that binds the player's ability to play the game to their identification as a Christian. We
cannot say that only Christians play this game, nor that all Christians recognize this verse from 1
Corinthians. We can say, however, that the game is staged as a quest for the Epistles inside the
Epistles, played as their authors, and that this may inspire some players to read those texts, and
others to remember them. Where this happens, the player may discover “faith,” hope,” and
“love” as quantities that describe the human's relationship to the divine. For the player who holds
the double reference in mind, “faith,” “hope,” and “love,” describe the inhabitable place in two
different worlds, and their presence in one affirms their presence in the other.
Those three words mean irreconcilably different things in those two worlds, but the
player is invited to know herself across both worlds using them, simultaneously. We find the
same dynamic wherever the Sword of the Spirit becomes an offensive weapon or pages of the
Bible restore health, wherever saints are reimagined as action heroes or scripture knowledge can
be traded for abstract reward points. This is the religious work of the religious game: they invite
23
the player to dual citizenship in irreconcilable worlds by circulating material that organizes what
it means to be human in either, but can only be translated in terms of the religious player's
Following Victor Turner's analysis of initiation rites, we can call the materials through
which the borders of humanity are negotiated, “sacra.”31 These are the “basic building blocks
that make up the cosmos and into whose nature no neophyte may inquire.”32 In the games at
hand, as in the rituals Turner studied, sacra are transmitted in “monstrous” form, and their
reception facilitates membership in a religious community. The procession of video game sacra,
in Evangelical terms seems to be: “X” defines one's situation as a human with relation to the
game (a player); play is crafted to draw the player toward Evangelical discourse; Evangelical
discourse explains that “X” defines one's situation as a human with relationship to the Lord (a
Christian). The Evangelical game is religious, then, not because it encourages belief, but because
Given, then, that “religion” designates negotiations concerning the place of humanity
among non-human entities, we can perform a few conjugations: things (persons, controversies,
performances, thoughts, texts, etc.) are religious when they stage such negotiations; a durable
confederation of humans and non-humans that collectively negotiates the borders of humanity is
a religious organization (or “a religion” for short). And, finally, this dissertation locates “digital
a possibility for co-emergence between a form of life and its environment, and digital religion
31
Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967),
102-110.
32
Turner, Forest of Symbols, 106.
24
can describe either digital life in religious environments, or religious life in digital ones. Limiting
ourselves to the specificity of religious organizations will prove valuable in ways similar to the
decision to observe historically localized computers. If it did not seek out relatively durable
confederations, a study of religion may find itself attempting to describe a dynamic that appears
wherever it looks. The relative durability of specific religions can be located in the practices and
discourses that their human and non-human members share, and these leave traces we can study.
These working definitions may begin to clarify why digital religion tends to generate
enigmatic and paradoxical cultural forms. The religious is the range of life that negotiates human
borders, and the digital is a particular tendency toward the automation of intelligence within the
peculiar involution where texts and practices already concerned with the boundaries of humanity
are accelerated, vivified, and further complicated through computerization. Again, to apply
Chidester’s words, the synergistic tangle of digital religion bestows a “certain degree of urgency
Religious studies has been developing its trade argot for the examination of digital
religion for fifty years. If we count the production of philologically informed computer programs
for indexing scripture as academic religious studies, our discipline produced digital religion, but
even if we only retroactively identify with writers of articles, we have been there from quite the
beginning. Jacob Neusner’s essay “Scholars and Machines,” perhaps the first academic
evaluation of scripture’s passage through computers, is significant, both because it well presents
the urgency of digital religion, and because he makes no effort to extricate his own writing from
33
Chidester, 29.
25
it. Monumental mainframe computers had recently processed thousands of fragments of the
Dead Sea Scrolls, producing comparisons, corrections, and indexes on a scale never attempted by
humans. Neusner understandably began by asking whether scholars of “humane letters” (a field
which includes rabbis, priests and secular academics), would soon lose their jobs to
mechanization, a very real possibility for many other professions in 1965.34 He comforted the
human humanists through the analogy of visual artists facing the invention of photography in the
late nineteenth century: both those who adopted the new technology and those who did not
discovered, when confronted with the camera’s verisimilitude, that their work was never “the
technical representation of reality” but “the representation of what man actually sees.”35 Faced
with a similar challenge by the thinking machine, Neusner proposed that the computer would
free humane letters from pedantic sorting work, allowing scholars to focus on what he claims
was always their task. Humanists are those “most unmechanized of men” who explore texts by
prior humans “to recover and ponder the memories and wise insights of the mind of man”
concerning the “wisdom, heritage, and worth” of “man” and apply them to contemporary
“human issues;” “Then the humane search for truth becomes, in itself and in its consequences, a
statement of being.36” More than circular, the argument is epicyclical, a five-fold knot where
every loop turns around an unclarified notion of “human life.” We need not attempt to discover
who this human is, nor whether we must agree with Neusner when he claims that its
34
It certainly includes “traditional Jewish students of the Talmud” as well as “the founders of Jewish Science,” and
others engaged in “philology and text-criticism.” Jacob Neusner, “Scholars and Machines,” in History and Torah:
Essays on Jewish Learning (New York: Schocken Books, 1965): 74, 73, 70.
35
Neusner, 69, 74.
36
Ibid.
26
confrontation with computers clarifies an ancient task of self-discovery rather than beginning
some new process in which computers are also agents. For now it will be sufficient to note that
the efforts of machines to read the Dead Sea Scrolls provoked the great scholar of Judaism to call
out urgently for humans: while computers may be able to crunch text-as-number in ways humans
cannot, those texts have been charged with a task in the service of humans, and they cannot
perform it without our unmechanized reflection. The present study does not disagree. But we
must recognize that the image of humans humanely humanizing human texts through the
humanities is a provocative acceleration of the question itself, not yet an adequate explanation
for the sense in which we are not computers. Even if, at some point in these last fifty years,
humans and computers had stopped moving long enough for their outlines to be traced, the
difference may still not have become clear. Moving forward, Neusner’s knot will serve as a
signal that the digital provides paradoxes of the sort that provoke scholars of religion (with the
hope that religion will provide paradoxes to provoke scholars of the digital).
Let us close this section's provisional definition of religion by directing this fascination
back along the path we have just traveled. Adapting the work of David Chidester, this
dissertation defines religion as negotiations of humanity's borders, and the movement of traffic
across them. Following Victor Turner, the materials that are rearranged in these negotiations and
transactions are called “sacra.” Defining religion in this way allows us to consider religion as
seriousness. A cursory look at the Evangelical game Timothy and Titus illustrated why a
definition of this sort is necessary. This game is religious not because anyone believes in it, but
because it mobilizes scriptural words and images to welcome players into an Evangelical
27
counterpublic.
Having now established the two components of digital religion, the foregoing section
closed with a rereading of Jacob Neusner's “Scholars and Machines.” This first scholarly article
on digital religion demonstrated the excitement produced where two dynamics complicate one
another. And we must now add a third and final foundational dynamic to our analysis. It will not
negate the peculiar liveliness of digital religion in any way, but it will make religious video
Excursus on Play
“Play” here will designate those activities that the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott situates
across the lively “potential space” that comprises the soft border of the human subject: “It is
outside the individual, but it is not the external world.”37 More precisely, in Winnitcott's clinical
practice he observed that the sense that a person has a self distinguishable from the world
depends upon shifting interactions across a “playground” of lively entities that resist both
othering and selfing. Infants tend to have a few specific “transitional objects” which seem to
have life of their own, and in time those objects lose their intrinsic value as the possibility of play
is “spread out over the whole intermediate territory between 'inner psychic reality' and 'the
external world as perceived by two persons in common,' that is to say, over the whole cultural
field.”38 Across our weaned lives, the bewildering liveliness of those early transitional objects,
now dispersed into everything continues to surprise us, catching us up in wild moments where
37
Winnicott, 51.
38
Winnicott, 5.
28
we lose ourselves. Play, then, is a name for the way our subjectivity both emerges and dissolves
through our grammatically complicated engagements with well worn blankies, religious artifacts,
“culture,” and the “electricity” upon a lover’s skin; it is difficult to say whether we act upon them
But play, as Winnicott envisions it, resists historical analysis. Play only exists in
particular instances, never in general. Remember an infant loving her first possession; remember
how merely washing it could render it foreign.40 If no similar object can stand in for it, how
much less can a general one? And without generalization, we do not have a history, but an
endless expanse of specific, private exuberances. We can, however, historicize toys and games as
machines for limiting play. Toys place the object of play within an extrinsic cultural continuity,
and games place the process of play within a matrix of rules. Play thus structured, however, is
not somehow inferior to Winnicott's vision of the primal play that develops into cultural play.
We might consider the vectoral tendencies produced by toys and games like deeply worn paths
in an open field, or currents in the sea. There are things, both collectively and personally, that
can only happen when play is constrained by structure. In Victor Turner's words, “Consciousness
must be narrowed, intensified, beamed in on a limited focus of attention. 'Past and future must be
given up' -only now matters. How is this to be done? Here the conditions that normally prevail
excluded.”41 Fortunately for our study, video games are both toys and games.
39
Winnicott, 54, 6, 98.
40
Winnicott, 4.
41
Victor Turner, “From Liminal to Liminoid in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology,” Rice
University Studies 60.3 (1974): 87.
29
Like a ball crafted to invoke professional sports, a character-doll already invested with
stories, or a tiny lawnmower, a video game is a toy. It both limits and accelerates the possibilities
of play toward the enactment of familiar tales. Video games, as toys, can be studied in terms of
who presents them to what playerships in continuation of which stories. Walter Benjamin noted
that playthings are “imposed on [a child] as cult implements that become toys only afterward,
partly through the child's powers of imagination.”42 These further powers must not be neglected
in analysis, particularly because the discovery of perverse or pious play through differently
narrativized toys often produces new toys. Many Evangelical video games, for instance, have
been mods, hacks, or clones of worldly ones. But we should also not assume that the excesses of
play are consistently productive. Play sometimes just exceeds the toy:
Playmobil makes a Nativity playset complete with camel, frankincense and myrrh, Jesus, Mary, Joseph,
and the guiding star – all the necessary elements are there. But these pieces are not limited to reenacting a
narrow telling of one sacred story […] other dolls like Playmobil firemen, Santa, Roman centurions,
racecar drivers, and Snoopy – virtually any toy character you can imagine – can and do make their
appearance at the manger as well.43
Like backgammon or dress-up, a video game is a game. It halts play where it reaches
particular limits. Brian Massumi usefully describes rules and the mechanisms for enforcing them
as transcendent relative to the immanence of play. The referee has the power to stop play when it
exceeds specific parameters, producing the specificity of a rule bound game that can recur,
allowing for later variation. “The inclusion of that anti-event-space in the event space not only
allows particular moves in the game to be qualified as to type (attributed intrinsic properties of
42
Walter Benjamin, “Toys and Play,” in Selected Writings 2.1, Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith,
and Rodney Livingstone, eds. (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005): 118.
43
Nikki Bado-Fralick and Rebecca Sachs Norris, Toying With God: The World of Religious Games and Dolls (Waco,
TX: Baylor University Press, 2010), 61.
30
fairness or foulness common to any number of other moves)… The anti-event-space is the
injection of generality into the particularity of the game, with which it channels into the
singularity of the play (this game as such, this game, an event).”44 Video games, as games, can
be studied in terms of when and how they halt play, and how regulatory structures transform
over time. Again, however, we should be cautious not to neglect the excesses of play. The cheat,
the spoilsport, and the over-achieving player who takes on novel prohibitions transform games.
Consider, for instance, the tendency of Evangelical game reviewers to evaluate whether it is
possible to complete a game while avoiding features they find morally objectionable: “The game
does promote violence with the car-jacking and stuff, although it is still optional, so you don't
If approached carefully, then, video games, being both games and toys, can ground a
study of play in historical specifics. That said, scholarship on video games has not shared these
findings with the many fields that could benefit from them. As the nineteen-nineties ended, the
tone of academic responses to video games changed dramatically. Whereas most prior
scholarship had only regarded the growing popularity of video games as a more or less severe
threat to the well being of children, a new generation of “scholars, many of whom had by now
grown up with [home video game] consoles” opened the new academic discipline of “game
studies” around this time, offering a range of alternative evaluations of digital gaming.46 This
44
Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 71-80.
45
Imfagentsamfisher, “Jak 2 (PS2),” accessed March 6, 2014,
http://www.christcenteredgamer.com/index.php/reviews/19-console/4479-jak-2.
46
Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig De Peute, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2009), xxv.
31
dissertation joins that recent wave of scholarship and may be classified as a work of game studies
as well as of religious studies. With scholars like Espen Aarseth and Mark Wolf, I share the labor
of examining video games as a data set for the humanities, and approach their surrounding
cultures as interesting material for history and the social sciences. However, the first generation
of player-scholars has tended to write for an audience that is at least as familiar with the games
being discussed as with the theories through which they are being filtered. Some scholars, like
Alexander Galloway, even take special pains to clarify his interlocutors as an imaginary
generation composed entirely of gamers (an identitarian configuration hard to locate with any
tool finer than bare assertion, despite the popularity of video games) and to dismiss outsiders as
irrelevant to the conversation: “Our generation needs to shrug off the contributions of those who
view this all as so new and shocking. They came from somewhere else and are still slightly
unnerved by digital technology. We were born here and love it.”47 And even when such a
division is not explicitly articulated, one is often created by embedding knowing references to
specific popular games at the center of dense arguments, leaving no alternate path for those who
have never played them. This has, unfortunately, nurtured an intellectual environment that
partitions game studies away from the many scholars in various fields who might productively
engage the emerging discipline's claims concerning the changes in popular media over the last
fifty years.48 Video games are sites of vital interaction among and across diverse social,
technological, and ideological fields, and thus merit the analytical attention even of scholars who
47
Alexander Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2006), xii.
48
Spacewar! one of the four primary contenders for “the first video game,” and apparently the first electronic game
to circulate on multiple computer systems, was created in 1962. Stewart Brand, “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and
Symbolic Death among the Computer Bums,” Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972, 40.
32
will never play them.
propose that the stakes are too high to limit discussion of this cultural form to communities of
fans. This chapter has sought to establish how video games productively complicate our
understandings of lived religion, digital culture, and play quite generally. Thus I hope to invite
non-gamers into the conversation on video games by explaining how both the toy and the game
aspects of video games can be satisfactorily understood by anyone who has used a personal
….
You could have been doing any number of things on your computer, but now you
entertain the possibility of playing a game. Perhaps you do not even close your word processor
and calendar. You pull a CD case from the shelf, snap the disc out, and place it into your drive.
The computer asks if you want to autorun the program. You click. The screen falls black.
The darkened screen lights up with a logo, an array of rusty iron gears printed “Genesis
3-D.” It is followed after a second by another logo, a reproduction of the fingertips from
DaVinci's “Creation of Adam,” God's finger almost touching Adam's, now over a spark of white
light, clearly rendered on a computer rather than with ceiling paints, surrounded by the words
“N'Lightning Software Development, Inc.” A blast of thunder sounds, though the spark remains
static. When it fades, one last logo sits at the top of the screen over a list of options:
CATECHUMEN. The letters are colored to glow like molten steel, and two images of flaming
33
swords flank the options on your screen: Game, Options, Graphics, Sound, Credits, Exit. Like it
usually controls an arrow, sliding the mouse now moves a sword up and down the list, each word
This is frequently called a “start menu,” or a “start screen.” Note that it is unclear to what
extent you have “played a game” so far. In a tangle of homophones greatly resembling Neusner's
use of “human,” game criticism, both academic and popular, broad and narrow cast, tends to use
the word “game” for several components of this engagement. The disc in its case is a game, the
program that this disk facilitates is a game, and now, if you click on the top option, you will run
a sub-program within that program, also called “a game.” And, should you be interrupted, you
For the purposes of this study, all digital systems that delimit and accelerate play,
combining the properties of toys and games, will be called “video games.” The start-screen and
its mechanics will be classified as “in-game.” This term, usually applied in game criticism to
designate only the diegetic layer of a game, will here identify all digital action facilitated by a
video game, whether it is emerging from the screen and speakers, or churning in backgrounds
inaccessible to the player. The intimately connected action in the analog world will be classified
with the neologism “out-game.” The in-game and out-game worlds emerge together. Consider
the contact zone where your mouse touches you. Ask whether a screen has one side or two. We
The start-screen is a fitting place to begin our analysis of digital games because we have
already encountered several pervasive features of digital games, but have not yet reached a place
where we will be tempted to use the mystifying language of “immersion,” nor have any elements
34
appeared which lack meaningful parallels in a personal computer's interface. The sword-cursor
moves when you move your mouse, as your arrow-cursor moved on your computer's desktop. Of
course, as with your arrow-cursor, this interaction is quite limited. Rotating your physical mouse
in a circle only results in incidental jiggling in the on-screen cursor, whether it appears as a
sword or an arrow. Picking up the mouse and shaking it does approximately the same, and hitting
the keys of your keyboard does not affect it in any way. But when you resign yourself to using
the mouse as if it were laid over the plane of the screen, as the arrow-cursor is, whether or not
you continue typing, you can use it to interact with certain entities on the screen, though others,
like the hills printed on your desktop wallpaper or the flaming swords on the sides of
It may seem peculiar to mention this surplus of motion, but it draws attention to a little-
considered aspect of computerized interaction: only a sliver of out-game action arrives in-game.
Just as, for some, typing is accompanied by muttering and finger drumming, so too do game
players often lean in their seats to follow the curves of a racetrack, or shout at their game
systems. In many cases, video games are accompanied by analog pressures that encourage or
limit surplus action, but there are necessary limits to what the digital apparatus itself can know.
Consider, for instance, dance-pad games, which are played by stepping on surfaces with
embedded buttons: some players might sway their hips to feel comfortable and rhythmic, but the
game cannot distinguish this behavior from awkward mechanical steps, or even from kneeling to
slap at the buttons with both hands. That is, the video game's properties as a toy interface with
the out-game world in places it cannot access as a game. This gap between what a video game
can perceive and what its supplemental materials might encourage is especially relevant in
35
religious instances. A press release might claim that one plays a video game featuring Christian
music by “praising God,” but the game's dance-pad cannot tell good-faith participation from
mockery.49
In the context of video games, general purpose input devices such as the mouse and
keyboard are called “controllers,” as are specialized gaming devices like joysticks, or dance-
Conventionally, a control scheme is described in a second person that takes place on both sides
of the screen: “when you press 'up,' you jump.” Stewart Brand’s Spacewar: Frantic Life and
Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums, perhaps the first piece of video game reportage,
already placed you in the computer in 1972.50 Here, again, the video game can be well
understood by anyone familiar with personal computers, which apply the same grammar: “when
you hit 'backspace,' you erased your work.” Where these two yous must be separated for clarity,
the digital one is a player-character, and the analog one is a player. Though player-characters
occasionally present eyes, limbs, and other features that evoke the sympathy of the player, we
must be cautious not to imagine that any easy anthropomorphism applies to all player-characters.
In fact, most player-characters in Evangelical games look like cursors, and some are more
abstract still. The human who participates in controlling a game is a player, just as a person who
participates in any other piece of software is a user. Manuel Sicart describes it poetically: “The
subjectivity of the player is our skin when interacting with a computer game: it marks the
49
Digital Praise, “Dance Praise PC Dance Game Adds Global Flavor Through Expansion Pack Volume 5: Praise
and Worship,” archived by the Internet Archive, November 19, 2008, accessed February 15, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20081119151804/http://www.digitalpraise.com/pr/06272007.html .
50
Brand, 50–58.
36
boundaries of the subject, but also determines how much we can interact with the digital world.
Playing is putting on the player-skin and experiencing the world, and the game-world within
it.”51
However, though video games are quite like other software, we classify them separately
because people play with them. Your word processor might be said to have a game aspect in that
it limits you, but its toy aspect, its narrative situation, is usually directed outward. Even if you are
not writing for a reason, you are using the software to write. In video games, the toy aspect
justifies the game aspect. That is to say, they are situated within stories that make their
limitations ends in themselves. And purposelessness attracts play. A video game's constraints are
calibrated to entice players to defeat them, and cultures of gaming work to create the players the
games require. We can study this process by examining particular games, and the specific
cultures that enjoy struggling with them. Neither the technology (game) nor the culture (toy) of
video gaming could have produced this effect independently, but at present they comprise a sort
of mill that draws in play. The effect has been dramatic by any measure: fifty one percent of
run proprietary game software that is very easy to install, and prohibitively difficult to
reproduce).52
The story that follows will observe the formation of a dramatic sub-process within this
larger engagement with video games. Between the early nineteen-eighties and still accelerating
in the present, a configuration of the culture and technology at the disposal of Evangelical
51
Sicart, 79.
52
Entertainment Software Association, “Sales, Demographic, and Useage Data 2013,” accessed March 16, 2014,
http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/esa_ef_2013.pdf
37
Christians is redirecting the movement of play, through video games, toward Christ. Like other
video games, the creation of Evangelical games entails the creation of both games and their
players, though these, quite unlike their worldly parallels, will be crafted on both sides through
the movement of sacra. This sacred context should not be mistaken for a violation of the
purposelessness that attracts play through games. In fact, as we move forward, we will discover
repeatedly that Evangelical games attend to the player’s present moment, whereas worldly games
tend to understand the act of play as a trajectory toward some other end.
Conclusion
co-emergence; they are digital, religious, and playful. Each of these adjectives gestures toward
contested territories within which it becomes difficult and finally impossible to say what is a
human. The complex senses in which we are and are not our computers, our souls, and our teams
exacerbate one another rather than cancel one another out. The study of religious video games is
a task for the humanities, because from whatever angle one looks, there seems to be a human
face looking back, but one can never be sure. The human is the mystery at the center of this
study, and religious video games emerge in the interaction of its shifting borders above/below,
This is also to say that the religious video game presents a liveliness that challenges our
is a digital conveyance for spiritual presence. This chapter established its three dynamics in order
to encompass the specifics that I encountered in researching religious games. Across my study, I
38
discovered that when my attention was focused on the often-dismissed creativity of religious
video gaming, my peripheral vision filled with the most unlikely phenomena. This introduction
was necessary to establish the tools that make religious video games comprehensible, but it is
also intended as an enticement to further curiosity concerning lived religion, and sacred
computing.
withdraw from the general field to focus on what we are capable of studying. Not the digital as
such, but computers, not religion, but religions, not play, but games. While the digital includes
distant entities like the singularity and the AI with which you will fall in love, the tools of a
cultural historian cannot reach them, so we must attend to historical devices and programs.
Likewise, religion can designate all negotiations at the borders of humanity, but a religion is a
durable confederation collectively negotiating those borders. And play is a primary practice by
which human subjects develop boundaries with the world around them, but a game is a system of
rules that restricts and accelerates this process in observable ways. By locating religious video
games within these specific virtualities, the study of their liveliness can be populated with their
bewildering details. To do justice to ambiguity, we cannot afford to be vague. We must seek out
39
Chapter 2
“What great opportunities we now have in cyberspace. But, with all good things, there is a twist
from our adversary.”
-Marty Bee, Christian game designer and critic53
54
Illustration 3: Demon, Neutral, and Saint in Left Behind's promotional materials
Imagine watching a square mile of Manhattan from the air. But don’t imagine too clearly.
53
Marty Bee and Steve Van Nattan, “Computer Games: Are they Honoring to God?” Blessed Quietness Journal,
accessed January 22, 2014, http://blessedquietness.com/journal/housechu/games.htm .
54
Montage produced from Left Behind Games Inc., Images “evil/demon.jpg,” “neutral/man_neutral.jpg,” and
“good/saint.jpg” archived by the Internet Archive October 5, 2007, accessed March 16, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://eternalforces.com/characters/images/*
40
Simplify your landscape until you cannot tell if this is Harlem or the Lower East Side; there are a
few cars, but mostly the roads teem with a strangely homogenous humanity, all white, all of
enlistment age, unclustered, empty handed, not running, not sitting, not falling over. Picture a
gray circle around each of them, following as they walk. This is the baseline reality of Left
You have been stuck on the same mission for three days. The objective here, as in other
levels, is to amass a Christian Army adequate to certain foreordained tasks. Specifically, you
must make contact with visiting evangelists at the corners of the map. But as you convert
gray-circled neutrals into green-circled Christians, and begin to speciate them into medics,
soldiers, and ministers, the game’s AI (on behalf of the Antichrist) is engaged in a strictly
parallel effort, making red-circled antitypes of your troops –medics, soldiers, and “secularists” –
and kills you with them. The biggest difference between the two armies is their orientation to
deadly force. Every character has his or her own “spirit meter” that goes up with prayer, and
down with fighting. So, the Antichristians grow more cohesive as they fire on you, but your
Christians troops begin to defect – losing their conversions and wandering off gray-circled –
when you give as good as you get it. Over and over, your little band reaches one corner, maybe
two, before the entire city is overrun with Antichristians, and they shoot you to pieces.
So, after three days of failure, you try a new strategy: not a light, balanced strike-force
that can zip from one corner to the next, but a juggernaut that crawls mercilessly through your
enemies. When you start toward the first evangelist, your army is dense with surgeons, armored
vehicles, and prophets, over a hundred of the game’s best troops. And it works. You mash the
“Q” key on the keyboard, keeping your army constantly praying, and a choir of elite gospel
41
singers praises the Lord from within the ring of soldiers, effectively preventing defection. It no
longer matters that the entire city is against you; New York’s constant infestation of minor
rock-musicians and petty criminals has been fortified also, working together now with armored
soldiers and demonists. But as you pray and praise, you kill hundreds of them easily. They do not
bleed, and their bodies vanish after a moment on the ground, but you kill them so quickly that
And fun, for a moment, is overwhelmed by a disquieting sensation. Every one of those
vanishing corpses has a name and a little biography. Every one of them could have been
converted. But by preventing you from playing casually at violence, the game led you to play at
it enthusiastically. By making every character potentially redeemable, it had left you no choice
but killing potential allies. Perhaps every design decision had been conscientious, even morally
and theologically defensible, but for a moment they staged a sort of pyrrhic victory. You were
embarrassed to be winning, and curious, suddenly, what your army's prayers would sound like if
Imagine strafing a square mile of Manhattan from the air. But don’t imagine too clearly.
To quote Leonard Cohen, “There is a war between the ones who say there’s a war and the
ones who say that there isn’t.” Left Behind: Eternal Forces (Left Behind Games: 2006) casts the
“secularist” as the anti-type of the “missionary.” This dissertation takes place upon terrain where
the only possibility of neutrality is constant motion. This study is an experiment in exploring the
interaction of mutually constitutive entities, clusters of agents that come into being together and
42
cannot be meaningfully separated. As we move forward, our task will be to locate Evangelical
video games among those entities without which they would not have their present form. Later
sections of this dissertation will seek out the seams across which Evangelical games are
embroiled in events as disparate as the Columbine massacre, and the smartphone boom. This
chapter, however, will attempt to understand Evangelical video games as the creative production
of an Evangelical community actively negotiating borders with two very different kinds of
non-human agents: the digital on one side, and the demonic on the other.
Left Behind: Eternal Forces drives the player toward a moral crisis wherein the use of
lethal force and martial strategy is unfortunate, but unavoidable. In this near future (here so near
that no new technology of warfare has emerged, as opposed to the books, wherein new
communications and military technology set the conflict a few years apace before us), every
Christian must fight against “The Global Village Peacekeepers,” a demonic cooptation of our
own United Nations, or be killed by them. In the early levels, rock musicians, gang members,
and secularists comprise the enemy force, but the battle is soon joined by tanks, spies, and
eventually by horned demons breathing fire. In a final, unprecedented, creative turn, the game's
final enemy is the Global Village Peacekeepers headquarters itself. You shoot at the building
until you are rewarded with a cinema of the Antichrist, still quite alive, punishing his generals for
failing to kill you. In this world there can be strategic, or even moral caution in the use of force,
but there can be no Christian anti-war movement. The algorithmic extension of Left Behind
co-author Tim LaHaye’s out-game opposition to the United Nations, nuclear disarmament, and
43
multiculturalism evokes a very particular Jesus: “he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment,
This is not to say, however, that the team that made LB:EF was of a single mind. Before
the game was released, in fact, Troy Lyndon, the CEO of Left Behind games, situated himself
strongly against precisely the depiction of death that would be applied in his own flagship game:
“What's more damaging are games that show killing and then let the bodies disappear,
desensitizing gamers to what's going on[.] Although seeing hundreds of dead bodies in Left
Behind: Eternal Forces at the end of a horrific battle wasn't our original intent, we can't help but
stay away from desensitizing gamers. It's our hope that we don't end up with a Mature-rated
game...but we might. Ultimately, our argument is that it's more humane to show the reality of
death than to desensitize in the name of a lighter rating.”56 The process by which the game
earned its “Teen” and did precisely what its lead developer opposed cannot be recovered, but it is
an enigma that should haunt our appreciation of the game. And such entrenched contradictions
fissure sacred ground as well. The astute reader may have noticed that the game as described
above deviated from Tim LaHaye's own theological position from which salvation, once
achieved, cannot be compromised: “We can never lose our salvation.”57 Tim LaHaye, however,
never renounced the game, nor even seemed to notice the dissonance: “for those who are into
video games, Eternal Forces is the #1 most powerful vehicle for their hearts and minds that’s
55
Luke 22:36 [KJV]
56
Matt Peckham, “Unholy MMO-LY” sidebar to “God Mode: Fragging for King, Country, and Creator,” accessed
March 16, 2014, http://www.1up.com/features/god-mode .
57
Tim LaHaye, A Quick Look at the Rapture and the Second Coming (Eugene, Oregon: Harvest House Publishers,
2013), 34.
44
been invented in our lifetime.”58
feature of Evangelism? Evangelical Christians are people who have been born again by
accepting the atonement of Jesus as described in the Bible, and who now seek to use various
media to bring others to that same experience. But in human attempts to convey a divine
message, the medium participates. In the case of LB:EF, it seems that particular conceptions of
game-violence and character development were so active in the game's emerging form that they
overrode the principled positions of its two most famous creators. This is not to say “the medium
is the message.” Jesus is the message. And this relational position should also not be mistaken
for technological determinism. Evangelical Christians often choose to convey their testimony
through a particular medium specifically because that medium was conspicuously lacking
Christian presence. To quote Troy Lyndon again, “perhaps instead of avoiding the media,
Christ-followers should focus on transforming the media.”59 Evangelical Christians are people
committed to the challenge of creating and circulating Evangelical media. For some, the only
media employed may be speech, or the testimony of their own lives, but these media are no less
participatory than the digital ones that will occupy the present study.
For my purposes, Evangelical media is that which seeks to orient lives around the Bible
and the Cross, welcoming strangers to new lives thus organized, and the already-committed to
rededication. Though other sacra are variously present, Evangelical media orients itself about the
58
Troy Lyndon, "Left Behind: Eternal Forces statement from LB Games Inc.,” archived by the Internet Archive,
May 26, 2013, accessed January 19, 2014,
https://web.archive.org/web/20130526172019/http://www.leftbehindgames.com/controversy.php .
59
Troy Lyndon, “Using the New Media for Good,” accessed March 15, 2014,
http://www.leftbehindgames.com/blog/?p=3 . Bold in original.
45
Bible and Cross rather than any particular tradition of practice or interpretation.60 This is not to
say that Evangelical media fails to produce the subcultural particularities and theological
specificity associated with denominational Christianity, but quite nearly the opposite. The
tradition that usually calls itself simply “Christianity” practices a “culturally adaptive biblical
experimentalism,” recycling and recoding its biblicist discourse to gather a community out from
the world around it, wherever it finds itself, and in the process has created cultural forms as
varied and specific as has the world. Consider Christian rock music, comic books, and romance
novels: as Evangelical Christianity has found itself in new cultural contexts, it has found new
ways to redeem the lost, and the specific adaptations to digital cultures continue this tradition.
The media thus generated “never by themselves yielded cohesive, institutionally compact, or
clearly demarcated groups of Christians. But they do serve to identify a large family of churches
describing the space outside of Christianity as “the world,” as to avoid the implication of
neutrality or rationality encoded in the word “secular.” Rather than “the church,” however, I will
follow Michael Warner in calling the network of discursively connected Christians into which
Evangelical media draws users “the Evangelical counterpublic.” That is to say, first, we are
observing a public, a “social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse” allowing for
60
This definition of Evangelical Christianity is derived from David Bebbington's “four qualities that have been the
special marks of Evangelical religion: conversionism, the belief that lives need to be changed, activism, the
expression of the gospel in effort, biblicism, a particular regard to the Bible, and what may be called crucicentrism, a
stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.” D. W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from
the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 2-3.
61
Mark Noll, American Evangelical Christianity: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 13.
46
“poetic world making.” Evangelical media, like worldly newspaper circulation or the literal
soapbox speech, produces a specific “relation among strangers” who are addressed both
personally and impersonally by the medium at hand.62 But, in Warner's words, Evangelical
and thus to be different from an imagined mainstream.”63 This imagination should not misread
as personal fancy. Imagining a mainstream is the ongoing material production of the knowledge
that there is a world out there. And, for counterpublics, of collecting their members to
Left Behind: Eternal Forces will help us frame the work of gathering a counterpublic. The
game certainly speaks to a field of strangers, inviting them to imagine themselves as a Christian
army beset by the forces of the world, but its relatively explicit ecclesiology makes it an outlier.
We cannot know what people did with the 70,000 copies the game sold – it is improbable that
every sold copy was played, and at least one was played for research purpose – but we can
extrapolate the audience it hails.64 Among the hundreds of Christian games I have played in
preparing this dissertation, Left Behind is one of the fewer than five that present positions on
issues concerning which Evangelicals (especially the newly converted) may disagree. Like the
62
I would contest, however, that the public of a game, a playership, is not “constituted through mere attention,” but
must develop and deploy physical skills in order to negotiate the game, a difference that will dramatically change the
other components of this publicity. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002),
65-124.
63
Michael Warner, “The Evangelical Public Sphere,” 1.
64
Troy Lyndon, “Exhibit 31.1: Certification,” accessed October 15, 2010,
http://www.faqs.org/sec-filings/091022/LEFT-BEHIND-GAMES-INC_10-K.A/http://
www.faqs.org/sec-filings/091022/LEFT-BEHIND-GAMES-INC_10-K.A/ .
47
books, the game includes explicit discussion (here on sermonic splash-screens between levels) of
evolution, political internationalism, and Biblical literalism.65 Because they seek to clarify
peculiar alongside the much larger class of Evangelical games that distinguishes their playership
as Christians from the world, without clarifying a border between any two types of Christian
strong stances on contentious issues does not, however, separate it from the larger body of
Evangelical games because it still presents its positions as unmarked Christianity. That is to say,
Evangelical games are theologically diverse, but their divisions are arrayed quietly across a field
within which all contained elements are self-described simply as “Christian,” defining a complex
Evangelical games, like most Evangelical media, do not frame themselves as part of any
project except the gospel as such. This focus on the Bible and Cross not only conceals
adapting the gospel message to any medium that will not get in its way: “evangelicals would
prefer not to poach on mass culture; their preference would be to transform mass culture, making
it entirely evangelical.”66 We must note, however, that Evangelical media is not boundless.
There are promotional images on Evangelical dating sites, but there is no such thing as
Evangelical pornography; there are Evangelical action games, but no Evangelical “murder
65
Other instances include Soldier of God and Bible Defenders by AV 1611 Games.
66
Heather Hendershot. Shaking the World for Jesus : Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture (Chicago, IL,
USA: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 13.
48
simulators.” The question, when facing any particular media artifact, is which part of it (if any)
can bring people to Christ. To determine how their work should proceed, Evangelical critique
acts upon worldly media like a centrifuge, attempting to separate its potentially redeemable
elements from demonic corruption. While “contemporary evangelicals have, since the 1960s,
developed a pop paraculture that allows adolescents to enjoy entertainments resembling those of
'secular' culture while lacking any 'harmful' influences,” these have been consistently
Evangelical heavy metal or rap is possible, for instance, remains a subject of debate in some
quarters. And, pointedly, there are Evangelicals who discern a line that excludes much of this
study's subject matter. To quote Neil MacQueen of Sunday Software: “I draw the line at
KILLING, or Christian titles that are overtly violent, -even if they are targeted at the teen/young
adult male gamers. I don't believe we need to imitate the violent secular games to reach the
gamers with a message of hope and love.”68 Here, again, notice that there is a question over
whether a particular sort of game can be used; MacQueen is not challenging the missionary
possibilities of video games altogether (though other Evangelicals may). Evangelical video game
culture, thus, is an effort to intercede at the line where the digital meets the demonic.
This section set out to locate Evangelical Christians and their media as mutually
dependent and co-emergent without reducing the complexity of that relationship. Evangelical
Christians will be located as people who use diverse media to draw others into new lives oriented
around the Bible and the Cross, and to reaffirm the orientation of those who already share in this
67
Jason Bivins, Religion of Fear (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 37.
68
Sunday Software Inc., "Sunday Software's Somewhat Infamous 'NO' Shelf," accessed January 18, 2014,
www.sundaysoftware.com/noshelf.htm .
49
new life. The community created in this way can be understood as a counterpublic in that it seeks
understanding also gives Evangelical media critique the task of drawing lines through media,
discerning which part can be redeemed and which must be removed. With regard to computers in
particular, this practice finds Evangelical Christians in good company, as several intersecting
publics are presently trying to discern general principles of interaction between humans and
computers.
The preface for J. Conrod’s Computer Bible Games (BibleBytes) presents a paradigmatic
father-son team of Seventh Day Baptists, this first anthology of religious video games was a
paperback manual for learning to program BASIC by creating one’s own educational software.
“God is the Creator of the laws of technology by which computers run. Man has made progress in the field
of computers only by the discovery of and obedience to these laws of God.
God requires us to be good stewards of all that He has given to us, including computer technology.
We have shown good stewardship with the computer in such fields as medicine, communications, etc. The
purpose of this book is to encourage Christians to grow spiritually through the enjoyment of computerized
Bible lessons and games.”69
Though it is not explicitly cited in later texts by Christian authors, this sentiment seems to
underwrite the ongoing surge in Evangelical software production, from church database
software, to searchable Bibles, and through the Evangelical video game, as well as emergence of
Evangelical critique of digital media: the digital is a gift to humans from God, and thus an object
69
J. Conrod, Computer Bible Games (Denver, Colorado: Accent Books, 1984).
50
of Christian stewardship. To be clear, we find this sentiment in non-Evangelical religious
organizations as well; the Church of England, for instance, has officially clarified that “No part
of creation is outside the care and concern of God, including cyberspace.”70 In my research, I
discovered Evangelical Christians tending to agree that computers have become an intrinsic
element of the human life world, and very few even passing comments suggesting that these
technologies were irredeemable. The digital, like the natural (a prior and still more frequent area
for discourses of “stewardship”), is a range across which sinful human nature will be expressed
unless Christians conscientiously craft digital expressions of their Truth. Within this frame, of
course, there are innumerable variations. In some formulations computers have inherent dangers
that Christian stewards must redress, perhaps addictive qualities, or tendencies to produce
violence and social isolation; in others the digital tends toward the rational and the educational,
and needs only to be freed from misuse; and frequently the digital seems to be entirely without
intrinsic qualities except perhaps as an amplifier and reproducer of human tendencies, good and
ill.
To understand these various possibilities, we must step back and allow Evangelical
specificity to illuminate a more general phenomenon. The cultural work of negotiating what it
means to be a human living among computers is not, after all, a project unique to Evangelical
Christians, nor do they engage in it alone. Evangelicals, in coming to steward computers, interact
with other groups engaged in parallel and often opposed relations with the digital. Chapters four
and six of this dissertation, for instance, will explore how Evangelical Christians consider the
70
Church of England, Board for Social Responsibility, Cybernauts Awake: Ethical and Spiritual Implications of
Computers, Information Technology, and the Internet (Church House Publishing, 1999), 45.
51
possibility of digital “violence” and “immersion” in ways that both replicate and disrupt
perspectives of the cultures in which they are embedded. The loudest voices in this regard are
conceptions of computing that circulate in the world rather than in other self-understood
cultures, then, we will require a terminology that can cross the boundary between Evangelicals
and the world in both directions. I propose “the human-computer interfaith” as a collective term
for the processes through which humans negotiate their borders with digital agents, even when
In 1983, when Stuart Card, Thomas Moran, and Allen Newell coined the term
Interaction, they offered this face and its cognitive cross-section as illustrations.
71
Illustration 4: The Human-Computer
71
Montage produced from “Figure 1.1 The human-computer interface” and “Figure 2.1 The Model Human
52
Behold the new man. The human is a stack of two-dimensional sheets, a placid Cyclops
flattened to the plane of the image. He smiles at a blank screen. How could he not grin as the
machine juts in from unthinkable and nameless dimensions, exceeding traditional perspectives in
drawing? And when the computer in front of him is gone, he smiles at the same blank screen,
now amused, it seems, by the computer behind the smile, visible as another sheet between him
Card, Moran, and Newell presented this mysterious image to argue that a single
instrumental psychology could encompass both humans and computers, and that it would begin
by tracing a line across their plane of intersection: “just follow a data path outward from the
central processor until you stumble across a human being.”73 And once we had found both the
CPU and the human, we could describe them homologically as two bounded individuals, each
composed of smaller machines, invested with different capacities, though describable in similar
terms. In particular, we are non-standard computers: “The recognize-act cycle, analogous to the
Dutifully, Card, Moran, and Newell acknowledge the historical contingency of the
schema wherein the individual subject of psychology interacts with a CPU across a complex
Processor,” Card, Stuart K., Thomas P. Moran, and Allen Newell. The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction.
(Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1983), 5, 26.
72
The invention of single-point perspective in the Renaissance has been convincingly tied to the emergence of an
individual subject which may well be fragmenting as it is pulled along the vectors of new communicative media.
This argument is made most articulately by Paul Virilio in Open Sky (London: Verso, 1997), where he argues that
humanity is being transformed by what he calls “dromospheric pollution” (dromos: journey), a new kind of
movement in stasis that explodes the horizon as vision approaches the speed of light.
73
Card, Moran, and Newell, 4.
74
Card, Moran, and Newell, 41.
53
channel of intermediaries, but they do so without unseating the proposed homology between the
entities at either end. The first computers, they explain, required a coalition of operators working
together to desire interaction (user), create punch cards (keypunch operator), and process them
(computer-operator), but in the early eighties, with the commercialization of the personal
computer, they argued that direct “conversational dialogue” between individual CPUs and
humans had become possible. To understand this interaction they insisted that the individual
quantitative limits. And they predicted that this model, in which the human individual is
understood as a second processor –a conception no less mythical than the notion that the
computer contains a homunculus– though it could offer little traction toward understanding
earlier eras of computing, would remain viable indefinitely into the future.
This foundational conception in computer science reminds us, again, that this study will
not be able to retreat from its subject and rest upon neutral, rational, secular ground untroubled
computers, are engaged with ideologically (and perhaps theologically) invested entities. This
study, in examining those relationships, will continue to apply a contact perspective, observing
that the agents involved are co-creatively entangled, without presuming that they are thus of
equal strength. Since The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction, new tools have emerged
the complicated conversation between fundamentally similar unitary user and CPU did not
quickly collapse under the weight of its own contingency, and it continues to haunt research on
54
human-computer interaction into the present. But across the following thirty years, with the
those facilitated by online gaming, culturally solidified forums, and social networking
applications, the dominant questions in this field began to change. Concerning both sides of the
screen, theorists of human-computer interaction are now asking how clustered intelligence
locates and in fact constructs the other with which it interacts. If my computer is a terminal that
helps to process data that is spinning through hundreds of distant servers, and I am myself a point
of aggregation for cultural forces that dramatically shape what I find in our interactions, then
theory must seek to explain how we ever manage to cobble together abstractions of one another
at all. If we look, for instance, to recent studies concerning the creation of computer systems for
specifically enculturated users, or the epistemic relations of users to networked systems, we find
I would like to add a single new layer to this complexity: the computer user does not only
isolate a computer from among its networked components, but experiences her interaction with
the computer within a more or less (often less) coherent universe that makes both computers and
humans comprehensible beings. The human emerges as the non-computer and the computer
emerges as the non-human, dialogically defining their relationship to a universe within which
various commonly invoked differences between humans and computers become guides for
75
The recent special edition of Metaphilosophy 43.4 (July, 2012), “Philoweb: Toward a Philosophy of the Web,”
includes several exemplary pieces within this new trajectory of HCI research. Alexandre Monnin and Harry Halpin,
“Toward a Philosophy of the Web” (361-379); Yuki Hui, “What is a Digital Object” (380-395); and Johnny Hartz
Søraker, “Virtual Worlds and Their Challenge to Philosophy: Understanding the ‘Intravirtual’ and ‘Extravirtual’”
(499-512) are especially salient for the present study.
55
ongoing interaction. Complex notions like “the purpose of technology,” “freedom,” “intention,”
or “intellect” are sacra in as much as they mark this boundary. This is the religious work of
theorists like Card, Moran, and Newell, clarifying what it means to be human in a world that
includes computers. Two recent theories concerning religious applications of media technology,
namely, Heidi Campbell’s “religious-social shaping of technology,” and Stewart Hoover’s notion
of the “plausible narrative of self” will show how religious studies can help us navigate this
terrain.
first firm foothold toward understanding particular instances of human-computer interfaith. She
stresses that the adoption of new technologies is a slow process involving complex processes of
communal negotiation that must be understood within a community’s historical context. Thus,
the scholar of digital religion must adequately investigate the “(a) history and tradition of the
community, (b) its core beliefs and patterns related to media, (c) the specific negotiation
processes it undergoes with a new technology, and finally (d) the communal framing and
These techniques are necessary, and her theory is absolutely correct as far as it goes. But
her focus on “communities” in motion tends to produce stories wherein theologians and other
communal authorities exercise a conservative control over social development. This both
obscures the creative work that takes place among the non-experts that comprise the majority of
a religious group at any instance of its history, and it prevents her theory from extending into the
76
Heidi Campbell, “How Religious Communities Negotiate New Media Religiously,” in Digital Religion, Social
Media and Culture, 85.
56
wilds that religious groups find at their borders. However, to hybridize her theory with
Chidester’s definition of religion, which seeks out border negotiations with non-humans, would
allow us to discuss history and tradition, core beliefs and patterns, specific negotiations, and
stay apace with Evangelical media critics who have been identifying the investments of worldly
media at lease since their confrontation of the novel in the mid-nineteenth century.77
But if not communities, with what do technologies emerge? Stewart Hoover, by directing
attention to the “plausible narratives of self” crafted by media users, allows us to seek emerging
subjects instead. These narratives are the complex of stories that people tell about themselves to
explain and guide their use of media technologies.78 In his broad study of American families as
they negotiated both media use and religious life, he found that people’s behavior rarely mapped
neatly onto their own stories, but that they necessarily told stories to themselves and others in
order to mediate their mediation. For instance, people were prone to explaining that they watched
shows of which they did not approve, but that they only did so rarely, and frequently for good
reason. His meticulous exploration of “accounts of the media” shaped my own focus on the
conversations Evangelical Christians hold on game review websites concerning the dangers,
powers, and proper uses of video games. These sites explain that computers are educational,
children are impressionable, games are (or are not) addictive, and dozens of other claims,
mapping a world across which the relevant media can be developed, critiqued, and enjoyed. And
if we again allow Chidester’s location of the religious to extend our attention into the wilds that
77
Robert Lawrence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994), 20.
78
Stewart Hoover, Religion in the Media Age (London ; New York: Routledge, 2006), 94.
57
surround religions, we discover that this work takes place wherever media is reviewed,
To hold Hoover and Campbell’s theories together with Chidester’s makes it possible to
understand the human-computer interfaith. The human discovers digital entities upon the
grounds that they are two different sort of being, but those stories are constantly changed by the
approach that applies to people or groups we know in advance to be “religious,” but rather a
rigorous insistence on including the “humanity” in the terms that must be negotiated as people,
embedded in their particular communities, develop their plausible narratives of self. I propose
that any particular human-computer interaction is best understood through the messy dialog
through which people, embedded in their larger communities of meaning, come to understand
that they are not computers. This frame, as well as helping to explain groups conventionally
termed “religious,” could well apply, for instance, to the ways Facebook users, in the context of
That said, this study primarily concerns the peculiar involutions at human/nonhuman
circulating sacra (that is, religions), so we would do well to return to those practices. Consider,
for instance, a computer scientist who approached the Lubavitcher Rebbe in the sixties, asking “I
know that everything that exists in the world, even something that we discover later in history,
has its source somewhere in the Torah. So, where are computers found in the Torah?” The Rebbe
58
answered that the Jewish practice of laying tefillin anticipated computers.79 “You walk into a
room and you see many familiar machines: a typewriter, a large tape recorder, a hole puncher, a
calculator. What is new? But under the floor cables connect all these machines so they work as
one.” Just so, “you put on Tefillin. First thing in the day, you connect your mind, your heart and
your hand with these leather cables – all to work as one, and with one intent.” Humans, faced
with computers, discover themselves in relation to them using the materials that are near to hand,
and those resources are transformed as well. In religious communities, those resources can
It was a long detour, but it will prove useful. This section set out to establish that
Evangelical Christians are one among the many communities who have been trying to
understand what it means to be human among digital entities for the last several decades. But we
cannot understand the process adequately by holding Christians only alongside other nameable
religions that mobilize sacra to make sense at the human-computer border. Computer scientists
and worldly video game review magazines are also persistently locating, describing, and shifting
the borders between humans and computers. Evangelical media critique anticipates this
perspective in that it tends not to mistake worldly media for a neutral secular sphere. To
must return again to the line that Evangelical critique draws through various media, partitioning
what can transmit the gospel from what must be discarded, now with the suspicion that the waste
79
In Jewish ritual practice, morning prayer requires binding two boxes (Tefillin) containing verses of scripture to the
body by means of leather straps, one against the forehead, and one on the upper arm. The Shluchim Office, “Tefillin:
Jewish Wrap (2004),” accessed January 29, 2014, http://www.shluchim.org/content/img/mivtzoim/tefillin.pdf .
59
Video Game Critique and Spiritual Warfare
understands itself in terms of computers, but in terms of the world’s understanding of computers.
surprise, that worldly conceptions of computing were frequently understood through the
intercession of demons. In particular, Evangelical video gaming tends to reflect the spiritual
warfare theology that was ascendant in global Evangelicalism across the 1980s and 1990s. They
present the computer as a battlefield. Demonic forces are arrayed against the human users,
making the digital both a range for tactical training, and potentially a place of grave spiritual
danger.
This urgency in subject formation may initially be difficult to locate because the most
frequent genre of Evangelical video game might be identified as the “digitized Sunday School
exercise.” Games with names like “Bible Scramble,” “Bible Quiz,” and “Bible Crossword”
present tasks that had previously been conveyed on worksheets, and which were little changed
by their digital remediation.80 It is likely that these digital word searches, word scrambles, and
fill in the blank quizzes appeared early, and have proliferated widely because they are relatively
easy to make. Transforming a paper quiz into a digital game requires little programming or
graphical design, and effectively no additional play design, even when they are embellished with
80
My list includes, for instance, Bible Jumbles, Gil's Bible Jumble, Bible Scrambles, Bible Book Scrambles, and
Bible Cryptos. In addition to two different games titled Bible Quiz, I have also found The Party Quiz: Bible Edition,
Children's Bible Quiz, New Testament Quizzler, Kid's Bible Quiz, Bible Books Quiz, Bible Quizzer, Bible Quizzes,
Bible Knowledge Quiz. Non-Evangelical examples include Buddhist Quiz, and LDS Games: Quiz. To offer only one
more dense category, the list also contains Bible Crossword (2x), Bible Crossword Puzzles, Crossword Puzzles,
Islamic Crossword Puzzle, (Jewish) Crossword, and People in the Torah Crossword.
60
flourishes like victory animations, or parallel score keeping for multiple players.
To encounter these games as the primary scene of religious video gaming should prevent
subjectivizing work of video games (for those who find this word compelling, my sixth chapter
deals extensively with the possibility that games may somehow be growing more immersive).
Rather than assuming that games interpellate the player as a little jumping humanoid, consider,
instead, “the most-played computer game of all time”: Microsoft Solitaire.81 As in Solitaire, the
easy to inhabit, but difficult to describe inhabiting. One may say “I clicked,” “I won,” or “I got a
thousand points,” but the sentence “I am the mouse cursor” never became conventionally
possible among computer users, and the impervious pointer never becomes a “me” affected by
the world that surrounds it. That said, Solitaire was conscientiously deployed as a subjectivizing
machine. Windows, when it appeared, was a frightening creature and Microsoft’s lead product
manager for entertainment explained that they created Solitaire to “soothe people intimidated by
Who, then, is the subject hailed by Bible Word Search (Cliff Leitch, 2000)? First,
Evangelical media, like the larger culture around it, tends to presume that video gamers are
usually children, but unlike their worldly parallels, Evangelical games focus upon the moral
status of the player-in-play. Play matters because the player can learn the Gospel (or even, in
81
Microsoft, "Microsoft Solitaire Collection," accessed January 27, 2014,
http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/microsoft-solitaire-collection/282592d5-5c50-496d-921e-b6ef523a
d4d9 .
82
Joel Garreau, “Office Minefield: Computers Make Work a Lot Easier. They Make Play Easier Too,” The
Washington Post, March 9, 1994.
61
some contemporary networked gaming, share it). Whether or not this conception of play creates
a zero-sum game culture in which one is either gaming with Christ or against him varies. The
historical examinations in this study will tend to locate voices that understand most games to be
relatively benign, though we will also hear from Evangelicals for whom gaming is either a
spiritual support or a danger. However, the perspective that presents video games as harmless
seems largely absent from Evangelical critique. Thus we can begin to see how even Bible
Jumbles (Jerry D. King, 1993) situates the player in a context of spiritual warfare. To play
Evangelical games creates a player who is equipped to stand against the wiles of Satan.
This becomes even clearer when we consider Evangelical games that contain some
visualized player-character. The catalog that organizes this study includes Evangelical racers,
adventures, shooters, puzzlers, flight simulators, game shows, role-playing games, and several
other genres that present the player somehow on screen. These narratively-oriented games tend
to offer spiritual warfare theologies, most obviously, in that the player-character tends to be a
Christian who must fight (and/or convert) coordinated Antichristian forces to survive. As in my
opening anecdote from Catechumen, these frequently include demons, the possessed, and
sometimes even Satan. This, of course, is connected to the history of video gaming as an
entertainment medium. In even the simplest game-worlds – irrespective of whether they model
racetracks or mazes, inner cities or outer space – narrative progress, or even survival in the
world, tends to be opposed by algorithmic entities. Thus, though there are some game-worlds
without enemies, the vast majority from which Christian game developers draw inspiration
include a class of entities that will constitute themselves as an Antichristian army wherever
progress is presented as Christian task. To redeem Pac-Man by replacing the dots with pages of
62
scripture would transform the ghosts into the object of spiritual warfare. That said, no such
extrinsic cultural determinism can explain the prevalence of spiritual warfare in Evangelical
games. There could, after all, have been widespread revulsion at the staging of sacred matters
through the confrontational conventions of popular video games. The following section will offer
a historical hypothesis concerning the prevalence of spiritual warfare in Evangelical games, but
Because Evangelical media creation is a primary mode of their media critique, we cannot
ever fully separate these aspects of their emerging game culture. However, when we examine
Evangelical video gaming through any of the three dynamics at hand, in terms of computers,
religions, or games, we prominently discover spiritual warfare. Spiritual warfare, religiously, will
be particularly visible in critique, public disputation on the place of these games among humans.
Spiritual warfare will relate to computers most clearly in “development,” the co-emergence of a
development team and its software object. And in terms of games, it is visible at the edge where
communities gather to discuss – frequently using online game review sites – the power of
various games to help or hinder the cultivation of prayer warriors. In many cases these
conversations simply reiterate the moral superiority of Evangelical games over their worldly
parallels, but they also frequently open discussions about the power of digital media more
nuanced than those offered in worldly media. For instance, the creators of Axys Adventures: The
Truth Seeker (Rebel Planet Productions, 2007), and game developer/distributor Sunday Software,
both offer the possibility that “shooting” in games is inappropriate, even if the target is a demon,
63
a critique that departs significantly from worldly critique, in which the word “violence” can be
development teams that are conduits for angelic rather than demonic forces. In my participant
observation at the 2011 Christian Game Developers Conference, I found myself on a landscape
teeming with demons. I was told about students who had found the remnants of ritual sacrifice in
a drainage pipe under George Fox University, and how they were then plagued by demons; I
learned how the “forces of Satan” were arrayed across the game industry, turning children
toward violence and the objectification of women, and how Christian developers must infiltrate
In gameplay, spiritual warfare manifests in gaming practices that enact the player’s life
within a world that integrates out-game theology with the game’s internal metaphysics. That is,
modes of play which encounter Biblical text on screen as scripture, and in-game conflict as
edifying for out-game life create theological formations not otherwise possible, like the Bible as
dismissible on-screen pop up, or demons who move according to simple combat algorithms.
Whether or not these theological novelties enduringly shape the out-game religious lives of
players, it is evident from Evangelical game critique that much is discarded when the game ends,
inconsistencies being dismissed as reminders that this is “just a game.” That said, when games
are incorporated into spiritual warfare, the work of play certainly includes learning to live among
(and live as) entities that emerge from contact between out-game theologies and algorithmic
83
Sunday Software Inc., "Sunday Software's Somewhat Infamous 'NO' Shelf," accessed January 18, 2014,
www.sundaysoftware.com/noshelf.htm.
64
possibilities.
The total edifice of Evangelical video gaming as discovered through these three
dynamics, bound at every point by multiply constituted entities like the production/game/product
and the player/critic, can be characterized as an abstract machine for establishing computers as a
front in spiritual war. My dissertation explores the theological work performed through these
new conjunctions by exploring how Evangelical gaming responds to the shared concerns of
Evangelical Christianity and worldly computing. The histories of computing technologies will
thus occupy most of our time together, as we observe Evangelicals interacting with new
technologies with their attendant fears and hopes. “Violence” and “immersion,” respectively,
will be prominently shared by Evangelicals and the world outside. Before moving in that
65
direction, however, spiritual warfare might be well understood through its historical connections
Though it is an outlier in that its vision of the worldly emphatically contains a range of
nominal Christianity, Left Behind: Eternal Forces is quite typical among Evangelical video
games in that the edge between the Church and the world is imagined as a front in a spiritual
war. This is not primarily because of the small number of games (among which LB:EF is
especially visible) that highlight the entanglement of their creators' perspectives upon earthly war
and upon the heavenly host, but because of the far greater number of them (among which LB:EF
must be also counted) that build upon the Christian spiritual warfare tradition. In spiritual
warfare life is imagined as an epiphenomenon of a great war between divine and satanic powers
in which humans are necessarily participants, but for which they can become increasingly
prepared. And “imagination” can be used here in the quite specific sense of image production,
whether these are news images of spray painted pentagrams, the facial sculptures of the
possessed, or the complex of demonic mental images and the variously theological media that
refract them, from sermons, to paintings of Michael slaying Satan, to The Exorcist. Though
Christian theologies of this sort frequently refer to the exorcism of Legion in the synoptic
gospels, and Paul’s admonition in Ephesians that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but
against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the
spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms,” we would be remiss to treat spiritual warfare as
co-extensive with Christianity. Spiritual warfare is a theological emphasis that fares variously
66
across the broad sweep of historical Christianities. It is as present in the Seventh Day Adventist
understanding of history as “the Great Controversy” between God and Satan, or Pentecostal
“deliverance” ministries, as it is absent in most mainline and social gospel Christianities, even
when they invoke a “kingdom of evil.”84 I was surprised across my dissertation research to find,
first, that Christian video gaming is a range of cultural production overwhelmingly informed by
spiritual warfare theologies, and, second, that Christian training for a life among demons could
not be easily separated from Christian training for a life among computers.
located along a landscape of imagination rather than belief. This is necessary, first, because we
as scholars of religion have little access to the latter, our instruments being more readily able to
record reports of belief. But, further, an insistence that spiritual warfare must be located as a
“belief” makes much of its circulation incoherent. This becomes apparent when we attend to
nearly any specific struggle in the spiritual war. Consider, for instance, the libel suit that Procter
and Gamble filed in 1982 against Amway, alleging that Amway was propagating a rumor that
the P&G logo had “666” encoded in it, and that the corporation paid part of their profits to the
Church of Satan.85 It is unclear whether Amway had spread the story, but it is clear that across
twenty years, Christians sent thousands of angry phone calls (and later emails) threatening legal,
economic, and prayerful action against P&G as a front in the spiritual war. It is also clear that
these messages change over time. The “owner” who hailed Satan on the Phil Donahue show
84
Walter Raschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel (New York: MacMillan, 1917), 86-87.
85
Sandra Salmans, “P.& G.’s Battles with Rumors,” The New York Times, 22 July 1982.
67
would eventually become the “president” who did so on Sally Jesse Raphael.86 If we situate
ourselves upon a landscape of “belief” (or apply a research model focused on theological
authority) these changes become incoherent, and those making the phone calls become credulous
rubes. What we do have here, however – as in the case of otherwise-unattested occult “high
priests” reporting that their particular tradition was the inspiration for various artifacts of popular
culture – is the development of Christian counterpublics which must be spiritually armed and
trained upon an imagined martial landscape.87 Prayer-warriors and their demonic opponents
appear in a gradual simultaneity, and cannot be located separately. That is to say, we cannot
designate spiritual warfare a complex of beliefs, inasmuch as the notion of belief presents the
believer as a preexisting subject and remains agnostic as to the reality of the faith-object.
Spiritual warfare is a set of practices through which Christians and Demons emerge together.
Though the greater spiritual war in which these games are both training exercises and
legitimate battlefields situates itself as an authentic interpretation of biblical mandates, and has
rich precedent in Christian demonological practices including the Catholic rite of exorcism, it is
necessary to specify that spiritual warfare manifests differently in different places and times.
Digital religion did not intersect the antidemonic war at large, but a very specific phase and
location within it. As the following chapter details at length within a fuller history of digital
religion, both Evangelical production and critique of video games appear around 1982 in a
86
James R. Lewis, Satanism Today (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2001), 216.
87
While Stephen Dollins only attests that his former high priesthood in the Church of Satan allows him to find the
secret teachings in Harry Potter media, William Schnoebelen attests that the creators of Dungeons and Dragons
actually attended his coven to “make sure the rituals were truly right ‘from the book.’ The Prophecy Club, “Stephen
Dollins: Occult Holidays Revealed,” Accessed January 25, 2012,
http://www.prophecyclub.com/meetings_dollinsholidays.htm ; William Schnoebelen, “Straight Talk on Dungeons
and Dragons,” accessed January 25, 2012, http://www.chick.com/articles/dnd.asp.
68
sudden surge. Over the subsequent decade, religious gaming goes into decline, but then the
roughly simultaneous application of Nintendo’s first game console and DOS-based home
computers as platforms for Evangelical gaming across the mid-1990s create a first major leap in
distribution, visibility, and absolute quantity of games. Between 1996 and 1999, Internet
This is to say, the first wave of Evangelical video gaming takes place in the context of the
“Satanic Panic” of the 1980-90s, as well as the Evangelical boom in spiritual warfare theologies
as exemplified in the “Spiritual Mapping” movement. The connection here should not be moved
in the direction of causality, but these conditions could certainly produce a context in which
games that situate the player in terms of anti-demonic war might be accepted as edifying.
Both of these public struggles with the demonic seem to emerge in continuity with new
public conversations about “Satanism” that emerge in the 1970s.88 The Satanic Panic, however,
presented police, legislators, and therapists rather than prayer-warriors as the front line. It was a
cultural moment wherein popular cultural themes like pentagrams on heavy metal albums were
connected by American news media to a temporary rise in prosecution of Satanic Ritual Abuse,
creating a feedback loop that accelerated the search for (and thus the discovery of) incidents of
this kind. The efforts by police and psychotherapists to locate Satanic ritual crime between the
1970s and 90s in Britain and the US were only very rarely examples of spiritual warfare in
themselves –in that Satanic conspiracy was fought through arrest, not exorcism, and the forces
invoked were arrayed across state and therapeutic hierarchies rather than angelic ones. That said,
88
Robert Glenn Howard, “Crusading on the Vernacular Web: The Folk Beliefs and Practices of Online Spiritual
Warfare,” In Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World, Trevor J. Blank, ed. (Logan, Utah:
Utah State University Press, 2009): 163; Jeffrey S. Victor, Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend
(Peru, IL: Open Court, 1993), 21-22.
69
the two cannot be fully disentangled. The civic combat against demonism often produced the
dossiers of evidence that motivated Christian campaigns of the same. For instance, Pat Pulling,
founder of BADD (Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons) –a “Judeo-Christian” (she was
Jewish, though she appealed largely to an Evangelical readership) campaign for public
awareness and action concerning Role Playing Games as a vector for non-metaphorical demonic
possession– deployed legal accounts of Satanic Ritual Abuse to argue that mothers of sons
afflicted with dangerous gaming should “Get outside help, preferably with a therapist and a
clergyman of the family’s faith (your child is in psychological and possibly physical danger as
Though the Satanic Panic was not consistently characterized by spiritual warfare, they
were bound together through several shared matters of concern. Dungeons and Dragons, heavy
metal music, and a loose nebula of “occult” religious practices including Satanism, were
encountered as attempts to corrupt the youth in various ways, ranging from losing their faith to
becoming demon-possessed murderers. Perhaps surprisingly, it seems that actors could coalesce
around these concerns though they might disagree concerning the existence of actual demons.
Bruno Latour is again helpful here, defining “matters of concern” as “Highly uncertain and
loudly disputed, these real, objective, atypical and, above all, interesting agencies are taken not
exactly as object but rather as gatherings.”90 Critically, Satanic Panic and spiritual warfare
shared a central concern with the potential for violence within children, and a particular
89
Pat Pulling, The Devil’s Web: Who is Stalking Your Children for Satan? (Lafayette, LA: Huntington House, 1989) ,
120.
90
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), 114.
70
emphasis upon the adolescent male.
The widespread presumptions that adolescent men are both naturally attracted to games,
and naturally attractive to demons (the former being precisely as provable as the latter) created
an environment of urgency for Evangelical media production and critique. The work is a slowly
Evangelicals and the world, however, the stakes of this struggle were different, as will become
clear in chapter four, where the two conceptions of adolescent male danger find their way into
the video game violence debates. Unlike worldly critique, which needed primarily to keep young
men away from dangerous media, Evangelical critique sought to train youth to fight against
demons. This tendency will be difficult to locate in the context of Satanic Panic, as it does not
coincide with therapy, censorship, or policing, none of which is capable of framing the
The spiritual mapping movement, unlike the Satanic Panic, was little publicized in
non-Evangelical media, though its historical significance in mobilizing bodies against demonic
forces seems to have been significantly greater. Its beginnings are in the emergence of a sort of
empirical sacred geography. The great commission to bring the Gospel to all the world is always
historically instantiated, and air travel and other twentieth century technologies had facilitated
unprecedented globalism of missionary efforts. Gatherings like the 1910 World Missionary
Conference in Edinburgh, the 1966 World Conference on Evangelism in Berlin, and the 1974
91
Bivins, 17.
71
International Congress for World Evangelism in Lausanne, Switzerland allowed evangelists to
generalize the fortunes of their ongoing work and strategize. The Lausanne conference set itself
2,300 “members of the Church of Jesus Christ, from more than 150 nations.”92 In this document,
point 12 of 15, “Spiritual Conflict,” explained that Christians “are engaged in constant spiritual
warfare with the principalities and powers of evil, who are seeking to overthrow the Church and
frustrate its task of world evangelization. We know our need to equip ourselves with God's
armour and to fight this battle with the spiritual weapons of truth and prayer.”
In this period, the prayer that functions as a spiritual weapon, prayer to which God
responds with power, was frequently designated “intercession.” Across the 1980s, some
Evangelical prayer ministries began to move from older models of intercession to develop what
control over large areas.93 In 1989, at the Lausanne II conference in Manilla, representatives of
the Church Growth movement presented this much more specific vision of those principalities
and powers of evil, and of how, precisely, prayer was to be used against them. Following a
demonology that had been developed by networks of intercessors, it was now explained that the
great commission to preach the Word to the entire Earth was being hindered by organized
hierarchies of “territorial spirits,” demons, often masquerading as local deities, who push back
92
J. Gordon Melton, “International Congress for World Evangelism” in Encyclopedia of Protestantism (New York:
Facts on File, 2005), 295; The Lausanne Movement, “The Lausanne Covenant,” accessed Feburary 14, 2014,
http://www.lausanne.org/en/documents/lausanne-covenant.html .
93
C. Peter Wagner, Spiritual Warfare Strategy: Confronting Spiritual Powers (Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image
Publishers, 1996), 251.
72
missionary efforts and harden the hearts of specific, geographically delimited populations.94 At
Lausanne II, a formidable attack was mounted by an international team of “widely respected
intercessors” who prayed constantly for the eleven days of the conference.95
After the conference, coalitions emerged to lead ongoing battle with these territorial
spirits, raising up prayer warriors, often collected into international organizations such as the
World Prayer Center, or Youth With a Mission. These warriors could attack specific demons by
praying toward, or even physically circling areas, while compelling the demons to desist in the
name of Jesus. In some cases, these geographically-oriented missions struck out after local gods
understood to be demons, and in others after large areas like the “10/40 Window, a piece of
geography between 10 degrees and 40 degrees north latitude [where] More than 90 percent of the
least-evangelized peoples of the world live.” In either case, demons were located as the
underlying cause of problems that others may have identified in sociological or cultural terms:
notable feature of the Evangelical landscape, praying to locate demonic forces, praying to break
their power, and praying for the establishment of churches. Around the year 2000, however, the
Spiritual Mapping movement seemed to transform from a dense network of institutions into a
looser network of practices. One significant reason for this was the planned and timely closure of
94
René Holvast, Spiritual Mapping in the United States and Argentina 1989-2005: A Geography of Fear (Boston:
Brill, 2009), 95.
95
Wagner, Spiritual Warfare Strategy, 19.
96
Wagner, Spiritual Warfare Strategy 29, 255.
73
AD2000 United Prayer Track which had organized many strategic level interventions, some
claiming the participation of up to 40 million intercessors.97 But the change came from
bottom-up simultaneously: in some churches, mapping and strategic level intercession became
regular practices, no longer relying upon those organizations, and other churches, convinced that
a public emphasis on the demonic was alienating new members, allowed spiritual mapping to
It seems quite likely that the diffusion of strategic level intervention into a loose network
of Evangelical practices established the ground upon which Evangelical gaming culture could
build. The digital is a quasi-geographical range, and those who interact with it describe
themselves variously as inside of it. Video games in particular, even when they offer the player
no on-screen representation, are conventionally described as a place one goes. It should not
surprise us that demons followed (or perhaps led) humans there. The context of Spiritual
Mapping, unlike Satanic Panic, explains why players continue to go there and fight demons.
The game Spiritual Warfare (Wisdom Tree, 1992), for instance, demonstrates the
influence of the spiritual mapping movement quite explicitly, sending the player on a mission to
fight a specific devil who is corrupting a city from his lair under the local prison. The spiritual
mapping movement also seems to have shaped the creative context for many Evangelical games
that lack this overt reference. Those Evangelical games that situate the player within narrative
worlds almost inevitably follow the common video game convention of escalating combat
leading to a final confrontation with a “boss” who has coordinated all previous conflict. This
97
C. Peter Wagner, “The AD2000 United Prayer Track,” accessed February 15, 2014,
http://www.ad2000.org/re00623.htm .
98
Holvast, 148-9.
74
structure, even outside of the many cases wherein the final boss is a great demon, presents the
game world itself as a territory ruled by coordinated evil, a structure that segues smoothly with
spiritual mapping’s presumptions. Beyond this, just as spiritual mapping framed local religions
as the facades of satanic activity, just so does Evangelical game critique, in its frequent emphasis
on Satan’s appropriation of digital entertainment, situate the cultural space wherein games are
gaining popularity as a front for which prayer warriors must be specifically equipped. And,
returning to the overlap between Satanic Panic and spiritual warfare, Evangelical games
frequently use the digital apparatus to demonstrate that the player is herself infested by demonic
danger, sometimes even showing that the demons inside the computer are inside of them as well.
Conclusion
To briefly recap a strange journey, we can well understand the development, critique, and
enjoyment of computer software as parts of a complex process by which humans come to locate
narratives of self. Humans craft computers with the understanding that they are separated from
them by slippery notions like “intelligence” and “freedom,” and computers craft humans back,
transforming these notions. Together, the human emerges as the non-computer and the computer
emerges as the non-human. How this dialog takes place varies as it is variously entangled into
that works to orient lives around the Bible and Cross. However, to bring any medium into this
75
work, Evangelicals must determine what parts to remove in making way for the gospel.
Computers, recruited as allies in this salvific work, have found themselves embroiled in an
ongoing anti-demonic war. In some cases the demons are working to mobilize digital technology
against evangelism, and must be pushed back, in others the computers are recruited to simulate a
demon-haunted world to assist Christians in training for spiritual warfare. In practices of critique,
creation, and play, Evangelical gaming culture is widely permeated by spiritual warfare. In some
sense these seem to reflect the Satanic Panic that was taking place during Evangelical gaming’s
first two waves, but the human-computer interfaith of Evangelical gaming seems to more directly
reflect the Spiritual Mapping movement. In Evangelical video games, when they present
demons, young people are provided with strategies for combatting them, and are not only framed
as their prey.
This leaves us with two further dynamics to examine; we require greater specificity on
the computers and the games of Evangelical Christianity. The following chapter will
meticulously place Evangelical games in the context of digital religion, proceeding through
76
Chapter 3
Holy Ghost in the Machine:
The Historical Situation of Evangelical Video Gaming
Illustration 6: End Times Ministry in Computer Bible Games and Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist
Before and after: along one plot arc, these two pictures are separated by the “twinkling of
an eye” (I Corinthians 15:52). On the left, we see evangelism immediately before the Rapture,
the player trying urgently to save as many souls as possible so they can meet Jesus in the air and
go to heaven without death. On the right, we see evangelism immediately after, the player trying
to save souls among those left behind so they can protect one another from the hordes of the
Along another plot arc, these two pictures are separated by nearly three decades of digital
religion, a challenging distance to map. The scene has moved from print distribution to
CD-ROMs, from a father and son pair of hobbyists to a multi-million dollar corporation, and
from coordinate-guessing to real time strategy. The subject of in-game evangelism, the digital
77
agent to which players minister, has developed from a letter “T” to a polygonal humanoid with
The present chapter seeks to do justice to both stories, the theological and the
the first half, Evangelical video games will serve as paradigmatic examples, guiding our
theoretical orientation to the history of digital religion. In the second half, they will serve as
signal flares, showing us where to steer as we traverse six decades of only faintly-mapped
history.
We can locate the Evangelical video game as an instance of digital religion easily if we
introduction (other definitions, of course, are possible, including those where the religious
excludes games and other frivolities entirely). “Computers,” for the purposes of this study,
means a chain of systems that perform algorithms (finite sets of prearranged commands
arranged into logical chains), so a room of children working to solve a single algebra problem
would count as a computer. The “digital,” however, only describes computers whose systems
communicate exclusively with on/off signals, and these seem to appear with Herman Hollerith's
experiments in punch card based computing in the 1880s. Here digital entities, those curious
beings whose existence is only possible within digital systems, first appear.
It is clear that the viruses and the files of the digital world are different from their analog
homophones in many ways, but we must take care when we describe that difference. Though
78
various determinisms are defensible – for instance, digital entities may be significantly more
limited than natives of the analog wilderness, or they may be accelerating human potential, or
causing us to kill one another – this study will, for better and worse, never have an opportunity to
observe the computer as such. What we see, instead, are particular digital entities whose
tendencies are shaped by a complex of factors including their budgets, licensing, and cultural
situation, no less than their hardware constraints. A story of these particularities serves as a
scaffolding for several generations of religious attempts to describe and harness the possibilities
the place of humanity among non-human entities,” we might argue that the digital is always
necessarily religious (in that human-computer difference is at stake). But if we limit our scope to
durable confederations of humans and non-humans that collectively negotiate the borders of
humanity – that is “religious traditions” or simply “religions” – we can limit “digital religion” to
an affordance, a co-becoming, between them. “Digital religion” designates the new possibilities
that religions and digital agencies gain as they reshape one another. Bounded in this way, there
does not seem to have been any digital religion before 1951. The Human-Computer interfaith
may be locatable earlier, as it is likely that certain programmers reflected on the theological
consequences of their work before this, but there is no evidence that digital entities were invited
into any religious organization, nor that they tried very hard to insinuate themselves.
organizations places Evangelical video games alongside computerized concordances and church
websites, offering a trajectory for this chapter's historical survey. However, this formula must not
79
be confused for the similar proposition that religions make space for digital entities. If religious
and digital technologies are both presumed to precede their combination, digital religion will
appear as a syncretic derivation in every instance. If we are not cautious, everything will arrive
late. How, then, can the historiography of digital religion account for technocultural history
surrounding and preceding religious affordances without obscuring the novelty of these
technologies and theologies? If it is to address the novum, a history of digital religion might well
is well expressed by what we might call the “Frye Curve,” after Patrick Frye, Lead Engine
Designer for the Evangelical company Xrucifix/Two Guys Software: “With the resources we're
forced to work with we can only produce games that are five to seven years behind the game
play curve (or worse).”99 The observation itself is hardly surprising. Many reviews of
Evangelical games describe them along a curve of this sort; Saints of Virtue (Shine Studios,
1999), for instance, was reviewed as “five years out of date.”100 In 2005, Eternal War (Xrucifix,
2003), Patrick Frye's own most visible game, was reviewed on the Evangelical game review site
“promotion of an alternate religion” in the game – “first and foremost” criticized Eternal War's
“violence,” but none of these elements was explicitly temporalized with relation to worldly
media. The control scheme, however, is identified as a “throwback to the Wolfenstein key setup,
99
“Interview with Game Developer Patrick Frye,” accessed January 18, 2014,
http://mlarcherstories.blogspot.com/2008_09_01_archive.html.
100
Christian Gaming.com, “Saints of Virtue,” accessed January 18, 2014,
http://www.christiangaming.com/oldsite/Reviews/XSOVirtue.shtml .
80
having the default keys using the arrow keys instead of the standard WASD controls found in
modern first person shooters” (a convention popularized with Quake (Id games, 1996)), and its
graphics are likened to those of GoldenEye or Quake II, both released in 1997.101 Though, with
these comparisons, Young argues that Fry's game was eight or nine years behind, rather than five
to seven, both the Evangelical developer and his Evangelical critic seem to agree that some sort
of lag is at hand. What is a curve, and is it an analytical device that we want to apply in telling a
two-dimensional matrix. If one assumes, first, that time proceeds along a single, consistent line,
and, second, that some single type of behavior by a single type of actor can be well understood
by counting instances as they overlap (ignoring, provisionally, the differences between diverse
sub-types of actors and behaviors) we find curves for a great number of technocultural
people using iPods) defining an initial low point, then they are increasingly imitated until that
behavior, for whatever reason, begins to decline. Though diffusion studies mapping the
contagious power of innovation had been conducted since the late 1930s, the curve's
contemporary shape – a smooth, symmetrical dome – seems to have been codified in Everett
Rogers' 1962 study, The Diffusion of Innovations.102 With the subsumption of deviance and
user-end creativity as “re-invention,” it is possible to say that “an innovation is not necessarily a
101
Jason Young, “Eternal War: Shadows of Light," accessed Janaury 18, 2014,
http://www.plaingames.com/games/reviews/review.asp?id=59.
102
Everett Rogers, The Diffusion of Innovations Third Ed (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1983); H. Earl Pemberton's “The
Curve of Culture Diffusion Rate,” American Sociological Review 1.4 (Aug., 1936), pp. 547-556.
81
fixed entity as it diffuses within a social system,” casting innovations as singular, if mutable
entities.103 With this in mind, we can return to Frye's four to six year delay of Christian games
on a “game play” curve. The relevant actor seems to be the game development team, and the
To observe a specific game play curve shared by Evangelical and worldly instances will
clarify what happens when we begin to think in curves. Here, then, is a game play curve for
dance-pad games, those games that invite players to rhythmically stomp on surfaces with
embedded buttons:104
In 1987, Nintendo created Dance Aerobics, apparently the first game to offer a floor-mat
with embedded buttons on which players dance. Nintendo was years ahead of the curve in this,
because it was only following the release of Konami's Dance Dance Revolution [DDR] in
103
Rogers, 176.
104
DWIExtreme, “Releases,” accessed January 18, 2014, http://www.dwiextreme.com/series/ (multiple releases by
numbered Level have been called single games); Wikipedia Contributors, “Dance Pad Video Games,” accessed
January 18, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_pad_video_games; CBS Interactive, “Search Games:
Rhythm>> Dancing,” accessed Janaury 18, 2014, http://www.gamefaqs.com/.
82
1998-1999 that release of dance-pad games leaped suddenly in frequency. The initial upward
leap describes a wave of commercial imitations hoping to capitalize upon DDR's success in
arcades (including Konami's own imitations in new versions of DDR, those imitations
comprising the Dance Maniax franchise, and the productions of various Korean arcade game
manufacturers whom Konami would soon take to court). But profit motives do not entirely
explain the curve, nor can it be reduced to the action of relatively established game studios: In
2001, at the curve's initial peak, StepMania, a free open source dance-pad game was created.
And it is only in 2005 (four years after the initial peak, seven years after DDR, and fourteen
years after Dance Aerobics) that Digital Praise released Dance Praise (Digital Praise, 2005), the
In this way we can apply the Frye Curve as a limited, but adjustable tool for comparing
Christian technologies with their worldly parallels. In some cases Frye's calibration at five to
seven years seems quite precise. For instance, though action role playing games first appear in
1982-4, Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda (1986) marked the sharp ascent of this game play curve,
and was followed six years later by Spiritual Warfare (1992), its Christian reimagining. But in
other cases we may need to calibrate our curve to describe larger distances from original to
adaptation: Evangelical 3D platform games like Bongo Loves the Bible (Sunday Software, 2005),
Bible Champions (Third Day Games, 2006), and Timothy and Titus (Sunday Software, 2007)
appear a full decade after Super Mario 64 (Nintendo, 1996) popularized the genre, following the
curve's peak by approximately eight years. Likewise, Axys Adventures (Rebel Planet
Productions, 2007), an Evangelical action role playing game greatly resembling Nintendo's
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998), but with 3D platforming elements appears, again,
83
about eight years late. But sometimes the Frye Curve cannot be adjusted to fit the data at all, as
in the case of Evangelical First-Person Shooters [FPS], which distribute themselves evenly
across the curve's advancing peaks, ranging from two to seven years late as new gaming
technologies emerge. The first Christian FPS, Super 3D Noah's Ark (Wisdom Tree, 1994)
appears atop the curve only two years after Wolfenstein 3D (Id Games, 1992) popularized the
genre, and The War in Heaven (1999) introduces polygonal First-Person Shooting only three
years after its popularization in Quake (Id Games, 1996). However, 1999 also saw Saints of
Virtue (Shine Studios, 1999) with its 1993-era game engine, and the Quake engine was still being
The problem, however, is not that thinking in curves works inconsistently, because we
can always change our variables and discover it more-or-less correct. Thus, we could smooth our
dance-mat curve further by looking more specifically at games in which the player steps in the
direction of arrows that rhythmically drift across the screen, a convention that begins with DDR.
Dance Aerobics, which ordered foot placement using an on-screen instructor and a highlighted
representation of the mat, would be excluded, but nearly all others would remain. The history of
imitable on-screen instructors in dancing games, on the other hand, would plot a very different
curve. Beginning with Spinnaker's Aerobics for Atari in 1983, it would include Nintendo's Dance
Aerobics (1987) but exclude most of the DDR franchise and all Christian instances thus far, and
only inconsistently rise until a sudden jump in frequency around 2008, as motion-sensing dance
I offer this series of possible adjustments, not to assert that we must choose proper
variables, but to demonstrate that describing technological innovation using a frequency curve of
84
this kind makes the novum imperceptible. To locate phenomena behind, ahead of, or upon the
curve discovers mimesis by presuming identity. Because a curve identifies every phenomenon as
somehow identical to other phenomena distributed across a temporally removed rise and decline
in concentration, they can locate “first” instances, but not “unique” ones, nor even “originals”
(should we assume that origination implies ongoing change). To do justice to Frye's own game,
Eternal War: Shadows of Light, to Dance Praise, or to any other piece of technocultural history,
we must learn to discuss some range of its features which have neither obvious predecessor, nor
successor. It is possible, for instance, that Eternal War is the only game that will ever include a
“weapon” called “Smite” that produces “Boom! A rippling explosion that disorients most
enemies” (with a “secondary attack” that produces “Several explosions at once, sending the
target flying backward”).105 It is likewise possible that Dance Praise's “Tune Into You” mode,
which “sets the dancing at your pace so you'll always be at the right level,” leaves it with neither
precedent nor successor as a dancing game that automates a good faith effort to match rather than
Any single, gameplay curve would render these particulars invisible, but so too would a
historiographical atomism which refused to even heuristically suggest identity between similar
games. Between the popular faith in “the curve,” and the overwhelming flatness of total
difference, we might describe, instead, a complex arrangement of “some curves” to draw novelty
105
Xrucifix, “Manual: Weapons," accessed January 18, 2014, http://www.xrucifix.com/anvil/manual.php?id=7.
106
According to www.tvtropes.org, there are three rhythm games that feature “dynamic difficulty” of this sort, but
one of these is a button mashing game (DJMAX Portable), and the other two are more (Guitar Hero 5) or less
(Rocksmith) stylized guitar games. TVTropes Contributors, “Dynamic Difficulty,” accessed January 18, 2014,
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DynamicDifficulty; Digital Praise, “Dance Praise: Over 50 Songs,”
archived by the Internet Archive, August 18, 2007, accessed Janaury 18, 2014,
http://web.archive.org/web/20070818201931/http://www.digitalpraise.com/flash.php.
85
into focus. The curves for “divine potencies rendered as player abilities,” and “First-Person
Shooters,” or “dynamic difficulty” and “dancing games,” for instance, meet in ways that gesture
toward the novum. Following this logic, this history of technological innovation strives to
describe the interference pattern produced by the intersection of all waves relevant to the
phenomenon at hand. If we were to return to our dance pad curve, then, and historicize it as the
intersection of the separate fortunes (that is, the curves) of specific trends in techno music,
on-screen instructors, moving arrows, floor-mats, motion detection accessories, open source
gaming, and digital Christianity, we would still only have a crude simplification, but we would
begin to detect the ways these trends transform one another. Though counting instances would
still remain relevant, such a methodology would work to draw the how out of how many.
If we apply this practice to the history of digital religion, it need not be understood as a
series of tardy imitations of digital practices by religious confederations, nor the tardy imitation
intersections between two technocultural histories, both of which are themselves the interference
patterns of innumerable further curves. To envision digital religion as a vast interference pattern
of interacting curves leaves us with a narrative principle much simpler than Frye's own maxim,
one not unrelated to Marxist questions about the ownership of the means of production: When a
digital technology becomes accessible to a sufficiently wide range of digital creatives, someone
wild entity captured by our research. Particular kinds of questions and research methodologies
produce curves. We, thus, must carefully explain what it is we are counting, where we found
86
instances, and what was excluded, without accidentally naturalizing these decisions. The Frye
Curve, which emerges when one compares some very few religious games with blockbuster
games that inspired them, is, in fact, a very helpful heuristic if regarded carefully. The lag of a
few years between the popularization of various gaming technologies and their application in
Christian games seems to reflect restrictive licensing in some cases, and slow processes like
game development, or software training in others. For analysis to coherently frame these diverse
factors, analysis of any curve must direct focus to the literally innumerable potential curves of
which the present curve is a two-dimensional slice. A complete accounting of those potential
curves is impossible, but the best study is that which presents the reader with as many curves as
Just as Evangelical video games can tell us much about digital religion, so too does that
broader frame reveal much about these specific instances. More specifically, if we were to
observe the curve of Evangelical video game production, we would observe the marks of various
technocultural shifts that transformed other aspects of the digital as well as the religious. This
chapter's historical survey begins with the advent of digital religion as such, but with the
emergence of religious video games in 1982, its rhythm is set by changes in their production.
With this in mind, we can now consider a quantified history of religious video games:
87
Religious Video Games:
1982 - 2010
80
70
Number of Games Released
60
50
88
40
30
20
10
designer or distributor's name, a year of release, and which I am relatively certain actually
existed, playable, on someone's computer. The catalog appears in full as an appendix to this
dissertation, and I expect that it will be corrected, expanded, and better understood through
ongoing research. Producing this catalog of religious video games has been a significant
counts only 45 Christian games, Moby Games lists 65 “educational-religious” games and Digital
Islam counts 26 “Middle Eastern and Islamic video games.”107 A complete catalog of religious
video games is not possible, however, and this should not be mistaken for one. Many games on
this list have quite nearly vanished already, leaving only scarce traces in archived websites or
limited-circulation magazines. I am certain that many further games have been lost without a
trace. The list is, likewise, necessarily incomplete because it was mapped according to my
specific selection criteria. Had I made different decisions as to what is religious, a game, or a
Nearly all of my research has taken place online and in digital periodical archives. My
initial search terms simply juxtaposed “game” or “video game” with words that I suspected
religious groups would use to hail like-minded web browsers. I tried words insiders might use to
describe themselves (e.g. “Hindu,” “Wiccan”), and diverse sacra including precious names (e.g.
“Hubbard,” “Abraham”), and books (e.g. “Bible,” “Quran,”). When I found any instance that fit
107
MobyGames, “Game Browser: Religion,” accessed January 27, 2014,
http://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/x,84/list-games/ ; Wikimedia Foundation, “List of Christian Video
Games by Release,” accessed January 27, 2014,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_video_games_by_release ; Vit Sisler, “Middle Eastern and Islamic
Video Games,” accessed January 27, 2014,
http://www.digitalislam.eu/findInSection.do?limit=50§ionId=1115&page=1,
89
my working definitions, I added them to the list, and made their name a new search term, seeking
out pages that may have cataloged that game alongside others. When I found websites selling,
reviewing, or digitally distributing games, I used the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) to see
if further instances could be excavated from the website's past. Working in this way, my purview
of non-English games has been relatively limited, and I am fortunate that some few games
released in Arabic, and one each in German, Swedish, and Thai found their way in. Games with
no traces on contemporary websites are not included. There were probably more Christian games
programmed in BASIC than I have been able to locate, and many of those may have been shared
between friends. Limited distribution only excluded games from this study when it pushed them
beyond the reach of my tools. What I could not find, I could not document.
supplemented in-game images and processes with distributor-authorized text, such as flavor text
in catalogs, and the page titles of websites. Consider Hebrew Learning (Ulrich Greve, 2002) and
Arabic Alphabet” (Islamic Playground, 2006), both of which are included in the chart. If these
had been produced by Rosetta Stone, or another company specializing in language instruction,
users may have tended to describe them as neither games nor religious. However, I have resolved
that the former is “religious” because Ulrich Greve, its creator classifies it as “Jewish Software,”
and the webpage offering instructions on it describes a session of use as “a new game;” in the
latter case, the fact that it is distributed through a site called “Islamic Playground” resolves both
108
Ulrich Greve, “Hebrew Learning for Windows CE 3.0/Pocket PC 2002/Pocket PC 2003,” archived by the
Internet Archive, February 9, 2005, accessed January 18, 2014; Islamic Playground, “Islamic Playground,” archived
by the Internet Archive, August 10, 2006, accessed January 18, 2014,
90
“game,” as “fun,” or as something one “plays,” I have called it a game.
include neither all games made by religious people, nor all games containing citations of
religious tradition. First, religious people and organizations occasionally produce artifacts which
are not themselves religious. For instance, though Bap (“How fast can you move your mouse?
www.christiancomputergames.net, I have not classified it with religious games, but with Hebrew
National Hotdogs and Oneida Silverware as exports from religious groups.109 I identified the
religious by first identifying sacra. That is, religious organizations manage their negotiations at
the borders of humanity by transferring materials of various kinds, and only games that used
these to draw their players into the ongoing border negotiations of specific religions were
If it had been possible, I would have abstained from the question of whether original
characters created by religious production companies are sacra. Because some games were based
entirely around them, though, I could not, and decided that they alone were not able to do
religious work. Fortunately, in most cases the games that contained them also contained less
ambiguous sacra. Some characters, like Bibleman or the Torah Tots, make the problem easier
still by refusing to travel apart from sacra. Thus, Music Machine (Sparrow, 1983) for Atari 2600
is not on this list because it contained Stevie, Nancy and the evil Mr. Pims, but because the
http://web.archive.org/web/20060810192930/http://www.islamicplayground.com/Scripts/default.asp.
109
Christian Computer Games.Net, "Bap," archived by the Internet Archive, December 20, 2001, accessed Feburary
10, 2014,
http://web.archive.org/web/20011220085307/http://www.christiancomputergames.net/english/OL_bap/index.html .
91
player tries to catch icons which the manual explains to be love, patience, gentleness, faith, joy,
peace, kindness, goodness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-3).110 It is possible that “The Pirates
Who Don't Do Anything” of Veggie Tales fame will eventually be sacra in their own right, but
for now their inclusion was not enough to get a game onto this list.
That said, there is no spiritually invested material, no matter how established, that is
This game, unreleased in the United States due to Nintendo of America's restrictions on
religious imagery, starred a dinosaur who could breathe fire when it carried a cross, and who
completed levels by placing four Bibles into a skull-block. After a bonus stage, the Devil would
fly to the next level, repeating the process endlessly until the player lost or gave up. What does it
110
Atari Age, “The Music Machine: Manual,” accessed February 10, 2014,
http://atariage.com/manual_thumbs.html?SoftwareLabelID=321 .
92
mean to say that the imagery is religious, but the game is not?
than those at humanity's edges. We might identify fantasy and blasphemy as prevalent tendencies
of this sort in popular media. Literature conventionally labeled “fantasy” is connected by the
presence of “supernatural content [that is] believed by few or no audience members and is believed
by audiences to have been believed by another culture.”111 Unlike believers in extravagant magics
or in dragons, who are exiled to the vague past, the others underwriting fantasy may in some
cases just be separated from the audience by banal religious difference. Thus, vampire-fighting
games, though full of crosses, souls, and holy water, are fantasy with religious citation, rather
than religious. Games like Devil World, or Konami's 1992 Noah's Ark, would be out of place on
this list because they present non-human agencies as human fantasy, and not as external beings
with whom borders must be negotiated. Blasphemous games, likewise, were not included in the
list. “Crucify-me! Jesus,” for instance, sarcastically describes itself as “another exciting toy for
your Christian child” then delivers a combination of Jesus wailing in pain, and cynically
expounded Bible verses quite consistent with the embedded caveat “Warning: This game is not
to be viewed by christians [SIC], unless they have a REALLY good sense of humor.”112 This
blasphemous game does not meet my operative definition of religion because it does not seem to
mobilize border negotiations between humans and non-humans, but between two groups of
111
Brian Laetz and Joshua J. Johnston, “What is Fantasy?” Philosophy and Literature 32.1 (April 2008), 161-172;
167.
112
Created by Aaron Chapman of www.nogod.com and circulated largely through www.newgrounds.com, 2000.
“Crucify Me Jesus,” accessed January 18, 2014, http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/1545 .
93
humans, one of whom views the other as foolish.113
The final problem for producing this list was deciding how many games add up to one.
Here the polysemy of “game” again becomes relevant to our analysis. Consider Bible
Adventures, a cartridge for the NES game console, released by Wisdom Tree in 1991; it is
frequently described as “a game.” Upon starting, the player's first choice is to select among
“Noah's Ark,” “Baby Moses,” and “David and Goliath;” these are each also frequently described
as “a game.” The present tally counted these as one game, rather than four, or three. However,
when Yalon Keret, creator of six Jewish games that were packaged together in Avner and
Brachot (Torah Educational Software, 2000), released them on his own website as separate
games, I count these as a total of seven games, and did not count the website distributing them as
an eighth.114 Though divisions of this sort created new entries, I did not count the repackaging of
older games into anthologies as the creation of new games. Likewise, ports of games from one
computing platform to another did not count create new entries, even when graphics were
updated in the process. And several crossword puzzles, jigsaws, or mazes distributed together,
each using the same engine, though with different levels, would be counted as containing a
113
As with religious games, blasphemous games seem to be largely oriented with regard to a (Anti-)Christian public.
Though I have not sought blasphemous games with the rigor I applied to the search for religious games, thus far, by
the above definition, I have located 15 blasphemous-Christian games (i.e. Beep Me, Jesus; Biblebelt Man; Bible
Fight; Broken Garden; Crucify-Me! Jesus; Giant Laser Jesus; Jesus Blastafon 9000; Jesus Dress Up; Jesus of
Nazareth Interactive Fiction; Myth Hunter; Nail Jesus to the Cross; Pope Wars; Running Jesus; Run Jesus, Run:
The 10 Second Gospel; Super Jesus: The Game; and The You Testament), seven blaphemous-Catholic games (GTP:
Vatican City; Nun Blaster; Operation Pedopriest; Pimp my Pope; Vatican Raiders; Vatican Quest; Whack the Pope)
only one blasphemous-Scientology game (Escape from Scientology Land), one blasphemous-Muslim game (The
Making of a Prophet), and the two blasphemous-Ecumenical games of the Faith Fighter series.
114
“Yalon Keret, “Game Programming & Graphic Design,” archived by the Internet Archive June 5, 2008, accessed
January 18, 2014,
http://web.archive.org/web/20080605115400/http://www.yalonkeret.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=art
icle&id=5&Itemid=6.
94
single game. This final matter of counting was by far the most challenging, as there is no
In conclusion, I made a series of decisions to delimit what I would call a religious video
game, and every one of them is contestable. As throughout this dissertation, I sought out video
games that include the sacra of the specific religious communities in which they circulate. I
interpreted this to exclude some kinds of blasphemy and fantasy, and decided that the licensed
characters of religious entertainment are not yet sacra. Further, new levels distributed with their
original games are absorbed into them, as are ports and anthologies. Charts which expand wildly
to accommodate every game with a cross in it, or contract to describe only those which have
been played by a thousand people of good faith are much needed, and if other studies produce
them, I hope our charts can meet amiably along a single set of axes.
Thus translating “religious video game” into quantifiable criteria, we find a chart that
seems to have several curves within it. After three decades of digital religion, a first wave jumps
up and dives back for nearly a decade's lull; a second wave rises and falls across the 1990s; the
turn of the century sees an unprecedented spike; and another wave crests across the mid-aughts.
The remainder of this chapter presents a history that follows this rhythm. For the sake of
narrative coherence, a section describing digital religion before video games opens the story, and
the final section includes the peak still rising at the chart's end. Each of these curves is an
interference pattern produced by innumerable further curves. The waveforms of mail-order and
Internet distribution, of CD-ROMs, personal computers, and restrictive game console licensing
had strong effects, but none of them should be mistaken as a curve's singular cause. The history
95
In the Beginning was the Word [1951-1982]
Between 1951 and the late nineteen seventies, digital religion began with a series of
experimental translations, moving scripture from languages that mediate between humans and
the divine into languages that mediate between humans and machines. With the end of the
Second World War, the monumental mainframe computers designed to guide missiles and break
codes began turning their attention toward civilian accounting under the supervision of various
universities and corporations with close government ties. In 1951, it seems, several projects of
feeding holy text into these demilitarized mainframes begin to take shape, the two most famous
of which were Christian, non-Evangelical, “high church” projects: In this year Father Roberto
Busa S.J. created a concordance of one canto (136 lines) of The Divine Comedy using IBM’s
enormous mechanical-electric punch card computers, and the American Philosophical Society
granted Episcopal Rector Rev. John W. Ellison funding to collate and compare various Gospel
theologians/engineers sufficient social capital to assemble more ambitious teams of humans and
computers toward more elaborate indexing projects; Ellison published a concordance of the
recently published Revised Standard Version in 1957, and Busa collated the complete work of
But even in this first period, when digital religion manifested as circuits of coders,
students, maintenance personnel, and literal tons of storage media carrying sacred text between
115
D. Harbin, Formatting the Word of God: An Exhibition at Bridwell Library, Perkins School of Theology, Southern
Methodist University (10/1998-1/1999). Edited by Valerie R. Hotchkiss and Charles C. Ryrie, “Fiat Lux: The
Electronic Word” (Bridwell Library, Dallas TX, 1998); D. M. Burton, “Concordances and Word Indexes: The
Fifties,” Computers and the Humanities 15.1 (Jun. 1981), 1-14.
96
concordances), diverse projects were emerging, and computers were coming to understand
scripture in wildly divergent ways. Consider two projects digitizing lashon kodesh (Hebrew,
digitizing the Dead Sea Scrolls that unsettled Jacob Neusner, prompting one of the first academic
meditations on digital religion. This project, also led by Father Roberto Busa, treated the Dead
Sea Scrolls like the Index treated Thomistic Latin, as a series of strings of letters. While it could
thus search forward or backward, it could only connect dissimilar words if humans tied them
together by adding themes, chapters, or other metadata to the text. The mainframe project at Bar
Ilan University, on the other hand, approached the Hebrew text of Rabbinic responsa as a
collection of conjugated words, producing a computer that could examine Hebrew texts
according to three-letter radicals, even when conjugation removed letters from immediate
proximity.116 The former, which could be configured to do nearly anything, but which did not
have any strong basis in the language it was examining, was conceptually influential in the
emergence of the digital humanities at large. The latter, on the other hand, being developed in
Israel with an algorithmic preference for Semitic languages, was quickly framed as a database of
“Jewish culture,” and grew to include both Talmuds, and dozens of other Hebrew texts,
including literature by Nobel Prize laureate Shai Agnon.117 Here we see how digital religion
that the lashon kodesh mediating between the human and divine is composed of strings of letters
leads to very different projects than does an Israeli project's presumption that it is composed of
116
Aviezri Fraenkel, “The Responsa Storage and Retrieval System: Whither?” accessed November 25, 2013,
http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~fraenkel/.
117 “
Database of Texts on Jewish Culture Available,” Computerworld, May 17, 1982.
97
conjugated radicals.
Digital religion was diverse even in its first phase, when it was entirely composed of
translation and indexing projects, but an “information age” is a tenuous temporality, only
extending as far as it can be carried by algorithmic agents and their discretizing instruments.
Thus, it is not surprising that the initial engagements between mainframe computers and sacred
text did not prominently include Evangelical projects. They, like other groups that did not have
sufficient social capital to access mainframes owned by IBM, Harvard, or various national
governments, had to wait until 1975 and the emergence of affordable home computers to face the
problematics of coding the sacred.118 And the growth of personal computing opened that
challenge rapidly: By 1982, approximately 600,000 bourgeois American families, as well as the
schools, businesses, and places of worship that served them, had begun to use personal
computers to restage the complexities of daily life as questions of data.119 Of course, a cursory
consideration of journaling, bill paying, and chess playing shows that there were informatic, even
algorithmic, aspects to personal life before personal computers, but only here were these
practices coded to be processed digitally. For instance, in this period computerized Bible
Processor” released by Bible Research Systems in 1980 for Apple II computers, was followed
quickly by Drew Haninger's initial DOS version of the Olive Tree Bible software, a program that
would continue to demonstrate the sacred possibilities of popular computing for the next several
118
Jeremy Reimer, “Total Share: 30 Years of Personal Computer Market Share Figures,” accessed November 25,
2013, http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/12/total-share.ars/ .
119
Gregory S. Blundell, “Personal computers in the Eighties,” BYTE January 1983, pp. 166-182.
98
decades.120 Similarly, the memberships and finances of places of worship began to migrate from
carbon paper to silicon as programs like PARSEC (Parish Secretary), Manna, A.C.T.S.
(Automated Church Transaction System), and MMS (Ministry Management System) circulated
communities, the Institute for Computers in Jewish Life invented the religious video game.
Rabbi Irving Rosenbaum (a polymath and amateur electrician who had helped to create Jewish
television programs for children in the 1960s) founded the institute in 1978 to help Hebrew
Theological Seminary (Skokie, IL) and other Jewish schools in the area access the Israeli
122
databases of Jewish culture already considered, and to create original educational software.
Among these first educational programs were a series of action and adventure games that fit
biblical narratives into the mechanics of popular games (The Jericho Game, The Philistine Ploy)
and others that placed a ludic frame onto quizzes (Jewish IQ Baseball, Mitzvah Munchers). As
these first religious games were initially distributed within the relatively enclosed network of the
120
Scott Lubeck, “Scrolling through the Bible,” Texas Monthly December 1984, 206-208; “25th Anniversary for
Bible Software is Celebrated with New Release” Business Wire, October 11, 2005.
121
Scott Mace, “In Focus: Spiritual Software,” InfoWorld December 27, 1982, 15-16; Tom Shea, “Linkletter:
Computers for Church,” InfoWorld October 11, 1982, 1; “Business System Answers Church's Prayers,”
Computerworld, December 13, 1982, 22.
122
For some further description of Rabbi Rosenbaum's life, see Illinois Senate (94th General Assembly, 2005), “SR
0041” which honors his memory. Accessed March 18, 2014,
http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/fulltext.asp?DocName=&SessionId=50&GA=94&DocTypeId=SR&DocNum=41&
GAID=8&LegID=15758&SpecSess=&Session= ; IMDB Contributors, “The Magic Door,” accessed November 25,
2013, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368521/ .
99
Institute for Computers in Jewish Life, further research is required to determine which instance
should be described as “the first religious video game.” Games were not placed in this
dissertation's official chronology from this point, as it is unclear when various games began
circulating on the Institute's computers. It is clear, however, that in 1983, Rosenbaum founded
the Davka Corporation to distribute these programs by mail to a broader audience of Jewish
Apple II owners, making their public release approximately simultaneous with the appearance of
In 1982, at least a dozen Christian games emerged for various home computer systems. In
New York, Anglican Brother Tobias Stanislas asserted, “I’ve written what I believe may be the
first ecclesiastical computer game. ‘Pax-Man.”123 But parallel firsts were also occurring in
Texas – where the Conrods, a father-son team of Seventh-Day Baptists, published Bible
Computer Games, a book teaching aspiring BASIC programmers how to make their own
Evangelical record label, began marketing ten different Family Bible Fun quiz games for the
Atari 400/800.124 It was a dramatic first year for Evangelical gaming, but 1983 only saw two
new releases, including an adaptation of the Christian television show “The Music Machine” (the
first religious game for a dedicated game console). 1984 then only sees one new Christian
computer game, and 1985 doesn't see any at all. The steep decline of Christian gaming after that
impressive first year accompanies a brief surge of Jewish games as Davka publicly released their
first ten games between 1983 and 1985. When that surge ends, religious gaming nearly vanishes
123
Mace, 15.
124
“Computer games introduced at Family Bible Fun Breakfasts,” Infoworld 5.40 (Oct. 3, 1983), 22.
100
entirely.
Looking back across the length of my study, the initial surge of religious gaming seems
to present patterns that remain visible for the following 30 years (the “seems” here is critical, as
historical patterns only become visible due to their specific selection criteria). First, we must note
that the Atari 400 and 800 were marketed as personal computers, whereas the 2600 was a game
console. This means that aside from Music Machine, all of these games were designed for home
computer systems rather than dedicated video game consoles. Because licensing has tended to be
much more affordable for multi-purpose computer systems, these will remain the mainstay of
religious gaming into the present (of the 773 instances through 2010, only 33 were released for
game consoles). There seem also to be some enduring patterns in game design from the outset:
The majority of the first releases are digitized educational worksheets and quizzes (e.g. Family
Bible Fun; Children's Bible Quiz), but there is a significant and diverse minority of games that
invited the player to identify with an on-screen character. In the first year, these already include
redeemed adaptations of worldly games (e.g. Pax Man), playable scriptural narratives (e.g. The
Philistine Ploy), and non-scriptural adventures built upon algorithmic adaptations of out-game
theology. Music Machine, the first instance of this final design trend, presages the later
adaptations of Bible Man, Veggie Tales, Adventures in Odyssey, Left Behind, and Torah Tots
franchises into video games. Though it adds the burden of maintaining continuity with those
franchises' narratives, developers continue financing their creativity and justifying their
125
Rabbi Rosenbaum’s puppet-based television show for Jewish children, “The Magic Door,” certainly counts as a
religious entertainment franchise, as it used a recurring cast of novel characters to illustrate religious teachings
across diverse media (in this case, television and records). Thus, though there seems never to have been a computer
101
But between 1984 and 1991, no surge of games matches the initial outpouring of
creativity. Why does religious video gaming dry up? It seems there was a larger vanishing at
hand; to quote the president of a department store chain in 1984: “The electronic toys are dead...
where we would have sold 1,000 video games, now we are only selling 20.”126 Thus, the long
lull in the history of religious games seems to demonstrate the consistent entanglement between
digital religion and other digital emergences; or, in the language of waves that opened this
section, here we see the Frye Curves of worldly and religious game production shifting together
Religious gaming's fruitful first year had been a year of wild over-production for video
games in general, and the years of scarce religious gaming begin with what historians of digital
culture tend to call “the great video game crash.”127 Sales of games had increased from $15
million in 1975 to an estimated $1.2 billion in 1981, and apparently it seemed for a moment that
any video game would sell.128 That year, a December TV Guide announced “It makes no
difference whether you've been naughty or nice; chances are that Santa will be dropping off a
game coded to recreate the fantasy world of that show, we might assert that the religious entertainment franchise is
an intersecting history without which that of the religious game cannot be sufficiently told.
126
Jennifer Lin, “Toys: Video Games Zapped by Lure of the Traditional” The Philadelphia Inquirer, Wednesday,
August 29, 1984.
127
To demonstrate the broad currency of this term, consider its use in literature for video game enthusiasts, as well
as designers and marketers: Nadia Oxford, “Ten Facts About the Great Video Game Crash of 1983,” accessed
November 25, 2012, http://www.ign.com/articles/2011/09/21/ten-facts-about-the-great-video-game-crash-of-83;
Wesley, David T. A., and Gloria Barczak, Innovation and Marketing in the Video Game Industry Avoiding the
Performance Trap (Farnham [Surrey, England]: Gower, 2010).
128
Arthur Howe, “Warner Slump May Signal End of Video-Game Craze” Philadelphia Inquirer, Friday, December
10, 1982.
102
video game under your tree this year. It's almost unavoidable.”129 Atari's dedicated game
consoles led in sales, but their 5200 Super System was released in 1982 alongside the
Commodore 64, ColecoVision, the ZX-Spectrum and several others.130 Atari's over-printing
millions of Pac Man and E.T. cartridges (rated in 2006 as the sixth and second worst games of all
time, respectively), thus, did not cause the crash, but it did display the surprising miscalibraton of
a significant company to their audience, and was emblematic of the crisis of confidence which
convinced many would-be game designers that their creativity would be wasted on video
games.131 The release of nine Family Bible Fun games in a single year seems to show that the
same over-confidence that characterized the worldly video game market of 1982 also extended
into Christian game development, and their place on the Atari 400/800 allowed the Christian
market to participate in the crash as well (though it was marketed as a personal computer rather
In retrospect, it seems that the burial of gaming’s first prototype biofeedback system (the
Atari Mindlink), and millions of cartridges of the E.T. video game in a New Mexico landfill
signaled only a collapse for the first generation of home game consoles, not of video games as
such, and was in part caused by the continuing proliferation of personal computers, which
remained platforms for new religious games.132 DOS games began to appear in 1986 with
129
Len Albin, “The Best Video Games of 1982,” TV Guide December 4-10, 1982, 50.
130
Roberto Dillon, The Golden Age of Video Games (Boca Raton, FL: Taylor and Francis, 2011), xvii.
131
Gametrailers.com: Best & Worst Games (TV 2006), MTV, 14 November 2006 (USA); IMDB Contributors,
accessed November 25, 2013, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0910891/; Dillon, 72-73.
132
"Atari Parts Are Dumped," The New York Times, 28 September 1983;
http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/consoles/2600/mindlink.html (accessed 11/25/2013); Debora L. Carr,
Home on the Strange: More Tales from My Albu-Quirky Journals (Dog Ear Publishing, 2010), 62;
103
Christian Text Adventure #1 (Bob Nance), and in 1990, TechnoCrafts Unlimited used that
operating system to release Nephi's Quest, the first game for Latter Day Saints.
In this quiet period, it remained clear that digital religion was productive of original
creativities, and not merely derivative of secular technologies. In particular, just as the indexing
projects of the 1950s were the first experiments in the burgeoning field now called “the digital
humanities,” the digital religious creations of the 1980s were frequently “ahead of the curve”
regarding various technologies of digital distribution. For instance, shareware, the tendency of
software distributors to circulate more-or-less complete versions of their wares for free, has been
and credited with the success of genre-creating game software like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D.133
Shareware, however, was pioneered by hobbyist programmers, and emerged first from an
experiment in digital religion. According to Jim Knopf, he created PC-File, the first program to
be distributed in this way, because he: “needed a program to print mailing labels for a local
church congregation.”134 Likewise, 1989's Franklin KJ-21 was the first dedicated electronic
book reader, a digital pocket dictionary redesigned as a biblical concordance and reader.135 And
in that same year, the Bible Library, with 9 Bible versions and 21 references, seems to be the first
popularly accessible work using CD-ROM technology to offer intertextual access to the digital
133
Robin Clark, "The Shareware Age," accessed March 30, 2013,
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/the-shareware-age-article.
134
Jim Knopf, “The Origin of Shareware,” accessed March 30, 2013,
http://www.asp-software.org/users/history-of-shareware.asp.
135
Peter N. Yianilos, “The Franklin Bible,” accessed April 26, 2012,
http://pnylab.com/pny/products/bible/main.html.
104
humanities.136
The death of the video game console was precisely the sort of death video games tend to
describe: dramatic, but brief.137 Between 1983 and 1988, Nintendo refined a marketing and
licensing campaign for their new NES console that succeeded in repopularizing the format. As
the NES moved from Japan to the US in its second year, Nintendo redesigned the machine to
ambiguate the border between computer and toy, and began selling it at consumer electronics
stores, but most importantly they attempted to prevent another glut of terrible games by
implementing various mechanisms to insure that only games that met their “quality” standards
(and whose developers agreed to pay 20% of their wholesale cost to Nintendo) could be played
on the system.138 Of particular interest for a history of digital religion, Nintendo of America
reflect ethnic, religious, nationalistic, or sexual stereotypes of language; this includes symbols that are
related to any type of racial, religious, nationalistic, or ethnic group, such as crosses, pentagrams, God,
Gods (Roman mythological gods are acceptable), Satan, hell, Buddha.
Officially, this meant that Nintendo of America’s policy grouped swastikas, blackface, and
crucifixes as a single type of language problem (which apparently did not include Mario’s
136
The Bible Library, “About Us,” Accessed June 18, 2012, http://www.biblelibrary.com/ee_aboutus.htm; A
Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth (Oxford: Blackwell,
2004), accessed March 18, 2014, http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/.
137
Dominic Arsenault, “System Profile: The Nintendo Entertainment System [NES],” in The Video Game Explosion:
A History from PONG to Playstation and Beyond edited by Mark J. P. Wolf (Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press,
2008), 109-112.
138
Luis Levy and Jeannie Novak. Game Development Essentials: Game QA & Testing (Clifton Park, N.Y.:
Delmar/Cengage Learning, 2010), 11.; Charles W. L. Hill, Strategic Management Cases: An Integrated Approach
(Mason, OH : South-Western/Cengage Learning, 2010), C166-7.
105
representation of Italians), and forbade them with the same force as “sexually suggestive or
explicit content” or “graphic illustration of death.”139 The two primary mechanisms for
enforcing their licensing were a “lock-out” chip, and threats to withdraw their entire library of
licensed games from any store that carried unlicensed ones.140 By Christmas of 1988, the NES
had already provoked the resurgence of the console market that has continued largely unabated
But Nintendo's quality standards largely prevented digital religion from sharing the
console resurgence along authorized channels (Taboo: The Sixth Sense, a Tarot simulator, and
perhaps the first non-monotheistic religious game, is the one conspicuous exception, and no one
seems to understand how it slipped under Nintendo of America's radar, particularly as it also
included nudity).141 Of the several companies that found work-arounds to the lock-out chip, the
most successful was Tengen, an Atari spin-off that fought Nintendo in court for their right to
make unlicensed games (and lost); number two was the Arizona company Color Dreams.142
Unlike Panesian or AGCI, whose releases included pornographic and bloody games
(respectively, approximately), Color Dreams produced relatively innocuous action and puzzle
games. In 1990, however, Color Dreams created the subsidiary Wisdom Tree company, which
139
For an evaluation of these policies as grounded in specific censorial decisions, see: Jim McCullough,
“Nintendo’s Era of Censorship,” accessed January 19, 2014, http://www.filibustercartoons.com/Nintendo.php .
140
David Wesley and Gloria Barczak, Innovation and Marketing in the Video Game Industry: Avoiding the
Performance Trap (Farnham [Surrey, England]: Gower, 2010), 34.
141
Moby Games, "Taboo: The Sixth Sense," accessed January 29, 2014,
http://www.mobygames.com/game/nes/taboo-the-sixth-sense .
142
For technical details on Color Dreams' circumvention, see Jon Valesh, “Nintendo, America!” accessed January
19, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/19990220025116/http://www.valesh.com/~jon/computers/nintendo.html ;
Chris Woodyard, “Nintendo Keeps Color Dreams Up Worrying : Video games” October 24, 1990, accessed January
19, 2014, http://articles.latimes.com/1990-10-24/business/fi-2859_1_video-game-market .
106
made seven unlicensed cartridges for the NES (and one each for the Gameboy, Sega Genesis,
and Super Nintendo consoles).143 Unlike the worldly license-dodgers who attempted to enter the
general video game market, Wisdom Tree circulated their games through Christian bookstores,
which were not interested in selling the console's slicker games, and thus had little to fear from
Nintendo's reprisal.144 Though their games were not as graphically sophisticated as several
contemporaneous religious games for personal computers (c.f. Captain Bible in Dome of
Darkness (Bridgestone Multimedia Group, 1994)), Wisdom Tree’s move onto game consoles
gave them unprecedented reach for an artifact of digital religion. Bible Adventures, in particular,
sold 250,000 copies, and has been by far the most frequent point of conversational reference in
In 1996, Wisdom Tree released a program for indexing the Bible, a less complex organ
than the mainline coalition led by Rev. John W. Ellison had created for the RSV in 1957, but it
was as small as a book of matches, and was bundled with a video game, NIV Bible & the 20 Lost
Levels of Joshua. The first 40 years of digital biblical indexes transitions from the immobile
mainframe to the hand held Gameboy cartridge. In some senses, the Bible’s first appearance on a
game console resembled the Franklin Bible readers released seven years earlier, but it is
significant that this cartridge actually packaged a game and concordance as a single piece of
software. The late 1990s, we may remember, were the years of “multimedia;” a vogue for
143 “
Wisdom Tree: The Spiritual Gamefare,” January 19, 2014, http://www.nesworld.com/wisdomtree.php.
144
Jeremy Parish, “Illicit Thrills and Dubious Pleasures,” accessed January 19, 2014,
http://www.gamespite.net/toastywiki/index.php/Games/G5-IllicitThrillsAndDubiousPleasures.
145
Nick Gibson, "Interview: Brenda Huff,” accessed Janaury 19, 2014,
http://www.sega-16.com/2006/08/interview-brenda-huff/.
107
showcasing the ability of computers to combine various things. Of course, if by “multimedia” we
mean only cultural formations that “appealed simultaneously to the eye and to the ear and
combined verbal with non-verbal messages” we would locate multimedia in “rituals, spectacles,
masques, plays, and operas, musical as well as visual, from the drums and trumpets of military
parades to the accompanying indoor performances” even before print.146 The significant trend in
the late nineties, then, was not multimedia as such, but a sort of international fascination, and
Across the 1990s, for instance, we find software increasingly bundled into peculiar
experiences. The “Microsoft Home” software line, for instance, began publishing a broad array
of popular software from 1993, and by 1994 these were being packaged into official “samplers”
and somewhat-less-official “packs” that might include an encyclopedia, various pieces of office
Though Wisdom Tree's foray into console-based digital religion well illustrated the
bricolage of 1990s digital culture, these Microsoft collections, being published on CD-ROM,
exemplify one of the two technologies that most prominently staged new convergences across
the present period: the World Wide Web (debuted in 1993) and the CD-ROM (became standard
on home computers around 1996). Microsoft collections were published on CD-ROM, one of the
two technologies that most significantly transformed digital life across the 1990s. In particular,
the World Wide Web allowed the creation of religious sites where communities could connect
146
Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2005), 33-34.
108
through and with simple programs, and the CD-ROM drive empowered the storage and
transmission of far more complicated programs, including the replication of archives previously
technologies offered spaces of contact where games, reference programs, educational guides, and
But before the World Wide Web, or the CD-ROM, the 1980s and early 1990s had seen
FTP servers, and gophers, all of which drew people and programs into dense contact, providing
content and momentum for later modes of circulation.147 I bring these up only now because they
seem not to have been significant vehicles for religious games in the 1980s, but the first
Evangelical Bulletin Board Services like Computers for Christ had appeared alongside the first
religious games, and other religious Boards, like the Makom Ohr Shalom BB, had been online
since the mid-1980s.148 The Bethany Bible Collection which featured “26 different high quality
Bible games and educational programs, including: Captain Bible, Bible Baseball, Creation
Station, Exodus, Where's Noah?, Tobiah's Quest, and many others,” being organized as a FTP
site for a short while in 1996 before being released as a CD-ROM, seems a rare, shining example
147
File Transfer Protocol [FTP] servers appeared in 1971, and offered a dispersed network of computer users simple
access to the files they stored. Bulletin Board Systems [BBS] are versitile, usually text based computer systems that
users could log in to in order to communicate with one another and access files as early as 1978. Gopher pages did
not appear until 1991, and they offered a browsable interface that resembled the roughly contemporaneous World
Wide Web, though their protocol was strictly heirarchical, rather than rhizomatic. None of these protocols,
incidentally, has gone away entirely, and the resource list compiled by the Internet Christian Library in 1996
includes some examples, like pharos.bu.edu, which continue to be maintained. “Not Just Bibles: A Guide to
Christian Resources on the Internet," accessed January 7, 2014,
http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/christian-resources.text/cres-04.txt .
148 “
Computer Exchange Spreading Christian Message,” New York Times August 24, 1984; Ira Rifkin, “Kibitzing in
New Tongue: by Computer: Valley New Age Synagogue Operates 'Bulletin Board'” Los Angeles Times January 7,
1988, accessed January 9, 2014, http://articles.latimes.com/1988-01-07/local/me-33963_1_bulletin-board.
109
relevant to the present study, and an excellent segue to this section's first great technology of
bricolage.149
CD-ROMs, relative to the magnetic diskettes that preceded them, were amazingly
capacious, one CD holding approximately the same quantity of data as 500 diskettes. This
sudden leap in storage capacity offered two major developments for digital religion, both of
which have significant effects upon religious gaming in particular. The first, and certainly the
better remembered, is how the CD-ROM empowered the creation of programs with vast built-in
stores of information. The immense databases of the emerging digital humanities, like the above
mentioned collection of Jewish culture at Bar Ilan University, could now be distributed as
consumer software. New collections like “The Encyclopedia of the First Millennium of
Christianity,” not only imitated the possibilities of the older archives, but included “multimedia”
material like video, audio clips, and color images.150 In video games, this last potential
manifested as improvements in graphics and sound quality, and became visible in Evangelical
games quite early. In late 1991, the first CD-ROM based game console, the Philips CD-i, was
released, as were five Evangelical video games, including Moses: Bound for the Promised Land
and Noah's Ark (Interlight Productions Inc.).151 These were pioneering releases in CD-ROM
based gaming, and in popular CD-ROM usage more generally. Likewise, for PCs, games like
149
Robert Woeger, "New Bible Internet Extensive File Library," accessed January 19, 2014,
http://www.theoblogical.org/dlatur e/itseminary/Dialogue/mail/msg00112.html.
150
Maged N. Kamel Boulos, "Encyclopedia of the First Millennium of Christianity 1998 – Second Edition,"
accessed December 23, 2013, http://www.zeitun-eg.org/encyclop.htm.
151
The Sega CD/ Mega CD accessory for the Sega Genesis was released within a few days of the CD-i, but it is not
a contender for the first CD-ROM console, as it had no stand-alone operation. For devices of this sort, the Turbo
Grafix 16 had a CD-ROM accessory as early as 1989. Carl Therrien, “CD-ROM Games,” in The Video Game
Explosion: A History from Pong to Playstaion and Beyond (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2008), 121-126,
122.
110
Captain Bible in Dome of Darkness (Bridgestone, 1994) created new spaces that integrated
complex animation and sound into play. These, however, were not quite as early, seeing as PC
based CD-ROM gaming had begun with The Manhole (Cyan, 1987).
The other new potential offered by CD-ROMs was a mode of circulation that vividly
demonstrated the bricolage of 1990s digital culture. That is, as well as allowing the admixture of
“multimedia” elements within individual programs, CD-ROMs also allowed multiple programs
to be clustered together in new ways. And, most importantly for this study, while large software
corporations were releasing samplers, so too were independent developers. Shareware, having
continued to blossom for a decade at this point, now presented a networked community across
which small offerings could be shared much more efficiently in thematic bundles. From
1993-1999, the Public Software Library distributed shareware to their subscribers on CD-ROMS,
rather than on floppy disks, producing a new marketplace for a range of niche softwares,
including digitally religious. To take a single instance, the March 1995 disk focusing on
“Home-Education” contained a folder of DOS files which contained twenty seven folders full of
CHURCHMG; another folder of Windows files included the subfolders RELIGION and
ASTROLGY (largely populated with different programs rather than conversions of the DOS
offerings).152 Significantly, these disks offered both motivation for the creation of new software,
and a means for circulating older works, drawing some programs that would have otherwise
never been seen by anyone except their creators into relative accessibility.
While one might find a “Jewish Screensaver,” some “memorable writings from the
152
The Public (software) Library, accessed December 13, 2013 http://cd.textfiles.com/psl/pslv3nv03/HOME/DOS/ .
111
Buddhist and Hindu philosophers” concerning women, or a program that “converts between
Gregorian, Julian, Jewish, Moslem, French Revolutionary, Icelandic and liturgical calendars,”
most experiments in digital religion distributed on CD-ROM by the Public Software Library in
this period were Evangelical projects.153 The forty-four religious games included in my study
which I located through their archives, for instance, continue the first non-monotheistic trend in
religious gaming with the next three Tarot reading games after Taboo on the NES, and The
Pesach Adventure, but all others games seem to have been Evangelical entries. In addition to a
broad cluster of trivia games with “Bible” in their names (e.g. Bible-Q, Bible Book Scrambles,
Bible in Mind, Bible Men), these included an assortment of adventure and arcade games, most of
It is difficult to say with certainty which religious communities began using the World
Wide Web toward sacred ends first, but several seem to have emerged online in 1994 (for
context, the World Wide Web only became publicly accessible in April 30, 1993).154 Notably,
many of those religious groups that arrived on the Web first had been engaged in digitally
networked religion using the various communication systems that immediately preceded it (some
of which are well understood as part of the Internet, in that they used TCP/IP network
protocols).155 Three prominent examples that reached the Web in 1994 should serve to establish
153
The Public (software) Library, accessed December 24, 2013 as archived by cd.textfiles.com,
http://cd.textfiles.com/psl/pslv3nv04/FILESBBS/UTIL_WIN/VID_UTIL.BBS;
http://cd.textfiles.com/psl/psl9312/DOS/ELEC_PUB/_DIRLIST;
http://cd.textfiles.com/psl/pslmonthly25/reviews/ed_03 .
154 “
Twenty Years of a Free, Open Web,” http://wayback.archive.org/web/20131208134409/http://info.cern.ch/ ,
archived by the Internet Archive December 8, 2014, accessed January 18, 2014.
155
“Internet,” Dictionary of Information Science and Technology (Hershey, PA: Idea Group Reference, 2007), 361.
112
the pattern: Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Kazen was answering religious questions from a distinctly
Lubavitch perspective over Fidonet as early as 1988; the network of rabbis and students that he
spent six years building on various bulletin board services seem to have joined him in launching
chabad.org, that critical first year.156 Dr. Richard J. Krejcir's “Into Thy Word Ministry,”
likewise, had an online ministry before it was technically on the Internet: “In 1992, we went on
Prodigy with an index site and in 1994, we were the first or second ministry on the Internet, I
believe (there many people with sites that had Christian materials, but no ministry online). But
this was enough to radically redesign how we 'did' ministry. Instead of printing out booklets, we
had downloadable fact sheets, outlines, and a few articles.”157 And, to complete our sampling of
Hinduism Today, which claims (and seems) to have produced the “first major Hindu website,”
used a network of Macintosh computers to facilitate their magazine's design and editing from
1988 onward. “1994 was the year Hinduism Today and the Tirukkural, started spreading their
tendrils through the Internet nadis. Power to the modem!”158 While their network was not
publicly accessible, like the above Jewish and Christian examples, it is clear that they were
156
"'Ask a Rabbi' on the Web: Online Rabbis Offer Answers,” accessed January 19, 2014,
http://www.jta.org/2006/09/11/archive/ask-a-rabbi-on-the-web-online-rabbis-offer-answers; Amy Harmon, “Yosef
Kazen, Hasidic Rabbi and Web Pioneer, Dies at 44,” The New York Times December 13, 1998, accessed January 19,
2014, http://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/13/nyregion/yosef-kazen-hasidic-rabbi-and-web-pioneer-dies-at-44.html.
157
Richard J. Krejcir, “ITW History,” accessed January 19, 2014,
http://www.intothyword.org/apps/articles/default.asp?blogid=3895&view=post&articleid=50131&fldKeywords=&fl
dAuthor=&fldTopic=0&contentonly=true.
158
"Nine Mac II's Enhance Hawaii's Hindu Network," Hinduism Today Magazine (Web Edition) October 1988,
accessed January 19, 2014, http://www.hinduismtoday.com/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=561; Satguru
Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, Yoga's Forgotten Foundation: Twenty Timeless Keys to Your Divine Destiny (Malaysiia:
Sampoorna Printers, 2004), 190; “1994: Year in Review,” Hinduism Today, December 1994, archived by the
Internet Archive November 5, 1996, accessed January 19, 2014,
https://web.archive.org/web/19961105222607/http://www.hinduismtoday.kauai.hi.us/Dec94.html.
113
appreciating the potential of digital networking in ways that would prepare them for the Internet:
“The publisher of Hinduism Today, for instance, can maintain continuous contact with all
members of the newspaper staff disbursed in several buildings without leaving the chair of his
powerful Mac II work station. Also, through a program called Tops, all forms of data and
information can be transferred with ease from one computer to another with but a push of a
button.” Their website not only published the magazine, but included pamphlets for printing,
archives of sacred text, a method for communicating with Gurudeva, among other tools.
Whichever of these sites was first hardly matters; what matters is that religion on the
World Wide Web went viral (about the same time, incidentally, that the word “viral” went viral).
Already in 1996, the Association for Religion and Intellectual Life [ARIL] offered a curated list
of religious resources because “Given the number of religious sites on the Web, surfing the
Internet can be like opening your door one Saturday morning to find a representative of every
church, synagogue, mosque, or cult group camped out on your front yard, all clamoring for your
attention.” That their initial list of nine “world religions,” seventeen Christian, eight Jewish,
eleven Buddhist, eight Muslim, and eleven Bible study websites was already a great
simplification, though most of these pages included links to dozens of others, speaks to the rapid
Facing this sudden efflorescence of online life, coalitions of religious people began to
gather to discuss what the Internet is and how they would interact with it. On one hand, the
159
Association for Religion in Intellectual Life, “Interfaith Internet – Website Catalogue and Reviews,” archived by
the Internet Archive, October 29, 1996, accessed January 19, 2014,
https://web.archive.org/web/19961029045955/http://aril.org/ ; Catholic Information Center on the Internet,
“Catholic Information Center on the Internet,” archived by the Internet Archive February 4, 1997, accessed January
19, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/19970204074851/http://catholic.net/RCC/homepage/CICI_Info.html .
114
Internet Evangelism Coalition formed in 1997, connecting representatives from approximately
70 different ministries, including the Billy Graham Center. Rufus Wells, an organizer of the
coalitions' conferences, presents a generous vision: “Jesus told his disciples to go out into all the
world and make disciples of all men. Now you don't have to fly all over the world to do this”.160
A contrary vision of the Internet (though, notably, not a position advocating avoiding it
entirely) is present in the emergence of content filtering services and software in this period.
Christian Internet Service Providers “Integrity Online,” and “Safeplace.net” began presenting an
Internet free of objectionable content in 1996 and 1997 respectively.161 X Safeplace.net, in its
early years as “Family Based Internet” demonstrated their specific perspective on the Internet by
stating in bold letters atop their “about us” page: “Did you know over 275 new pornographic web
new creativities became possible. Printed on CDs and sold on the Internet, the Egyptian company
Future Soft released the first six video games for a Muslim playership in 1997. To adopt the
Street, Juz Amma, Stories from Ahadith, Stories from Al Seera, and The Prophet's Wars were all
“games designed for religious education,” or, in terms presented earlier in this chapter, they are
largely “playable scriptural narratives” and “non-scriptural adventures built upon algorithmic
160
Dina Sanchez, “Evangelists Work to Spread the Gospel in Cyberspace – Ministy Leaders are Teaming Up With
Technology Professionals to Harness the Power of the Internet,” The Orlando Sentinel November 2, 2000.
161
Integrity Online Bouncing Back from the Online Bombs,” Mississippi Business Journal September 9, 2002,
accessed March 8, 2014,
http://msbusiness.com/blog/2002/09/09/integrity-online-bouncing-back-from-dotcom-bombs/ .
162
Family Based Internet, L.L.C., “About us,” archived by the Internet Archive June 24, 1998, accessed March 10,
2014, http://wayback.archive.org/web/19980624014153/http://www.safeplace.net/home/aboutus/aboutus.htm .
115
adaptations of out-game theology.”163 Digitized worksheets appear as sub-games within these
programs, but these would not become a major standalone edifice in Muslim gaming until games
Just as the history of digital religion marks the 1990s as extraordinary for their new
technologies of bricolage and the spaces of complex contact they created, the same history
discovers the early 2000s opening spaces for play where none could have been imagined
previously. The middle of a web page and the palm of a hand gain the potential to host complex
digital playspaces. This does not only mean new spaces for games narrowly defined, but a great
range of newly spatialized activities that facilitate action at the border of the human. I will, of
course, continue to give games special priority, and this period finds me in good company; here
we also see various new groups created to structure religious conversation on the potentials and
Returning to the chart that gives this chapter its rhythm, we must now try to understand
the impressive wave of religious video games that seems to crest across the turn of the 21st
century. The wave can be understood in several ways: new religious communities began making
video games, developers started making several small games rather than a few large ones, and
games moved increasingly onto websites, leaving their traces accessible to research decades later
(that is to say, it is possible that this spike documents a change in the possibility of research no
163
Heidi Campbell, "Islamogaming: Digital Dignity via Alternative Storytelling," in Halos and Avatars: Playing
Video Games with God (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010), 63-74. "Welcome to Future Soft:
Products," archived by the Internet Archive January 28, 1999, accessed January 19, 2014,
http://web.archive.org/web/19990128161335/http://www.future-soft.com/newweb/Products.htm.
116
less than a change in its object). But all of these tendencies seem to follow a now established
pattern wherein the Frye Curve of religious gaming spikes where it intersects with a rising curve
religion's interaction with changes in game console licensing, and with the boom in personal
computing. In this case, the new technology was the appearance of three different
web-enhancing programming languages between 1995 and 1996, Java, JavaScript, and Flash, all
of which allowed programs to be placed directly into web pages. To quote an excited reporter
observing its emergence, Java applets could present “animations, interactive games or other
parlor tricks.”164 Across 1996, both Macromedia Flash, and the distinct, but similarly-named,
JavaScript joined the larger effort to “bring full interactivity and sophisticated user interface and
Though these new programming languages are disproportionately visible through the lens
of religious gaming, they cannot be separated from the more general phenomenon of ongoing
Internet popularization, and its specific surge in popularity as a tool for religious instruction. To
speak in impressive approximations, in the year 2000, 35 million Americans searched for
religious information online (for comparison, 36 million people downloaded music that year).166
Likewise, the first browser-accessible Bibles had appeared in the Web's initial years, but they
164
Julio Ojeda-Zapata, “Take a Sip of the Future at Hot Java Sites,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, Monday, December 11,
1995.
165
Rick Waldron, "The Flash History,” accessed January 19, 2014,
http://www.flashmagazine.com/news/detail/the_flash_history/; Steve Champeon, “JavaScript: How Did We Get
Here?” accessed January 19, 2014, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2001/04/06/js_history.html .
166
Genevieve Bell, “The Age of Auspicious Computing,” Interactions 11.5 (Sept.-Oct. 2004), 76-77; Elena Larsen.
“Wired Churches, Wired Temples: Taking Congregations and Missions into Cyberspace,” (Washington D.C.: Pew
Internet and American Life Project, 2000), 8.
117
continued proliferating, offering a growing range of features for specific theological
communities, though they tended to continue using HTML rather than Java-type languages.167
Likewise, though most congregations could not afford to hire programmers able to use all of the
Web's new possibilities, there were 20,000 congregational websites in the year 2000, followed
by a new range of church management software “to manage your Site at the same level of
competency that larger churches with teams of technical people can.”168 That is to say, the wave
Between 1996 and 1998, a dozen religious games programmed in Java were released
online, clustered on two websites, and comprising less than a quarter of total religious game
production in those years. Since there is not, as far as I know, any common term for them, we
can call websites that offer simple access to lists of browser-based games “game suites.”169
Appearing alongside better-funded worldly gaming projects such as Gamesville (“Wasting your
time since 1996”) and Swirve, religious game suites were among the first organized attempts to
harness the browser as a gaming environment.170 As with religious games generally, it is notable
167
The “Online Bibles and Commentaries on Bible Versions” list maintained by True Grace ministries offers an
interesting perspective on this continuing growth. This page counts three online Bibles in 1996, six in 1997, eleven
in 1999, and nineteen in 2000. True Grace Ministries, “Online Bibles and Commentaries on Bible Versions,”
archived by the Internet Archive, December 25, 1997; August 7, 1997; November 16, 1999; December 16, 2000,
accessed January 19, 2014.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20011115024736/http://www.auburn.edu/~allenkc/bible.html .
168
Church Web Works, “Web Freedom,” archived by the Internet Archive, October 11, 2003, accessed January 11,
2014, http://wayback.archive.org/web/20031011145435/http://www.churchwebworks.com/site/web_freedom.php.
169
As part of their final exam, the undergraduate students in my 2010 “Religious Games and Sacred Play” course
compiled this wiki page with links to 11 religious game suites. Religious Gaming Wiki Contributors, “Online Game
Suites,” accessed January 11, 2014, http://religiousgaming.wikia.com/wiki/Online_Game_Suites .
170
Virtual Advisor Inc., “Gamesville.com: Wasting People's Time Since 1996,” archived by the Internet Archive,
118
these first two online suites of religious games – Zigzag World (1996) and Jewish Funland
(1997)– were made for Jewish publics, but as with religious games generally, Evangelical
Christians soon became the liveliest range of production. With seventeen new Java games
distributed over six game suites, nearly half of the religious games released in 1999 were
released in online suites. Four of these game suites were Evangelical (one more being made for a
Mormon, and another for a Jewish playership). Each of the next three years would best 1999 in
the production of game suites, but the proportions stayed fairly consistent: seventy-nine new
games, and thirteen new Evangelical game suites, as well as two new suites for Jewish players,
one for Mormons, one for Seventh Day Adventists, and one for Messianic Jews. These suites
used diverse programming languages, and a few used several, not only including Flash, Java, and
Javascript, but also presented games created through clever application of more standard web
technologies like HTML (e.g. ArmoQuest (Rick Ellinger, 2001)), or Common Gateway Interface
The games that structured this new playspace greatly resembled those that had appeared
on DOS and Windows systems over the preceding years. Sunday School exercises originally
designed for papery play (e.g. crosswords, word-finds, quizzes, mazes, coloring, and hangman)
as well as those which would require a bit of specialized equipment (e.g. jigsaws, card games,
slider puzzles, dreidels, and sticker books) took prominent place. One online card game in
119
particular, Unity (Yeshuateinu Company, 2000) was tied for the first Messianic Christian video
game. And, though this period never saw online games with the graphical sophistication possible
on CD-ROMs, every category of character-based game found a place in these online playspaces.
Games set within scripture (e.g. Sim Abraham (Good Book Games, 2003)) appeared alongside
non-scriptural adventures built upon algorithmic adaptations of out-game theology (e.g. Epic
(CCC Ministries, 2000)). Though there were earlier instances, among the redeemed adaptations
of worldly games, BoMToons – that is “Book of Mormon Cartoons” – deserves special mention
for its whimsical Mormon in-jokes like Donkey BoM (stories from the Book of Mormon
recreated in the style of Donkey Kong). From 2005, this “crazy idea of a few returned
missionaries who wanted to feature some of the funnier things from the Book of Mormon and
Mormon culture” troubles any simple dichotomy between blasphemous and sacred games, by
attracting what seems to be a public that can laugh at its own sacra.172
One of these game suites' most interesting properties was how their value as a linkable
resource created channels between Christian communities. Links to game-suites hosted on other
sites both allowed websites with no games to offer entertainment to their visitors, and for those
few sites with their own original games to augment their playspace. For instance, in 2004 the
online version of Guide Magazine, an instructional and entertaining publication for Seventh Day
Adventist youth, introduced a section entitled “game launch.” This page collated a social picture
captioning game that had been on their site since 2001 with two new quiz games (FACTory Pop
Quiz, and Instant Recall), and a dress-up game. It also provided a link to www.twopaths.com,
172
Nick Pasto, “Why a Redesign?” blog post January 6, 2008, archived by the Internet Archive, September 10, 2010,
accessed February 1, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20100918172645/http://bomtoons.com/index.php?start=35 .
120
which
“began in January, 1996 with the publication of Wisdom of the Bible at members.aol.com. The
TwoPaths.com domain was registered in 1999 and now includes Bible Quizzes, Jesus' Teachings as Told
in the Gospels, Bible Word Search Puzzles, and Bible FAQ. Webmaster Cliff Leitch is the son of a Baptist
mother and a Presbyterian father, and husband of his Catholic wife, Helen. However, the Bible study
materials at TwoPaths.com are not primarily his own interpretation, nor do they represent any particular
173
denomination or tradition.”
Given our present understanding of Evangelical media as that which works to orient lives
around the Bible and the Cross, rather than to any particular tradition of practice or
have at times made otherwise denominational communities more Evangelical. This effect should
not be overstated, however, because linking is substantially less symmetrical than many other
ecumenical practices – organizing shared holiday services, for instance: while the Adventists
linked to Two Paths, it does not seem that a link ever pointed back. And with having arrived at
this qualified excitement for the Evangelical potentials of online playspaces, we can move on to
There had been some small amount of precedent in Joshua/KJV and the Franklin Bible
readers, but the last period saw very few artifacts of digital religion that fit into a pocket. The
popularization of hand-held computers at the turn of the century, however, created spaces for
sacred programming, presaging the smartphone boom that marks this study's own technocultural
moment. Because the Gameboy and the dedicated reader open only to programmers who can
either hack or license their way in, digital religion had little purchase. The first pocket computing
platforms, like the Psion Organiser II (1984), the Apple Newton MessagePad (1993), and Palm
173
The Christian Bible Reference Site, “About,” archived by the Internet Archive, August 14, 2001, accessed
January 19, 2014, “http://web.archive.org/web/20010814124016/http://www.twopaths.com/about.htm .
121
Pilot (1996), however, opened spaces for tiny programs – the entities not yet called “apps” – and
it would not be long before they became the scene of digital religion. Somewhere between 1996
and 1998, there began to appear programs for Psion organizers that could calculate the dates of
holidays, with Easter apparently spawning several targeted projects.174 The beginning of digital
religion as designed for pocket computing came in 1998, with the release of the Olive Tree Bible
for Palm organizers, and PocketBible for Windows CE.175 To date, Bible, a tiny program that
provides biblical quotations on nine topics, is the only religious program I have been able to
locate for the TI-85 graphing calculator, but because this platform was so popular among novice
programmers who frequently shared their programs between peers using a simple cable, I suspect
this was a particularly fruitful platform for ephemera of digital religion.176 The Palm OS and
Windows CE, on the other hand, organized communities of programmers who shared and stored
their programs online, generating a fascinating wave of pocket-sized programs, and preserving
them for later research. As of Feburary 2001, PalmLDS.com had dozens of programs for
genealogy and scripture reading and reported that “The Church is now producing documents
formatted for handhelds.”177 In 2004, Mobile Ministry Magazine began promoting organized
174
Helmut Heller, “Hello, Welcome to My Psion Page,” accessed January 30, 2014,
http://heller.userweb.mwn.de/psion/psion.html .
175
Bob Dasal, “The Olive Tree Bible Software Story – Using PDAs to Study the Word” Pulpit Helps, March, 2004,
accessed January 30, 2014, http://www.pulpithelps.com/www/docs/1090-6962 ; Laridian Electronic Publishing,
“Welcome to Laridian!” accessed January 30, 2014, http://www.laridian.com/content/about.asp .
176
Though this page is called “games,” I suspect that the word was used as a catch-all for entertaining programs,
some of which do not seem to be games in any other sense. Because Bible describes itself only as “this program” at
the level of code, and it contains no elements that might be understood as either imaginative or competitive, I have
not included it in the list. The Ticalc.org Project, “TI-85 Basic Games,” accessed January 29, 2014,
http://www.ticalc.org/pub/85/basic/games/ .
177
Doug and DeAnn Jenkins, “Palm LDS Resources,” archived by the Internet Archive, Feburary 2, 2001, accessed
January 12, 2012, http://web.archive.org/web/20010202024400/http://www.palmlds.com/.
122
reflection “on the mobile aspects of technology and how it can be used best in ministry.”178 The
first religious game I have been able to discover for this new range of computing is Bible Game
B (Danny Newport, 2001) for Palm. The following year this game was followed by more
Evangelical entries, as well as two Jewish games, and the quite separate Qabalah Trainer (Brian
Berge, 2002) for Palm, a game designed to entrench sacred correspondences in the minds of
Occultists.179
Before we move on to new groups created to structure religious engagements with video
games, we might follow Qabalah Trainer toward a sort of intermission: magically efficacious
games. Moving beyond its precedent in Tarot software, in 1997 Steve Nichols released an
Enochian Chess program digitizing a sacred system once transmitted by the Hermetic Order of
the Golden Dawn: “You may use the game for practical ACTIVE divination, to alter & influence
events as well as to simply predict.”180 The Journey to Wild Divine (Wild Divine Project, 2003),
likewise, joined the tiny pocket of games attempting to brings back biofeedback gaming after the
Atari Mindlink's literal burial.181 Unlike other games played with biometric sensors, however, it
provided a New Age context complete with shamans, pagodas, and Deepak Chopra; play
178
Antoine R.J. Wright, Mobile Ministry Magazine 1.1 (2004), accessed March 11, 2014,
http://www.mobileministrymagazine.com/Issues/mmm_v1.pdf .
179
Erik Zimmerman, "Kabbalah Trainer V1.99,” accessed January 19, 2014, http://www.qabalah-trainer.com/
(accessed 1/19/2014); Brian Berge, “My Palm Software: Qabalah Trainer,” archived by the Internet Archive,
October 10, 2002, accessed January 19 2014,
http://web.archive.org/web/20021010034800/http://www.brianberge.net/software/qabalahtrainer/ .
180
Steve Nichols, “The Enochian Chess CD,” accessed March 11, 2014,
http://www.hermeticgoldendawn.org/nichols-chess.html ; Steve Nichols, “Enochian Chess,” accessed March 11,
2014, http://enochian.net/ .
181
Vincent Gonzalez, “Imagining the Self-Controller: 'The Wild Divine Project' as an Experiment in Religious
Game Interface,” accessed Feburary 2, 2014,
http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2010/04/14/imagining-self-controller-wild-divine-project-experiment
-religious-game-interface .
123
resembles magic, as does its promised results: “Enhanced powers of creativity and intuition,”
“Greater awareness of mind and body,” and “A sense of being in balance, connected, and in the
'Zone.'”182
In this period, several new groups emerged and set out to restructure religious
engagement with video games, not only by presenting new instances, but by offering flexible
discursive frames. Several of these groups emerge to decry what they describe as occult
tendencies in popular gaming, but they seem never to have actually intersected with
contemporaneous magical gaming. For instance, the Evangelical video game review site Christ
total “morality score.” A game can lose all of these points only if “occult magic is used by the
player” in “an environment that is filled with major occult references,” and CCG clarifies that
this includes only “games that base their magic system off of an actual religion such as Wicca or
Satanism and should not be confused with magic systems in games that are made up for make
believe purposes to provide a safe fun fantasy environment.”183 However, rather than attack The
Journey to Wild Divine – which seems to be its perfect object of critique – this site has focused
on games like Devil May Cry 3 (Capcom, 2005). The reviewer notes that the main character
“uses magic that can temporarily turn him into a demon, which I think can easily be viewed as
182
The Wild Divine Project, “The Game,” archived by the Internet Archive, December 16, 2003, accessed February
1, 2014, http://wayback.archive.org/web/20031216014946/http://www.wilddivine.com/content.php?cont_id=2 .
183
CCGR, "Christ Centered Gamer Reviewing Standard," accessed February 2, 2014,
http://www.christcenteredgamer.com/index.php/faqs/15-game-reviews/16-christ-centered-gamer-reviewing-standard
.
184
Ratrap 99, “Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening (PS2),” accessed February 2, 2014,
http://www.christcenteredgamer.com/index.php/reviews/19-console/4478-devil-may-cry-3-dantes-awakening-ps2 .
124
The difficulty of locating this practice among the practitioners of “an actual religion”
should not distract us from the historical significance of this website. In the year 2000,
and The Dove Foundation all began to offer video game reviews for Christian players. Christian
Computer Game Reviews [CCGR, later Christ Centered Game Reviews] and The Staging Point,
appeared the following year.185 No less than religious software, these sites themselves present
newly quantified modes of Christian life in their structures of critique. The standards of
Shepherd's Staff, for instance, are quantified but not yet algorithmic, arranging games according
to a five point “Overall Christian Rating” scale. The game reviews presented by The Staging
Point and The Dove Foundation divide their evaluations into several categories, the former
offering numerical values for “Fun Factor,” “Technique,” “I.Q. Level,” and “Responsibility,”
where the latter did the same for “sex,” “language,” “violence,” “drugs,” “nudity,” and
“occult/other.” Guide 2 Games, Christian Gamers, and Christian Gaming, on the other hand,
each made the propriety of games for Christians a single quantity equally weighted alongside
several others. Those categories might measure morally unweighted factors like “Game Engine,”
and “Game Play” (Christian Gaming), or juxtapose such categories with “Violence” and other
moral categories of worldly game critique (Guide2Games and Christian Gamers). CCGR,
185
Christian Gamers, “Main,” accessed March 2, 2014, http://www.geocities.ws/christiangamers/ ; Christian
Gaming Staff, “Main,” accessed March 2, 2014, http://www.christiangaming.com/ ; The Dove Foundation, “Game
Search Results,” accessed March 2, 2014, http://dove.org/reviews/GameSearchResults.asp ; Christiananswers.net,
“Guide 2 Games,” accessed March 2, 2014, http://www.christiananswers.net/spotlight/games ; Tim Emmerich,
“Shepherd’s Staff,” archived by the Internet Archive February 14, 2004, accessed June 4, 2011,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20040214141745/http://www.graceworksinteractive.com/ShepStaff/index.html ;
CCGR, “Main,” accessed March 2, 2014, http://www.ccgr.org ; The Staging Point, “Game Ratings,” archived by the
Internet Archive, February 6, 2002, accessed March 2, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20020206221424/http://stagingpoint.com/games/.
125
presents the most complex algorithm for Christian game critique, juxtaposing an equally
weighted “game score” and “morality score,” each of which are subdivided into five categories
This trend cannot be separated from the game-violence debates that reached peak
newspaper-presence in this period. They cannot be entirely understood through them either,
though, and since my next chapter covers those debates at length, we might do well to juxtapose
them with a related emergence of digital religion: In 1998, Paramount pictures threatened legal
action against Sunrise Video in American Fork, Utah, which operated a mail-in service to
remove the nudity and sex from VHS cassettes of Titanic for five dollars a cassette.187 Little else
was heard about this trend until 2002 when Utah-based Trilogy Studios released, and began
advertising, MovieMask, a program for Windows that could place a corset over the nude scenes
in Titanic or cover on-screen gunshot wounds.188 That August, the Director's Guild of America
announced that they were ending several years of near-silence by filing a lawsuit against Trilogy
Studios and six other companies who facilitated clean viewing in various ways.189 The Director's
Guild worked to frame film-editing as profiting off of a derivative work, and emphasized the
186
CCGR, "Christ Centered Gamer Reviewing Standard," accessed February 2, 2014,
http://www.christcenteredgamer.com/index.php/faqs/15-game-reviews/16-christ-centered-gamer-reviewing-standard
.
187
Rachel Roemhildt, “Family Fare Folks Find Ways to Clean Up Offending Films,” Insight on the News, December
25, 1998, accessed March 18, 2014,
http://theeditedmovieencyclopedia.blogspot.com/1998/12/family-fare-folks-find-ways-to-clean-up.html .
188
PR Web, “Trilogy Studios Announces Launch of 'Movie Mask' Website,” PR Web January 23, 2002, accessed
January 31, 2014, http://www.prweb.com/releases/2002/01/prweb32292.htm.
189 “
DGA Files Lawsuit Against Entities that Provide Unauthorized Altered Versions of Videocassettes and/or
DVDS (August 20, 2002), accessed January 31, 2014,
http://www.viewerfreedom.org/legal/20020820DGA/DGAfileslawsuit.PDF
126
possibility that people may be confused as to which version was the director's original.190 The
ensuing court battles granted a strange neutrality to digital agents. While it is illegal to make
parts of VHS cassettes “imperceptible” and sell them, “the creation or provision of a computer
program or other technology that enables such making imperceptible […] if no fixed copy of the
altered version of the motion picture is created by such computer program or other technology,”
was judged to neither confuse anyone, nor steal anything.191 This technology, though its legally
delimited task is to make imperceptible, invites users to become directors and share their schema
for film transformation. Today, the ClearPlay DVD player applies an immense library of such
To close this curve by returning attention to our primary focus, we should note that this
period also saw the emergence of groups that restructured religious video gaming, by changing
how games are made. The Christian Coders Network, for example, appeared online in 2000,
presenting forums that very quickly came to connect a global network of programmers. By 2002,
there seem to have been participants in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland,
France, Indonesia, Ireland, Scotland, Singapore, Slovakia, Trinidad, the Netherlands, New
Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Vietnam.193 While this network
190
Associated Press, “Court Rules Against Sanitizing Films,” Fox News Online,
www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_wires/2006Jul08/0,4675,FilmSanitizers,00.html .
191 “
Family Movie Act of 2005,” Section 202: Exemption from Infringement for Skipping Audio and Video Content
in Motion Pictures. http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/pl109-9.html (accessed 1/20/2014).
192
Family Safe Media, "Filter Library," http://www.familysafemedia.com/filter_library.html, (accessed 1/20/2014).
193
Christian Coders Network, “Member List,” archived by the Internet Archive August 23, 2002, accessed March 7,
2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20020823112116/http://www.christiancoders.com/cgi-bin/ubb-cgi/memberlist.cgi .
127
programming games, the web, business systems, or anything else a coder may be working on”,
Tim Emmerich, a Christian game designer and the founder of Shepherds Staff game
reviews, began a conversation in these forums, asking whether the Christian Coders Network had
enough interested members to create something like the annual Game Developers Conference
without the "secular 'junk'."195 The following conversation is fascinating because, faced with the
what sense there already existed an "industry" of Christian game design, and where there seemed
not to be one yet, how one might be created. Active companies were listed, developers circulated
their own skills and time commitments, and general reflection on the successes and failures of
Christian gaming were gathered into a hypothetical second-order structure for Christian game
design.
Christian Game Developers Conference [CGDC] in Oregon. Attendance over the next few years
triples then plateaus: 90 attend in 2003, "over 100" in 2004, and 100 in 2005.196 These
conferences, though numerically small, might be considered one more of this period's significant
new spaces of play. They were, first, places where games were played and shared, and by
194
Christian Coders Network, “About the CCN,” archived by the Internet Archive January 27, 2001, accessed
March 7, 2014, http://wayback.archive.org/web/20010127010700/http://www.christiancoders.com/about.shtml .
195
Graceworks (Tim Emmerich) “Christian Game Developers Conference?” accessed March 10, 2014,
http://ccnarchive.christiandevs.com/thread.php?f=HelpWanted&t=000004
196
Ibid., International Christian Game Developers Association, “Welcome!” archived by the Internet Archive
February 11, 2005, accessed March 11, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20050211053050/http://www.cgdc.org/ ; International Christian Game Developers
Association, “Welcome!” archived by the Internet Archive December 1, 2005, accessed March 11, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20051201143840/http://www.cgdc.org .
128
bringing prolific companies like Wisdom Tree into collaboration with ambitious newcomers,
they spur game making. And from the beginning, these conferences have been interrogating the
nature of digital religion in ways that we, as scholars of religion, might productively imitate:
"similarities and differences between seeking capital for a secular game and a Christian game?"
"Where does one draw the line between the content that goes into a Christian game versus the
The next spike in religious video game creation, like the ones before it, overwhelmingly
reflects the increased participation of gaming technologies which had only a few appearances in
the previous period. And, again, this period contains a few examples that defy the Frye Curve by
giving technologies sacred work while they are still cutting-edge. But there is not a section after
this one to see how those technologies mature. In 2011, I performed my first search for “bible
game” in the “Marketplace” (later “Play Store”) where Google distributes software for smart
phones and tablets, and I immediately declared my historical survey closed: I was standing at the
foot of a peak in Christian gaming approximately five times the height of those of 2002 or 2007.
The Bible game seemed to have acquired some new tendency that would require new analytical
instruments. But the curve-and-a-half leading up to this shift will provide clues to guide the treks
that will chart the new peaks and valleys of digital religion. This is the period where digital
religion becomes something one signs-up for, a matter of apps and profiles.
197
Via Tech LLC, “Topics” archived by the Internet Archive October 20, 2003, accessed March 11, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20031020124556/http://www.cgdc.org/pages/topics.htm .
129
Both of these technocultural trends might be well framed through the release of
Pope2You. In May 2009, Pope Benedict XVI celebrated World Communications Day as popes
had every year since 1967; he presented a letter to the Church.198 In keeping with the year's
theme of “New Technologies, New Relationships,” this letter was embedded in a website that
also unveiled a Youtube channel, a wiki facilitating conversation on papal messages, and links to
two applications, H2Onews for iPhones, and Pope2You for Facebook.199 These artifacts of
digital religion are each embedded within a system of personal subscriptions, and while the first
two allow anonymous viewing, none of them allows further interaction until the user signs-up.
Registered users can then use the software to communicate in specific ways. The Pope2You
Facebook application, for instance, allows users to share carefully-chosen images and quotations
of the Pope without the possibility of commentary. It seems, in fact, to resemble Facebook's
native photo-sharing in every way except that this one cannot be accessed or seen by the
uninterested, nor can anyone disrupt the Vatican's messaging with her own commentary.
Both this program and H2Onews for Apple's iOS based hand held computers are
designated “applications,” or “apps,” to classify them within the ongoing vogue for centralized
media). Apps, whether for game consoles, phones, personal computers, or subscriber
communities like Facebook, are usually distributed digitally from a single service that manages
licensing and some aspects of quality control. The app is thus intimately connected with the user
198
Catechesis of the Popes, “World Communications Day,” accessed March 11, 2014,
http://catechesisofthepopes.wordpress.com/other-themes/media/world-communications-day/
199
Pontifical Council for Social Communications, “Pope 2 You,” archived by the Internet Archive May 25, 2009,
accessed March 11, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20090525104517/http://www.pope2you.net/index.php?id_testi=6
130
profile. As a rule, to access software, users are required to create a file by which the service can
identify them, create a password to protect that file, and contractually agree not to share the
password. These files, interchangeably called “profiles,” “user accounts,” or various other
service delimited names, extend far beyond (and before) app based computing, organizing our
exchanges, for instance, with online discussion forums and Automated Teller Machines. Their
content varies wildly according to the system that applies them, and that content is differently
accessible to differently permitted users. Consider, for instance, how different your Facebook
profile looks when accessed by you, by a “friend,” by Facebook staff, by advertisers, or by the
National Security Agency. In this last period, the profile became a dominant formation of human
identity, not only as we are understood by computers, but as we understand one another and
ourselves. Religious communities discovered the relationship of this new humanity to their own
sacra both by creating new services and by applying the affordances of apps and profiles in
Though profiles can be traced back through Multi User Dungeons and online forums
back into the early 1980s, and may go much further back along other lines, it is with the
popularization of websites like Myspace and Facebook in this period that the maintenance of
profiles becomes a dominant identity practice among computer users. These websites, commonly
called “social networks,” allow users to make some aspects of their profile visible to other users,
including a range of aesthetic elements that encourage (and emulate) personal identification
between the user and his profile. But we should not assume that these networks are entirely
populated by humans. As vehicles for the circulation of sacra, these services also empower
asymmetrical networking with God, and other powerful non-humans. Today, in very particular,
131
the Facebook Message from God app says: “Today we believe God wants us to know that
The profile elements visible between networked users at the standard level of access
allow for various forms of religious identification. Myspace's basic profile information, for
instance, includes a drop-down menu of fourteen possible religions. Facebook, on the other hand,
provides an open space in which users can write whatever answer they choose to the question
“religion.” Users can then decorate their profile and share it with other users. Here too, the major
social networks offer different options, all of which provide religious opportunities. Consider
how Myspace, in allowing users to include music, animations, and sparkles on their profiles,
created room for an outpouring of religious creativity. Other websites quickly began providing
images formatted specifically to enhance profile pages by emphasizing users' various specific
interests and demographics. In 2007, for instance, both Imikimi.com and ImageChef.com began
generating digital photo frames for use on Myspace. The website Zingerbug, in categorizing
these frames, immediately included an “Angels” category as well as categories for various
holidays, and by 2009 it had material to populate a free standing “Christian” category.201 These
images were, in many senses, a continuation of Christian clip art, an art form that had been
evolving at least since 1987 when it was included in T/Maker's influential ClickArt software.202
200
All Devotion, “Daily Message from God,” Accessed March 13, 2014, http://www.alldevotion.com/
201
Zingerbug.com, "Customizable MySpace Angel Comments,"archived by the Internet Archive, November 7, 2007,
accessed January 24, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20071107083211/http://www.zingerbug.com/Comments/Customizable/angels_page
1.htm ; Zingerbug.com, "Customizable Imikimi Comments, Glitter Graphics and Templates: Christian," archived by
the Internet Archive, March 3, 2009, accessed January 24, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20090303104934/http://www.zingerbug.com/Comments/Customizable/christian_pa
ge1.htm .
202
Justia Trademarks, “CLICKART CHRISTIAN IMAGES – Trademark Details,” accessed March 13, 2014,
132
Unlike previous Christian clip art, however, digital crosses no longer circulated along the limited
ambit of the church bulletin, but through differently constrained networks that users described as
For some users, however, profile-level modifications of this sort were inadequate. In
2007, Myspace was answered by the Christian alternative, ThySpace, and YouTube was answered
by GodTube. Without accidentally confusing a website's name for its project, we might note that
this parallel shift and its associated social networking projects were created the year after Time
Magazine put a mirrored monitor on its cover and declared YOU the person of the year. In
turning social networking from an egoistic project to one of divine focus, these websites did
more than change the label on the box. In terms of content organization, GodTube makes
devotionals and newsletters parallel priority alongside videos, and ThyWorks (as ThySpace
renamed itself) supplemented music pages and personal profiles by partnering with Christian
comic books like David's Mighty Men and Archangels: The Saga.203 By creating new services
rather than applying worldly ones in Christian ways, digital creatives attempted to shift the
center of the social network from the individual to the God they serve.
However, though there is a significant difference, religious work on shared networks and
religiously organized networks do not stand in a clean dichotomy. This becomes clearer when
users are given more options than profile modification and heavily constrained play. Consider,
for instance, Second Life, a three-dimensional online world created in 2003, in which users can
interact with any scripted object, inhabit any space, and wear any body that they or another user
http://trademarks.justia.com/744/64/clickart-christian-images-74464970.html .
203
ThyWorks.com, "About Us,” archived by the Internet Archive October 29, 2007, accessed March 13, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20071029134513/http://thyworks.com/about_us.php .
133
can design. Homesteading by religious communities in this world seems to begin in 2006 with
the appearance of locations like the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Second Life, the
Humanism Garden, and Second Life Synagogue Beth Israel, followed by the Anglican Cathedral
of Second Life, and ALM CyberChurch of Second Life in 2007, and Kannonji Buddhist Retreat
in 2008.204 These early settlements of various religions in Second Life are important because
each of them shows how religious subscribers can create worlds within the worlds provided to
them by specific services. Though the spatialized format of Second Life makes these particularly
dramatic, welcoming users to sit in a pew before a polygonal pulpit or to wander through
Heaven, the creation of religious interest groups on Facebook demonstrates the same principle:
Where the tools are provided, religious communities frequently establish enclaves in which their
sacra can circulate, affirming those who already know them and inviting new participants to join
in as well. These tools can be as large as trends in computing, or as small as particular features of
pieces of software.
While video games had been networked in various ways for decades, in this last period,
Christians began discovering the potentials of networked video games as spaces for building
communities. The late 1990s had seen the birth of both clans and guilds, teams of players that
seem to emerge in networked games, whether or not the games themselves provided tools for
204
Kenneth Sutton, “Going to Church in Second Life,” UUWorld Magazine (Feburary 2, 2007), accessed January 29,
2014, http://www.uuworld.org/life/articles/16206.shtml ; Torin Golding, “SL Humanism Group,” accessed March
12, 2014, http://slhumanismgroup.blogspot.com/ ; Julian Voloj, “Virtual Sanctuary,” Jewish Daily Forward,
February 16, 2007, accessed February 11, 2014, http://forward.com/articles/10101/virtual-sanctuary/ ; Anglican
Cathedral of Second Life, “History,” accessed January 29, 2014, http://slangcath.wordpress.com/about/history/ ;
Dokimos.org, “Cyber Church in Second Life,” accessed March 12, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20070208182449/http://dokimos.org/secondlife ; Cathy Lynn Grossman, “Faithful
Build a Second Life for Religion Online,” USA Today, accessed January 29, 2014,
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/gaming/2007-04-01-second-life-religion_n.htm
134
their management. Anyone playing under a consistent name could include a marker of her clan
affiliation, and the Internet would facilitate the fuller work of profile making. By 2002, Christian
guilds like “Tribe of Judah” began to appear, using private servers to play First Person Shooters
without the foul play present on worldly servers.205 In our present period clans of Christian
gamers begin to give way to ministries like +CGO+, “Christian Gamers Online,” which seek to
network Christians as gamers, and to access online networks of gamers as mission fields.206 And
where games legitimate clans and guilds by granting them digital real estate or other perks, these
ministries find ways to apply them toward in-game congregation. This legitimation, and with it,
Online games at present. [IXO He Will Return IXO], for instance, is a clan extending its
Christian presence across many of the largest MMO worlds, ministering to players in Age of
Conan, Star Wars Galaxies, Warhammer Online, and World of Warcraft.207 In 2009, reports
begin to circulate of a stable church community conducting weekly services in Ultima Online:
“Here there was a female pastor espousing the virtues of non-denominational Christian faith in,
of all places, Sosaria. West of Trinsic near the Bog of Desolation to be precise. I felt awkward to
As with social networking services, this period witnessed some religious communities
205
Tribe of Judah, "Community FAQ," accessed January 23, 2014, http://www.toj.cc/toj.php?x=main/faq/2 .
206
Christian Gamers Online, Inc., “Position Statement,” accessed March 12, 2014,
http://christiangamers.net/cms/index.php/2012-12-30-22-09-12/positionstatement .
207
IXO He Will Return IXO, “Home,” accessed March 12, 2014,
http://www.guildportal.com/Guild.aspx?GuildID=238745&TabID=2009410 .
208
GreyPawn, “Vas Rel Sanct – Church in UO,” accessed March 12, 2014,
http://stratics.com/community/threads/vas-rel-sanct-church-in-uo.162454/.
135
shifting beyond the ambiguous practice of building in worldly systems to create their own
networked game worlds. Alongside the emergence of the first Christian FPS clans, Eternal War:
play, fighting demons together as angels. Left Behind: Eternal Forces (Left Behind Games,
2006), similarly, allowed for networked combat between players; here, notably, one player had
to play as the forces of the Antichrist. In 2008, the Islamic social network, Muxlim Pal (Muxlim)
became the first stable multi-user online world organized for a religious public. In 2010, three
different Christian games – Yahero (Yahero), Godstoria: The Bible Online (FIAA GmbH), and
Bible Bible Town (Third Day Games) – present very different visions of how biblical truth can be
transmitted through shared game-worlds. Godstoria: The Bible Online, was a territory
management and war strategy game wherein each player would play as Abraham, pursuing
God's promises and building a colony upon a great plain populated by other players who were
also Abraham. In my six months as a settler in that world, I found the combat against other
Abrahams quite difficult to explain to myself or anyone else. BIG Bible Town also invites players
to create their own biblical villages, but this game avoids the theological problem of multiple
instances of key biblical characters competing against one another by casting the player as a
customizable child living in a dusty era that unifies all of biblical history. While witnessing the
sacred narrative in the embedded game worlds, which are unlocked weekly for paid subscribers,
each player gathers tokens that can be spent building a town for other players to visit. Yahero,
our final multi-player Christian game world, largely avoids the problematics of biblical
remediation by working in a sci-fi idiom. The player is cast as a protector of “Zioden,” a flying
city built around a great homiletical tree. Though I completed most of the content released for
136
Yahero before the service closed down, collecting the Logosphere of Creation and various
lumiscrolls, I never succeeded in talking to other players in the game world. Through some
malfunction, perhaps my own, other Yaheros offered only ghostly companionship, standing still
services, we can now better understand the organizations that are deploying them. Moving from
how to who, then, the leap beyond our capacity became possible because in this period religious
games became both larger and smaller business than ever before.
To begin with the grandiose, this period saw the emergence of multimillion dollar
religious game development. New corporations like Left Behind Games and Digital Praise
remediated Christian franchises like Left Behind, Veggie Tales, and Adventures in Odyssey in
attempts to hold cultural ground alongside worldly media franchises. Likewise, this period also
witnessed a return of digital religion to dedicated gaming consoles. Though consoles had long
stopped banning religious content, they continued to limit the range of software through
prohibitively expensive licenses and development kits. The return to consoles, then, is made
Entertainment released The Bible Game (2005), and Larry Boy and the Bad Apple (2006). Under
each name, they released two different Evangelical games, one each for Game Boy Advance, and
the other for Playstation 2 (and XBOX as well, in the case of The Bible Game). The three Yoga
games released for handheld consoles between 2007 and 2008, similarly, are produced by
Square-Enix, Konami, and Ubi Soft, three of the largest worldly games companies active
137
today.209
The only work of an explicitly religious company in the return to consoles recalls the
foundations Roberto Busa laid for digital religion. The Xbox 360 game console offers a forum
for downloadable community-created games (read: apps), and Lifeway Books, perhaps the
biggest Evangelical publisher today, saw it as an opportunity to spread the Gospel. Aaron Linne,
“Bringing the Holman Christian Standard Bible translation to the Xbox via Bible Navigator X
begins the fulfillment of a dream I have had since the Xbox 360 launched, and they announced that there
210
would be downloadable games.”
“Now, in our first go at putting this most sacred content onto a video game system via Bible
Navigator X, it works with the medium so perfectly: It feels natural and nice, like the XBOX was made to
host the Bible. ”
“The Xbox isn’t just secular entertainment anymore. We can use technology that other people
developed to study Scriptures through a new medium. Some people are just more comfortable with a
211
controller in their hands than a book.”
But, again, that religious gaming became big business only explains a small number of
elaborately produced entries. While these have done much to energize the field and to circulate
sacra, the surprising number of games released in 2011 was only possible because religious
games also became small. Of course, religious video games have always been small. If the word
designates the daring and under-funded creativity of auteurs and small development teams,
religious gaming has been indie from its first days in the early 1980s. But across the 2000s, new
209
Begin with the DS: Tipness's Yoga (2007, Square-Enix); Let's Do Yoga (2007, Konami); Quick Yoga Training
(2008, Ubi Soft).
210
Aaron Linne, “First-Person: An Xbox Dream,” accessed January 20, 2014,
http://www.baptistpress.org/BPFirstPerson.asp?ID=32218 ; Microsoft, “Bible Navigator X: HCSB,” accessed
March 17, 2014,
http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-GB/Product/Bible-Navigator-X-HCSB/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d80258550415?
purchase=1.
211
Aaron Linne, "B&H Introduces 'Bible Navigator X' for XBOX 360," accessed January 20, 2014,
http://hcsb.org/hcsb/b/authorjournal/archive/2009/11/10/b-amp-h-introduces-bible-navigator-x-for-xbox-360.aspx.
138
tools accelerated the circulation of indie games and enhanced their visibility, resulting in the
emergence of a self-aware indie games movement whose energy would benefit religious game
designers. For instance, the 2002 Game Developers Conference saw the release of Steam, a
relatively open platform for digital distribution of computer games, as well as the first “Indie
Game Jam,” in which developers attempted to create innovative games under severely
constrained time limitations.212 The Christian Coders Network's speed game competition,
founded in 2006 and still active into the present, wherein participants have less than a month to
create original games, seems contiguous with a self-aware indie games movement.
Unfortunately, because I only discovered the contest in the weeks before my dissertation's
submission, the present count of 773 religious games only includes those of the speed games that
were published elsewhere as well (i.e., G.M.L. Armor (Barry Ijmker, 2010), Souling's Quest
(Hanclinto Games, 2010), and Finding Adina (Washburn Bros, 2007)). In continuity with the
indie games movement, this contest self-presents as an engine of innovation. In early years,
winners were separately selected for “Best Fun Game” and “Best Presentation of Christian
Teaching,” but today, these categories include “Polish” and “Creativity/Innovation” as well.213
religious publics, the discovery of religious possibilities within them, and the infusion of
religious gaming with large budgets at one end and indie game energy at the other – the immense
increase of religious games in 2011 will no longer appear mysterious. Since the 1990s,
smartphone usage had been largely contiguous with the limited market for palmtop computing,
212
Chris Hecker, “IGJ0,” accessed March 15, 2014, http://www.indiegamejam.com/igj0/
213
Christian Coders Network, CCN Speed Game Contest, archived by the Internet Archive June 15, 2009, accessed
March 7, 2014, http://wayback.archive.org/web/20090615061630/http://www.gameace.org/~ChristianCoders .
139
but even here there was some religious creativity (the Olive Tree NIV Bible was released for
Blackberry, for instance, in 2005).214 But in 2007 the iPod touch and iPhone both appear
followed by Google's Android devices in 2008, and these new app based platforms move
computers into pockets with surprising speed. 2011, the year that may have contained as many
Christian games as all prior years, was also the year that found a full third of American adults
Android and iOS devices have many similar features such as touch screens, cameras,
accelerometers, and Internet access, all of which will interact with sacra in surprising ways.
However, as we have seen with computers ranging from mainframes to game consoles, nothing
impedes digital religion quite as severely as restrictive licensing, and the difference between
Apple and Google's app platforms in this regard is visible in the range of religious applications
produced for each of them. The Android Play Store is centralized de facto, whereas the iOS
Appstore is centralized de jure. While Google's own hub for digital distribution is the most
common way to download Android software, the operating system is open source and users can
choose to download apps from other websites at their own risk, or even use other distribution
hubs if they prefer. IOS, on the other hand, is a closed, proprietary operating system, and the
Appstore is the only way to install software on an unhacked device. Whereas Google
occasionally removes software from the Play Store when it violates their terms of service, Apple
must approve all software used on their devices. Their quality standards, while not explicitly
214
Olive Tree Bible Software, “NIV Bundles Now Available,” accessed March 15, 2014,
http://www.olivetree.com/newsletter/issues/2005/OTNL_20050518.html .
215
Aaron Smith, “Smartphone Ownership 2013,” accessed March 15, 2014,
http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/06/05/smartphone-ownership-2013/
140
directed against religious creativity as were Nintendo of America's standards for their early game
Consistent with previous generations of digital religion, scripture remains a primary form
of digital religion on smartphones. In 2009, Android gets both The Talmud and Holy Bible – King
James Version, and Olive Tree already reports hundreds of thousands of religious texts
downloaded for iPhones.216 Beyond this, perhaps the smartphone boom’s effects on digital
religion might be best understood by gesturing to the device’s various parts and observing their
recreation as affordances for religious publics: cameras gain transcendent vision from apps like
Christian FrameIt!, and Christian Cross Sticker Widget (2010); headphones begin to play
religious radio apps like K-Light (2010); GPS is oriented to sacred landscapes like that of
Christian Praying Compass; even barcode readers take on sacred possibilities through programs
like QRyptic Jude (2011).217 This quick sampling of Christian possibilities is meant only as a
hint. Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, and Pagan apps abound for both iOS and Android, and they
consistently uncover new sacred possibilities for these increasingly ubiquitous devices.
Android platform abounds with artifacts of digital religion produced by a range of religious
216
"Holy Bible – King James Version,"
http://appgravity.com/android-app/lifestyle/indiaNIC-android-TheHolyBible (accessed 1/20/2014); Joseph Barclay,
“The Talmud,” http://appgravity.com/android-app/lifestyle/indiaNIC-android-TheTalmud (accessed 1/20/2014);
Olive Tree Bible Software, "The Dominant Animal in Mobile Bible Publishing," accessed March 15, 2014,
http://blog.olivetree.com/2009/08/12/olive-tree-in-the-newspaper/
217
Technicow Creations, "Christian FrameIt!" accessed January 24, 2014,
http://appgravity.com/android-app/media-video/com-technicow-christianframeit/ ; Hedgesoft, “Christian Cross
Sticker Widget,” accessed January 20, 2014,
http://appgravity.com/android-app/lifestyle/com-hedgesoftsolutions-widgets-christiancross; DJBSoftware Inc,
“K-Light,” accessed January 20, 2014, http://appgravity.com/android-app/entertainment/com-djbapps-klight;
GeoLinx, “Christian Praying Compass,” accessed January 24, 2014,
http://appgravity.com/android-app/tools/com-prayingcompass-christian; Verse Ability, "QRyptic JUDE," accessed
January 24, 2014, http://appgravity.com/android-app/arcade/air-QRypticJude
141
creatives to whom iOS would be unattainable. Apps whose only task is displaying animated
crosses, pentagrams, or other sacra, for instance, comprise a sprawling mediascape that slants
hard away from Apple. This difference, as it manifests in religious games creation, is already
visible in the last years of my present history. Whereas I was able to locate only three religious
games for iOS – Bible Blocks (Jonathan Giles, 2009), Bible Reference Game (Thy Word Is True,
2009), and Word Cross (Michael Surran, 2010) – Android had seven games in 2010 – Bible
Stories Word Search (LittleIslandGames), BibleTet (ApproS), Bible Traveler: Bible Numbers
(Sam Mejias), Brain Cafe: Test Your Faith (Urbian), Game- Books of the Bible (PaKeSoft), Race
on Squares: Bible Edition (ApproS), Sort the Name: Bible Puzzle (Sam Mejias).
In 2011, the time was right. Hundreds of developers suddenly found themselves able to
do something new. They could create their own vehicle for the Good News and send it out to
everyone. Apple’s more restrictive licensing practices recall digital religion’s first days on those
jealously guarded mainframes slightly more than do Google’s, so it stands to reason that Android
presents a wilder efflorescence of religious games, but the difference is minute compared to how
far digital religion traveled in sixty years. Recall that in those first days the computers were not
only massive, they were distant. Initially, the most widely circulating objects of digital religion
were bound indexes, and those were themselves enormous, costly and rare. Devices like Bible
readers had increased portability, but had never sought ubiquity. But now the staggering
demographic of humans willing and able to maintain a smartphone plan has become a missions
field. Every day it becomes more likely that a person looking for a game about the Bible will
142
Conclusion
Are Evangelical games five to seven years behind the game play curve? Having
and used this frame to consider the historical expanse of religious video gaming, both “yes” and
“no” seem to be good answers. Some religious games have in fact been made using technologies
and modes of play that saw their peak popularity some half-decade earlier, while others have
A lag, of course, is easiest to see when religious games are framed as vehicles for
outdated technoculture. In some cases, game critics and developers make this frame attractive by
centering those elements that were previously featured in popular games. Spiritual Warfare
(1991), though it included a much more flexible primary weapon system than any Zelda game to
date (to name only one interesting difference), seems to have been received as the Christian
Zelda; Dance Praise (2005) has always been the Christian DDR. But we can locate religious
gaming upon a leading edge as well: The Philistine Ploy (1983) was one of the first graphical text
adventure games, appearing a year before King's Quest; Interlight's Bible games for CD-i
(1991-1992) were among the first CD-ROM console games; religious games were shareware
before Wolfenstein; and the first religious game suites proliferated in perfect step with their
worldly counterparts. Within two years of the Android marketplace's creation it was so full of
But digital religion is neither late nor early, and it reveals its most surprising possibilities
when we seek its particularity. This survey highlighted some extravagant specificity as in a game
packaged with a digital Bible reader, or games with magical powers, but the broad center merits
143
the same attention. From the beginning to the present, religious video gaming has taken worldly
games, Sunday school exercises, scriptural narratives, and out-game theologies and recreated
them, invested now with their characteristic liveliness. Even the dozens of Bible word scrambles
and jigsaw puzzles should not be distorted into a simple secondarity. Sunday schools whose
students are anonymous to one another, and jigsaws that become animated Bible scenes when
assembled, should not be framed as derivative. They are lively, peculiar, specific, and entrusted
Seeking this particularity, we now turn toward an investigation of particular games. The
next two chapters will open this work with a study of Evangelicals in the game-violence debates,
144
Chapter 4
You are B.J. Blazkowicz, an American soldier trapped in a Nazi fortress. You throw the
door open and find yourself facing a crimson swastika banner; the hallway stretches to both
sides. To your right a guard dog barks. You wheel frantically toward the lunging beast, but it
218
Robert G. (Bob) DeMoss Jr., “Media Play: When You Haven't Got a Prayer,” Home Life 53 (December 1998):
60-61.
145
bites into you before you can shoot it. You unload two pistol rounds into its face and the German
Shepherd whimpers, collapsing into a pool of blood. A guard hears the gunfire and comes
running, shouting in German and firing a machine gun. You draw back into the doorway to catch
your breath.
You are B.J. Blazkowicz, a soldier from the Republic trapped in a fortress of the Master
State. You throw the door open and find yourself facing a banner emblazoned with a great blue
+; the hallway stretches to both sides. To your right a giant rat barks. You wheel frantically
toward the lunging mutant, but it bites into you before you can shoot it. You unload two pistol
rounds into its face and the hideous creature whimpers, collapsing into a pool of blood. A guard
hears the gunfire and comes running, shouting in English and firing a machine gun. You draw
You are Noah, God's chosen caretaker, only trapped in the ark for five more days. You
throw the door open and find yourself facing the bent bars of some animal's broken cage; the
hallway stretches to both sides. To your right an angry goat bleats. You wheel frantically toward
the lunging beast, but it bites into you before you can feed it. You feed it two pieces of fruit from
a slingshot and the goat snores loudly, falling asleep on the floor. An antelope hears the twang of
your slingshot and comes running, clattering its hooves and spitting its inexplicably dangerous
saliva. You draw back into the doorway to catch your breath.
Since the first vogue for arcade gaming, rhizomatic networks of computers and their users
146
(including those who primarily use them as rhetorical foils) have been engaged in lively
disagreements over the possibility that video games may cause humans to kill one another.
These debates concerning the referent and importance of “violence” with respect to computer
software have significantly shaped the entanglement of computers and humans. The
game-violence debates are the primary context for such basic notions as adulthood, morality, and
good taste as they relate to computers. As such, these debates merit the attention of religious
studies, cultural studies, Science and Technology Studies, and other disciplines concerned with
the historical mediation of morality. For the study of American religion, however, the
game-violence debates are of particular interest because they showcase how the emerging
sacralizing concerns it shares with the simultaneously emerging public of worldly computing.
Specifically, they tend to agree that problematic media violence enjoins cutting-edge
technologies of photorealism to depict the emission of “blood and gore” where weapons
(including bodies) presumed to be accessible to audience members come into conflict. However,
while the hegemonic worldly discourse on game-violence only works to prevent murders
Evangelical games must forge virtues. Alongside consequentialist concerns flickers a vision of
non-violence that orients children to spiritual warfare. We will come to understand this
This chapter and the one that follows it will present the game-violence debates by
beginning with First-Person Shooters [FPS]. These are games wherein the immediate object of
player control is a camera that fires projectiles into the game world. While most genres –whether
fighting (Mortal Kombat), adventure (Grand Theft Auto), or racing (Carmageddon)– have
147
periodically offered instances for public scrutiny within these debates, the FPS is the only full
genre which is regularly queried as potentially irredeemable. In some cases, the genre even
becomes a synecdoche for game-violence as such, and begins to absorb a surprising variety of
media: “They call them first-person shooter games. They are one of the most popular and
troubling genres of video games. First-person shooter games include 'Doom,' 'Quake,' 'Mortal
Kombat,' 'Turok,' 'Killer Instinct,' 'Sin,' 'Half-Life,' 'Rainbow Six,' and 'Tribes.' These video,
computer, and Internet games rip, slice, and blow up body parts and scatter them across the
screen in 3D realism.”219 I offer an Evangelical example here, but worldly instances abound;
what matters is that two of these are only FPS games if that category is interchangeable for
“problematic violence.” We will need a more substantive definition, but this one provices a
First-Person Shooters
The three moments of play that open this chapter welcome us into the genre's flexibility.
The first moment is situated within the 1992 release of Wolfenstein 3D for DOS based home
computers, the game most frequently cited by game critics as the seminal instance of the FPS,
and the following two are situated within Wolfenstein’s adaptations for the Super Nintendo
[SNES] game console. The second moment is frequently derided as an object lesson in the
Wolfenstein 3D removed Nazi imagery to avoid offending players, but sought no narratively
219
Ken Reaves, “Video, Computer, and Internet Games,” Living With Teenagers Parent Ministry Edition 22 (July
2000), 31.
148
coherent alternative. The third moment is from Super 3D Noah’s Ark (1993) [S3DNA], a FPS
created by the Christian company Wisdom Tree for audiences who hope to avoid violence.
Brenda Huff, former sales associate and current owner of Wisdom Tree is quite clear: “We were
offering parents and gamers an alternative to the violence of so many other games. We were
These adapted games should not be dismissed as the further evacuation of an already thin
cultural form, and we learn little by identifying them as censorial efforts. Yes, of course, the
problematically violent is itself a complex creative process, and in every case these evacuations
leave spaces in which surprising creative work takes place. Super 3D Noah’s Ark places players
into a sealed menagerie structured according to rigid mathematical specifications, safe from the
destruction outside, but crowded with mythically charged wildlife. As part of the larger cultural
can observe the co-becoming of theologies and technologies, market pressures and moral panics,
and agencies human, animal, machine and divine. To understand these spaces, though, we must
enter by following one agency or another. Let’s begin with the code all three games share.
In many senses, Wolfenstein 3D was nothing new. The games Maze War (Steve Colley,
1974) and Spasim (Jim Bowery, 1974) had inaugurated the FPS formula eighteen years earlier:221
220
Gibson, “Interview: Brenda Huff."
221
Though game historians tend to agree that these two games are the first instances of the First-Person Shooter, this
particular citation is notably from a history of the form written by Theodore Beale, the primary designer of the
Christian FPS The War in Heaven. Vox Day (Theodore Beale), “Halo and the High Art of Games: A History of the
First-Person Shooter,” in Halo Effect: An Unauthorized Look at the Most Successful Video Game of All Time, ed.
Glenn Yeffeth and Jennifer Thomason (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2006), 154-155.
149
One plays by exploring the game world to locate and shoot specific targets; these will generally
be active opponents (either computer or human controlled), but may also include strategic or
whimsical targets (e.g. shooting a candle to light it, or shooting out windows for fun).
Wolfenstein 3D is certainly not remembered for its narrative innovations, as Id games apparently
took nothing from the many explorations of FPS story-telling from those intervening decades,
like characters who engage players in dialog or items with purposes beyond killing enemies or
opening doors.222 Nor, even, is Wolfenstein 3D significant for unprecedented quantities of blood
depicted on screen (c.f. Commando Libya for Commodore 64, the self-described “sadism game”
in 1986).223 This game is remembered as the watershed of the FPS genre, rather, because of the
surprising number of agencies it brought into collision: on the analog side of the screen, the
game was the first FPS blockbuster, selling more than 100,000 copies in its first year, and on the
digital side of the screen, it efficiently deployed the increasing power of personal computers to
create thrilling hordes of Nazi enemies.224 And, most importantly, as thousands of players each
killed hundreds of Nazis, game studios swarmed the battlefields hoping to continue the frenzy
and redirect it in support of their radically divergent projects. Or, in the words of Wolfenstein's
celebrity programmer John Romero, “Wolfenstein 3-D was the first fast-action FPS and
officially ushered in the genre.” Of course, since Romero said this as the single most established
character in the history of First-Person Shooting, his judgment of a game's “official” status is
222
For some narratively rich outliers in the history of FPS games, see: The Colony (1987, Mindscape), The
Terminator (Bethesda, 1990).
223
Commando Libya (Robert Pfitzner, 1986).
224
Jay Wilbur, then CEO of Id Software, estimated that a million free demo versions (shareware) were circulating as
of 1993. Dwight Silverman, “`Doom' Bursts Onto College Computer Networks,” Houston Chronicle, December 15,
1993.
150
both nearly tautological (he demonstrates the strange power of this office by declaring “DOOM
Another feature that begins with Wolfenstein and remains a significant feature of the FPS
landscape is the relative separability of game worlds and “game engines.” These provide “the
core algorithms controlling a game. It reads controller input from the user, drives characters
through game levels, fabricates behavior, generates sound at specified times, and generates
real-time display.”226 And they are readily reapplied to divergent projects. The opening
instances of play demonstrate some peculiarities this generates, as each of them presents only
agencies possible within Wolfenstein 3D’s game engine: a body that can run but cannot fall,
enemies that can hear and see but cannot collaborate, walls that always meet at right angles. But
the two adaptations use the Wolfenstein engine to accommodate play by very different publics.
One strove to satisfy the moral requirements of “families” at large (by way of Nintendo of
America's quality standards) by retaining blood but scrambling the potentially offensive context,
and the other attempted to welcome Evangelical Christians in particular by removing blood as
part of a fuller recontextualization, turning the shooter into a playable version of the Flood
narrative.
While it might be easy to say in the abstract that FPS games compel any single type of
action (murder, for instance), the multiple, parallel lives of a single game engine might be
applied as a palliative in temporary bouts of technological determinism. Doom, the FPS which
225
The Romero [John Romero], comment on “Ultima Underworld: The Sygian Abyss's Influence on Wolf3D,”
accessed January 20,2014, http://rome.ro/smf/index.php?topic=2798.0;wap2.
226
Adrian Herwig and Philip Paar, “Game Engines: Tools for Landscape Visualization and Planning?” accessed
January 20, 2014, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.134.75&rep=rep1&type=pdf, 4.
151
built most directly upon the technology and the success of Wolfenstein 3D, became the
architecture for both official training exercises for US Marines, and for Chex Quest (Digital Café,
1996), a bloodless cereal-themed shooter.227 The movements of shared technologies mark bright
lines between disparate gaming publics, but so too do the skills (e.g. the ability to play a FPS),
and tropes (e.g. the image of children who naturally enjoy “action”) that orient the application of
those technologies.
debates to which they are oriented. Having located the FPS game as both a site of intense
these creatively productive debates. First-Person Shooters are games where we look out through
the player-character's eyes. They prepare a place for us, but to do this they must make
As game-violence debates orient the circulation of these technologies, skills, and tropes,
what, if anything, distinguishes the diversity of Evangelical creativity from the diversity of
worldly creativity? In a word, playerships. A game implies a humanity who will play it. A
playership can be identified by some combination of its particular desires, talents, literacies,
ages, genders or nearly any other set of features. The games at hand have been crafted for
different groups with different understandings of “violence” and different orientations to it. The
227
For information on “the military entertainment complex” see Timothy Lenoir and Henry Lowood, “Theatres of
War,” in Collection, Laboratory, Theater Scenes of Knowledge in the 17th Century, ed. Helmar Schramm, Ludger
Schwarte, and Jan Lazardzig (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005); 427-457. For information on “advergaming” see Ian
Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2007).
152
presence of a game, however, does not require such a humanity to actually exist anywhere.
Some simple questions will help us see overdetermination which accompanies in-game
solutions to out-game moral concerns: “Was S3DNA created in order to convey a Christian
message?” Perhaps some members of the team had that intention, but there is no way to know.
We can certainly say that this intention would not have been sufficient to create the game, as
Wisdom Tree received the Wolfenstein engine because Color Dreams, their parent company,
purchased it for a gory adaptation of the movie Hellraiser.228 So we may ask instead, “Is S3DNA
biblical?” Well, it depends what you mean. Where Genesis 7:2 places seven pairs from every
species and two pairs from every unclean species into the ark, this game includes 250 to 400
instances each of five different clean animals. But the Bible was clearly consulted, as the six
unique animals that serve as level bosses are all ceremonially unclean.229 But these ambiguities
are not the province of Christian adaptations alone. If we ask “Did SNES Wolfenstein adaptation
successfully remove the Nazi presence?” again, it depends what we mean. The DOS original
When game critics complain that removing this “Hitler’s” mustache produces “a generic shoot
`em up romp against generic bad guys” (and they do), they are not complaining that the loss of
Nazi insignia fragments an otherwise coherent historical recreation, but perhaps that without
228
Martin Nielsen, "The Story of Color Dreams," accessed January 20, 2014,
http://www.nesworld.com/colordreams2.php ; “Hellraiser,” accessed January 20, 2014,
http://www.uvlist.net/game-7863-Hellraiser .
229
Propadeutic, “Super 3-D Noah's Ark 'Walkthrough,'” accessed January 20, 2014,
http://www.gamefaqs.com/snes/563038-super-noahs-ark-3d/faqs/18347 .
153
those insignia it is less pleasurable to play at killing these simulated humans.230
Neither game seems to have reached its intended playership. Nintendo of America calls
their public “families,” and Wisdom Tree calls theirs “Christians.” Both are imaginary
collectivities that have specific modes of play, hailed by games designed to accommodate them
and distributed to find them. Nintendo, for instance, designed a game reflecting the maxim that
family play does not involve swastikas, and Wisdom Tree that Evangelical play references the
Bible somehow. But these modes of play are always imperfect fits with real playerships. Just as
few families seem to have been impressed by SNES Wolfenstein friendliness, Christian games
have not yet become the primary form of entertainment for any denomination that I could locate.
And we need not apply a free-market model of desire – situating players as consumers within a
mismatches between modes of play and playerships. Failures to locate playerships inspire the
creation of new games, but these attempts might not come any closer to their object. In observing
assuming improvement, nor even that each successive layer's direction of growth is the same, we
The difference is that S3DNA seeks a child who is a budding prayer warrior. While both
games seek out the child, Nintendo's child is the child imagined by media studios seeking to
230
Approaching narrative coherence from a very different angle, the Japanese adaptation makes this a story about
how Blazkowicz is fighting a sort of zombie-factory overseen by Corporal Adolph Troutman. Clubey, “The SNES
Version and the SFC Version,” archived by The Internet Archive October 30, 2011, accessed January 20, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20111030062857/http://www1.linkclub.or.jp/~clubey/other%20platforms/snes2.htm
l; Quote above from Jay Wilbur of Id software. “Jaguar Version of Wolfenstein 3D Restores Original Plot,
Unleashes the Power of 64-bit Technology; 64-bit Technology of the U.S.-Made Jaguar Flexes its Muscle Once
Again,” Business Wire, August 1, 1994.
154
avoid litigation. In working primarily to create media that does not hurt children, Nintendo has
imagined the child as an almost entirely passive creature. This child is innocent and
impressionable; its pleasure is a species of “fun” of which it seems to be the passive recipient. Its
only active capacity seems to be growing, and even that, with regards to both educational and
recreational software, is so framed by mediated influence that it usually sounds like the
emergence of television's potentials rather than the child's own. The child as located by
Evangelical media, on the other hand, is not conceived as children-in-general, but quite the
opposite. The child growing to be in but not of the world is presumed to be an already moral
agent. What they put into their minds matters, not only because they may express undesirable
traits later, but because maturation is the process across which they “put on the whole armor of
God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil” (Ephesians 6:11, KJV). Neither
game, again, might ever locate the child they seek, but these very different conceptions of the
player will mobilize the design and circulation of very different games.
Since the first Evangelical game-review websites appeared in the mid-1990s, they have
tended to rate games as mixtures of toxic elements, “violence,” “occultism,” (foul) “language,”
and “sex” being the most frequent list. The claim that a game contains a great amount of any
single element is sufficient reason to declare it inappropriate for Christians, or even for humans
at large. This mode of media critique is continuous with previous Evangelical critique of radio
and television in that Christians are trying to decide whether or not worldly modes of
communication are fit to transmit sacred messages. That said, we should not assume that
Evangelical critique has had any static set of concerns with worldy media. It seems that
Evangelical media critique emerged across the 19th century with a gradual shift of attention from
155
the problem of sin to the problem of 'vice.'231 At both ends of this transition, the theater was a
dominant popular entertainment, and throughout, Evangelical declamations (though that medium
has rarely lacked battles) concerned “filth” and “licentiousness” rather than “violence.”232 The
following chapter follows the development of the word “violence,” as a lens through which we
can observe the emergence of Evangelical games. However, we cannot map “violence” onto a
Even were we to pursue the referent of “violence” within video games alone, we would
find an unruly collection of shifting criteria. While we could make a tidy chart of games that
include flesh-colored bipeds that emit red-stuff or cries of pain when removed from play, games
with items named after out-game firearms, or myriad other indexes for “violence,” none of these
would fit the occurrence of the word “violence” in Evangelical critique, nor for that matter its
worldly cognate. Any consistent criteria we choose will locate instances that diligent critics
ignore. Nor can we resolve this complexity with recourse to a hermeneutic of family
resemblance. There is no reason to assume in advance that the surname “Violence” is not a
homophone with several non-intersecting meanings. Should a family resemblance appear, our
task would be to try and discover what holds the family together, and to never presume things
Nor have the laboratory studies of video games and violence that have proliferated over
231
Dominic Erdozain, The Problem of Pleasure: Sport, Recreation and the Crisis of Victorian Religion (Woodbridge,
UK: Boydell Press, 2010).
232
Herrick Johnson, A Plain Talk About the Theater (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1882), accessed
January 20, 2014, http://books.google.com/books?id=1wIOAAAAYAAJ&dq ; Rev. Samuel Govern Winchester,
The Theater (Philadelphia: William S. Martien, 1840), accessed January 20, 2014,
http://books.google.com/books?id=v5MVAAAAYAAJ&dq ; James Buckley, Christians and the Theater (New York:
Nelson & Philips, 1875), accessed January 20, 2014, http://books.google.com/books?id=vZEXAAAAYAAJ&ots.
156
recent decades solved this problem. In trying to correlate two things (and a distinct publication
bias seems to make trying a fair allegation), these studies have been unreliable on both ends.233
At times, indices for violence have presumed the neutrality of the state by tracking criminal
convictions, while at others they have imposed a neurological determinism by assuming certain
kinds of brain-waves are the site of “violence.”234 On the game-side, things are even less
reliable, as game selections have consistently introduced multiple variables, comparing, for
instance, puzzle games with fighters.235 There seems to never have been any quantitative attempt
to validate or debunk the actual practices of game studios seeking to avoid violence. If Chex
Quest actually causes anyone to go easier on a punching bag, it remains solidly unproven.
That said, though the object of the present study is the debate, and not its legitimacy,
whether or not video games do in fact cause out-game violence is an important question, and my
deconstruction should not be mistaken for a dodge. If we were to interrogate a “violence” which
includes all crippling force against human bodies or threats thereof, including those shielded by
state sanction or caused by dangerous labor conditions, that is, if we included institutional and
structural violence, we would require methods neglected in the debates considered here. Toward
applies Hart and Negri’s Empire to investigate structural violence, global labor conditions under
233
Christopher J. Ferguson, “Evidence for Publication Bias in Video Game Violence Effects Literature: A
Meta-Analytic Review,” Aggression and Violent Behavior 12 (2007), 470-482.
234
Jeffrey Goldstein, “Violent Video Games” in The Handbook of Computer Game Studies, Joost Raessens and
Jeffrey Goldstein ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 341-357.
235
Lillian Bensley and Juliet Van Eenwyk, “Video Games and Real-Life Aggression: A Review of the Literature,”
Journal of Adolescent Health 29 (2001): 244-257.
157
neo-liberalism, and video games.236 If we were to include police and military violence as
possible effects of video gaming, we could even find concerted attempts to produce it. There
seems, in fact, to be a vast feedback loop in which technologies developed for the gaming
With reference to Atari games, Ronald Reagan famously quipped, “Many young people have
developed incredible hand, eye, and brain coordination in playing these games. The Air Force
believes these kids will be our outstanding pilots should they fly our jets.”238 The present study
cannot inject this concern into the game-violence debates, but perhaps we can move forward by
Locating Violence
Board [ESRB; the video game industry’s rating authority in the United States], television
pundits, child psychologists, ministers engaged in prophetic media criticism, video game review
websites, and the several other intersecting expert systems whose efforts to locate game-violence
shape the creation of Evangelical games, there is a surprising consensus concerning which games
include violence. It surprises because it emerges despite and not through efforts to define
game-violence. But the doxa successfully incorporates one of the tensions that causes “violence”
to resist definition: even in the Latin root word vis, the “force” denoted already includes both the
236
Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig De Peute, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
237
Lenoir and Lowood, “Theatres of War.”
238
Quoted in Detweiller, 2.
158
imposition of force by one human on another, and the force of specific emotions over the human
subject (as in “violently in love”). At present, both senses display a strong, even determinative,
relationship with “violation” of good order.239 Since at least the 1960s, broadcast news media
have deployed “violence” to designate only force which is not authorized by properly constituted
authorities, classifying, for instance, harm done by protesters as “violence,” while applying a
discourse, we find that even force against inanimate objects is liable to be identified as “violent”
if it is deemed inappropriate: In 1972, 58% of American men agreed that burning a draft card
was violent, and at present it is common for newspapers, when describing street protests, to
categorize dumpsters and windows as potential victims of violence.241 And public controversies
over “media violence” seem to apply the same conservative impulse to the good orders of
imaginary worlds: a British study of reactions to cinematic and televised images found the “most
prevalent general rule seems to be that behaviour which is judged to be appropriate, fair and
justified – even when overtly violent – is not usually seen to be seriously or ‘really’ violent.”242
Thus, when a particular instance of force is identified as violence, especially as serious violence,
we can read this classification as proposing appropriate relationships between entities of various
kinds.
239
Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Society and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press,
1983), 330.
240
David Graeber, Direct Action: An Ethnography (Oakland: AK Press, 2009), 449.
241
Science 23 (June,1972),1300-1303, as cited in Alan Bäck, “Thinking Clearly About Violence,” Philosophical
Studies 117.1 (Jan. 2004). 219-230; 219.
242
David E. Morrison, et al., Defining Violence (Lutton, UK: University of Lutton Press, 1999), 6.
159
In religious studies, then, we can often use locations of “violence” to mark the boundaries
of religious communities. When Dr. Thomas S. Fortson, President of Promise Keepers, says that
The Passion of the Christ “is not a violent film, but it is very graphic,” he is not measuring a
quantity of blood, but describing his organization's relationship to the film's sacra.243 And where
this fails, the difference between varieties of violence often does similar work: “Of all the violent
acts that have occurred in the history of the world, the Cross was by far the most important.”244
Thus, before we can evaluate the rhetorical development of these proprieties, we must
acknowledge that force applied in a digital world differs dramatically from either the secret
violence of emotions or the material violence of bodies. To understand the stakes, we must do
the word itself some violence, wrenching it out of its understood meaning.245
A conversion experience: In 1988 the game Maniac Mansion (Lucas Arts) was adapted
and rereleased for the Nintendo Entertainment System [NES]. The original game, produced for
home computers the previous year, cartoonishly parodied the conventions of low brow science
fiction and horror films: “Disembodied tentacles hopping around. Chainsaws in the Kitchen.
Plants with unusual appetites.”246 To release the game on the NES, that is, in order to market
243
Promise Keepers, “This is a Movie You Have to See!” archived by the Internet Archive, February 13, 2004,
accessed January 20, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20040213013151/http://www.promisekeepers.org/paff/pass/paffpass20.htm#fortson
article .
244
Michael Karounos, "Movie Review: 300," accessed January 20, 2014,
http://www.christiananswers.net/spotlight/movies/2007/3002007.html ; Brett Willis, “Movie Review: The Passion
of the Christ,” accessed January 20, 2014,
http://christiananswers.net/spotlight/movies/2004/thepassionofthechrist.html.
245
A meaning of “violence” dating from the early 16th century. Williams, 331.
246
The specific home computers were the Commodore 64 and Apple ][. This is copy from the back cover of the
Apple ][ version. Petr Maruska, “My Lucasarts Collection: Maniac Mansion,” accessed May 4, 2011,
http://collection.maruska.cz/detail.php?id=01&name=Maniac_Mansion.
160
Maniac Mansion to the four million American households which had made the console 1987's
best selling Christmas gift, the dark humor had to be tempered to fit Nintendo of America's
quality standards.247 Douglas Crockford, the programmer who headed the conversion, later
recalled that he was never quite sure what would offend Nintendo's quality controllers. He
“prohibit ‘depictions of excessive and gratuitous violence,’ which would seem to ban any game in
which your character met people, killed them, took their money, and then bought more weapons. But
in fact most Nintendo games are still faithful to that theme, so we were unclear as to how to interpret
Nintendo's policy. In the Super Mario Bros games, which are considered clean and wholesome, kids
248
routinely kill creatures, and the only motivation is that they are there.”
Crockford's reductio ad absurdum sets a logic baseline for our inquiry into
game-violence. Note that he is perversely using the word “kill” in places where Nintendo
consciously avoided it: Crockford continues, “The central activity in most Nintendo games is
killing things. The image and the act are good, but the word is bad, even if the word does not
suggest the image or the act.”249 But Crockford's grammar is more interesting still. What is
being killed, and by whom? The object is a set of entities that Crockford simultaneously
identifies as “things,” “people” and “creatures,” an ambiguity which makes sense because the
killing subject is not Super Mario or B. J. Blazkowicz, but an entity named both “your character”
and “kids.” Game heroes and game enemies emerge together from the immanence of code, only
247
Nathan Cobb, “'Gleelok's is Four' 'Digdogger's Five' Toys Go Back to the Future as Home Video Games Return
in a Big Way,” Boston Globe, 13 March 1988.
248
Douglas Crockford, “Now You're Really Playing With Power: The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion for the
Nintendo Entertainment System, The Untold Story,” accessed January 20, 2014
http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/maniac.html .
249
Ibid.
161
becoming distinct entities when distributed along the surface of the screen, so their killing can be
described by its graphical face (i.e. “Mario kills turtles”). The actions of the conjoined subject
orthogonal to on-screen representation. Thus entities that “kid-characters” kill need not be
described according to their visual similarity to human beings, as this has no consistent
relationship to the types of agency with which they engage their players.
The sequence of three Wolfensteins that opened this section demonstrate this fact,
showing how Nazis, non-descript villains, and angry animals can be graphical overlays on the
same algorithms. SOD (1999) by art-game designers Jodi pushes us to the brink of Crockford’s
reductio.250 Here Wolfenstein 3D is again modified, but now all images have been replaced with
pattern as controlled the Nazi soldier and (unnervingly) it dies with the same scream. From the
dizzying incoherence of SOD and Crockford’s palpable bitterness, we can establish a logical
baseline for what “violence” might mean: action that overtakes other agents, even digital ones,
constraining their ability to act, and/or driving them toward the immanence in which they cease
to be agents.
Through this lens, a surprising amount of what one does on a computer could be
interrogated as forms of violence. For instance, Crockford’s reductio potentially allows us to see
the use of antivirus software as unambiguously violent, as its users constrain and destroy entities
capable of both resistance and reproduction. But so then is deleting any piece of software, and
perhaps so too is deleting a digital photograph, or backspacing over a single letter. But public
250
JODI, “SOD workshop,” accessed January 20, 2014, http://studio23.free.fr/JODI-workshop/ .
162
scandals over violence concern force improperly applied, rather than force as such, so while the
“Antivirus is Murder” campaign will never be born, the actions of hacker collectives like
agencies can constrain and/or destroy which others with impunity comprise the movements of a
moral universe, a system of stratified powers within which human action has value. Thus the
debates over game-violence, even in their most general form, are an appropriate data set for
religious studies, but they will be especially instructive as their historical unfolding both binds
a way of marking it as force in violation of good order. Thus, the declaration of violence should
be heard as a way groups separate themselves from what they oppose. Notably, only a tiny
fragment of what occurs in digital worlds tends to be described as violent, but the rule remains
that the label “violent” is leveraged against digital actions deemed to be violating good order.
With this established, we can now set out to trace the overlapping and divergent practices of
Because the whole of Evangelical discourse on any given topic is too wide and wild to
examine coherently, I have selected a fragment. Between 1985 and 2008, the Southern Baptist
251
See, for instance: Tom Brewster, “Security Firms are Getting Hit by Increasing Numbers of Attacks, as Hackers
Get More Violent Against the Industry, a Security Expert Warns,” archived by The Internet Archive, April 17, 2011,
accessed January 20, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20110417154447/http://www.itpro.co.uk/632788/hackers-get-more-violent-against-
security-firms .
163
Periodical Index lists seventy-six articles referencing “video games.” This section will present
the sixty-four of these that I was able to access through the corporate library of LifeWay Books
as a telling slice of Evangelical Christian discourse, and place them alongside the results of
...
Video games are born in the secrecy of the laboratory, and they jump sharply in
popularity when they move to the secrecy of nightclubs and bars.253 But neither Spacewar at
MIT, nor Pong in the corner of a tavern, became sites of controversy concerning violence.254 As
a bar game, Death Race (Exidy, 1976), wherein the only action is running over blocky,
monochromatic gremlins (“We were quite careful not to call these figures people”), garnered
condemnation, but this seems to have quieted again quickly as the scandal of a single violent
anomaly.255 The first moral panic concerning game-violence began when games began
circulating as objects of youthful secrecy, migrating into the dark, unregulated space of the video
arcade.256 In 1981, the year that Pac-Man (Namco, 1980) ate four billion American quarters, Dr.
252
That is, I am examining every instance of “video games” from Christian Health, Christian Single, Church
Recreation Magazine, Home Life, Living With Children, Living With Preschoolers, Leading Student Ministry,
Living With Teenagers, Proclaim, Parent Life, Youth Ministry Update between 1985 and 2008.
253
Dmitri Williams, “A Brief Social History of Game Play” in Playing Video Games: Motives Responses, and
Consequences edited by Peter Vorderer and Jennings Bryant, (Taylor & Francis e-library, 2009), 237.
254
Bar games did occasionally raise the specter of gambling, however, and thus share some territory with the
widespread banning of pinball in the 1930s. For a history of controversies and innovations in pinball and novelty
games as they contribute to the social possibility of the video arcade, see the opening chapter of Stephen Kent’s
Ultimate History of Video Games (Roseville, CA: Prima Publishing), 1-17. Especially valuable to the present
discussion is the image of New York’s mayor Fiorello LaGuardia smashing a pinball machine with a sledgehammer
to publicly inaugurate a ban against them.
255 “
Sick, Sick, Sick,” Newsweek, January 10, 1977, 54.
256 “
The Battle for America’s Youth,” The New York Times, January 5, 1982.
164
Stuart Kaplan, chief of adolescent and child psychiatry at the Long Island Jewish-Hillside
Medical Center identified the draw of these spaces as “sublimated violence:” “It's the shooting,
killing and destroying, combined with the sounds and colors.”257 But it was the possibility that
young men, drawn in by the destroying and the colors (and by the greedy, exploitative
shopkeepers, another tantalizingly demonic figure in many of these stories) would gamble, fight,
and sell drugs in the arcades that led several American towns to regulate these spaces across the
early 80s:
“Only the bad kids go into them, and we worry about the young children not old enough to make value
judgments. Those without strong moral codes can be drawn in. […] The game rooms teach gambling and
breed aggressive behavior […] Children snatch purses and gold chains for money to put in these
258
machines.”
That is to say, the concern at this point was not that video games portrayed violent
actions, but that they cultivated an action-oriented atmosphere in which young men would be
prone to violence.
The first reference to video games in the Southern Baptist Periodical Index, notably, is to
a pair of articles in Church Recreation Magazine written to assess these specific fears about the
arcade and determine whether churches should install arcade-style machines on their premises.
One side was frankly bewildered – “there is no past experience to which we can refer”– but the
other presented a defense not only of the arcade, but of the video game as such, specifically
because, as long as the on-screen antagonists do not resemble humans, video games are “no more
violent than skeet shooting.” To fight with computerized enemies, in fact, was framed as a noble
257
“Pac-Man Fever,” Time, April 5, 1982; Ellen Mitchell, “Video Game Rooms Targeted by Towns,” The New York
Times, December 13, 1981.
258
Peter Kerr, “Issue and Debate: Should Video Games be Restricted by Law,” The New York Times, 3 June 1982.
165
task which neither encouraged nor resembled interhuman conflict: “The machine itself is the
The Southern Baptist Periodical Index reports no instances of “video game” between
1986 and 1992, a silence which harmonizes elegantly with a period of relative quiet in the
game-violence debates, as observed through other newspaper and journal databases. But this
quiet does not mean that negotiations stopped, only that they were highly professionalized in this
period. I do not refer here to the fact that half of all psychological laboratory studies on
game-violence published before 2001 date between 1985-87, but to the shift that seems to
precipitate this research focus: across this period Nintendo’s game consoles became the most
popular toys in America, followed closely by Sega’s rival offerings.260 This means, on one hand,
games migrate from the public secrecy of the video arcade into the privacy of the living room,
and with that shift, talk of delinquent violence is replaced with talk of parental
mismanagement.261 And on the other, Nintendo of America’s quality control policies – those
which inspired Crockford’s reductio – seem to have largely succeeded in avoiding “random,
gratuitous, and/or excessive violence” as judged by purchasing parents.262 Kids were killing
appropriately.
But when video games came to share the living room TV, they also had to share a public
259
David Napier, “The Use of Video Games in the Church,” Church Recreation Magazine 15 (Jan. – Mar. 1985):
47-48; Robert Rauss, “Video Games: Another Perspective,” Church Recreation Magazine 15 (Jan. – Mar. 1985): 49.
260
Lillian Bensley and Juliet van Eenwyk, “Video Games and Real-Life Aggression: Review of the Literature,”
Journal of Adolescent Health 29 (2001): 244–257.
261
Though home consoles had been available since the early 1970s, home consoles only become more profitable
than arcade games in 1989. Dmitri Williams, 230.
262
This formula is taken from Nintendo of America’s “Quality Standards,” as discussed at length in chapter three.
166
conversation on violence in children’s television that had grown increasingly ornate, though not
increasingly systematic, since the late 1960s when they were first suspected of causing Robert
Kennedy's assassination.263 Heather Hendershot notes that in the 1980s, “like today, violent
representations were violence in the same way that, say, a kick in the head is violence.”264 But
there is an elegance to this sloppiness, and one which it will retain as it slides into video game
expertise which exercised most power over television, were primarily concerned with imitable
violence. We might generously assume that media corporations are concerned with the health of
their youthful viewers, but we must also recognize that costly lawsuits are a primary way they
receive notice of failure. To prevent children from mimicking televised action, cartoon characters
with handguns are regulated in ways characters with lightning cannons are not; cartoon villains
In 1993, the first congressional hearings on video games and violence opened by rooting
this concern with childhood imitation upon terrain shared among government, capital, and
religion: “Today is the first day of Chanukah and we’ve already begun the Christmas season; it is
a time when we think about peace on Earth and good will toward all people, and also about
giving gifts.” Throughout the hearings, Senators Lieberman and Kohl made it quite clear that
their purpose was to prevent Night Trap (Digital Pictures) and Mortal Kombat (Midway), two
263
Heather Hendershot, Saturday Morning Censors: Television Regulation Before the V-Chip (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1998), 28.
264
Hendershot, Saturday Morning, 34.
265
Hendershot, Saturday Morning, 50-51.
167
popular games from the previous year, from being given to children as presents.266 What
enticement to childhood use of force was so dangerous that Congress had to work to prevent it?
The games on trial have little in common: one is a lonely strategic thriller, and the other a
competitive fighter; and most remarkably, Night Trap is almost entirely free of visible blood,
though Mortal Kombat will nicely redress the balance. Condemnations in the name of all
reasonable people (“Mortal Kombat and Night Trap are not the kinds of gifts that responsible
parents give”) and declarations concerning the games’ similar influence over children (they
“teach a child to enjoy inflicting torture”) serve to bind the games together, but tell us little about
how they were initially identified as “violent.” In this regard, the key word throughout the
hearings was “realism:” “Night Trap uses actual actors and achieves an unprecedented level of
realism.”
The “real” that includes Night Trap’s vampires and Mortal Kombat’s fire-breathing
ninjas seems to be almost exclusively an evaluation of the games’ shared deployment of gaming
technologies that had only recently become affordable for console development. Both Mortal
Kombat and Night Trap presented their in-game entities as digitized video footage of human
actors.267 Prior to these two, most games for arcades, home computers, or consoles employed
graphics that tended to evolve toward increasingly subtle cartoonishness rather than
photorealism, as only expensive laser disk players had previously been capable of digitized
video. But as technologies of digital photography became more pervasive, and the computational
power needed to place them in games less expensive, this sort of “realism” became a public
266
CSPAN, “Video Game Violence (December 9, 1993)” accessed January 21, 2014,
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/52848-1 .
267
Lethal Enforcers, to be released soon after the hearings was similarly a full motion video game.
168
concern. And in 1993 Id games, the creators of Wolfenstein 3D, apply this technology to the FPS
for the first time. Doom, another frenetic, simplistic shooter, surrounded the player with demons
digitized from clay models.268 Echoed in contemporaneous journalism already nostalgic for the
innocence of Pac-Man, this is a “realism” identified by the density of its visual rhetoric, not by
its resemblance to any out-game world, allowing its referent to shift with technological advances.
The Washington Post, for instance, called Doom “ultra-realistic” and presented the production of
the real very clearly: “Like the best fantasy novels, all of the elements of Doom coalesce around
together is the ingenious ‘Doom engine,’ a ‘spiffy algorithm’ that allows players to move
Thus “realism” drifts, alarmists tending to agree with advertisers as to its referent in any
particular year. But Doom, unmentioned in the hearings, would soon assert itself its reality,
despite the polygonal “realism” (spatial models composed of geometrical shapes) popularized in
The morning before the 1993 hearings, representatives from several large video game
corporations, including Nintendo and rival home console manufacturers, announced that they
would take up collective self-regulation before regulation was forced upon them. The two
268
David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture (New York:
Random House, 2003), 134.
269
Dave Nuttycombe, “Pac-Man, Tetris -- and Now It's Doom's Day; Here's a Game on the Cutting Edge. And the
Slicing Edge. And Hacking. And Gouging…” The Washington Post, October 10, 1994.
270
In August 2011, Germany’s 17 year long restriction of Doom to adult players was lifted, because the ongoing
graphics had become so dated that the game was no longer violent. “Germany lifts Doom sales ban after 17 years,”
BBC News, September 1, 2011, Accessed January 1, 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14748027.
169
systems that emerged the next year each established graded scales for violence that identified
“blood and gore” as a mark of severe violence, but otherwise varied significantly.271 By 1997,
however, game designers were only applying for ESRB ratings.272 This new system resolved the
271
The Recreational Software Advisory Council [RSAC] system which rated computer software, as opposed to
console games, did not articulate violence to a typology of players, instead giving separate scales for “Sex,”
“Violence,” and “Language” running from zero to four. Violence was 1) “Harmless conflict; some damage to
objects,” 2) “Creatures injured or killed; some damage to objects; fighting;” 3) “Humans injured or killed with small
amounts of blood;” 4) “Humans injured or killed; blood and gore,” “Wanton and gratuitous violence, torture, and/or
rape.” C. Dianne Martin, “An Alternative to Government Regulation and Censorship: Content Advisory Systems for
Interactive Media,” in The V-Chip Debate: Content Filtering from Television to the Internet. Monroe Edwin Price,
editor (Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1998), 179-194; 182.
272
Federal Trade Commission, “Marketing Violent Entertainment To Children: A Review Of Self-Regulation And
Industry Practices In The Motion Picture, Music Recording & Electronic Game Industries: A Report Of The Federal
Trade Commission,” (September 2000) Appendix D, 17, archived by The Internet Archive May 1, 2013, accessed
January 21, 2014, http://www.ftc.gov/os/2000/09/index.shtm.
273
John Romero, [Adrian Carmack modeling Doom's Baron of Hell, ca. 1993], accessed March 16, 2014
http://romero.smugmug.com/Video-Games/The-Archives/480_BdMqY#14482_rE9zd
170
problem of game-violence by proposing a taxonomy of humans correlated to the specific types
of violence “appropriate” to each of them, mimicking the strategy applied in MPAA ratings since
1968 (and consanguineous with TV Parental guidelines of 1996). The ESRB initially partitions
humans into “Early Childhood,” “Kids to Adults,” “Teen,” and “Mature,” marking
developmental breaks at 3, 6, 13, and 17.274 The first category includes no “objectionable words
or depictions whatsoever” (an interesting possibility, given the range of depictions to which
cultural critics from Adorno to Falwell have found objection), its early bound being defined by
cognitive and motor limitations rather than moral ones.275 The “Mild Animated Violence; Comic
Mischief; and Animated Violence” appropriate for six-year-olds (a group that will be renamed
“Everyone” as of 1998) is defined with reference to “Road Runner” cartoons and “The Three
Stooges.” At 13 it is safe to engage in “Realistic Violence,” though “Animated Blood and Gore;
Realistic Blood and Gore” is only appropriate for people over 17.276
If the notion that older children can participate in more “realistic” violence in-game
without becoming violent afterward, or the specificity of 17 and 13 as the moments of maturation
seems like a folksy application of the MPAA’s rather arbitrary schema for human development
274
The additional category “Adults Only” is not a demographic marker, as it designates only the “Mature” category
with the additional possibility of “Strong Sexual Content.” It marks an optional development for people over 17 who
happen to enjoy pornography. No game console has licensed games with this rating, and only 21 PC games have
ever received it and decided to publish with it rather than revising in order to earn a lower age rating. “List of AO
Rated Products,” accessed January 21, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AO-rated_products.
275
Adorno’s critique of cartoons in general and Donald Duck in particular might be well considered here. Theodor
Adorno, The Culture Industry (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 110.
276
Jack Heistand, “Video Rating System,” Testimony before U.S. Joint Congressional Committee. Rating Video
Games: A Parent's Guide to Games, Witness Panel #7. (HRG-1993-SJS-0035; Date: Dec. 9, 1993; Mar. 4, Jul. 29,
1994 ). Text in: ProQuest Congressional Hearings Digital Collection; Accessed: January 21, 2014.
171
to a new medium, that is because it was.277 The ESRB standards drew upon a variety of sources,
but they “placed priority on meeting consumer’ needs,” reflecting popular understandings of
child health as measured in focus groups rather than the positions of “social scientists.” Thus the
timing and character of maturity as understood by the MPAA (PG-13 was adopted in 1984, and
17 was set for X rated films in 1970) were carried over by parents already acclimated to them.278
And parents were told in no uncertain terms that they already agreed with the scheme for
humanity defined here. These are “independent judgments of people like themselves.”279 From
here legislation will primarily attempt to place the force of law behind ESRB ratings by
restricting the sale of games below their demographic, or mandating signs that explain the
ratings.
Evangelical game critique in this period largely echoes the concerns of the 1993 hearings
and the strategy of the ESRB. It is presumed that all children (and all boys particularly) enjoy
video games; “violence” is a primary concern that continues to be located primarily in “realism”
which must be sequestered from younger children to prevent contagious influence. But across the
concerns not voiced in the congressional hearings: “Tell your preschooler, 'We need to fill our
minds with good things, not bad things.’”280 At times these concerns share territory with
277
The break at 6 is rather harder to trace, but it may reflect the same tendency which made TV-Y7 and its cognate
TV-Y7 FV (with “fantasy violence”) thinkable in 1997.
278
Bruce A. Austin, Immediate Seating: A Look at Movie Audiences (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 1989),
110; Claudia Eller, “FTC Playing Parent or Big Brother?” Los Angeles Times, September 29, 2000.
279
Heistand, “Video Rating System.”
280
Kay W. Moore, “Parents: Sharing and Supporting,” Living with Preschoolers 21, (October – December 1993),
26-27.
172
psychology, attending to violence in tandem with the possibility that “young teens can become
addicted” or develop “excessive preoccupation” with “mesmerizing” games, but they should not
be hastily glossed as another species of media “effects” literature.281 Though Evangelical game
criticism frequently attends to “effects,” there is a curious attention to the child-at-play which
does not necessarily concern the child-after-playing. Biblical verses that require Christians to
keep their minds pure (Mark 7:20-22),282 or exhort them to attend to “whatever is true, whatever
is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable (Phil. 4:8)” are entirely
foreign to the modes of play enjoined within a worldly public and will require separate analysis.
The question is: “Would I be embarrassed to play this game with Jesus?”283
Remembering Columbine
For both Evangelical and worldly game criticism, negotiations concerning game-violence
gained a new urgency on April 20th 1999, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered
themselves and thirteen of their classmates at Columbine High School in Littleton Colorado. The
two boys' diaries –entitled The Book of God and A Virtual Book: Existences, respectively– reveal
that they had been planning far worse for over a year; guns, knives, and 99 explosive devices
were readied for a spree that would have killed everyone in the school and continued into
surrounding neighborhoods, had faulty equipment and (perhaps) cognitive dissonance not
281
Pete Carpenter, “Inside Out: Curing the Video Game Addict,” Living with Teenagers 17 (April 1995), 6; Carol L.
Bruning, “Video Mania,” Living with Children 15 (October - December 1992), 14-15; Wilson Wayne Grant, “Your
Teen's Health: Can My Teen Overdose on Video Games?,” Living with Teenagers 15 (April-June 1993), 41.
282
Charles Lawless, “Pharisees and Video Games,” Proclaim 22 (April – June, 1992), 48-49.
283
Robert G. (Bob) DeMoss Jr and G.W. Austin, “Media Play: The Games People Play,” Home Life 51 (June 1998),
60-61.
173
intervened.284 But, The Book of God and Existences also raise the alarming possibility that
playing FPS games might be, for some players, a process of ethical and metaphysical
reorientation that would be well characterized as religious. In Chidester's terms, the tragedy
cannot be separated from ways of being a “human person both in relation to the superhuman and
in relation to whatever might be treated as subhuman” that Klebold and Harris seem to have
Not only had Doom introduced new technologies of photorealism and continued to
demonstrate the profitability of the FPS, driving well-financed creativity, its creators had also
released tools that allowed players to design their own gamescapes complete with new weapons
and enemies using the Doom engine: modding.286 In Doom and many subsequent FPS games,
the engine was deliberately left open for fan-created levels. That is to say, a game like S3DNA
could now be made by any sufficiently dedicated amateur.287 Further, though the frequent claim
tautological acceptance of branding logic, Doom made this sort of combat possible over the
Internet, and brought it wide recognition. Both modding and deathmatching facilitated the
284
The collapse of the two boys' horrific initiative is largely psychologist Jerald Block's extrapolation from survivor
accounts that observe Klebold and Harris sparing students without clear reason across the second half of the tragedy
and even appearing to lose interest. I will follow Block in refraining from trying to reconstruct what, precisely, was
happening in the boy's minds, but I would like to flag this moment as the process, viewed from without, of the
perpetrators coming to realize that their violent video games in fact did not train them to kill human beings. Jerald
Block, “Lessons from Columbine: Virtual and Real Rage.” American Journal of Forensic Psychology 28.2 (2007),
5-34.
285
David Chidester, Authentic Fakes, 18, viii.
286
Masters of Doom, 166.
287
I have been unable to locate any Doom mods that circulated as non-violent or biblical alternatives for Christians.
The Christ Killa mod, in which players shoot “hordes of homicidal Jesus Christs,” however, might give pause to
anyone who attempts to locate a meaningful difference in games along a line of “Christian symbolism.” Rachel
Wagner, “The Play is the Thing” in Halos and Avatars, 58.
174
growth of a lively online community in which Klebold and Harris were active. The boys seem to
have found community in deathmatching, and alienation among their high school peers, and Eric
Harris in particular was a talented level designer. Without Doom, of course, the boys may have
planned some different horrific act, but their very specific atrocity is poorly understood without
reference to how the specific affordances of Doom allowed them to play these games as members
Harris’ Book of God (apparently named for Doom’s “god-mode” in which the player was
invulnerable to attacks) seems to frame Doom as the template for a sort of ritual. The massacre
was planned as a species of human sacrifice that attempted to give the welter of high school
meaning by forcing its elements into the schema of the game world: “Everyone should be put to
a test, an ULTIMATE DOOM test.” And where reality exceeded that model, Harris planned to
access his memories of play as the monastic practice which had taught him to live in that world:
sympathy, mercy, or any of that, so I will force myself to believe that everyone is just another
monster from Doom like [Former Humans] or [Lost Souls] or Demons, so it is either me or them.
But Harris' journal only shows that Doom as religion is possible, not that it was
widespread beyond this tragic case. By April 1999, Doom II had already sold over a million
copies, the original Doom had already become one of the first three PC games ever to sell over 2
million copies, and approximately 15 million people had downloaded a sample version of the
288
Block, 18, 22.
175
game that included nine levels and allowed deathmatching.289 Without access to their journals,
we cannot know how Doom related to the world making projects of these millions of Doom
players who seem never to have ritualized the game. We can, however, extend Chidester's line of
questioning to consider the religious dynamics of Colombine far beyond the school itself.
Within hours of the massacre, the names of these two boys and their school, this game
and its genre, become a technical argot for describing adolescent desire and the effects of video
gaming in American newspapers. Under Chidester's definition of religion, the sudden appearance
of a widespread notion that a set of humans can be turned into murderers by a specific
news media, was “teenage boys enjoy games that are violent like Doom, but playing them may
lead to another Columbine.” In 1999, Factiva reports that 40% (608/1527) of newspaper articles
discussing "video game violence," "violent video games," or "violence in video games" did so
through reference to “Columbine.” This declines annually across successive years, but remains
significant: 24% (243/994), 20% (123/602), 13% (75/556), and 15% (106/708). Newspapers
discussing the possibility of “another Columbine” specifically hit 223 instances in 1999,
declining to 158, 107, 65 and 47 in 2003.290 After this and into the present, the memory of the
Columbine tragedy less fades than becomes inseparable from the larger cultural field. In 2002,
the US Army functionalizes the new conception of youth by publicly releasing a FPS as a
289 “
Id Software Names New Designer.” Business Wire, March 1, 1999; Wagner James Au. “Masters of 'Doom,'”
Salon.com, accessed January 21/2014, http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/05/05/doom/print.html.
290
Factiva searches performed September 1, 2011.
291
Gloria Goodale, “Video Game Offers Young Recruits a Peek at Military Life,” Christian Science Monitor, May
176
To say that the religious role of the Columbine tragedy was the creation of images
orienting the interactions of youth and media is not to dismiss the work of religious traditions in
mourning or organizing. Consider, for instance, the myth of the girl who said “Yes,” and how it
placed Evangelical identity near the center of collective memory on the tragedy. The story is that
while Kliebold and Harris were in the library, one of them aimed at a young woman, and asked
her if she believed in God. She said “Yes,” and in most accounts that was her last word. But
tellings vary. Valeen Schnurr, who survived, recalls the confession as her own and forensic
evidence seems to support her, but the families of Cassie Bernall and Rachel Scott, both of
whom died that day, each held that their daughter had said “Yes” before her death, and each
worked to spread their daughter's testimony as an inspiration to others.292 Of these, She Said Yes,
the account published by Cassie Bernall's mother, circulated most widely, even spending several
weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Here we see a characteristic Evangelical attempt
to frame youth as moral agents rather than passive recipients of entertainment: “It is also easier
to get angry, to point fingers, or to lose oneself in what the media calls the 'larger' issues. In the
wake of Columbine that has meant gun control and video games, school security and Hollywood
violence, preventative education and separation of church and state. All of these issues are
important, but at the end of the day they may not be the things that really count.”293 She sees
teens “crying out for relationships” and frames her daughter's “Yes” as bravely “choosing to
177
extend a hand rather than recoiling judgmentally.”294 The Christian youth is conceived, again, as
an active moral agent, here armed with friendship against alienation and tragedy.
video arcades, or game-violence in general, both shared the effects emphasis of worldly
criticism, and occasionally complicated matters with an attention to the moral status of the
player-in-play. Notably, these divergent rhetorics of violence often share close quarters. One
article, for instance, combines descriptions of school shootings with a grotesque echo of
Crockford’s reductio, identifying the violent act as that of play: “Severed heads and broken
spines in ‘Mortal Kombat IV.’ Your teen is the one who delivers the fatal blows.”295 And in Bob
DeMoss’ editorial response to Columbine in the Southern Baptist periodical Home Life, this
combination becomes a radical act of media criticism. He opens by agreeing with worldly news
reports in indicting violent video games as causes of the tragedy, but then subverts this
indictment by classifying the games and those news reports as part of the same problem. He
presents the news footage of Columbine as a species of “reality television,” implying that
television’s simplifications of Klebold and Harris’ motivations only serve to exacerbate the
“deficit in the souls of our kids.” He closes with a solution: “Kill your TV.”296
Even when Evangelical critique tacks hard toward emphasis on media effects, the
attention to the player as a moral agent opens these sorts of radical potentials. Richard Abanes,
for instance, places the Columbine massacre alongside military use of FPS games as training
294
Bernall, 159.
295
Mike Nappa, “Media Minutes,” Living With Teenagers October 1999, 32.
296
Bob DeMoss, “Media Play: Violence at School,” Home Life November 1999, 60.
178
devices, producing the compound image he labels “little Manchurian Candidates.”And when he
seeks to dampen the mood of fear, the possibility of positively-valued media effects he adds
include some which are salient to the immediate well-being of the player: “[Video games] can be
fun, instructional, and therapeutic (intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually), not to mention
It is in this milieu of urgency concerning game-violence, and with this blend of positions,
that Christian video game review websites began to emerge. As I explained in my third chapter's
history of digital religion, “Christian Gamers,” “Christian Gaming,” The Dove Foundation,
Christiananswers.net’s “Guide 2 Games,” and “Shepherd's Staff,” all began to offer video game
reviews for Christian players in 2000; Christian Computer Game Reviews [CCGR] and The
Staging Point appeared the following year.298 These sites each host a wild diversity of
interpretations of “violence,” but all of them place it among their stated concerns, and the
discourse on each site, from the organizational level to the public discussion boards, locates
violence using the same aesthetic criteria as the ESRB. “Violence” remains strongly correlated to
criteria of imitability is again located through a small set of iconic objects and tendencies, the
most consistent of which is blood. CCGR clearly marked the shared territory in their 2002
297
Richard Abanes, What Every Parent Needs to Know About Video Games (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2006), 76,
115.
298
Christian Gamers, “Main;” Christian Gaming Staff, “Main;” The Dove Foundation, “Game Search Results;”
Christiananswers.net, “Guide 2 Games;” Tim Emmerich, “Shepherd’s Staff;” CCGR, “Main;” The Staging Point,
“Game Ratings;” Pure Fun, “Games.”
299
"Sin," Staging Point.
179
review of the Christian FPS Catechumen: “This game isn't violent, you don't see any blood.”300
And, like the ESRB, every one of these sites articulates danger to age distinctions, though these
now lose their clear year-based demarcation. For instance, though a cut-off age is never offered,
Shepherd’s Staff's reviews frequently state that a game with high “Overall Christian Rating” is
particularly appropriate for children or “the whole family,” while reviews offering “acceptable”
Christian Ratings frequently add that discretion should be made as to player age.301
But it seems that even in the structure of some of these sites we can still detect concerns
with violence attached to the moral status of the player-in-play, rather than concerns for his
behavior after play. The reviews on CCGR, for instance, have always located violence on the
terrain shared by Evangelical and worldly criticism, but as of 2005, these standards have been
presented as a grading rubric (that is to say, an algorithm), so the priority of various indices of
“imitability” can be compared. Of the 10 points allotted, one quarter are for “blood” and another
quarter for “gore,” with the remaining 5 points coding all other signs of violence. These later
points arrange a series of non-exclusive criteria from wildly divergent modes of game criticism
into a single scale, such that it would be difficult to “check only one” in most cases.302 In
300
CCGR, "Catechumen," accessed January 22, 2014,
http://www.christcenteredgamer.com/index.php/reviews/18-computer/4514-catechumen .
301
http://www.graceworksinteractive.com/ShepStaff/ (archived by the Internet Archive, Febuary 16, 2011, accessed
January 22, 2014.
302
That is, “Violence (Check only one)
___ - No Violence (-0 pts)
___ - Sports Violence (Ex. Fighting in Hockey or Rushing the Mound in Baseball) (-1pts)
___ - Cartoon Type Silly, Non-Deadly Violence (Ex. Simpson’s Hit and Run, Crash Bandicoot) (-2 pts)
___ - Non Deadly Violence (Ex. Knockout Kings, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) (-2.5 pts)
___ - Killing non-human realistic creatures (Ex. Deer Hunting) (-2.5 pts)
___ - Shooting objects that represent enemy aircraft, tanks etc. (Ex. Star Wars Rogue Squadron) (-3 pts)
___ - RPG Violence (This is where you enter a command and watch it happen Ex. Final Fantasy) (-3 pts)
___ - Killing non-human, fictional beings (Ex. Robots or Aliens) (-3.5 pts)
180
general, visual depictions of humanity, and narrative implications of motive and mortality are the
criteria for severity of violence, criteria like those applied by the ESRB. But the territory shared
with worldly critique is marbled by Evangelical specificities: Both vehicular-shooting games and
menu-based Role Playing Games receive -3 points for violence, irrespective of the graphical
humanity or the narrative “cold-blood.” The specific number, like other algorithmic arbitrations
of morality, evades specific explanation, but it is certainly a ludic criterion where the ESRB
consists entirely of visual and narrative ones. Perhaps we are seeing a discomfort with
play-mechanics. We cannot know. But in drawing our attention to the ways game-violence is
connected to player interaction, this seems to be another Evangelical reminder to “Hate what is
evil; cling to what is good” even while playing games (Romans 12:9).303
This history will carry us from the first debates over game-violence through the creation
of the most recent Evangelical FPS game, but to understand its relationship to Evangelical play
requires theorization. Crockford’s reductio, which raises the potential reading of all force against
digital agencies as “violence,” produces a strange vantage upon the game-violence debates,
sensitizing us to the fact that in every case the removal of violence is in fact a strategy of
___ - People killing people in self-defense (Ex. Medal of Honor) (-4 pts)
___ - People killing people in cold blooded murder (Ex. Grand Theft Auto 3) (-5 pts);” CCGR, “Christ Centered
Gamer Reviewing Standard,” accessed July 12, 2012
http://www.ccgr/org/index.php/faqs/15-game-reviews/16-christ-centered-gamer-reviewing-standard .
303
Ken Reaves, “Video Game Violence,” Living with Teens,” September 2001, 31.
181
substitution.304 The question is perhaps necessarily what a video game will invite players to
And, it is clear that Evangelical and worldly game criticism tend to use the same criteria
depict the emission of “blood and gore” 3) where weapons (including bodies) presumed to be
accessible to audience members come into conflict. And, second, both ranges of game criticism
are strongly concerned that these games may provoke or train imitation by adolescent boys
This sharing of analytical territory is consonant with the findings of studies in other
Evangelical media from Christian Contemporary Music to comics, cinema, and dating manuals:
“In other words, evangelicals, who strive to be ‘in but not of the world,’ have produced media
that overlap in interesting ways with unabashedly ‘worldly’ media. For nonevangelicals,
Christian media are uncanny: both distant and intimate, familiar and unfamiliar in their
references.”305 In Evangelical game critique, this distance seems to be the occasional (and this
inconsistency cannot be stated too clearly) tendency to interrogate the moral status of the player
in the act of play, and not only the ways game-play might translate into “real-world” action.
This difference can be well framed through Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence.”
Here he notes that violence, as judged by the state, is always evaluated as a relationship between
304
This is a further extension of David Morgan’s work on “The Violence of Seeing:” “Iconoclasm, in other words,
is not a purging of images tout à fait but a strategy of replacement.” The Sacred Gaze (Berkeley, Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2005), 117.
305
Hendershot. Shaking the World for Jesus, 212.
182
means and ends, which is to say, it is evaluated teleologically. An application of force might be
judged illegal (under positive law) because it involves means without historical precedent, or
(under natural law) because it leads to ends that cannot justify the use of force. Together, these
two theories of law form a single mechanism that directs overwhelming force against violence
teleological system concerned primarily with the proper training of adolescent men, we find
responses to game-violence that mirror these theories of law. The problem of unjust means is
imitated.307 We see this strategy, for instance, in the replacement of bullet-based weapons with
energy-weapons, or the substitution of zombies or robots for more explicitly humanoid victims
(note that this includes changes to enemies as well as weapons, as it is a reconfiguration of the
game itself as a means, and not merely means as represented in-game). The problem of ends,
conversely, is addressed largely by assenting to the notion that the game is a training exercise,
but changing the object of training. The FPS games made by the US Army or Hezbollah are the
most obvious instances of this tendency.308 Force can evade evaluation as “violence” either by
306
Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Selected Writings 1, edited by Marcus Bullock, and Michael W.
Jennings (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005): 236-252.
307
To expurgate (a book or writing), by omitting or modifying words or passages considered indelicate or offensive.”
“bowdlerize, v.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. June 2011. Oxford University Press. Accessed January 24, 2014.
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/22199 .
308
These two FPS games, each the licensed product of a standing military, each claiming to offer players the
experience of “real” soldiers have become a matched pair in critical game studies. For contextualization of both
within the military and publicity operations of each see “Banal War: Full Spectrum Warrior” (97-122) in Witheford
and De Peute, Games of Empire.
183
criticism is contiguous with worldly criticism, these are appropriate readings of the FPS games
that I examine in chapter five. Swords that shoot Holy Spirit beams are a species of energy
weapon, and firing it at a human to convert them to Christianity is a species of justified war.
But inasmuch as non-violence in Evangelical gaming can be read through that part of
Evangelical critique that engages the player non-teleologically, situating critique around their
moral status in the moment of play, these games seem to include instances of what Benjamin
calls “divine violence.” Divine violence, Benjamin claims, does not make law at all. It is a
new world. Inasmuch as they are acts of moral consequence in the present, consuming
Bible-scrolls or using the Sword of the Spirit to tame demons (and other surprising events within
Evangelical games) are not metaphors. These are events occurring in an elsewhere inhabited by
the work of non-violence with respect to Evangelical play. The games that occupy the following
chapter are voices within the Evangelical conversation on game-violence, meaning, in large part,
that they replicate worldly concerns and techniques, perhaps using biblical images rather than
other non-imitabilia, but nonetheless do the same work of defining the perimeter of the
authentically human. In the context of the Columbine massacre I suggested that this work might
be well classified as religious, in that it negotiates what it means to be a human person, both
within the tragic enclosure of the school and out in the world that attempted to make sense of
it.309 But calling it religious does not adequately address what makes the flickering, multiply-
309
Chidester. Authentic Fakes, viii.
184
embodied, emerging prayer warrior different from the worldly player. There may, after all, be a
religion out there as well. We could easily follow Agamben and frame the construction of
homines sacri –humans set apart for sacrifice – from the bodies of minorities, labor, and other
reductio we could even begin to notice how the disposable bodies of First-Person Shooters create
a space for those desacralized victims, and consider the possibility of the military-entertainment
But something other than religious grouping may be located here. Inasmuch as there
exists an Evangelical Christian counterpublic bound without by its separation from the world and
within by individual attention to Evangelical subject formation, there exists an Evangelical mode
of play that invites players to deepen their Christianity through acts of concerted non-violence.
The vector of growth flickers between a developmental future-past axis, and a cosmological
upward-downward one. In terms of the first orientation, these games may present an immediate
danger, but in terms of the second, there may be good reason to endure it. Now the player is
invited to growth toward safety, and now to immediate performance of spiritual warfare.
Following the College of Sociology, then, I would like to emphasize that this mode of play is the
precarious work of co-emergence of the human and its world in the exercise of force upon
entities engaged as the barriers to subjectivization. It is “that which causes one to tremble with
In this sense the Evangelical FPS games might be read as a paradigmatic case of digital
310
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
311
Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 129.
185
religion, casting it as, again, something more than a re-use of existing technology. In Music
Machine, Pax Man, and The Jericho Game, religious video games began with what I have called
redeemed adaptations. Perhaps, though, we should remember that the allegedly former games
were still present alongside their religious doubles. Along a temporal axis, the consequentialist
concerns with games never entirely vanish, but the cosmological axis traces a line along which
the player can grow in relationship to his own spiritual capacity. Why did Evangelical game
designers make so many FPS games in the wake of Columbine? Perhaps they stage sacred play,
not despite the dangers of the medium, but because of them. The dangers of play and the urgency
of play oscillate rapidly. Both the entities within the games and the games themselves are
part-subject in the interactions that constitute Evangelical subjectivity, but only as they are being
actively managed by the always-emerging Evangelical subject. The player fights the game.
In the words of a prominent Evangelical game review site, “Is there a danger in pushing
through too much garbage to get a small nugget of goodness? A guiding verse might be
Philippians 4:8 Whatever is true, noble, lovely, admirable, excellent or praiseworthy... think
about these things.” But make no mistake, the urgency of non-violence is the context of spiritual
war: “We are the soldiers tasked with the rescue of this digital generation. God has put the
passion of gaming in our hearts to reach these people, and it is a high calling. ”312
Conclusion
312
Flyingmonk, “God Loves Gamers, Reaching the XBOX Generation,” accessed February 22, 2014,
http://www.christcenteredgamer.com/index.php/easyblog/entry/god-loves-gamers-reaching-the-xbox-generation
186
This chapter situated the word “violence” as, itself, a site of struggle. While it is
important for many activities to establish themselves as non-violent, the word resists definition
because its prevailing uses only mark violations of good order as seen from particular positions:
an unjustly broken window is violence, but a just execution is not. This situation becomes more
complex still where the word is applied to mediated creativities because extrinsic standards of
good order tend to lose much in translation. But across the twentieth century, the hegemonic
voices in media criticism have been those who risk lawsuits from imitations of their media, and
photorealism to depict “blood and gore” from weapons presumed to be accessible to audience
members, and it is set aside for older audiences. Media that hope to avoid classification as
violent, and the age-limitation of their audience, need only avoid these traits, for instance by
substituting humans for robots, guns for magic, or applying cartoonish colors.
In general, Evangelical media shares this specific understanding of violence, and these
tactics for avoiding it, but a different standard which disrupts the world's consequentialist
motives for avoiding violence flickers alongside it: “whatever is true, whatever is noble,
excellent or praiseworthy – think on these things” (Philippians 4:8, NIV). Thus, for Evangelical
critique, the child-at-play is not merely a consumer who must be prevented from becoming a
murderer, but is also an active moral agent and his play is understood as meaningful in itself.
Thus, though Evangelical non-violence often resembles worldly attempts to remove the
dangerous possibilities of play, it can also be well framed as “divine violence.” Spiritual warfare
through non-violent games enjoins players to apply force in ways that escape all consequentialist
187
logic, existing already in another world, rather than working to create a future. The prayer
warrior who comes into existence at this edge is engaged in sacred play. It took some time, but
this is a complete vision of the religious game as an affordance. These games do not only adopt
older technologies and transform them, but emerge as something new. This particularity will
188
Chapter 5
Taking the Kingdom By Force:
Living and Dying in the Evangelical First-Person Shooter
Shambler Teneb
Illustration 10: Enemy morphology in Quake (left) and Eternal War: Shadows of Light (right)
The parallel increase in bodily complexity from Shambler to Teneb, and from Death
Knight to Captain, seems to evidence a parallel evolutionary leap: the limbs have become lithe,
189
and the teeth more numerous, the spattered blood has blended into the textures around it. We
might propose a variety of causes for this jump: the games were released eight years apart (Id ,
1995- Xrucifix, 2003), and the latter's creators described their work explicitly as an interpretation
of the former. But it is not clear how, from these bodies, we could detect that we are witnessing a
transition from worldly to Evangelical media, that the former are just monsters whereas the latter
are demons, or that when the former are destroyed it is violent and when the latter are destroyed
it is not. As this chapter explores the six Evangelical First-Person Shooters created across
approximately the same period, the reader would do well to be haunted by these creatures. Their
similarity and difference demonstrates the historical trajectory of a cultural form that blossomed
wildly, but has not been seen for a decade now, and which reveals much about the relationship
The preceding chapter staged a simple question: How do Evangelicals decide what
constitutes violence in video games, and what happens when they try to remove it? Through
examination of the intersecting histories of the game-violence debates and Evangelical game
criticism as they develop across from the emergence of mass video gaming through the aftermath
of the Columbine massacre, this historical analysis arrived at four conclusions: The likelihood
that the dominant voices in both worldly and Evangelical media criticism will identify games as
“violent” increases in proportion to the presence of certain historically specific cues selected by
American movie and television rating authorities (i.e. when they use contemporary technologies
of photorealism to depict “blood and gore” released from humanoid bodies by weapons
presumed to be accessible to the audience); they also agree that this is primarily a problem
because these games may provoke, train, or encourage adolescent boys to perform similar acts
190
outside of their games; Evangelical critique diverges, however, by adding a supplemental
concern with the moral state of the player-in-play, claiming that the Bible forbids thinking about
this specific kind of violence; I then concluded that the non-violent struggles staged by
Evangelical games constituted “sacred play,” in that they allowed the player to manage her
instances of this sacred play, we must slow down and observe how these sacrifices work.
To observe the space for sacred play staged in non-violent shooting, let us again consider
the Christian adaptation of Wolfenstein 3D into Super 3D Noah’s Ark [S3DNA] and its worldly
adaptation into the Super Nintendo game Wolfenstein. The original game included paradigmatic
acts of imitable and prohibited force: shooting humans and dogs with a handgun. Both
imitation. Nintendo retained the imitable weapons, but replaced Germans with Masterstaters and
dogs with mutant rats. The Christian company Wisdom Tree, on the other hand, replaced the
guns with fruit-launchers, so while the new enemies simulate animals that exist out-game, the
device being used upon them does not, staying imitation. Both of these, clearly, are
modifications in the “means” by which games apply the force of influence upon players, and
both can be easily understood through the “effects” discourses shared between Evangelical and
worldly game criticism. Where, if anywhere, does the Evangelical game demonstrate the
attention to the player-in-play that distinguished Evangelical game critique? In light of the
The answer cannot simply be that S3DNA empowers players to participate in a Bible
story: The player-character does not perform any specific action ascribed to the biblical Noah,
191
the game ark does not match biblical specifications, and the casts of animals vary wildly. But we
can nonetheless locate sufficient similarity between the two Noahs to identify some of the
specific changes that make room for player engagement. Both Noahs are their world’s crucial
exception to otherwise universal destruction, both produce a habitable space for humans, and in
both cases, Noah’s movement toward a human place is paced by interaction with animals. Here
we can identify a difference rooted in emphasis on player interaction: the playable edition is a
ritual wherein player-action progressively creates that human place. This is clearest, perhaps, as
concerns the story’s temporality. In the biblical account of the Ark, Noah does not know how
long he will be on the Ark and animals (the dove and crow) pace the time to land by scouting. In
S3DNA, on the other hand, the anonymous (and potentially divine) narrator states plainly that
land will be reached in six days, but these days take exactly as long as it takes Noah to locate and
subdue six unclean animals (which, in gaming argot, are the level bosses). Likewise, the biblical
account of the Flood presents a tidy distinction between animals and humans, quite unlike those
other Bible stories which include animals that speak like humans, humans who graze like oxen,
bestiality, or winged humanoids; in the game, on the other hand, player action creates the
human/animal distinction. Awake, the game’s animals move like Noah and shoot like he does,
but when put to sleep, the animals stop resembling Noah and come to resemble the scenery
instead.
fruitlaunchers, and otherwise by being rather implausible, but the possibility of sacred play is not
a matter of belief at all, and the sacred significance of in-game action is only indirectly related to
the out-game viability of the actions represented. That is to say, an act of sacred play with
192
S3DNA would be one wherein player action both situates Noah’s humanity with respect to the
animals, and the player’s humanity with respect to Noah’s God, but this does not require or
induce the player to carry Noah’s fruitlaunching subject position outside the game. What matters
is that the subjectivizing work within the game occurs with relation to entities that provide
reference to Christian subjectivizing practices on the far side of the screen. Though in some
senses this Noah resembles the Bible's Noah as little as either resembles the player, some players
are capable of holding the double reference in mind, turning “Noah” into an inhabitable space in
two different worlds. This identification does not coincide with the process of Evangelical
subjectivization in all cases, of course, but inasmuch as the Evanglical is a person who learns to
envision his own life as best understood through a particular reading of the Bible, play that holds
counterpublic. Alongside Noah, then, the animals and mysterious voices that describe boundaries
of humanity are likewise reference points for life in the game, in the Bible, and in the
Evangelical counterpublic that holds them together. Caring for animals or attending to the voice
of God out here is quite different, but if the player is part of a Christian community he or she will
be directed to the Bible for further clarification. By obeying the voice, and pressing back the
animals, the Evangelical player creates a human space, and (in some cases) becomes an
Evangelical subject.
Shooters [FPS games] to date, S3DNA is the only one where animals form the constitutive
outside of in-game humanity. In five of the others, demons are cast as the proper object of
First-Person Shooting (Saints of Virtue, the other exception, is explained below and found to
193
continue the pattern in most significant senses). The player will create a human place by marking
off the human from the demonic, and the sacra that bind the games to the Bible tend to be
scriptures that interpolate the player as a prayer warrior, and subject of spiritual warfare. This is
interesting for several reasons, not least of all because Doom, one of the most influential FPS
games, and the primary instance that cast the genre as a vector of contagious violence, was a
game about shooting demons as well. To understand the religious work of the Evangelical FPS
game, we must first understand in what sense their demons are sacra, and shooting them is thus a
Let us imagine the demonic archipelago: Within the vast nebula of cultural productions
that contain demons, from ancient masked rituals to contemporary horror films, Doom and these
five Evangelical games form a small constellation. We are considering only ten years of FPS
demons. Their inhabitants, without ever meeting, share the characteristic marks of their shared
ancestry: leathery red skin, black horns, bulging, glowing eyes. Their basic form is
wings and serpentine appendages, hooves and fangs. Explaining this trope of wild admixture,
Derrida identifies the demonic as the realm of undisciplined combination that precedes the
clarity and responsibility of the human subject, “that which confuses limits among the animal,
the human, and the divine, and which retains an affinity with mystery, the initiatory, the secret or
the sacred.”313 Demons are powers not yet tamed, and the demonic archipelago is a compound
313
Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 2.
194
eye considering the paradox of the human before and outside of subjectivization.
Be that as it may, we must be cautious not to assume that every horned creature called
“demon” shares a single task, because the subject is not everywhere identical, nor are the
processes of its production. Bakhtin, for instance, points out that the demons of European folk
humor prior to the seventeenth century, and still visible in the writings of Rabelais, represent an
underworld as ambivalent as the lower half of the human body. They were both destructive and
generative, merciless in their pleasure seeking, but entirely without strategy. But these tendencies
were directly connected to the place of demons in the medieval carnival, a ritual practice that
brought even clergy, scholars, and royalty “low,” and which entirely lacked footlamps dividing
the actors from their audience. In such a space demons could not present a the curable lownesses
of satirical and didactic tales. The demons presented the absolute lowness that even hieratic
humanity retains, the organs of reproduction, excretion, and digestion. But when power came to
root itself in “the stability and completion of being” –Enlightenment in philosophy, bourgeois
increasingly present a relative rather than an absolute underside, a problem that could be
And in large part this change prepares us for the twentieth century's contributions to the
demonic archipelago, which make Doom's demon's thinkable. While today’s popular demonic
only infrequently highlights the ambiguity of defecation and generation, it remains a space of
ambiguation between seriousness and levity. Some demons, of course, will seem to be held fast
314
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1984), 101.
195
within the weave of a particular theology, but they cannot be trusted. Casual demons can become
serious without notice; theologically bound demons can burst suddenly into dismissible,
humorous contexts. It would require a separate study to say with certainty when the ambiguously
playful devil was born, but the Underwood Deviled Ham mascot, appearing in 1895, seems to
have been an emergence. Though he signified the spicy indulgence of spiced meat, he was
nonetheless “a real he-goat, half man, half goat, with horns, pronged spear and a tail. He was a
leering demonic Lucifer, frequently portrayed in early ads dipping a whole ham into a boiling
caldron as flames roar in the background and Satan’s sons dance with glee.”315 We find another
early emergence in the writings of Mark Twain. Consider, for instance, the Satan of “Letters
from the Earth” (1909), striking hard at the theological and social fault lines running beneath the
church, his arguments crueler and harder to forget because of their humor.316 The cinema
offered at least two different lineages of half-serious devils, with horror's amusingly frightening
Satan emerging as early as 1913 in The Student of Prague, and a screwball comedy devil in
the century as a sports mascot, striving to intimidate one team and encourage another: DePaul
gets “The Blue Demons” (1901); Duke, “The Blue Devils” (1922); Northwestern State
University, “ Vic the Demon” (1923); and Arizona State University, “The Sun Devils” (1946).318
315
BG Foods, “About,” Archived by the Internet Archive, February 20, 2009, Accessed May 5, 2011,
http://www.bgfoods.com/underwood/underwood_about.asp .
316
Mark Twain, “Letters from the Earth,” accessed January 25, 2014,
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/twain/letearth.htm .
317
Carlos Clarens, An Illustrated History of Horror and Science Fiction Films: The Classic Era (1895-1967) (New
York: Putnam, 1967),10; W. Scott Poole, Satan in America : The Devil We Know. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers, 2009), 134.
318
DePaul University, “Welcome to DIBS Domain,” accessed January 25, 2014,
196
Around 1960, we see a dramatic change in Underwood's ham-demon – “The current red devil
has been stripped of evil. He is a happy Satan, smiling, carrying his spear, and apparently waving
at the potential customer. His footwear appears to be elves slippers.” – but this may be because
the notion of a devil that is merely spicy had become unextraordinary in American popular
culture.319 Doom's demons are true natives of the twentieth century's demonic archipelago; low,
but never genital, they are purchased like spicy ham, enjoyed like comic fops, feared like movie
The demons in Evangelical games, unlike those in Doom, are sacra. This claim does not
relate to the shape of the demons, their behavior, or the ways one addresses them; across the
demonic archipelago we find red, horned, AI controlled beings, and we shoot them. These
demons are sacra inasmuch as they are encountered in acts of play oriented to an Evangelical
counterpublic that frames humanity with respect to demons through various theologies of
spiritual warfare. Building upon the “Armor of God” described in Ephesians 6 and increasingly
prevalent in Evangelical media since the 1970s, these are Evangelical visions of Christian
subjects (whether individual or collective) that emerge in armed struggle against demons.320
Because Evangelical FPS games invite an embattled counterpublic constituted through this
320
For the political valences of this theology, see Bivins, Religion of Fear, 34. For its global reach in Charismatic
Christianity see Joel Robbins, “The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity,” Annual Review of
Anthropology 33 (2004), 117-143.
197
theology, killing demons in Evangelical games is religious, again in Chidester’s terms, because it
is “discourses and practices that negotiate what it is to be a human person both in relation to the
Evangelical mode of play, demons are only the liveliest of a number of agents (others include
Bible-verses, the Armor of God, etc.) that make play a moment of being Evangelical.
Doom is a vehicle for the circulation of entities that are sacra in other contexts, but the
game does not invite sacred play. Consider the use of pentagrams; if the game stressed the
balance of the elements, the vital connection between nature and spirituality, or other concerns
that define a Wiccan counterpublic, these stars-in-circles could invite a Wiccan mode of sacred
play. Likewise, were the goal human betterment through alignment with Satanic power, the
inverted cross which began the second episode of Doom could hail play within a Satanic
counterpublic.322 The closest thing Doom provides to a point of connection to any further
ontological orientation is the elliptical statement that “You wonder where bad folks will go when
they die” when you have apparently destroyed Hell at the end of one episode.323 It may, of
course, occasionally become part of sacred play, but this will necessarily be an anomalous
That said, the Evangelical counterpublic is neither a static nor a singular entity. Even
given that shooting demons in Evangelical FPS games is a sacred act, we can only understand it
321
Chidester, Authentic Fakes, vii-viii.
322
Episode 2, Map 1, The Deimos Anomaly.
323
In the “The Plutonia Experiment,” a set of separately playable Doom II levels released as part of Ultimate Doom
(id Software, 1996), there is one further hint that the Hell of Doom has some relationship to out-game theology.
Upon completing the game “Hell has gone back to pounding bad dead folks instead of good live ones.” “Hell,”
accessed January 22, 2014, http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Hell .
198
Ominous Horizons: Eternal War:
Super 3D Noah’s Ark The War in Heaven Saints of Virtue Catechumen Rev 7
A Paladin’s Journey Shadows of Light
Year 1994 1999 1999 2000 2001 2003 2003
N’Lightning N’Lightning 2 Guys Software /
Developer Wisdom Tree Eternal Warriors Shine Studios Marty Bee
Software Software XRUCIFIX
Genesis 3D / Barbie
Genesis 3D / Ethnic
Generation Girl Genesis 3D / Special Quake Engine /
Engine / WOLF 3D / “SNES A4 / 3D Hunting Cleansing
Custom engine / none Gotta Groove Force (Hezbollah, Half-Life (Valve,
Other Uses Wolfenstein” (MacMillan, 1998) (Resistance Records,
(Mattel Interactive, 2003) 1998)
2002)
1998)
Setting, Frame In-game “health,” Setting, Frame
Role of Bible Setting In-game “keys” In-game “health” Largely absent
quotations “objectives” quotations
counterpublic was manifesting at any particular moment. From here we cannot yet see the
relationship between spiritual warfare theology and Evangelical concerns with the internal states
of children in general and adolescent boys in particular. From here we cannot yet see the specific
ways that coming to inhabit the overlapping worlds of these games and of the Bible works to
forge the identity of prayer warriors. And we cannot yet see the ways that changes in video
gaming seem to have produced changes in theology. To understand the sacred work of
non-violent struggle, I spent several months destroying the demons in these games. The second
section of this chapter attempts to string Christian FPS games into a single historical narrative.
The chapter then concludes with analysis, and reflections upon where this trajectory seems to
have led.
The demons of Evangelical FPS games are sacra inasmuch as they are part-subject in
processes of human identity negotiation taking place on both sides of the screen. But only in
their first appearance, and never again, were these sacred demons an invitation for Christians to
play demonically. For the developers of The War in Heaven (Eternal Warriors LLC, 1999), this
was necessary in order to make player choice morally significant (“we really can't teach much
about making a good choice if there isn't any choice”), but many Christians found this an
irresponsible use of in-game freedom (“Our biggest hurdle there is that many Christian stores are
loathe to carry a title that has a demon on the cover, or that allows the player to choose the evil
324
Celia Wren, “Point, Click & Cheat: 'War in Heaven,' the Computer Game [Software Review], Commonweal
127.6 (March 24, 2000).
200
path”).325 The sacred demons thus emerge through a fissure in the FPS’s Evangelical public,
defining the genre’s enduring dilemma: If player choice is morally significant, how can a game
Unlike most of the Christian FPS games that follow, this first instance refracted a
or emerging simply from “the Bible.” Alongside the links to download a demo, read reviews, or
purchase the game, Eternal Warriors’ website offered a tab which led players to the writings of
Dr. Greg Boyd, a minister, scholar and prominent advocate of “openness theology.”326 While the
creators of War in Heaven knew Boyd first as their personal pastor and an inspiration in their
thinking on spiritual warfare, in 1999 he was a celebrity because of the divisions his theology
was causing among Evangelicals. The controversy of this game engages a larger Evangelical
Openness theology had emerged in its mature form in 1994 with the publication of The
volume in which five Evangelical theologians had asserted that “God, in grace, grants humans
significant freedom to cooperate or work against God’s will for their lives, and he enters into
325
"Andrew Lunstad of Eternal Warriors, Makers of 'The War in Heaven' Offers Some Insights into their Game and
the Christian Gaming Market," archived by the Internet Archive, March 16, 2009, accessed January 22, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20090316094147/http://www.christiangaming.com/Reviews/XWarInHeavenIntervi
ew.shtml .
326
The game manual also gives “Special Thanks To Dr. Greg Boyd, whose sermons on spiritual warfare first
inspired this game.” We can perhaps locate the entrance of sacred demons into the FPS at Boyd’s Woodland Hills
Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. Greg Boyd, “Spiritual Warfare: Free Will and the Legacy of Augustine” (1997).
Archived by the Internet Archive, February 26, 2000, Accessed January 22, 2014,
https://web.archive.org/web/20000301200152/http://www.eternalwarriors.com/ .
201
dynamic give-and-take relationships with us.”327 This position, while it sounds much like the
understanding of the relationship between human volition and divine foreknowledge.328 Greg
Boyd expresses it well: “I affirm (because Scripture teaches) that God is absolutely all knowing.
There is no difference in my understanding of God’s omniscience and that of any other classical
theologian, but I hold that part of the reality which God perfectly knows consists of possibilities
as well as actualities. The difference lies in our understanding of the nature of the future, not in
our understanding of God’s omniscience.”329 The fissure this position defined in American
Evangelical thought is well located by the controversy stretching between 1999 and 2001
wherein Boyd’s theological position was officially rejected by the Baptist General Council, but
his professorial position at Bethel, the university and seminary represented by that same council,
was retained.330
Openness theology resembles Process Theology, in that God moves with humans through
327
Clark H. Pinnock et al., The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1994), 7.
328
That is, most American Evangelicals hold that “the initiative in salvation is on the human side even though full
salvation can only be by God’s grace” even if this is in conflict with their church’s official doctrine. Though we
could locate the choice-emphasis in American Evangelical belief through a variety of sources, I find Roger Olson’s
reflections as an Arminian minister and seminarian especially telling. He offers ethnographic notes from the
seminary demonstrating that his students could not distinguish Arminian theology from Calvinist, because they had
always taken a folk theology of almost total freedom for granted. Roger E. Olson, “American Christianity and
Semi-Pelagianism,” accessed January 22, 2014,
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2011/02/american-christianity-and-semi-pelagianism/ .
329
Greg Boyd, “A Brief Outline and Defense of the Open View,” accessed January 22, 2014,
http://www.gregboyd.org/essays/essays-open-theism/response-to-critics/ .
330
Truett M. Lawson, “A Personal Account of the Foreknowledge Dispute at the Conference,” archived by The
Internet Archive, March 5, 2001, accessed January 22, 2014,
https://web.archive.org/web/20010305214118/http://www.bgc.bethel.edu/4know/report.htm; Ross Moret. “Beyond
Sola Scriptura: Open Theism within American Cultural Trends.” Stone-Campbell Journal 10 (Fall 2007), 213-229;
216.
202
time, but it directs this temporality in the service of a literalist hermeneutics emphasizing willed
choice. This reading practice, for instance, clarifies God regretting Creation because of human
choices, and gives moral weight to the War in Heaven mentioned in Revelation; God could, in
some sense, be surprised by these willed decisions because the moment we share with God is
conceived as the seam between two different textures of time. God is omniscient in that God not
only knows the smooth, stable time of the past, but knows the future as well, a time textured by a
finite number of choices that branch the universe into real, but really limited, trees of possibility.
God strategizes, then, by knowing the finite number of possible choices and outcomes, and
accounting for all possible choice: “We might compare this view of God to a master chess
Boyd and other openness theologians orient the choices made by humans to this cosmic
game through biblical images of demons: “The challenge of explaining how God could create
beings who can resist his will and genuinely war against him is epitomized in Satan.”332 But the
chess-demons of openness theology are not yet the FPS demons that concern us in this
chapter.333 Theodor Beale, The War in Heaven’s primary designer (and author of a Biblical
fictional novel of the same name), proposes the necessary jump by equating the faculty for
choice shared among humans, angels, and demons with the problem-solving capacities of
331
Greg Boyd, Satan and the Problem of Evil: Constructing a Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy” (Downers Grove, IL:
InterVarsity Press, 2001), 113.
332
Boyd, Satan, 17.
333
Greg Boyd did endorse the final product, however, allowing his own 14 year-old son to play it, and comparing it
favorably to previous Christian games. Ellen Barry, “New Media Let Christians See No Evil, Hear No Evil,” Boston
Globe, 12 December 1999.
203
Artificial Intelligence: “When seen from the posthuman point of view, we are all nothing more
than [AI Controlled Characters] running around the virtual environment of [a Massively
Multiplayer game] called the World of Man.”334 He is not, notably, saying that the model we are
about to see is actually a fair representation of our own Artificial Intelligence, but Beale’s
reduction of choice to algorithmic processes lays the ground for a game wherein player decisions
Because Beale modified Boyd’s theology so human and angelic choice could now be
computerized game, the sacred demon can be born in a moment of player choice: “While some
Christians may object to our decision to allow the gamer to play as a fallen angel and receive
short-term rewards in return for evil actions, we believe that our design is in accordance with
Biblical teachings. God gave every individual the gift of free will, and because the choice to
serve Him or not is so vitally important, we felt that the ramifications needed to be highlighted,
not avoided, in this game.” And highlight the ramifications they did: immediately upon starting
The War in Heaven, the player can choose "The Divine Path of Obedience" or "The Fallen Path
of Power.”
A cruciform mouse cursor passes back and forth between an angel and a demon, the
female protagonists of the game’s two paths, standing armed in discrete panels. The decision to
obey or oppose God is reduced to a single decision across an absolute binary, less like making a
move in chess game than choosing to play as black or white (or, to use the convention of
334
Vox Day [Theodor Beale], The Irrational Atheist Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens
(Dallas, Tex: BenBella Books, 2008), 283.
204
team-based FPS deathmatching, already well established in 1999 and perhaps visible here, red or
blue). During play, the moral weight of this initial decision relative to other in-game entities will
become clear, but upon first play, the decision is informed only by the images on screen and
whatever theological presumptions the player has about them. If one’s presumptions were drawn
from openness theology the very starkness of the choice may be theologically-compelling, as this
theology maps the forks in textured future-time to a form of choice that is beyond persuasion:
“agents (human and angelic) are the ultimate cause and explanation for their own free
behavior.”335
Once the choice is made, in whichever direction, the next six hours will be spent in
battlefield ethnography. In either direction, the player moves from one stronghold to the other,
learning first her own culture and proceeding into that of the enemy. And to designate the
patterns of life of angels and demons “cultures,” is at most mildly hyperbolic. In each location
the angelic player gains one article of the “Full Armor of God” as described in Ephesians 6, but
for each Godly article there is a corresponding demonic one (The “Breastplate of
Righteousness,” for instance, and the “Breastplate of Sin”). The differences between the two
sides reveal the opposition of life-worlds in which each side is deeply invested. When the player
enters as an angel, the toad-like Lo Nakei [Hebrew: Unclean] will only reveal its capacities to
lumber, waggle, and belch lightning, but Eternal Warriors filled this world with evidence that
these monsters are engaged in aesthetic, and even moral collaboration and growth.
multiplicities: An untrained angel wields the single line of a sword, and an inexperienced demon
335
Boyd, Satan, 420.
205
meets it with a two fingered claw; elite angels call down fire and lightning with long smooth
trumpets, unbroken by slides or valves, and demons do the same by splaying their tattooed
fingers. While both sides keep books of instructive poetry on their battlefields, enshrined on
lecterns, lit by candles and sealed with sacred images (crosses or pentagrams, respectively), these
books contain different scripts, and, most importantly, their poetry addresses the player from the
consistency of mutually exclusive ontologies. Demonic poetry calls the player “Goddess” and
demands merciless self-improvement even at the expense of other demons. Angelic poetry calls
the player “daughter of the King” and demands submission to and reliance upon the Lord. And
these visions of the good are grounded in sacred space at both ends. In their fifth mission, in
either direction, the player must defile the enemy’s sanctuary. An angel must enter “The Hall of
Idols” (which a demon would remember as their second level, “The Tree of Knowledge”) and
destroy statues of great demonic generals, now revered as Gods. A demon must climb to “The
Shrine of the Lion,” which resembles images of the Jerusalem temple designed for Sunday
school felt-boards, all white marble and grassy courtyards, to smash golden crosses and colossal
scrolls.
All of this, even if casting Christian children as demons defiling the things of the Lord is
disturbing to some, can be read as the symmetry necessary for a good faith demonstration of how
choice works in openness theology. But, as will frequently be the case, the procedural rhetoric
exceeds its inspiration in out-game theology. Late in The War in Heaven, demons acquire “The
Corruption Spell,” the single ability for which angels have no parallel. While angelic folklore
says that demons can repent, and should be accepted if they do, this would presumably be a
private affair between one demon and her own conscience before the Lord, and in any case the
206
Illustration 11: Destroying Sacra on the Path of Fallen Power (top), and the Path of Divine Obedience (bottom)
game never illustrates the possibility. But demonic religion drives toward apotheosis, so by the
fifth level when the Spell becomes available, the player’s character recognizes herself as a
Goddess. While one could only become an angel by submitting to the Single, High God, angels
can become demons by pursuing the vision of strength embodied in any great demon. The
Corruption Spell makes this playable; if a Goddess allows a weak angel to attack her, waving her
hand over the angel’s face rather than fighting, the exposed angel will convert and become a
demon as well.
In this moment we can see the complex situatedness of sacred demons. Clearly, we
cannot say that the game simply presents simulations of demons in which Evangelical players
207
believe. The corruption spell presents a moment wherein the game betrays openness theology’s
emphasis on freedom and moral responsibility, the very emphasis that was the developers’
defense against detractors. In Boyd’s words, “Admitting that Satan and demons can sometimes
influence our thinking and behavior does not mean they can determine our thinking and
behavior.”336 But the same stark classificatory divide that made the initial selection such an
exemplary frame for an openness theology vision of choice, when applied to the ways AI can be
“influenced,” created a vision of choice that no longer made sense outside the game and sealed it
But the player does not learn to do out here what they do in there. The sacred demon has
one face inside of the screen against which players can develop a subjectivity as a chooser,
experiencing the paths as almost perfectly symmetrical, though one ends with generosity and
reward and the other with cruelty and betrayal. And the sacred demon has a face on this side of
the screen that may in some cases articulate to Boyd’s specific spiritual warfare theology and in
others to the variety of ways that Evangelicals understand demons. But the demons’ manifold
tasks on this side of the screen, like appearing on the games’ packaging, marking it as a
controversial Evangelical commodity, are always also the scene of their subjectivizing work. In
all cases the two sides remain in unstable relation. Just as the player and the player-character
form a flexible whole, so too do these demons, and interacting with them negotiates on both
sides of the screen. It is not surprising that many Evangelicals thought this sacred work was not
appropriate for their children. An anonymous reviewer on CNET speaks eloquently for the part
of the Evangelical counterpublic uncomfortable with the moral dilemma The War in Heaven
336
Boyd, Satan, 168.
208
stages: “Any Christian who would make a game in which people could choose to fight against
God and/or God's angels as a demon is seriously weak in his Christianity. Sick idea. Skip this
game - playing 'demon' is not something anyone should do, whether or not this game teaches The
Saints of Virtue
In 1996 David Slayback, then a member of Evangelical Free Church in Fresno California,
was a programmer at Sierra Online, working on The Realm, a cartoonish role-playing world that
allowed players to fight one another for their possessions.338 He quit, complaining that his work
was “increasingly violence-oriented,” and used personal loans and money from relatives to start
Shine Studios with artist Michael Ulrich.339 "We lived on faith -- faith in the vision God gave
us.” Saints of Virtue, their only game, sold 15,000 copies in its first year (War in Heaven had sold
10,000 across the same period), and was praised by Christian game critics for its “cutting-edge
3D graphics [and] great sound.”340 Of course, some part of this praise was hyperbolic, and it
seems that many Christian gamers could enjoy the game while recognizing that the user-friendly
Gamestudio A4 engine was not “graphically up to par” with contemporary offerings from better
337 “
Hmmm,” User Review (June 5, 2000), accessed January 22, 2014,
http://download.cnet.com/The-War-In-Heaven-demo/9241-2095_4-1498884.html?messageID=781233 .
338 “
David Slayback,” accessed January 22, 2014,
http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,14233/ .
339
John G. Taylor, “Spiritual Battlefield: Fresno Man Creates a Computer Game that Puts Right Over Might,” The
Fresno Bee, Monday, September 11, 2000.
340
Ken Reaves, “Video, Computer, and Internet Games (Review),” Living With Teenagers (Parent Ministry Edition)
22 (March 2000), 31; Julio Ojeda-Zapata, “Christian Video Games: Teen-Age Gamers Pick Up the Battle of Good
Vs. Evil,” The Vindicator (Youngstown, OH), October 14, 2000.
209
funded game developers.341
Saints of Virtue opens with a short video illustrating the stakes of the game to follow. We
see a character who seems to be Shine Studios’ imagined public, an adolescent White male,
standing between his bed and his personal computer, contemplating his own precarious moral
situation: “I fight the powers of darkness for control of my mind. The battlefield isn’t even a
physical one, the battles rage within the kingdom of my heart, deep within my very soul.” Then a
rogue’s gallery of the game’s enemies flashes past in unsituated darkness. The “masks of
humanity” are a series of floating blue masks covering totemic objects: Worldliness conceals a
globe, Self-Righteousness a powdered wig, and Self-Indulgence a brain seething with lightning.
Back in the bedroom, the boy says “I truly am a warrior” as the camera zooms into his right eye,
down a spiraling red tube of meat, to his beating, schematic heart. Now we see the boy in the
darkness, progressively encased in Ephesians 6’s “full armor of God.” Once he is wearing gold
from head to toe and armed with “the Sword of the Spirit,” a great television screen tuned to
static lights up the dark room and the masks flee down a hallway. Where are we?
The manual, box, and in-game text situate game-action within “the Kingdom of the
Heart” and describe the masks as “personified tendencies of the flesh.”342 This is to say, the
adolescent boy who opened the game is both the hero and the battlefield; he is fighting inside
himself to expel the semi-foreign presence of his own body. Gameplay precedes from the
“Amphitheatre of Apathy,” through the “Labyrinths of Legalism,” and “New Age Nirvana,” until
341
Ojeda-Zapata, “Christian Video Games;” Shine Studios, “FAQ,” accessed January 22, 2014,
http://saintsofvirtue.com/faq.html .
342
See, for instance, Shine Studios, “Gameplay,” accessed January 22, 2014
http://saintsofvirtue.com/game.html#gameplay .
210
the player-character arrives at the “Domain of the Heart,” each of these areas being further
appropriate moral problems translated into the ludic idiom of a FPS. Often these encounters
require the player to enact a parable in order to proceed (e.g. smashing an idol in “The Temple of
Man”), but in others the player is invited only to observe an allegory (e.g. the pendulum in “The
Caves of Loneliness” “has no purpose other than as a reminder of the lonely things of life”).344
Between these two poles, the Heart is full of optional interactions. “The Mall of Distraction,” for
instance is crowded with Vanity masks and commodities like sports equipment or clothing on
mannequins, those presumed to be desirable to the ideal player. Interaction with these objects is
of consequence for the player, not for the in-game character: “You try to take it. But it crumbles
in dust.”
Consistently across its various biomes, the Heart is partitioned by gates that are sealed
with “Worldly Wisdoms” and unlocked with Bible verses. In S3DNA the game had been an
illumination of a Bible story, but no scripture had been quoted in game at all. War in Heaven
both illustrated a Bible story and included scripture as the Angelic counterpart to Demonic
poetry. But in Saints of Virtue scripture enters the game as a swarm of interactive objects. One
must find “Words of Truth” and use them to refute untruths which bar progress between areas,
for instance using “Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not
destroy and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart
343
These are 1) “Caves of Loneliness,” “Pits of Despair,” “Mall of Distractions,” “Gallery of Nothingness,” “Media
Maze;” 2) “Twisty Maze,” “Trap Dungeon,” “Trap Room,” “Abstract Maze,” “Rules Maze;” 3) “Love and Peace
Temple,” “Mountains of Relativity,” “Shrine of Heaven,” “Earth Shrine,” “Temple of Man;” 4) “Swamplands of
Selfishness,” “Ruins of Pride,” “Paths of Perseverance,” and “Temple of the Heart.”
344
Shine Studios, "Hints," accessed January 22, 2014, http://saintsofvirtue.com/hints1.html .
211
will be also." (Matthew 6:20-21)” to refute "The one with the most toys wins."345
For the present study, what is most interesting about the Kingdom of the Heart is that it
seems to be simultaneously the heart of the player-character and the player him/herself. Ignoring
the character’s (hegemonic and unmarked) gender/sex, race, and class, the game’s accompanying
materials describe both the protagonist and their ideal player as a young Christian: “When it
comes to this generation of young people, Christians are out of excuses for not providing them
with world class products for thinking and playing.” “We developed Saints of Virtue with the
viewpoint that the player is a Christian. While the game can be enjoyed by anyone, it has far
greater meaning and depth for the Christian.”346 Thus the curious fact that the character is both
the adventurer and the terrain to be explored, through the FPS convention of looking out through
the eyes of the player-character, seems to cast the player as both terrain and adventurer as well.
Thus, at the game’s end, when the player places Jesus on the throne in “the Temple of the
Heart,” we need not claim that the moment is accompanied by a percussive instant of conversion
to say that it is a Christianizing performance. The game hails a counterpublic that is Evangelical
This makes SoV’s sacred play decidedly unlike the morality plays from which it draws
inspiration. We still have vices surrounding and challenging “Christian,” our “Everyman,” and
the story still stages moral conflicts on homiletically named landscapes.347 But the relationship
345
Shine Studios, “Game,” http://saintsofvirtue.com/game.html (accessed 8/20/2011)
346
Shine Studios, “Shine Studios: Our Mission,” accessed January 22, 2014, http://saintsofvirtue.com/shine.html;
Shine Studios, “Core Issues,” accessed January 22, 2014, http://saintsofvirtue.com/core.html;
http://saintsofvirtue.com/game.html .
347
This is, of course, a simplification. For a detailed historical exploration of narrative movement in morality plays,
see C. N. Manlove, “The Image of the Journey in "Pilgrim's Progress": Narrative versus Allegory,” The Journal of
212
between the human-figure in a morality play and the implied audience seems relatively
sympathetic rather than empathetic when held alongside this new medium.348 Where the
morality play always moved through its conflict by illustrating moral combat, SoV only reaches
its end for players who enact several hours playing as if they are themselves infested with vices
that must be placed into proper relation to the emerging Christian subject. And though we cannot
know how many of the thousands of purchasers completed the story, because Eternal Warriors
invited “winners” to post their comments online, we know that it was done at least hundreds of
times: “This game lead me a lot closer to God!” “I am 8 years old and the game helped me learn
to be brave.” “The hard level was very difficult, just like our real battles of spiritual warfare.
Though both of the previous two FPS games had been released after the Columbine
massacre, their production was well in advance of it, so while their reception was doubtlessly
changed by that tragedy, it is unreasonable to examine game structures for traces of its influence.
In Catechumen and its sequel Ominous Horizons: A Paladin’s Journey (2000-2001, N-Lightning
Software), however, perhaps we can see both sacred demons and the subjectivizing work of play
213
Ralph Bagley, the founder of N’Lightning Software, had long been disturbed by the
violence he saw in popular games, but was unable to find any investors who would help finance
a non-violent game of the quality he envisioned. “I submitted the concept for Catechumen to
some investors and they flatly turned me down. Then, after Columbine, they called me back and
said, 'Let's do this thing.’”350 The $830,000 that went into Catechumen’s production, advertising
and distribution was explicitly and consciously applied to match the moral sensibilities of
Evangelical families concerned that adolescent boys were particularly susceptible to the
As in nearly all Christian FPS games, the primary weapon in these games is the Sword of
the Spirit, and the enemies are largely demons. However, while the angels used the Sword to
order heaven in War in Heaven, and the hero (and the player) used the Sword to order his own
heart in SoV, N’Lightning’s two heroes use the Sword to manage demonic activity in terrestrial
human history. And while the player-character is described as a (White, male) Christian in both
games, his efforts no longer work to create a Christian interior, but to create an external world in
which Christianity is possible. This change significantly complicates the work of establishing a
human place through First-Person Shooting, because the Sword will now have to interact
simultaneously with entities already organized into strata as humans or animals. It is the
incompletion of N’Lightning’s solution to this challenge that most clearly bears the signature of
post-Columbine negotiations.
In Catechumen, set beneath Rome, circa 171 CE, all humans are either Christians or
350
Adrian Chen, “Q & A: Ralph Bagley,” Willamette Week, July 20, 2005, accessed January 22, 2014,
http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-4626-ralph_bagley.html .
214
demon-possessed. The player character is the eponymous catechumen, a young Christian whose
teacher has been captured by a Romano-Satanic alliance and is being held underground. Along
the path downward, a series of angels present the player with various forms of the Sword of the
Spirit, and other weapons that fire beams of holy light. This light is Catechumen’s primary mode
of social interaction, and when it contacts various entities it has various effects depending on the
exposed to light fired from the Sword or other holy weapons, he or she converts, falling to kneel
in prayer. Christians seem not to be affected in any way. Demons scream and writhe, burning
into smears of red light. Though they are never explicitly described as “demons,” shooting
positions them upon the same moral stratum as demons, burning them alive, producing similarly-
simulated pain. Lions, Catechumen’s only unambiguous animal antagonists, fall on their side
when defeated and stay physically present. Here, perhaps, we are observing a pacifying effect of
holy energy derived from the story of Daniel in the lion’s den and applied in a historical situation
of Christian martyrdom. Halfway through the game, however, the player climbs down into “The
Abandoned Farm” and finds a place where design exceeds any out-game theology. Here,
guarded by exploding demons, are some small pens of pigs. It seems the designers placed these
pigs in Catechumen’s underworld as mere scenery, but their place in its economy of violence
Because the game booklet listed “lions” as enemies, but not “pigs,” I was unsure what
these creatures were doing here. Nearby, a group of exploding demons were sitting around
campfires, a first in the game. “Maybe,” I considered, “demons had farms.” The game gave no
215
further clue, so I climbed into the pen with the pigs. They ran around randomly, neither causing
me harm nor really seeming to notice me. So I shot them. At first, the pigs ran from me and
squealed. Apparently holy energy is painful for pigs. So I shot the adorable piglets a thousand
times. I poured an incredible amount of holy energy into them, keeping one of the game’s
strongest Swords focused on a single pig. And after a full 15 seconds of light from the
tri-repeater Sword, the pig charged me. Instead of dying, the piglet suddenly became the most
Evangelical game. For instance, from 1992 on, games in the Legend of Zelda franchise have
frequently included chickens which displayed this same mechanic: when struck a few times they
would squawk and run away, but when exposed to extravagant violence, the chickens would
retaliate as formidable enemies.351 Within worldly modes of play, cruelty punishments are
cruelty –when the player treats a harmless or helpful simulation of out-game life (“an innocent”)
as an enemy– for a game to give no confirmation of the act at all, keeping player action against
them out of the game’s economy of violence. That is, generally, chickens and shopkeepers are
impervious to player attacks, so attacking them is either impossible (e.g. the “attack” button is
disabled) or produces no consequential effect (e.g. bullets cause them to complain, but they
never die). Notably, this non-recognition of player violence is the surest way for game
developers to evade public critique. Making violence against innocents possible, required, or
351
In The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (Nintendo, 2002), this tendency was displayed through pigs. For a
growing fan-produced catalog of games displaying this tendency, see
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VideoGameCrueltyPunishment (accessed January 22, 2014).
216
beneficial though optional, tends to be treated as morally equivalent in non-academic game
criticism, whether worldly or Evangelical.352 In worldly modes of play, even when cruelty is
Evangelical games tend not to acknowledge cruelty any more than worldly games do, and
this single instance in all FPS games reviewed, may just be a riff on Zelda. But situated within an
Evangelical mode of play, considering the moral work performed during play, the cruelty
punishment becomes interesting precisely because it belongs in a worldly game. The pig is a
reflective boundary between two modes of play. Quite simply, it should not be here: unlike
pacifying lions, where the light seemed to be directing miracles into historical martyrological
narratives, shooting a peaceful piglet invites no miraculous intervention. And in this moment of
misuse, it becomes clear, suddenly, that the holy light hurts. And it does not only hurt demons, if
it is used for a purpose aside from creating divine order, it hurts whatever it faces. But when that
pain crosses a critical threshold, it again does the sacred work of classification by creating a new
hero. The light creates a monster that evicts the perverse player from the game, managing the
352
For instance, Duke Nukem 3D, allowed players to give money to pole-dancers and then shoot them, but the
money was not deducted from any quantified fund, giving it to the dancers had only graphical and auditory effects,
and shooting them did not yield any points. Grand Theft Auto III, on the other hand, allowed players to expend
in-game currency to have implied sex with sex-workers, granting a health bonus, then kill the sex-workers to recover
the money. Setting aside the small expenditure of ammunition in each case, these might be regarded as roughly
equivalent acts of cruelty, though the first game makes it optional, while the second rewards. Bloggers criticizing the
violence in these games generally failed to note the distinction, however. Mediawatch, for instance, says that “In
Duke Nukem bonus points are awarded for the murder of these mostly prostituted and partially nude women” Media
Watch Blog, “Teaching Boys to Kill,” archived by the Internet Archive, March 13, 2005, accessed January 22. 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20050313213900/http://www.mediawatch.com/wordpress/ .
353
This inconsistency is visible even within single games. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, while it does
contain the aforementioned punishment for striking chickens, also fails to acknowledge violence against humanoids,
and contains creatures as harmless as unprovoked chickens against whom violence is rewarded (“rock/bush-crabs”).
217
Ominous Horizons: A Paladin's Calling (OH:PC; 2001, N-Lightning Software),
Catechumen’s more sophisticated sequel, again offers a vision of human history infested with
sacred demons and holy weapons. In this story, told through the same shooting mechanics,
Gutenberg’s press has been destroyed by demons and the player must travel around the world
gathering pieces of his first printed Bible so he can emerge from despair and resume his printing
efforts. But OH:PC draws just barely to the Evangelical side of the porcine border, never
allowing the holy light to be misused, but also never attaining the theological clarity present in
most of Catechumen.354 Instead of focusing on the power of the Sword to convert people,
OH:PC has most enemies occupy the quasi-demonic space that lions or mythical creatures held
in Catechumen. The protagonist travels around the world being attacked by rats, bats, beetles on
one hand, and Grendel, “ninja-demons,” and Annubis on the other, but every human in the game
is a Christian who fails to react when fired upon.355 The game neither presents the possibility of
Though I do not want to cast the Columbine massacre as too firm a border in the history
of Evangelical play, it does seem that the simplification of the game’s ethical problematics only
continues the shift that both of the N’Lightning shooters demonstrate when contrasted with the
previous two FPS games. These games offer no suggestion that the evil to be managed is within
354
As Ominous Horizons is not one of my primary field sites, this data has been gathered from examinations of
recorded game-play. DragonsDream18, “Videos,” accessed January 22, 2014,
http://www.youtube.com/user/DragonsDream18 and Altmer451, “Videos,” accessed January 22, 2014,
http://www.youtube.com/user/altmer451/videos .
355
Though some enemies are called “druids” in the official walk-through, they have skulls for faces and bones for
hands. When they are shot sufficiently they vanish into a cloud of smoke. The one unambiguous human who appears
in the Anasazi ruins is apparently also a Christian, protecting a cross that mysteriously appeared there from demons,
and claiming no other religious orientation.
218
the player herself. Subjectivity is still won by arranging a self with respect to demons, but these
demons are neither playable, nor are they cast as dangers within the player. Spiritual warfare is
now the work of creating an exterior world habitable by a Christian subject rather than an
internal one. The question of whether Evangelical youth (particularly those who enjoy FPS
games) have within themselves a potential to misuse force is no longer raised at all. Whether this
reflects the important place of Columbine in Evangelical game criticism or not cannot be
determined, but it is clear that N’Lightning, financed to create a shooter that would not lead to
“another Columbine,” figured the sacred work of Evangelical play in the same way as those
Rev 7
By his own account, Marty Bee took up game design “after seeing a demon-head and
pentagram displayed prominently on a CNN special on game designers.” His ongoing efforts to
create a non-violent shooter then were perhaps less about demons indigenous to adolescent
minds than those within the game industry: “The industry is built on four pillars or false gods
[…] Baal (the god of sex and eroticism), Molech (violence and mayhem), Mammon (money),
and finally Satan himself (the occult).”356 But the primary strategies for removing violence from
his Rev 7 (2003, Marty Bee) mirror the consensus between Evangelical and worldly criticism
wherein violence is only bloody or imitably inter-human force: “Seeing as you are really not
shooting anything human, that solves the moral conundrum of killing things in games for a
concerned Christian or parent. Also the enemies dont [SIC] explode in a spray of blood and guts,
356
Bee and Van Nattan, “Computer Games: Are they Honoring to God?”
219
they just fade away most times (its just a story anyway.)357”
Inspired by the best-selling Left Behind novels, Marty Bee decided to make the book of
Revelation playable.358 Had he taken a resolutely historicist hermeneutics, the result may have
resembled Catechumen, crafting a specific embattled Christian community in the past; a futurist
hermeneutics could have produced a range of soon-to-come end times simulators (like the Left
Behind games, for instance); Rev 7, however, applies an idealist hermeneutics, imagining the
drama of Revelation neither suspended in the past nor the future, but subsisting transtemporally
within Christian experience blended freely with elements from the other two.359 In particular, the
game creates a shooter environment from each of the seven churches described in the second and
third chapters of Revelation by applying several different canons of interpretation and aesthetic
styles simultaneously.
engagement with a computer and with a Bible. Its player’s manual is two pages of technical
installing the game, as with most software, one must click a button which confirms that the user
“agrees with the above terms and conditions.” Here, the entire text of the terms reads “artwork
357
Marty Bee, “Post-Mortem: Rev 7,” accessed January 22, 2014,
http://firstpersonshooters.net/Games/Rev%207/postmortem.html .
358
Marty Bee, "Interview," accessed January 22, 2014,
http://firstpersonshooters.net/Games/Rev%207/interview.html .
359
These three possible readings of Revelation are taken from Mark Reasoner, “What Does the Bible Say About the
End Times?” in Rapture, Revelation, and the End Times: Exploring the Left Behind Series, Bruce David Forbes and
Jeanne Halgren Kilde, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 71-98; 78-9.
360
Marty Bee, "To Him That Overcometh," accessed January 22, 2914,
http://firstpersonshooters.net/Games/Rev%207/Overcomers%20Study%20Rev7.html .
220
and interpretation (c) Marty Bee, 2004 / original manuscript, John (c) A.D. 90 / original message,
The hermeneutic of Bible study in Rev 7’s instruction manual invites untutored reflection
on every word of the text as explications of the player’s own experience: “List some ‘false
apostles’ that you might know of today,” “If the seven lamps are the seven churches, what do
you think can put out our ‘light’ today?” But this radical nearness of the FPS to the practice of
Bible study seems to bring Marty Bee’s own unsystematic associations into the game from all
sides. Because “quiet time” with Jesus “usually” happens in the morning, ammunition and health
items are donuts and coffee.362 Some enemies are metaphorical images of vices, like clocks with
handguns, while others are horned demons. The landscapes sometimes reference the historical
cities in the book of Revelation and at others include images decrying 20th century New Age
spirituality. The aesthetics in some places are grim, even grisly, and in others reflect the
quasi-futurist aesthetic of the Jetsons or antique motel signs. This, we must remember, is one
The demons emerge with the complex markings of this biblical hermeneutic. Because the
letter to Smyrna says “the devil is about to cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried”
(Rev 2:10), the accompanying Bible study invites serious reflection on the possibility of
persecution. The game, however, condenses several lines of reflection into the image of
“Beezlebubba, the Sherriff of Smyrna,” a horned demon that speaks like a cartoon's stereotype of
a poor white southerner, chasing the player-character shouting “Get over heah boy!”
361
Bee, “Rev 7 Interview.”
362
More specifically, the dart-gun requires cookies, the grenade launcher requires pie, and both the chain gun and
rocket launcher use donuts; Bee, “Rev 7 Interview.”
221
An Evangelical mode of play that develops through interaction with Beezlebubba and
these other intuitive blendings welcomes the player as an invested but unsystematic reader of the
Bible. The game, in fact, seems to be a machine for desystematizing Bible-study, welcoming
date, returns us to the explicit concern with adolescent interiority that characterized Saints of
Virtue. We again begin in a teenage boy’s bedroom, but John’s voice does not resemble our
“I'm sitting on my bed, holding a knife to my throat. A war rages within my mind, to simply
make one strong thrust and end my pain forever, or hold onto what remaining shards of reality I still grasp
and try to regain my life. Images pierce my mind like nails into my skull. I can't take this tormenting life
anymore, I want to end it. I will end it!”
But John does not need to be brave, only willing. In this game, unlike SoV, the haunted
adolescent is merely a patient, simultaneously acted upon by angels and demons, both conceived
as autonomous agencies. And, pointedly, the player is always an angel. This is, in fact, the only
Evangelical FPS to include any multiplayer mode – a surprising lacuna given how influential
“deathmatch” practices have been in the popularization of the genre – but “Players can only
assume the roles of angels in single player and multi player.”363 This means that the developers
have successfully deployed the “lifematch,” reconceiving the FPS as a space of collaboration
between angels, but have done so by making the player the solution to adolescent malaise but not
363
Tim Emmerich, "An Interview with Two Guys Software, the Producers of Eternal War: Shadows of Light,"
accessed January 23, 2014, http://www.christiananswers.net/spotlight/games/2002/interview-eternalwar.html .
222
its victim.
Separated from the paradoxical identification of the player with both the protagonist and
the infested game-world that characterized SoV, the adolescent interior becomes a landscape of
death: “In the distance, I saw several tall, dark strongholds pierce out of the harsh wasteland. The
cries and screams of demons echoed from the monuments of evil.” When the developers describe
this as “The Quake of Christian Games” they seem not to be referring to the fact that this is in
fact an application of the Quake Engine, but to the gruesome aesthetics that opened this chapter's
inquiry.364 In some places, in fact, the demons that inhabit John’s heart do Id’s successor to
Doom one better, adding extra jaws, rows of teeth, and rotting tentacles in the process of
sacralizing the monsters. The gruesomeness, however, still invites a consciously contrived act of
non-violence, at least in as much as it continues to avoid the criteria for identifying violence
shared between Evangelical and worldly critique: “Gore isn’t a factor in Eternal War, you can’t
rip demons up into red meaty pieces. When you strike demons with your holy weapons, darkness
will emit from them and they’ll groan, that’s about the extent of it.”365
Having removed the specific cues that raise the question of violence, Eternal War moves
outside of the game-violence debate, and is now at liberty to include flourishes that sharply draw
our attention to the erotics of game-violence. First, unlike the protagonists in any of the FPS
games discussed here so far, Evangelical or worldly, the Angel Mike seems to get pleasure from
shooting his opponents. Were we firing bullets at humans, a hero who shouts “Does that sting?”
or “Yes!” when his shots make contact would run the risk of disgusting players and inciting
364
CCGR, “Two Guys Interview Part One,” accessed January 23, 2014,
http://www.ccgr.org/index.php/reviews/21-misc-articles/4263-two-guys-software-interview-part-1 .
365
CCGR, “Two Guys Interview Part One.”
223
censors.366
And while the most humanoid demons in Eternal War are rotting zombies, their
intelligence exceeds anything attempted in previous Christian FPS games. When the genre
finally includes demons that can hide, collaborate, and use multiple attacks, they have been
separated entirely from identification with the player. They move like humans, but they are
problems in someone else’s soul. Our last vision of FPS non-violence invites play as a merciless
Comparing the modes of play welcomed by Evangelical FPS games, we seem to observe
a single, slow shift that is simultaneously technological and theological. In 1994, Super 3D
Noah’s Ark situated players as already a biblical hero, divinely commanded to engage physical
danger, but morally secure. There were no demons. But with the boom in FPS popularity that
cast the entire genre as “Doomclones,” shooting became a space for engagements in spiritual
warfare. In early 1999, The War in Heaven and Saints of Virtue both imagined Evangelical play
as a process of moral development. Here the Christian subject was embattled within, and putting
on Ephesians 6’s armor of God became a process of managing internal demons. But after the
Columbine massacre, Evangelical game criticism came to face a possibility of adolescent evil too
palpable to be played with. N’Lightning’s two FPS games, Catechumen (2000) and Ominous
366
Duke Nukem 3D (3D Realms, 1996) included comments of this kind, the player-character saying “Oooh, that's
gotta hurt!” or “Hehehe... what a mess” when an enemy is killed, but this game received the highest possible RSAC
rating for violence.
224
Horizons: A Paladin’s Calling (2001), financed specifically as games that would not turn
adolescents into killers, cast the player as the protector of the Christian tradition, just as
inevitably virtuous as Noah, but now responsible for the salvation of others.
My research has not uncovered any Evangelical FPS games released between 2003 and
2014, not so much as a Fight-the-Pharaoh mod for Quake, nothing.367 But perhaps we had
reached a sort of stopping point, an elegant ambivalence on the meaning of spiritual warfare and
its relation to adolescent amusement. On the right hand, in the stark clarity of Eternal War, the
Evangelical shooter becomes a single-minded attempt to clear out the demons in the adolescent
interior. And on the left hand, the player is simultaneously suspended at all of the borders which
game-violence crosses, through the dizzying polyphony of Rev 7: it is a grotesque cartoon, the
trademarked property of Christ, in the head and in the world, historicist, futurist, and praeterist.
But both strategies found ways to welcome players into an Evangelical subjectivity defined by
spiritual warfare without having to impute that there is something potentially demonic about or
But elegance is not an explanation for the end of Christian FPS creativity. The decline of
a curve, no less than its rise, is an interference pattern of innumerable other trends. And,
pointedly, the disappearance of the Evangelical FPS has not signaled a decline of the Evangelical
video game. Perhaps in the vanishing of Evangelical FPS games we witness the diffusion of
organizations. The decade without an Evangelical FPS has also been the Facebook decade, so
367
This is corroborated by Nick Gibson's recent article on Christian FPS games. Nick Gibson, “Christian FPS
Games,” accessed January 23, 2014, http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/christianfps/christianfps.htm .
225
perhaps we are seeing a shift toward more broadly shareable Christian software for the context of
“social media.” Maybe the growing alienation of the player-character from the demonic
landscape has mimicked the movement of video game culture from a sub-cultural edge to a
cultural center, and a movement, with it, of Evangelical gamers out from a space where they had
We might begin by observing the emergence of networks emerging to share a new way of
playing a FPS as an Evangelical FPS in this period, moving away from concerns with violence as
previously defined. Around 2002-2003, often networking through the emerging culture of online
Evangelical game criticism, several groups like “Tribe of Judah” began to appear, using private
servers to play FPS games like Unreal Tournament, Team Fortress, and Counter-Strike in
distinctly Evangelical ways.368 These games tend to feature humanoid opponents, but with the
possibility of disabling on-screen blood. “Christian Crew Gaming,” one of the oldest and most
vibrant of these communities, shows a new set of concerns in the story of their own emergence:
“The Christian Crew came about amongst a group of gamers who were tired and distressed at the
continuing lack of social morals and overwhelming profanity, pornography, and outright
disregard for fair play and good sportsmanship found on the average game servers, specifically
Counter-Strike game servers of the time.”369 Echoed in the parallel emergence of Evangelicals
guilds in Massively Multiplayer Online Games like World of Warcraft (Blizzard), it seems a
growing number of Evangelicals have lost the need for their own shooters, developing, instead,
modes of sacred play and Christian communities of play for worldly games.
368
Tribe of Judah, "Community FAQ," accessed January 23, 2014, http://www.toj.cc/toj.php?x=main/faq/2 .
369
Christian Crew Gaming, "History," accessed January 23, 2014, http://ccgaming.com/about/history/ .
226
In early July 2011, as this chapter was cooling and taking on its present shape, I traveled
to George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon to attend the tenth annual Christian Game
Developers’ Conference. In-flight, I spent the majority of my time considering the interaction of
sacred violence and interiority. The proximate cause of my reflection may have been my
decision to do fieldwork from the plane; I was both immersed in the violence of The War in
Heaven and itchingly aware that the pleasant elderly man sitting next to me was either making
faces because I was furiously killing angels and taking notes, or that was just the face he tended
to make on planes. I couldn’t know. But as I subtly shifted my screen angle, deadened my facial
affect, and lowered the volume of my headphones, I realized I was participating in one of the
mysteries explored in this chapter: game-violence, like the mythic violence that orients
Christianity, is the migration not only of images of public violence, but of their enactments, into
The following evening, in the parking lot of George Fox University, not having
previously studied Christian Crew Gaming and similar groups, I was surprised to find myself
playing Halo: Reach (Bungie, 2010), a popular, worldly FPS, with prominent Christian game
developers and their children. Violence was again drawn toward an interior, but here the mode of
Christian interiority was the XBUS, “a converted 40′ transit bus that has been outfitted [with] 16
networked Xbox 360 game consoles so […] each player gets their own 27” HDTV.”370 Inside,
the blood invisible to anyone else on the street, a (small, but literal) busload of attendees at the
Christian Game Developers’ Conference was playing the current edition of Microsoft’s
370
Xbus Games, “About,” archived by the Internet Archive, April 9, 2012, accessed January 23, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20120409093949/http://www.xbusgames.com/about-xbus-games .
227
best-selling FPS series. To consider the game through the various semiotic indexes of violence
that have proven significant thus far, blood spattered when players were shot, and for one round
we played the “head hunter” mode, which caused a skull to appear whenever a player was killed,
but in neither case would “gore” be a likely complaint (the skull was clean and was not visibly
extracted from the fallen body); while some imitable weapons like combat knives and a golf club
are included in the game, the XBUS employees consistently selected an assortment of “energy”
weapons instead.371 Relationally, of course, it was more complicated. The XBUS allowed me to
be killed by the other players in diverse ways, as the modes changed every few minutes, and I
was exceptionally poor at all of them. Aside from the conspicuous absence of swearing, the
shouts inside the XBUS were the typically paradoxical chatter of competitive gaming: “Arg!
Who killed me?! Ha! He’s killing everyone!” It sounded like a sort of answer to the Baptist
debate almost twenty years before on whether churches should install arcade cabinets.
While Halo deathmatches at the Christian Game Developers’ Conference seem to reflect
the change in Evangelical FPS gaming since 2003, my experience at the conference showed that
this has not been a homogenous movement, nor should it be understood as a stopping point. The
conversations I had with participants revealed a divide between those who had gathered for a
conference of “Christian-Game Developers” and those who came for a conference of “Christian
371
Christ Centered Game Reviews gave the game 5.5 for violence, explaining “Halo: Reach is pretty tame for an
M-rated game, much like the other games in the series. The entire game is spent shooting things, but the violence is
not graphic. The enemies are all aliens, and none of them look even a little human. There are blood splotches
throughout the game (and depending on the weapon, blood will hit the walls) but no dismemberment.” “Headhunter
is pretty simple, with control points scattered around that periodically move as the map continues. Kill opponents
and capture their skull (it’s nothing graphic), then take it to a control point to gain a point. You need points to win,
so capturing skulls is vital to winning. It’s a pretty crazy and hectic variation on standard Halo play, and adds a lot to
the game.” CCGR, “Halo: Reach,” accessed January 23, 2014,
http://www.ccgr.org/index.php/reviews/19-console/5204-halo-reach-xbox-360 .
228
Game-Developers.” Chris Skaggs, proprietor of Soma Games, and organizer of this year’s
“While Soma Games is a group of Christians making video games, we're not what you might call a
‘Christian Video Game company’ and it's important for us to be very clear about this to avoid inaccurate
expectations. We're making games that will be founded upon, and informed by Christian thought and the
Christian understanding of reality - however, we don't plan on making games that teach Christian theology.
There are no scripture references, no Biblical characters and no telling of the Jonah story - other companies
372
have been there and done a fine job. We hope to try something a little different. ”
Soma Games’ first release, G: Into the Rain, however, is in some sense a single prolonged
retelling of the Noah’s ark story, again, specifically configured to answer concerns about
violence. As a strategic, top-down, space shooter wherein the player must harvest resources from
an encroaching cloud of “The Rain,” “The Arc series provides a stimulating alternative to
cross-over appeal, G did not find a place in this dissertation's catalog of religious games.
As in The War in Heaven, the game opens with a choice, but the moral significance of
this choice is radically different. One now chooses for which of ten corporations they will
become an employee. These corporations, with names like “Panis Global,” “DASA Corp,”
“Clarifex” and smoothly designed geometrical logos, seem to be entirely plausible entries into
the corporate culture of the early 21st century. G even follows this choice with an unnerving
simulacrum of a contract: “I, the oversigned, understand that this constitutes a working
agreement between myself and New World Incorporated and that failure to complete my duties
faithfully and effectively will result in breach of contract and subsequent denial of pay.” Barker,
372
Soma Games, "About Us," accessed January 23, 2014, http://www.somagames.com/about_us.php .
373
Soma Games, "G: Into the Rain," accessed January 23, 2014, www.somagames.com/ARC/index_g.php .
229
your in-game guide, speaking as a fellow crew member, incentivizes the game’s point system by
identifying it with unjust labor practices: “Time doesn’t matter, but supplies do. Each rocket you
use comes out of our pay.” And regardless of one’s choice of corporation, it quickly becomes
clear that play is always configured as morally dubious: “Be Advised: Several competitive firms
making conflicting claims. Legal status of your mission is unclear and ambiguous. Do not
engage.”
Echoing this concern with the violence that comes with working for an unethical
corporation, the Christian Game Developers Conference was largely preoccupied with the
question of how to influence game design in a Christian direction if one happens to be a game
designer working for a non-Evangelical company. But, at present, this new imagination of an
Evangelical counterpublic that emerges in interaction with the corporations that create games as
much as the communities that play them, or the entities within them, still seems to be only
partially imagined. A vocal minority was fearful, telling stories of game designers who requested
not to work on a game because it included excessive violence only to be fired and blacklisted
from future employment, and motivational speaker Os Hillman framed the work in Dominionist
terms as an Evangelical subversion, “Taking back the mountains of culture.” But the dominant
tone was the curious and playful ethical reflection one might expect of game designers, straining
One discussion session, led by Tim Johnson, an entertainment consultant who worked on
several Veggie Tales games, asked how participants could design games that “reflected God’s
truth” in the mode of Christ’s parables: “If you open a treasure box [in a game] and there is a
Bible inside, we lose the metaphor … When Jesus told a parable, he didn’t tell the parable of the
230
man who sold everything he had to buy a field because there was a Torah buried in it.” His
session cited Bible verses and encouraged designers to make games that enjoined “Cooperation,”
“Individuality,” “Sacrifice for Later Reward,” and “Eucatastrophe,” taking his examples of these
“Christian principles” from Nintendo games and other “family friendly” productions rather than
Evangelical ones. During the question and answer session, the room descended into confusion.
Several participants had worked in the game industry for years and had specific anecdotes about
the resistance of players to any moment wherein these mechanics became ethically challenging
enough to merit description as specifically Christian. One designer related that he had made a
game where players had to sacrifice a well-liked, AI-controlled teammate in the act of play. But
players wouldn’t do it. They would play the scene again and again, convinced that they will
eventually stop making what they could only perceive as a mistake. Tim Johnson’s response was
two-fold: it has to be fun, and there has to be an analog Christian outside the game to explain the
greater truth to which the game points. Again, Chris Skaggs set the tone: “This isn’t about
converting people, it is about blessing people… Just to bless people, all the people, the secular
people.”
Alongside established patterns, a new kind of sacred play seems to be emerging wherein
the Evangelical player is interpellated as an exegete, sacralizing worldly games into the service
of Christian truths, and the Evangelical designer labors to better fit games for that task. And like
the earlier shifts in Evangelical play, it is again visible in game criticism. The recent edited
volume Halos and Avatars: Playing Video Games with God contains articles by Kevin Newgren
and Craig Detweiler that propose that worldly FPS games like Fallout 3 and Bioshock are
already better for Christian subject formation than the last generation of explicitly Evangelical
231
entries because their blood and gore are context for complex moral dilemmas in-game.374
At the conference, I found neither the end of Evangelical concern with violence, nor with
spiritual warfare (I have not, in fact, ever been told so regularly that demons are a live issue in
my own life). But attention may be shifting to another contact zone, one that figures Evangelical
gamers themselves as sacra, binding out game religion to algorithmic structures through their
own presence on either side of the screen. In some ways it seems that the next mode of
Evangelical play may be the play of Evangelism itself, and we cannot know in advance how it
Conclusion
This chapter set out to explore Evangelical FPS games as sacred play, then considered
why there have not been any new instances of this genre in ten years. If the development and
disappearance of these games are told as singular narrative, the overall trajectory seems to begin
with the player as both soldier and battlefield, and end with the player as a confident angelic
being who intervenes in a spiritual war outside of himself. Faced with the horror of the
Columbine massacre, these games pressed moral ambiguity to the margins, increasingly
envisioning a player who fights evil but does not contain any. It is a story of clarification and
maturation across which the subject of sacred play seems to grow in coherence until it is capable
The sacred demons of Evangelical gaming, like other video game characters, can easily
374
Kevin Newgren, “BioShock to the System: Smart Choices in Video Games” 135-149; Craig Detweiler, “Born to
Play,” 190-196; see also Mark Hayse, “Ultima IV: Simulating the Religious Quest,” 34-47.
232
feign death without disappearance. No amount of Holy Spirit launching can prevent them from
reappearing when the game is started anew. But as these Evangelical FPS games recede in
memory and their publishing companies close, some kinds of demon seem to be drifting into
obsolescence. While later games still often include demonic opponents, they tend not to
approach as a horde that fills the whole field of vision. They are now more likely to be final
bosses or rare enemies, evil concealed behind the world. As the spiritual mapping movement
transformed from a network of organizations into a network of practices, so too has sacred play
apparently become a paradigm for engagement with (and avoidance of) the demons in the world.
This transformation does not seem to presage the disappearance of Evangelical gaming, but a
233
Chapter 6
“In the classic sense of the word, anything is baptised that is immersed. Immersion alone is
classic baptism. But immersion alone is not Christian baptism. Christian baptism demands faith
and repentance in the thing baptised.”
- F. G. Allen375
375
F. G. Allen, “The New Birth: Its Nature and Necessity,” accessed January 23, 2014,
http://www.sermonindex.net/modules/articles/index.php?view=article&aid=3452 .
234
to be facing down into a ravine of abstract information. In the deep distance, binary code slides
past in punctuated green columns; the data-aesthetics evokes The Matrix, conveying a vague
flurry of digital activity beyond your comprehension. Nearer to you, thickening out of the
informatic mixture like curds out from milk, the field of play is peopled by solid algorithmic
entities such as “viruses,” “logic gates,” and “the firewall” itself, all of which resemble tiny
spaceships. The game between these entities is scored on an interface resembling burnished steel,
dotted with colored lights and single-purpose screens, closer and more communicative than the
game field. And then, off the screen through the speakers, in the air over your shoulder, the
voices of two children take credit for your actions in the game and disagree about what they
mean. Both rejoice when you win, and groan when you lose, bickering intermittently like a
You are of two minds. Specifically, your minds are two teenagers, a bookish blonde girl,
and an excitable African American guy. Both are residents of Odyssey, Ohio. As Mandy, you are
cautious, awkward, and distracted; as Michael, you are reckless, computer savvy, and
game-focused. Both of you, in the opening cinema, agreed to go inside the computer using “the
community center's “Bible Room.” As Mandy, you went in because you are writing a paper
about computers for school; as Michael, you seem to pursue flashing lights without reserve or
explanation. Your Michael-self goads you toward danger, and your Mandy-self answers with
calls to discretion.
235
Unsurprisingly, then, it is as Michael that you disable the “safety protocols,” allowing
deeper entry into the game, but barring escape. And as Mandy, discovering you are trapped, you
Michael presses you onward and inward through six more games - Spam Dodger, Binary
Bridge, Virus Viper, Brig Breakout, Debugger, and Hard Drive Havoc. Each game brings
multiple levels of computerized reality into collision: circuitry, email messages, raw binary, the
mouse cursor, and the physical magnetic hard drive apparatus all appear to interact visibly. In
each game, your task is managing the interaction of “good” and “bad data” (“Grab the good and
zap the bad,” Michael explains).Your reward after the games is access to emails from friends
back in physical reality, but instead of explaining how to get out of the computer (which one may
reasonably expect, as one of those friends designed the Room of Consequence), the emails offer
Choices and Consequences 098: “One should be just as careful in choosing one's
pleasures as in avoiding calamities.” -Intercultural Wisdom
Value of Time 032: “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the
stuff that life is made of.” -Benjamin Franklin, American Statesman, Scientist, and
Philosopher (1706-1790)
At the center of the system, you encounter Seepi Yu, the computer's Central Processing
Unit [CPU] reimagined as a kind of Dracula whose body integrates an exposed human brain and
electronic circuitry. The eloquent parasite first offers, then compels you (both of you) to stay
forever inside of the computer playing video games. Seepi-Yu maintains a slave-colony of
hideously aged children, and feeds upon the time they waste playing games: “Time, life, same
thing.”
236
Illustration 13: A Designer of Immersive Games and His Audience
But when you finally defeat the monster, you discover that it was all a ruse; you were
safely inside a simulation that dramatized the danger of computers. But your Michael-self learns
a valuable lesson about time-management nonetheless, and your Mandy-self is still vindicated,
and neither seem upset about being trapped in a seamless simulation of mortal danger.
I open this study's last substantive chapter with Adventures in Odyssey: The Great Escape
because a cultural history does well to settle its accounts by establishing an orientation to the
future, and at present it seems quite nearly impossible to describe the future of gaming without
saying the word “immersive.” This is not to say that the games of the future will immerse us, but
rather that media criticism – both Evangelical and worldly – seems to anticipate that they will.
Given my present attention to the human-computer interfaith, I take the possibility of immersion
seriously, but I must regard the proposition that computers will ever contain as much life as
humans can experience as a statement of faith rather than one of fact. That conviction, however,
mobilizes material productions of the future, and the ambivalence The Great Escape presents
237
concerning the entry of humans into computers will allow us to close this study with a sense that
Evangelical gaming might proceed into the future quite differently than its worldly equivalent.
In the context of Evangelical gaming, our approach to the word “immersion” well begins
with the Michael-Mandy dialectic, an interplay of fear and fascination at the prospect of being
not contrary to their worldly cognate, but are densely entangled and frequently inseparable.
Again, the possibility of a radically divergent understanding seems to flicker within Evangelical
critique, and an attempt to isolate it will be worth the effort. Immersion, in either case, presents a
of immersion appear where the human-computer interfaith confronts the possibility of the human
with relation to the ongoing development of computer technology: As more and more of life
becomes computable, humans are both thrilled and terrified that we seem to be going inside. We
can easily locate worldly narratives of immersion ranging from the fearful (e.g. The Matrix, or
the periodic public concerns over “internet addiction”) to the fanatical (e.g. ReBoot or The
Quantified Self Movement).377 These two faces of worldly immersion, however, are united as
immersion are frequently held together by their production as consumer computing’s current
marketing sensation, and by their attentive anticipation of another leading edge. Consider The
Matrix as a significant synecdoche of this tendency: a blockbuster movie that unveils dazzling
376
M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84.
377
Quantified Self Labs, “About the Quantified Self,” accessed January 24, 2014, http://quantifiedself.com/about/.
238
Evangelical stories of immersion, on the other hand, occasionally disrupt the vision of
consistently progressing time upon whose horizon immersion appears to be inevitable with a
teleological motivations, considering instead the player-in-play, this is a vision of time that
stretches down into the present rather than out into the future. It is not a time that one uses
efficiently or inefficiently toward future projects, but a time that one treasures or squanders in the
present. To use Walter Benjamin's theoretical argot, we could call it jetztzeit, “now-time.” In
biblical terms, this is the chronotope in the parable of the ten virgins: “Therefore keep watch,
because you do not know the day or the hour (Matthew 25:13).” But the formula presented by
emerged when the computers were becoming increasingly present to public consciousness. Like
digital religion, the notion that there is a space for humanity inside the computer seems to have
been a product of specific human-computer interfaith movements emerging in the wake of the
Second World War. Arthur C. Clarke's 1948 story “Against the Fall of Night” concerned a future
humanity who had conquered death and mastered memory technologically, but his recreation of
the story in 1953 as The City and the Stars seems to have been the first work of fiction to suggest
that a human personality could be stored inside of a computer.378 This story, as well as Frederick
378
Robert Geraci, Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 54-55.
239
Pohl's “The Tunnel Under the World” (1955), and those contemporaneous stories by Stanislaw
Lem that present human minds as storable on computer hardware, however, do not consider the
computer as a place for the human, but as a substitute for the fleshy brain: “An electronic brain,
gentlemen, wishes us nothing but good; however the endurance of coils and tubes has its limits
too.”379 The eponymous “total environment simulator” in Daniel Galouye's Simulacron 3 (1964),
seems to have been the first literary projection of a computer system in which human minds
could conduct what seem to them to be complete lives: “I brushed straggling hair off my
forehead and gazed out on my counterfeit world. It screamed back at me that what assailed my
eyes was only a subjective, simuelectronic illusion. I cast about for something that would blunt
To this point, however, we can frame these visions of entry into computers as instances
of a trend that predates computers. The fantasy/fear of passage into a medium seems to
frequently accompany a widespread cultural fascination with that medium. For instance, consider
the similarly ambivalent fantasies that emerge alongside the early twentieth century's fascination
with the cinema: Buster Keaton climbs into a movie screen in Sherlock Junior (1924) and his
body is bizarrely stable alongside the flickering cinematic natives, producing some danger and
much comedy as lions and cliffs appear and vanish around him. Similarly, in Hellzapoppin
(1941), a fight in the projector room causes Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson to be comically pinched
when their own film goes out of frame, and humorously endangered when they are accidentally
379
Frederick Pohl , The Tunnel Under the World (Project Gutenberg ebook collection, April 14, [1955] 2010),
accessed January 24, 2014, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31979/31979-h/31979-h.htm ; Stanislaw Lem, "The
Eleventh Voyage," The Star Diaries: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), 38-73;
45.
380
Daniel F. Galouye, Simulacron 3 (Phoenix Pick, 2011), 86.
240
thrust into a western. Elmer Rice's literary serial in the New Yorker, “A Voyage to Purilia”
(1930) offers a vision of the improbable, action-packed world where all movies take place: “I
shall make only passing reference to the floods, the avalanches, the tornadoes, the
mine-explosions, the bursting dams, and the forest fires which impeded our progress and
imperiled our lives.”381 In these cases at least, wandering inside reveals the incompatibility of
the human with the media-world, and the results are darkly comical.
And so too with the immediately following fascination concerning television: In Roald
Dahl's 1964 novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Mike Teavee insists on being “the first
person in the world to be sent by television,” and is thus miniaturized to his parents' dismay.382
Hanna-Barbera's The New Alice in Wonderland (1966) opens the story with Alice chasing her
dog through the TV, rather than a rabbit down a hole, then proceeds to depict joys and perils
much like those of the novel, though now with Flintstones cameos. EL Doctorow's Book of
Daniel (1972) imagines children escaping a world of political and economic oppression by
getting into the box: “The children were sitting on the floor, too close he thought. Too close. He
made no move to interrupt their attention. If they could get inside the television set they would
be better still.”383 And these ambivalent visions of immersion were followed soon after by
grotesque possibilities as in Poltergeist (1982) and the Twilight Zone Movie (1983), where the
television becomes a space where children can be trapped, even a kind of cartoonish hell.
381
Elmer Rice, “A Voyage to Purilia – X,” The New Yorker December 14, 1929, 130; Ian Jarvie, Philosophy of the
Film: Epistemology, Ontology, Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 1987), 33.
382
Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1964), 152-155.
383
E. L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel (New York: Random House, 2007), 155.
241
is not that one fantasy outlives another (the three presently coexist happily), nor certainly that
metaphorical. The significant difference is that immersion in computers, unlike the other two,
became a widespread theoretical construct. The notion that people can currently go partially into
computers, and the attendant anticipation that we will soon be able to immerse ourselves entirely
have become principles of design and widespread conceptions of computer users' own practices.
The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary declared the word “immersive”
obsolete. Though one might be immersed in mathematics, superstition, or a book any time from
the 1660s to the present, as of 1989, the adjectival form, “Characterized by or involving
immersion,” was temporarily antiquated.384 Without this word, however, the popularization of
home computing and video gaming was becoming tangled up with new stories about humans
going inside computers. Like prior vogues for stories of this sort, the tone was decidedly
ambivalent. William Gibson's novel Neuromancer (1984), for instance, described a space called
both “cyberspace” and “the matrix” that “has its roots in primitive arcade games […] and
military experimentation with cranial jacks.”385 The Lawnmower Man (1992), visually,
presented filmic representations of life in a computer that have influenced game and interface
design, and, narratively, offered a wild array of possibilities for better sex, augmented
intelligence, and a sort of non-metaphorical Godhood complete with psychic powers that
384
“2. transf. and fig. To plunge or sink into a (particular) state of body or mind; to involve deeply, to steep, absorb,
in some action or activity. Chiefly pass. or refl.” "immerse, v.," OED Online. December 2013, Oxford University
Press, accessed January 24, 2014, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/91880?result=2&rskey=NAdHqk& .
385
William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984), 69.
242
continue to work offline. The Net (1995), with its protagonist whose social world is entirely
mediated through – and in danger from – the Internet, presented a differently digitized humanity
Factiva's first citation for the word “immersive” in any newspaper comes from 1991, and
concerns the development of virtual reality for military training. Dennis Breglia hoped that
immersive. He shouldn't be able to tell if it's real or artificial.”386 Here, notably, “immersive” is
context that the word begins to circulate rapidly: “Will users be able to cope with the immersive
(and possibly drug-like) aspects of virtual worlds?”387 Across the late nineties, however, the
word “immersive” went from aspiration to advertisement, and had to increasingly bear the load
of a diverse field of variously impressive things: “Today, immersive gaming is the sound of
bullets ricocheting around you, spent shell casings bouncing off a stone floor, the roar of a beast
behind you, and a thumping techno soundtrack shaking your game room.”388
This usage of “immersive” has remained dominant into the present, so it is this one we
must consider when asking what the next generation of games will be like. In both worldly and
Evangelical game critique, players call a medium “immersive” when it looks, sounds, or feels
386 “
Navy Ponders Move to Virtual Reality,” Defense and Aerospace Electronics 1.20 (November 4, 1991).
387
IFIP World Computer Congress, Karen Duncan, and Karl Krueger. Linkage and Developing Countries
Information Processing '94: Proceedings of the IFIP 13th World Computer Congress, Hamburg, Germany, 28
August - 2 September, 1994 (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1994), 192.
388
Gordon Ung, “Big Audio,” Maximum PC (May, 1999), 51.
243
like they are somehow inside of it. It is a flexible notion that can identify as many different
media tendencies as there are ways of identifying the boundaries of a fiction. “Immersive” can be
used to describe encounters with convincing character dialog, novel modalities of game control,
In this sense, Evangelical game review sites seem to use the word “immersive” and its
cognates in quite the same way worldly websites do. Plain Games presents a range of meanings:
Call of Duty 3 (Activision, 2006) on Wii is immersive because of motion controls; Scratches is
immersive at least partially because of “excellent music and ambient noises;” Two Worlds
(Reality Pump, 2007) is immersive because the game world changes dynamically.389 Christ
Centered Gamer, similarly, locates games with “immersive story lines,” “music,” and “control
schemes,” among other indexes.390 Shepherd’s Staff uses it to praise relatively high tech
Christian games, like Catechumen, and One Nation Under God (Inspired Idea, 2002), though
Taken together, all such applications of the word in popular discourse on technology
seem to gesture toward a possible synthesis: new technologies are called “immersive” when they
389
James Tench, “Call of Duty 3,” archived by the Internet Archive, February 10, 2007, accessed January 24, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20070210175825/http://www.plaingames.com/games/reviews/review.asp?id=215;
Stephan Mack, “Two Worlds,” archived by the Internet Archive, February 14, 2008, accessed January 24, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20080214123805/http://www.plaingames.com/games/reviews/review.asp?id=241 .
390
Werner, "Call of Duty," accessed January 24, 2014,
http://www.christcenteredgamer.com/index.php/reviews/18-computer/5376-call-of-duty-modern-warfare-3 ;
Deepfreeze32, “The Wolf Among Us,” accessed January 24, 2014,
http://www.christcenteredgamer.com/index.php/reviews/18-computer/5603-the-wold-among-us-pc ; IBJamon, “The
Legend of Spyro: The Eternal Night,” accessed January 24, 2014,
http://www.christcenteredgamer.com/index.php/reviews/19-console/4943-the-legend-of-spyro-the-eternal-night-wii-
ps2 .
391
Tim Emmerich, "Exceptional Game List," accessed January 24, 2014,
http://www.graceworksinteractive.com/ShepStaff/exceptional.htm .
244
interrupt the feedback loops through which humans find their place in the world, but obscure
those disruptions such that users continue to report full use of their faculties. At least to date, this
effect is only possible temporarily. A virtual reality helmet is a window when it is new, but it
becomes a blindfold when what it shows is no longer regarded as realistic. As technologies and
their accompanying rhetorics of immersion are replaced, new advertising and fan-speech across
successive generations promises immersion, pointing toward a future where no new replacement
will be necessary. In this way, something we might call “the Tron Ideology” has emerged as a
given within popular technological discourse: There is a place in the computer for us, and a new
These last two sections presented the story of a new conception of media emerging in
continuity with an older one. When cinema, the mainframe computer, and television took hold of
creative imaginations, stories began to present the ambivalent possibility that people would soon
go inside of the medium. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, when personal computers became
increasingly popular, a new wave of media told similar stories. The difference, however, is that
the notion that we can, that we shall, even that we should go into the computer, has become a
relatively unified discourse on technology shared among theorists, technicians, and casual
computer gamers. The word “immersive” presently does much of the work that holds this field
toward a future where we will finally go inside the computer. With this groundwork laid, we can
consider how Evangelical games do and do not reinforce the Tron Ideology.
245
Evangelical Disruptions to Immersion
As we saw in game review sites, Evangelical game critique frequently shares the
language and practice of immersion with its worldly counterparts. The Christian Developers
Network forums, for instance, use the word “immersive” over a hundred times to refer to
cutting-edge monitors, graphical engines, sound systems, and narrative styles. But, as with
gaming. This section locates that possibility across the period of The Great Escape's emergence,
considering, first, that story's various strands, then three specific moments in Evangelical
computing that appeared in the years between its cartoon and video game versions.
In making Adventures in Odyssey: The Great Escape, the Evangelical parachurch media
empire Focus on the Family greatly resembles the characters Eugene and Geoffrey who make the
deceptive game-within-the-game (also called “The Great Escape Simulation”). This CD-ROM
game, based upon prior moralistic radio dramas and cartoons, cultivates a player who is both
Mandy and Michael, who desires entry into computers but regards them with suspicion. Notably,
Christian computing is not exempt from this ambivalence. Though the eponymous town of
Odyssey “has a small-town feel about it, and most folks there still live by the traditional values
that often characterize such places” – that is, though it is a fantasy of a space where organic
conservatism could flourish – the very popular Adventures in Odyssey radio show nonetheless
forward the teaching of the gospel.392 The 1993 story “Into Temptation” introduced the Room of
392
For a list of inventions in the radio program, see Aoiwiki Contributors, “List of Inventions,” accessed January 24,
2014, http://www.aiowiki.com/wiki/Inventions ; Description quoted from Aoiwiki Contributors, “Odyssey,”
accessed January 24, 2014, http://www.aiowiki.com/wiki/Odyssey .
246
Consequence specifically to show how dangerous Evangelical games could be if mismanaged.393
Despite his parents' exhortation that he not do so, Jimmy Barclay considered buying “the
ultimate portable action video game experience,” the “Mach-10 Bible action computer game.”
Mr. Whittaker, Adventure in Odyssey's central character, offered the Room of Consequence as a
device that “will let you play out the future,” and see what would happen if Jimmy made the
wrong decision. As we watch the tragic consequences of disobedience unfold, the show's moral
concerns are fairly unambiguous: Jimmy shouts, “I mean it is a BIBLE GAME!” to which
The plot wherein the Room of Consequence became both the game apparatus and a
simulation of its own dangerous inner workings was first presented in the radio play “Gloobers”
(November 14, 1998), then again in the cartoon Escape from the Forbidden Matrix (2001).394 In
these cases the plot was almost identical to that later presented in The Great Escape, but the
games being played were not yet about computers themselves, and the time-leech was called
“Master Brain.” Also, the less adept second player was not yet feminized, though his hesitation
was absolutely consistent. Likewise, the ambiguation between the informatic and mechanical
strata of the computer was established in Gloobers where, already, the characters cannot stop
“playing the game from the inside” because of the “big drop to the keyboard.” And the moral
payload challenging the value of time spent immersed in video games was already established
here, before the message was carried by a video game: “You see, time is one of God's most
393
Aoiwiki Contributors, "Into Temptation," accessed January 24, 2014,
http://www.aiowiki.com/wiki/Into_Temptation .
394
Aoiwiki Contributors, “Gloobers,” accessed January 24, 2014, http://www.aiowiki.com/wiki/Gloobers .
247
precious gifts. It is a shame to squander it on such frivolous activities as computer games. Of
course that doesn't mean you can't play computer games on occasion; the key is to master them
Between the release of Escape from the Forbidden Matrix as a video and its playable
adaptation, The Great Escape, a few new pieces of digital Evangelical media offer compelling
extensions of this principle. Consider, for instance, Covenant Eyes, an online accountability
system launched in 2001, and “Fully recommended and endorsed by Focus on the Family.” To
quote their statement of purpose, “Job 31:1 states, 'I have made a covenant with my eyes.' It is
our stated purpose to provide a tool enabling Internet users to maintain that covenant, regardless
of whether their temptation is to pornography, gambling, or simply time spent on the Internet.”395
The software monitors users' internet activity and sends reports to the user's “accountability
partners.”
The model was soon imitated by other Evangelical services like Accountable2You
(2006), Safe Eyes (2006), and Saavi Accountability (2010), and whatever conclusions we draw
from these software will to some extent apply to similar software for other religious publics, like
WebChaver (2008) and Halal Gate (2008). Accountability services of this kind should not be
confused with content filtering services like Integrity Online and Safeplace.net presented in
chapter three. In fact, though both are operating properly when they are preventing users from
looking at pornography, in terms of immersion these two ranges of software are quite nearly
395
Covenant Eyes, “Purpose Statement,” archived by the Internet Archive, April 7, 2003, accessed March 8, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20030407062654/http://www.covenanteyes.com/about.php .
248
accountability software aims to disrupt the Internet experience by injecting the presence of an
extrinsic humanity.
In the five years we are considering here, 137 new Evangelical games were released and
most of them are not terribly forthcoming on the time-management principles they propose for
their users. There are two in particular, however, that gesture along the same line as the above
accountability software. First, Caught in the Web (Gibson Productions, 2002) is an interactive
fiction programmed using the Windows help file format, and packaged with a stand-alone die
rolling program.
You are surfing the Internet when something quite remarkable and distressing happens to you. By
mistake you end up at a dark website called 'The Dark Druid' and, as you enter the page, you feel
yourself grow drowsy and your head slumps down onto the desk before your computer monitor.
Before you know it, you find yourself reappearing in cyberspace as a 'Cyber Spirit Warrior'.
Scenes alternate between those textually describing you trapped in a “small virtual prison
cell,” “a virtual dungeon,” or other online oubliettes, and those which use the help file format to
produce web-like pages for the player to click on directly. The image is a unified field of online
danger complete with pornography, gambling, and get rich quick schemes. In victory, you escape
249
from the Internet by assembling clues, and solving embedded jigsaw puzzles. In failure, the
player is forced to manually reset the game, staring at a screen with no links, options, or
A second resonant game bridging the adaptations of The Great Escape was in fact
published, as was that game, by Digital Praise. Light Rangers: Mending the Maniac Madness
(Digital Praise, 2005), is a cartoonish action game starring AJ, Angel and Amos, crime-fighting
child heroes whose secret base is hidden in the Angel Town Community Church. The game's
presentation of technology is crisply dichotomous. On one hand, the Rangers' mentor “Dr.
Goodman has designed all his villain-stopping gadgets in such a way that only those with a good
understanding of God's word can charge up their energy.” On the other hand, four villains are
using different technologies to control the minds of Angel Town's children. In three quadrants of
town, the no-ma-virus is making children disobedient, billboards are making them vain, and
robotic teddy bears are making them selfish. Though each of these demonstrate interesting fears
of the technological control of children, the toy factory relates most directly to the present
conversation. Here the villain Fast Forward is creating toys “programmed to say things that make
kids impatient.” The Light Rangers, however, cannot infiltrate the factory because “His
zoom-bots are way too fast” so, instead, the player controls Crash, the Light Rangers' robot. That
is to say, the digital can accelerate children until they cannot bear the slowness of analog life, but
it can also accelerate them so they can selectively dismantle those technologies from inside.
Here, solidly in 2005, the year The Great Escape was released as a video game against
the dangers of video games, we can consider how these Evangelical technologies might imply a
chronotope of immediacy that intersects that of immersion. As The Great Escape's story
250
developed, the medium of its transmission and the media it examined underwent a gradual
convergence. A vector from radio shows, to cartoons, to video games joined up with a vector
from out-game life with video games, to video games themselves, to video games about video
games. Quite unlike the progression of the Evangelical FPS in the preceding chapter, which
seemed to distance the player from his or her own conflicted interior, The Great Escape is a
video game that challenges the player's present playtime. The reminders about time-management
challenge the player to ask whether he or she should have done what it took to earn those
reminders.
The Evangelical games and Internet accountability software that appeared in the space
just before The Great Escape's convergence, some of which were connected to Adventures in
dangerous slickness of the Internet by using Internet. Likewise, Caught in the Web and Light
Rangers propose different dangers for their different playerships, but both the adults of the
former and the children of the latter are endangered by immersion. In both cases, the
technologies of enjoyment can either entrap users through time-distortion, or, if skillfully and
“Immersion” has several homophonic meanings, but in Evangelical and worldly game
critique it describes a specific chronotope, a time-space in which moving forward in time means
moving also into the computer's interior. Though Evangelical gaming frequently performs its
creativity in ways that match this chronotope, the subject of Evangelical computing is also
invested with a flickering potential that seems not to move forward in time, but more deeply into
251
the present. In Walter Benjamin's terms, Evangelical computing locates a messianic potential in
its users by situating them as “subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous empty time,
but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit].”396 Immersion is not something on the
horizon, but a present possibility and a potentially dangerous one. The player is addressed as
already inside the computer in some significant sense, but still able to receive messages that
remind him or her how precious time is. This is not time that moves forward at all, it is time in
the immediate.
The question, in this light, is not whether there will someday be computers large enough
for humans to fit into them entirely, but whether we shall allow ourselves to become small
enough to fit. There may someday be a culture whose members overwhelmingly accept
themselves as having only capacities that can be expressed digitally, and who contain those
capacities entirely within digital systems. The creation of such a world requires further expansion
of digital technology, and further reduction of our notion of the human. These might be
As we move in this direction, there are new problems to address, problems that
Crockford’s reductio might productively help us designate “violence.” The parts of ourselves
that we locate inside of computers are subject to specific dangers not present in the analog world.
Consider webpages, for instance. While (one is tempted to say “because”) they are endlessly
reproduceable, they are also absolutely disposable. As of 2013, humans seem not to know, nor
have any way to reliably reconstruct, what the first webpages looked like in 1990. “We don’t
396
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah
Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 261.
252
really know what the first one looked like,” said Dan Noyes, a web manager at CERN. “It may
A shape of this principle particularly relevant to the present study would be the tendency
of Bible reading apps to delete all of a user’s notes when the software updates. Todd75238
complains of NIV Bible (2012, Tecarta), “This used to be a great app until they just couldn't leave
it alone. With a new update I have lost all my margin notes (tons of notes) and all my highlights.
The newest update was supposed to correct that but still can't find any of notes. They are
somewhere saved online, but how I get them back to my iPhone app I haven't figured out.”398
When this occurred on the GLO Bible app, a creation of “Immersion Digital,” CK complained “I
currently have lost trust and will now return to my faithful paper Bible with all of its notes,
highlights, and post-its.”399 The contrast between the physical and digital Bible resembles a
question of family-time presented by Covenant Eyes: “Are you less involved with your spouse or
The subjects of immersion, should they ever exist, will be humans for whom violence
against their digital aspects will be understood as violence against their whole selves. We heard
fore-echoes of it in the prior chapter's closing, where the players of First-Person Shooters shout
397
John Murawski, "Hunt for the World's Oldest WWW Page Leads to UNC Chapel Hill," News & Observer May
24, 2013 http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/05/24/2915835/hunt-for-worlds-oldest-www-page.html .
398
Todd75238, comment on "NIV Bible (Tecarta): Customer Reviews," accessed January 24, 2014,
http://app-store.appspot.com/?url=viewContentsUserReviews%3FpageNumber%3D0%26type%3DPurple%2BSoft
ware%26id%3D310295776%26onlyLatestVersion%3Dtrue .
399
CK, comment on “Important Update for PC, Mac, iPad, and iPhone,” accessed January 24, 2014,
http://globible.com/blog/?p=1826&cpage=1#comment-59996 .
400
Covenant Eyes, “Danger Signs of Internet Addiction ,” archived by the Internet Archive December 11, 2001,
accessed March 8, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20011211181344/http://www.covenanteyes.com/addictionsigns.php .
253
“Argh! I am dead again!” Or imagine the strange sentences people would say if Facebook were
to suddenly lose all of its data, “I have lost all of my friends,” “How am I supposed to remember
what I like?” But for now these are homophones for which we assume every computer user has
at least two meanings (“I don't mean I really died, I just died in the game”). The Tron Ideology
guides the emergence of a human for whom such words refer only to aspects of themselves fully
subject to the special vicissitudes of digital removal. And it seems there is a flickering possibility
within Evangelical media critique that conceives of the human as a being that does not move
We could propose several reasons for why Evangelicals seem to have a disruptive
attention to the immediacy of their computer interactions alongside the immersion they share
with the world. Perhaps successive generations of Christian computer users, each framing the
digital medium as temporary in comparison to the eternal message of the Bible – a contrast all
the more distinct when the computer carries the Bible – came to share a conception of the digital
as shallow waters and never grew entirely comfortable with the notion of immersion. Perhaps the
rival future of eternity in heaven has resonated powerfully alongside the emerging tales of
transhuman immersion, leaving fissures in the latter and preventing it from hardening into its
worldly form. Perhaps because Evangelical Christians have souls and they do not fit without
remainder into computers. It is hard to say, but we need not close our eschatological arrival in
What matters is that there is a difference here, a sense in which the human-computer
interfaith of Evangelical Christians cannot be equated with that of the world. As with “violence”
this difference is, again, an attention to computer users, even in their most dismissible moments,
254
as consequential moral agents. Even when they eagerly anticipate the next-generation game
consoles (and they often do), Evangelical Christians are sometimes called back to the present by
With respect to the chronotope of immersion, we might have closed this dissertation by
asking whether more and more convincing technologies of play will be applied by Evangelical
Christians in the future. It is fortunate that Evangelical media critique has demonstrated this to be
an inadequate frame for the time-space of technology, because instruments for measuring future
events are not amenable to academic citation. But to attend to the present, we might notice that
the massive spike in Evangelical game production that ended chapter three’s history seems to be
dominated by what are commonly referred to as “casual games,” games designed to host play
sessions potentially scalable down to a few minutes, or even a few seconds. In fact, though
“casual” was not yet a major genre designation among game critics, the online suites that
transform Evangelical gaming around the turn of the century tended to be quite “casual” as well.
Perhaps, finally, Evangelical casual play should not be hastily equated with its worldly
equivalent, nor only read as a result of ease of programming. Perhaps Evangelical games are
narrowing to become a film that the player can flit in and out of, always coming back, an
Conclusion
The future presents a horizon rolled up like a scroll. This chapter examined a curious
phenomenon, usually called “immersion,” wherein new digital media obscure their interruption
of the analog world such that humans say that they are inside those media. With successive
255
generations of digital media, this has developed into a worldly mythology that there is room for
us inside of the computer, and that some new interface will soon arrive to welcome us into it.
While “immersion” is an ideal shared by many Evangelical game designers and players, there
seems to be some significant dissonance within Evangelical gaming, much like the dissonance on
the problem of violence. Evangelical media production draws users back to the present, offering
creation of new technologies, and an attendant humanity that increasingly comes to understand
evocative. It is unlike the ambivalence that tends to accompany popular exuberance myths about
entry into one’s media (including recent health discourse concerning “unplugging”), because the
time retrieved has no future-directed purpose. This is not the time of health or efficiency. On one
hand, it seems to be unnecessary to even stop using the computer to experience this now-time,
but on the other, it creates a situation from which immersion becomes temporarily unthinkable.
Significantly, Evangelicals have forged this alternate relationship to the worldly chronotope of
digital progress, not despite but through their own digital projects.
We can anticipate the subjects of immersion, the humans who cannot imagine a part of
themselves that does not fit into a computer, but we cannot know whether they will ever arrive.
Should they eventually appear, it is difficult to predict how they might interface with Evangelical
Christianity. Christians may dedicate themselves to explaining that this full immersion is a
misconception, that the complete person has a significantly analog life, or they may cheerfully
embrace the subjects of immersion as potentially Christian people, extending current projects in
256
digital religion to meet the needs of an immersible humanity. Evangelicals have created a digital
culture that draws their own attention back to the present, to rediscover the urgent work of living
now, when humans are always still outside, and it makes the speculative futures of immersion
hard to tell. We can be certain, however, that should the subjects of immersion ever arrive, they
257
Chapter 7
Conclusion:
The New Creation
Your grandmother's face is different in heaven. But then again, everything is different.
When you were a child, she gave you a toy rocket ship, and after she passed away it helped you
to remember her. Even when you became an adult, and an astronaut, you wore that toy rocket as
a necklace. You had it on when your real ship was struck by an asteroid. But it seemed to be
gone when your grandmother found you lying there – somehow – on the green grass of heaven.
She thought it was funny that you didn't recognize her perfected form.
In her new body and under her new name, Axis, your grandmother leads you to Christ's
258
Great Throne. She guides you through the golden streets, explains heaven's radiant machinery,
and shows you a modified Hebrew alphabet for solving puzzles. She walks on water and rides a
winged horse – anything she can do to bring you to Christ. Everything is glorious, and
everything is surprising.
….
Heaven: The Game (Genesis Works, 2009) is a particularly fitting beginning for our
parting reflections because it merges several different kinds of last-things, materials from the
book of Revelation, from science-fictional futures, and from personal reflections on human
focused on end-times preparation. Between then and his trademark on “Heaven: the Game” in
2002, several components of the final game seem to have already come together under the names
LD2, The Awakening and Heaven: Home of the Kings.401 Heaven's architectural style already
included golden towers, spinning rings, and a great gate like a single shimmering pearl, the roar
of the lions had already been recorded, the spaceship theme was established, and the face of your
angelic grandmother had already appeared, though it once belonged to “Trishal,” whose hair and
clothing were slightly different.402 But early promotional materials also describe scenes
featuring a “Book of Life,” and “Marriage Supper,” neither of which arrived in the final game.403
These might appear in McCauley's later games, or they may vanish entirely. At present, we are
401
Last Days.org, “LD2: Music Internet Video,” archived by the Internet Archive, May 1, 2002, accessed March 14,
2014, http://wayback.archive.org/web/20020501115907/http://www.lastdays.org/ld2lowt.htm .
402
Heaven the Game, “Enter,” archived by the Internet Archive, October 17, 2002, accessed March 14, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20021017103929/http://www.heaventhegame.com/ .
403
Heaven the Game, “Time Dome,” archived by the Internet Archive, October 24, 2002, accessed March 14, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20021210220305/http://heaventhegame.com/timedomet.htm .
259
almost a year past the promised release date for Journey to Heaven, but this may not mean
anything. Heaven itself was promised for six years before players could access its “World
Immersion Technology.”404
Heaven: The Game thus reminds us that our visions of things to come are tangled up with
the present from which we view them. To see what is coming changes us, and as we change so
too does our vision of the future. McCauley’s vision of Heaven bears bright marks of his own
milieu, but this is harmonious with his intent to deploy visions of the future in saving souls now.
My own present task lacks these dramatic stakes, but it is structurally similar. I must now
consider what will come after a study from which I have not yet extricated myself. To envision a
horizon beyond the present text mobilizes conclusion, but it seems we must move forward
through recapitulation.
This study began by situating religious video games within Karen Barad's objective
realist ontology, discovering the “digital,” “religious,” and “playful” as relational dynamics
rather than fields of objects. Each of these came to resemble an involution at a border of
humanity – with algorithms, non-human agents, or playthings, respectively – and the religious
video game, as located though all three, was discovered to be a site of extraordinary liveliness.
We then began to clarify this study's particular object by considering the stakes of gaming for
Evangelical Christianity. Evangelicals share a media project in that they seek to draw people out
from the world and organize their lives around the Bible and the Cross, conducting this work
through any medium that will sustain it. But this requires Evangelical media criticism to discern
404
Genesisworks LLC, “What is Heaven?” archived by the Internet Archive April 5, 2013, accessed March 14, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20130405055943/http://www.heaventhegame.com/
260
which part of any given cultural form can transmit the Gospel, and which part must be discarded.
Evangelical media criticism encounters the video game through two very different tensions that
add up to more than a single whole. The first project, the human-computer interfaith, extends far
beyond nameable religions and helps us understand what Evangelical creativity can tell us about
the religious dynamics of digital culture more generally. The second project, spiritual warfare,
helped us to grasp the specificity of Evangelical media, not only as the engagement of different
cultures, but of different creatures. On one side, Evangelical video games negotiate what it
means to live among the digital, and on the other they negotiate what it means to live among the
demonic.
The following pair of chapters then offered historical specificity for this engagement’s
halves. First, the work of religious game creation and critique in ongoing negotiations between
computers and communities of faith was further clarified through a full history of digital
religion. I explained how I located 773 religious games released between 1982 and 2010, and
presented that list’s four major curves as an interference pattern produced by other technocultural
phenomena like changes in licensing, the creation of new systems of distribution, and shifting
Internet cultures. The three decades of digital religion before religious games set the stage for
their emergence by showing how computers first entangled with religious communities, and
recent app based computing granted them a dramatic finale, skyrocketing beyond this study’s
capacity.
Spiritual warfare was then clarified through an exploration of the place of Evangelical
Christianity in the game-violence debates. This chapter found that criteria for identifying
game-violence are largely shared by Evangelical Christian critique and its worldly parallel:
261
“blood and gore,” cutting edge technologies of photorealism, and presumed imitability. Worldly
media, however, orient the problem with game-violence as a consequentialist matter, working
primarily to prevent murder and its attendant litigation, while Evangelical media critique
contributes the additional possibility of treating the player-in-play as a significant moral agent.
In response to video arcades, the appearance of “Full Motion Video” in games, and the
Columbine massacre, Evangelical critique consistently disrupts their own agreement with
meaningful danger of games. This flickering further possibility of critique created room for what
we might call sacred play, and after theorizing it through Walter Bejnamin’s “Critique of
Violence,” I devoted the following chapter to tracing one vector of its historical transformation.
demons and the ritual practices of video game nonviolence are in constant motion. Six
successive First-Person Shooters stage conflict against demons who relate variously to the
player’s own moral terrain. Taken as a series, these games seem to other the demons further and
further, moving them from positions wherein they can entice the player to make mistakes and
face the consequences, to locations where they can only serve as villains without motives. I did
not attempt to explain the sudden (and now decade-long) vanishing of the Evangelical FPS, but I
frame a closing possibility that these games may have been replaced by an emerging mode of
Rather than closing with predictions for the future of Evangelical gaming, my study
instead closed with some specific reflections on how Evangelical gaming might relate to futures
262
as such. As Evangelical and worldly media critique had tended to agree on the referent of
“violence,” but not on its importance, so too do these fields of critique tend to use the word
“immersive” to describe a progressive tendency of users being further and further brought inside
computers, but Evangelical media critique seems to present a variant temporality that injects
caution into our understanding of the process. Examining Evangelical games alongside Internet
accountability software, I presented the possibility that, again, Evangelical critique contains a
possibility for considering human-computer interactions in the present that disrupts future driven
worldly understandings. An attention to the player's present seems to disrupt any approach to an
immersed future.
To return again to the vision of Heaven above, I offer a “save game” screen because, of
the various kinds of ending video games offer, these greatly resemble the ideal conclusion for a
study of this sort. Digital religion is a field in motion, and Evangelical video gaming shows no
sign of losing its place as one of digital religion’s most vibrant ranges of creativity. This
summary seems to be neither an unqualified defeat (“Game Over”), nor a conclusive victory
(“The End”), but a pause where we can record our progress, a place to begin again later. The
What, then, are the affordances of a study of this sort? What can one do with it? It
depends, I suppose, which parts one interacts with and how. Some elements are relatively
detachable, while others could only be extracted in connection with their various examples,
arguments, and puns. Immediately after this concluding chapter, for instance, my table of
263
religious video games presents the most comprehensive vision of this field yet complied, and I
formatted it specifically for easy portability. I hope someone tries simply offering the list to
undergraduates stumped for research topics. On the other hand, I expect “Crockford’s Reductio”
would help scholars of game-violence understand the debates, but I would recommend that one
let the phrase pack some context when it travels, lest it arrive sounding like frivolous, if poetic,
bitterness. In either case, the dearth of attention that has been paid to religious video gaming thus
far is surprising, and I hope this dissertation will help to attract that attention, and perhaps even
help to focus it in valuable directions. I will close, then, with four possibilities for how this
Evangelical media critique is complex and in constant motion. The traction it provides
against worldly media critique, including our own as scholars of religion, merits further
appreciation. Like the chapters above examining different applications of “violence” and
“immersion,” future studies would do well to consider other matters of concern around which
Evangelical critique clusters. Studies of how Evangelical games negotiate the meaning of “sex,”
for instance, could examine song selections in Christian dance-pad games, and draw findings
into conversation with material cultural artifacts like purity rings, and finally even bodily
alternatives to Role-playing games like the Forgiveness trilogy, or situate Spiritual Warfare and
Axys Adventures as specific responses to the Legend of Zelda series, but it could then tie these to
the religious debates surrounding Harry Potter, Dungeons & Dragons, and the Ouija Board.
But this study also hopes to inspire focused research projects running parallel to this one,
264
for instance, would be particularly valuable, and the appendix to this study would provide
hundreds or dozens of case studies, respectively. Traditions like Yoga, Tarot, and Mormonism,
because their game creation has been relatively limited, have not even received the scant
scholarly attention that has been paid to the larger gaming cultures, and the instances I found
could easily ground a chapter in a larger study of these religions’ various digital explorations.
Though this dissertation focused on religious traditions, further, I also attempted to gesture
toward other phenomena in the broader nebula of religious activity unmoored to religions: The
playerships would be immense, but rewarding. In particular, concerted studies of blasphemy and
fantasy in video games would allow us to speak with new clarity on practices of
As two final possibilities for future research, I would like to recommend experience-near
experiments in digital religion. I was asked several times, as I conducted this study, whether I
was going to set up situations in which I could observe people playing Christian games. The
short answer is that I did, but I situated my findings as background information. In the end, I
applied my own experience of play as a necessary part of the research apparatus and
contextualized myself among the ghostly players implied by published accounts, and by the
games themselves. I adopted this tact because, early in my research process, I taught a course on
“Religious Games and Sacred Play” in which I invited all of the undergraduate participants to
play religious games and document their experiences. I learned from this work that researching
particular instances of play requires methods almost wholly incompatible with the cultural
history I hoped to perform. In the context of the classroom, the students encountered the games
265
as exercises rather than as evangelism or entertainments, and their descriptions of play reflected
this, but their descriptions were also brilliantly perverse and particular, reflecting biographical
specifics that I was not equipped to contextualize. No player can stand in for any other. To
understand players instead of games, scholars would have to apply intensive psychological
is the opposite of the laboratory studies that reduce children to abstract quanta of potential
violence. Inspired by the attention that Evangelical critique directs toward them, scholars whose
disciplines specialize in such things would do well to perform intimate studies of players-at-play.
But the study which I most hope follows the present one would be a more personally
opinionated academic study, perhaps like Andrew Beaujon's Body Piercing Saved My Life.405 As
a music critic, he crafted his study of Evangelical popular culture from an academic margin that
both demanded historical rigor, and offered space for nuanced reflections on his own enjoyment
of, and frustration with, Christian rock music. I have argued that video games are a special sort
of software primarily because they mobilize play, and a study that centers the writer's own
jouissance while engaged with religious games would reveal a great deal. Though I suspect that I
will not write it, I hope someday to read an autoethnography in which the author undergoes
religious conversion through engagement with digital religion. On which note, though I have
shared some specific moments of joy, confusion, and moral perplexity, this dissertation avoided
any general statement on whether Evangelical video games are enjoyable. So, in closing, yes,
some of them are wonderful, unforgettably good games. And all of them are surprising.
405
Andrew Beaujon, Body Piercing Saved My Life (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2006).
266
Appendix: Religious Video Games (1982-2010)
Family Bible Fun:The Prophets 1982 Christian / Biblical Atari 400/800 Homecomputer Software Inc.
11
http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-family-bible-fun-the-prophets_13310.html
The Great Gospel Game 1982 Christian / Biblical Atari 400/800 Endehl Public Domain Software
12
http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-great-gospel-game-_20040.html
Christian
Pax Man 1982 VIC 20 Brother Tobias Stanislaus
13 (Episcopalian)
http://books.google.com/books?id=FzAEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA15
Children's Bible Quiz 1983 Christian / Biblical Atari 400/800 Moses Engineering
14
http://books.google.com/books?id=40a5AAAAIAAJ&q=%22moses+engineering%22
Music Machine 1983 Christian / Biblical Atari 2600 Sparrow
15
https://atariage.com/software_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=321
268
Heather's Easter Egg Hunt 1989 Christian / Biblical DOS Ginnie and Tom Reynolds
36
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20110701141416/http://wurb.com/if/game/75
Taboo: The Sixth Sense 1989 Christian / Biblical NES Tradewest
37
http://www.mobygames.com/game/nes/taboo-the-sixth-sense
Christian
Nephi's Quest 1990 DOS TechnoCrafts Unlimited Inc.
38 (LDS)
http://www.mobygames.com/game/nephis-quest
NES / DOS / Sega
Bible Adventures 1991 Christian / Biblical Wisdom Tree
39 Genesis
http://www.wisdomtreegames.com/games/bibleadv/
Exodus: NES / DOS / Sega
1991 Christian / Biblical Wisdom Tree
40 Journey to the Promised Land Genesis
http://www.wisdomtreegames.com/games/exodus/
Appendix: Religious Video Games (1982-2010)
Moses: The Exodus 1992 Christian / Biblical CDi Interlight Productions, Inc.
51
http://www.mobygames.com/game/cd-i/moses-the-exodus
Noah's Ark 1992 Christian / Biblical Windows / Mac Wisdom Tree
52
http://www.wisdomtreegames.com/games/noahsark/
Onesimus:
1992 Christian / Biblical Windows Ark Multimedia Publishing
53 A Quest for Freedom
http://www.mobygames.com/game/onesimus-a-quest-for-freedom
NES / DOS / Sega
Spiritual Warfare 1992 Christian / Biblical Wisdom Tree
54 Genesis
http://www.wisdomtreegames.com/games/spiritualwarfare/
The Story of Jonah 1992 Christian / Biblical CDi Interlight Productions, Inc.
55
http://www.mobygames.com/game/story-of-jonah
272
The Story of Samson 1992 Christian / Biblical CDi Interlight Productions, Inc.
56
http://www.mobygames.com/game/cd-i/story-of-samson
Words of Jesus 1992 Christian / Biblical DOS Testament Software
57
https://archive.org/details/WordsofJesus_1020
Hebrew: Divide and Conquer 1992 Jewish Apple II Davka Software
58
http://www.worldcat.org/title/hebrew-divide-conquer/oclc/32877972
Jerusalem Stones 1992 Jewish Windows Davka Software
59
http://www.thejewisheye.com/pack2.html
Assorted Trivia 1993 Christian / Biblical DOS Genesoft
60
http://cd.textfiles.com/psl/pslv2nv07/FILESBBS/GAMES/DOS/TRIVIA.BBS
Appendix: Religious Video Games (1982-2010)
The Adventures of CJ's Closet 2001 Christian / Biblical Windows Kay Productions
286
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20050206035656/http://kayproductions.com/products.html
The Key 2001 Christian / Biblical Windows Mug Software
287
http://web.archive.org/web/20021121222623/http://www.godcentric.com/thekey/games.htm
The Last Bible 2001 Christian / Biblical Windows DistantStar Productions
288
http://web.archive.org/web/20051210062655/http://www.distantstarproductions.com/
The Prodigal Son 2001 Christian / Biblical Windows / Mac Sunday Software
289
http://web.archive.org/web/20011006034745/http://sundaysoftware.com/prodigal/prodigal.htm
The Ten Commandments 2001 Christian / Biblical Windows / Mac Sunday Software
290
http://web.archive.org/web/20021205012120/http://sundaysoftware.com/tenbrief.htm
Appendix: Religious Video Games (1982-2010)
Abraham and Sarah 2002 Christian / Biblical Windows / Mac Sunday Software
321
http://web.archive.org/web/20020207045217/http://www.sundaysoftware.com/abe/abe.htm
Acts 13:30
2002 Christian / Biblical Windows Roxie Carroll
322 Memory Match
http://web.archive.org/web/20020310083949/http://www.akidsheart.com/bible/april/act13_30.htm
ArmoQuest II 2002 Christian / Biblical Online Rick Ellinger
323
http://web.archive.org/web/20031011104926/http://www.rhinoprints.net/games/
ArmoQuest III 2002 Christian / Biblical Online Rick Ellinger
324
http://web.archive.org/web/20031011104926/http://www.rhinoprints.net/games/
Babble 2002 Christian / Biblical Windows Good Book Games
325
http://web.archive.org/web/20031204160613/http://www.goodbookgames.com/GBGames/Babble/index.html
The Good News Broadcasting
299
The Jesus Quiz 2003 Christian / Biblical Online Salvation Outreach Ministry
411
http://web.archive.org/web/20031228150915/http://www.matthew223.org/
The Nem Rehsif 2003 Christian / Biblical Windows Gibson Productions
412
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20040205210211/http://www.timshen.truepath.com/tag.html
Treasure 2003 Christian / Biblical Online Christian Computer Games.Net
413
http://web.archive.org/web/20030621102313/http://www.christiancomputergames.net/english/frame_home.html
Veggie Tales:
2003 Christian / Biblical Mac / Windows ValuSoft, Inc.
414 Veggie Carnival
http://www.allgame.com/game.php?id=43863
Veggie Tales:
2003 Christian / Biblical Windows ValuSoft, Inc.
415 Creativity City
http://www.allgame.com/game.php?id=42953&tab=screen
308
The Jar Activity Center 2003 Muslim Windows Fine Media Group
426
http://www.noorart.com/the_jar_activity_center_arabic_software
The Journey to Wild Divine:
2003 New Age Windows Wild Divine Project
427 The Passage
http://web.archive.org/web/20051203044742/http://www.wilddivine.com/20J3K4K1/
ABC Bible Coloring Book 2004 Christian / Biblical Windows Roxie Carroll
428
http://web.archive.org/web/20041126045910/http://akidsheart.com/gamesd/biblegames.htm
Adventures in Odyssey:
2004 Christian / Biblical Windows Digital Praise
429 The Sword of the Spirit
http://www.christcenteredgamer.com/index.php/reviews/18-computer/4686-adventures-in-odyssey-sword-of-the-spirit
Adventures in Odyssey:
2004 Christian / Biblical Windows Digital Praise
430 The Treasure of the Incas
http://www.christcenteredgamer.com/index.php/reviews/18-computer/4491-adventures-in-odyssey-treasure-of-the-incas
Appendix: Religious Video Games (1982-2010)
Three Wise Men 2007 Christian / Biblical Online Bible Game Zone
626
http://web.archive.org/web/20080815103122/http://www.biblegamezone.com/
Timothy and Titus 2007 Christian / Biblical Windows Sunday Software
627
http://www.sundaysoftware.com/titus/
Tower of Babel 2007 Christian / Biblical Online Bible Game Zone
628
http://web.archive.org/web/20080815103122/http://www.biblegamezone.com/
Tower of Babel 2007 Christian / Biblical Online LittleAngelsGames.com
629
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20081121081529/http://www.littleangelsgames.com/games.aspx
Two of Each Kind 2007 Christian / Biblical Online Bible Game Zone
630
http://web.archive.org/web/20080815103122/http://www.biblegamezone.com/
Appendix: Religious Video Games (1982-2010)
The "Ha'adamah" Blessing Game 2008 Jewish Windows / Mac Yalon Keret
666
http://web.archive.org/web/http://yalonkeret.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5&Itemid=6
The "Ha'etz" Blessing Game 2008 Jewish Windows / Mac Yalon Keret
667
http://web.archive.org/web/http://yalonkeret.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5&Itemid=6
The "Hagefen" Blessing Game 2008 Jewish Windows / Mac Yalon Keret
668
http://web.archive.org/web/http://yalonkeret.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5&Itemid=6
The "Hamotzi" Blessing Game 2008 Jewish Windows / Mac Yalon Keret
669
http://web.archive.org/web/http://yalonkeret.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5&Itemid=6
The "Mezonot" Blessing Game 2008 Jewish Windows / Mac Yalon Keret
670
http://web.archive.org/web/http://yalonkeret.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5&Itemid=6
Appendix: Religious Video Games (1982-2010)
The "She'hakol" Blessing Game 2008 Jewish Windows / Mac Yalon Keret
671
http://web.archive.org/web/http://yalonkeret.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5&Itemid=6
Ulpan Arcade 2008 Jewish Windows Davka Software
672
http://www.davka.com/cgi-bin/product.cgi?product=467
Parasha Challenge 2008 Jewish Online Chabad-Lubavitch Media Center
673
http://www.chabad.org/kids/itchekadoozy/parshah_game_show_cdo/aid/725535/jewish/Ki-Teitzei.htm
Ali's Baggy Thoub 2008 Muslim Online Emaan Productions
674
http://web.archive.org/web/20080306010027/http://www.emaanproductions.com/
FAARIS:
2008 Muslim Windows Qadimoon
675 The Boy Who Became a Warrior
http://www.qadimoon.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=99&Itemid=127
334
Giant Puzzle Adventure 2009 Christian / Biblical Online Christian Broadcasting Network
691
https://web.archive.org/web/20091118134247/http://superbook.cbn.com/games/a-giant-puzzle-adventure.aspx
Gizball 2009 Christian / Biblical Online Christian Broadcasting Network
692
https://web.archive.org/web/20091118134247/http://superbook.cbn.com/games/gizball.aspx
Gizmo's 3 Point Shootout 2009 Christian / Biblical Online Christian Broadcasting Network
693
https://web.archive.org/web/20091118134247/http://superbook.cbn.com/games/gizmos-3-point-shootout.aspx
Gizmo's Gigabyte Grab 2009 Christian / Biblical Online Christian Broadcasting Network
694
https://web.archive.org/web/20091118134247/http://superbook.cbn.com/games/gizmos-gigabyte-grab.aspx
Gizmo's Lab Round-Up 2009 Christian / Biblical Online Christian Broadcasting Network
695
https://web.archive.org/web/20091118134247/http://superbook.cbn.com/games/gizmos-lab-round-up.aspx
336
Phoebe's Photo Recall 2009 Christian / Biblical Online Christian Broadcasting Network
701
https://web.archive.org/web/20091118134247/http://superbook.cbn.com/games/phoebes-photo-recall.aspx
Superbook Artifact Adventure 2009 Christian / Biblical Online Christian Broadcasting Network
702
https://web.archive.org/web/20091118134247/http://superbook.cbn.com/games/superbook-artifact-adventure.aspx
Superbook Matchup 2009 Christian / Biblical Online Christian Broadcasting Network
703
https://web.archive.org/web/20091118134247/http://superbook.cbn.com/games/superbook-match-up.aspx
Superbook Says 2009 Christian / Biblical Online Christian Broadcasting Network
704
https://web.archive.org/web/20091118134247/http://superbook.cbn.com/games/superbook-says.aspx
Tower of Babel 2009 Christian / Biblical Online My Bible Games
705
http://www.mybiblegames.com/games.php
337
Big Bible Town 2010 Christian / Biblical Online Third Day Games
731
www.BIGBibleTown.com
Brain Cafe:
2010 Christian / Biblical Android Urbian
732 Test Your Faith
http://appgravity.com/android-app/brain/org-urbian-android-quiz-bible/
Build a Church 2010 Christian / Biblical Online Big Light Games
733
http://web.archive.org/web/20100819232942/http://www.biglightgames.com/index.php?task=category&id=106
Crossman 2010 Christian / Biblical Online Big Light Games
734
http://web.archive.org/web/20100819232942/http://www.biglightgames.com/index.php?task=category&id=106
Feed the Cows 2010 Christian / Biblical Online Barry Ijmker
735
http://christgaming.com/feed-the-cows/
340
Jesus Birth Bibleionaire 2010 Christian / Biblical Online Big Light Games
741
http://web.archive.org/web/20100819232942/http://www.biglightgames.com/index.php?task=category&id=106
Keys of the Kingdom 2010 Christian / Biblical Windows Left Behind Games
742
http://web.archive.org/web/20101102171028/http://lbgstore.com/keysofkingdom.html
Left Behind 3:
2010 Christian / Biblical Windows Left Behind Games
743 Rise of the Antichrist
http://web.archive.org/web/http://www.leftbehindgames.com/LBGStore/index.php/leftbehind/left-behind-3.html
Little Shepard 2010 Christian / Biblical Online Big Light Games
744
http://web.archive.org/web/20100424073348/http://www.biglightgames.com/index.php?task=category&id=106
Noah's Ark Hidden Objects 2010 Christian / Biblical Online Big Light Games
745
http://web.archive.org/web/20100819232942/http://www.biglightgames.com/index.php?task=category&id=106
341
“25th Anniversary for Bible Software is Celebrated with New Release.” Business Wire, October
11, 2005.
Abanes, Richard. What Every Parent Needs to Know About Video Games. Eugene, OR: Harvest
House, 2006.
Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1998.
Aichele, George. “Jesus' Violence,” in Violence, Utopia, and the Kingdom of God Fantasy and
Ideology in the Bible, edited by Tina Pippin and George Aichele, 72-91. London:
Routledge, 2002.
Albin, Len. “The Best Video Games of 1982.” TV Guide, December 4-10, 1982.
All Devotion, “Daily Message from God,” Accessed March 13, 2014.
http://www.alldevotion.com/ .
Allen, F. G. “The New Birth: Its Nature and Necessity.” Accessed January 23, 2014.
http://www.sermonindex.net/modules/articles/index.php?view=article&aid=3452 .
Alter, Robert. Yoga in Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
345
Apple Inc. “Apple Launches iPad.” Accessed March 3, 2014.
https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/01/27Apple-Launches-iPad.html .
Arizona State University. “The New ASU Story: Athletes.” Accessed January 25, 2014.
http://www.asu.edu/lib/archives/asustory/athletes.htm .
Arsenault, Dominic. “System Profile: The Nintendo Entertainment System [NES].” In The Video
Game Explosion: A History from PONG to Playstation and Beyond edited by Mark J. P.
Wolf, 109-112. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2008.
"'Ask a Rabbi' on the Web: Online Rabbis Offer Answers.” Accessed January 19, 2014.
http://www.jta.org/2006/09/11/archive/ask-a-rabbi-on-the-web-online-rabbis-offer-
answers .
Associated Press. “Court Rules Against Sanitizing Films.” Fox News Online, July 6, 2006.
http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_wires/
2006Jul08/0,4675,FilmSanitizers,00.html.
Association for Religion and Intellectual Life. “Interfaith Internet – Website Catalogue and
Reviews.” Archived by the Internet Archive, October 29, 1996. Accessed January 19, 2014.
https://web.archive.org/web/19961029045955/http://aril.org/.
Atari Age. “The Music Machine: Manual.” Accessed February 10, 2014.
http://atariage.com/manual_thumbs.html?SoftwareLabelID=321 .
Atari History Museum. “The Atari Mindlink.” Accessed November 25, 2013.
http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/consoles/2600/mindlink.html.
"Atari Parts Are Dumped." The New York Times September 28,1983.
Au, Wagner James. “Masters of 'Doom.” Salon.com. Accessed January 21, 2014.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/05/05/doom/print.html
Austin, Bruce A. Immediate Seating: A Look at Movie Audiences. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth
Publishing, 1989.
Bäck, Alan. “Thinking Clearly About Violence.” Philosophical Studies 117.1 (Jan. 2004): 219-
230.
Bado-Fralick, Nikki and Rebecca Sachs Norris. Toying With God: The World of Religious Games
and Dolls. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981.
---. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1984.
346
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
Barglow, Raymond. The Crisis of the Self in the Age of Information: Computers, Dolphins, and
Dreams. London: Routledge, 1994.
Barry, Ellen. “New Media Let Christians See No Evil, Hear No Evil.” Boston Globe, December
12, 1999.
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share. New York: Zone Books, 1991.
“The Battle for America’s Youth.” The New York Times, January 5, 1982.
Beaujon, Andrew. Body Piercing Saved My Life. Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2006.
Bebbington, D. W. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s.
London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.
Bee, Marty and Steve Van Nattan. “Computer Games: Are they Honoring to God?” Blessed
Quietness Journal. Accessed January 22, 2014.
http://blessedquietness.com/journal/housechu/games.htm .
Bell, Genevieve. “The Age of Auspicious Computing.” Interactions 11.5 (Sept.-Oct. 2004): 76-77.
Benjamin, Walter. “Critique of Violence.” In Selected Writings 1, edited by Marcus Bullock, and
Michael W. Jennings, 236-252. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press,
2005.
---. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, edited by
Hannah Arendt, 253-265. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
347
---. “Toys and Play.” In Selected Writings 2.1, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland,
Gary Smith, and Rodney Livingstone, 117-121. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of
Harvard Univ. Press, 2005.
Bensley, Lillian and Juliet van Eenwyk. “Video Games and Real-Life Aggression: Review of the
Literature.” Journal of Adolescent Health 29 (2001): 244–257.
Berge, Brian L. “My Palm Software: Qabalah Trainer.” Archived by the Internet Archive,
October 10, 2002. Accessed January 9, 2014.
http://web.archive.org/web/20021010034800/http://www.brianberge.net/software/qabalahtr
ainer/.
Bivins, Jason. Religion of Fear. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
B G Foods. "About." Archived by the Internet Archive, February 20, 2009. Accessed May 5,
2011. http://www.bgfoods.com/underwood/underwood_about.asp .
Block, Jerald. “Lessons from Columbine: Virtual and Real Rage.” American Journal of Forensic
Psychology 28.2 (2007): 5-34.
Blundell, Gregory S. “Personal Computers in the Eighties.” BYTE, January 1983: 166-182.
Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games. Cambridge, MA : MIT
Press, 2007.
Boulos, Maged N. Kamel. "Encyclopedia of the First Millennium of Christianity 1998 – Second
Edition." Accessed December 23, 2013. http://www.zeitun-eg.org/encyclop.htm .
“Bowdlerize, v.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. June 2011. Oxford University Press.
Accessed January 24, 2014. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/22199 .
Boyd, Greg. Satan and the Problem of Evil: Constructing a Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy.”
Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001.
---. “A Brief Outline and Defense of the Open View.” Accessed January 22, 2014.
http://www.gregboyd.org/essays/essays-open-theism/response-to-critics/ .
---. “Spiritual Warfare: Free Will and the Legacy of Augustine." Archived by the Internet Archive,
February 26, 2000. Accessed January 22, 2014.
https://web.archive.org/web/20000301200152/http://www.eternalwarriors.com/ .
348
Bozon. “GDC 2008: Wii Ware Interview: IGN Sits Down with Tom Prata to Discuss Nintendo's
New Service.” Accessed January 24, 2014. http://www.ign.com/articles/2008/02/21/gdc-
2008-wii-ware-interview .
Brewster, Tom. “Security Firms are Getting Hit by Increasing Numbers of Attacks, as Hackers
Get More Violent Against the Industry, a Security Expert Warns.” Archived by The
Internet Archive, April 17, 2011. Accessed January 20, 2014.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20110417154447/http://www.itpro.co.uk/632788/hackers-
get-more-violent-against-security-firms .
Briggs, Asa and Peter Burke. A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet.
Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005.
Bruning, Carol L. “Video Mania.” Living with Children 15 (October - December 1992): 14-15.
Buckley, James. Christians and the Theater. New York: Nelson & Philips, 1875. Accessed
January 20, 2014, http://books.google.com/books?id=vZEXAAAAYAAJ&ots .
Burton, D. M. “Concordances and Word Indexes: The Fifties.” Computers and the Humanities
15.1 (June 1981): 1-14.
Campbell, Heidi. “How Religious Communities Negotiate New Media Religiously.” In Digital
Religion, Social Media and Culture, edited by Pauline Hope Cheong, Peter Fischer-Nielsen,
Stefan Gelfgren, and Charles Ess, 81-96. New York: Peter Lang, 2012.
---. "Islamogaming: Digital Dignity via Alternative Storytelling," in Halos and Avatars: Playing
Video Games with God, edited by Craig Detweiler, 63-74. Louisville, KY: Westminster
John Knox, 2010).
Card, Stuart K., Thomas P. Moran, and Allen Newell. The Psychology of Human-Computer
Interaction. Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1983.
Carpenter, Pete. “Inside Out: Curing the Video Game Addict.” Living with Teenagers 17 (April
1995): 6.
Carr, Debora L. Home on the Strange: More Tales from My Albu-Quirky Journals. Dog Ear
Publishing, 2010.
Catechesis of the Popes. “World Communications Day.” Accessed March 11, 2014.
http://catechesisofthepopes.wordpress.com/other-themes/media/world-communications-
day/ .
349
Catholic Information Center on the Internet. “Catholic Information Center on the Internet.”
Archived by the Internet Archive, Feburary 4, 2014. Accessed January 19, 2014.
https://web.archive.org/web/19970204074851/http://catholic.net/RCC/homepage/CICI_Inf
o.html.
CBS Interactive. “Search Games: Rhythm >> Dancing.” Accessed January 18, 2014.
http://www.gamefaqs.com/ .
---. “Two Guys Interview Part One.” Accessed January 23, 2014.
http://www.ccgr.org/index.php/reviews/21-misc-articles/4263-two-guys-software-
interview-part-1 .
CERN. “Twenty Years of a Free, Open Web.” Archived December 8, 2014. Accessed January 18,
2014. http://wayback.archive.org/web/20131208134409/http://info.cern.ch/ .
Champeon, Steve. “JavaScript: How Did We Get Here?” Accessed January 19, 2014.
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2001/04/06/js_history.html .
Chen, Adrian. “Q & A: Ralph Bagley.” Willamette Week, July 20, 2005. Accessed January 22,
2014. http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-4626-ralph_bagley.html .
350
The Christian Bible Reference Site. “About.” Archived by the Internet Archive, August 14, 2001.
Accessed January 19, 2014.
---. “Problems with Quizzes.” Archived by the Internet Archive November 11,1999. Accessed
January 19, 2014.
http://web.archive.org/web/19991111155742/http://www.twopaths.com/quiztrouble.htm
Christian Computer Games.Net. "Bap." Archived by the Internet Archive, December 20, 2001.
Accessed Feburary 10, 2014,
http://web.archive.org/web/20011220085307/http://www.christiancomputergames.net/
english/OL_bap/index.html .
Christian Coders Network. “About the CCN.” Archived by the Internet Archive January 27, 2001.
Accessed March 7, 2014.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20010127010700/http://www.christiancoders.com/
about.shtml .
---. “CCN Speed Game Contest.” Archived by the Internet Archive June 15, 2009. Accessed
March 7, 2014. http://wayback.archive.org/web/20090615061630/http://www.gameace.org/
~ChristianCoders .
---. “Member List.” Archived by the Internet Archive August 23, 2002. Accessed March 7, 2014.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20020823112116/http://www.christiancoders.com/cgi-
bin/ubb-cgi/memberlist.cgi .
Christian Developers Network. “Where's CCN? (Christian Coders Network).” Archived by the
Internet Archive January 15, 2008. Accessed March 7, 2014.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20080115211545/http://www.christiandevs.com/ .
---. “Andrew Lunstad of Eternal Warriors, Makers of 'The War in Heaven' Offers Some Insights
into their Game and the Christian Gaming Market." Archived by the Internet Archive,
March 16, 2009. Accessed January 22, 2014.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20090316094147/http://www.christiangaming.com/
Reviews/XWarInHeavenInterview.shtml.
351
Christian Gamers Online, Inc., “Position Statement.” Accessed March 12, 2014.
http://christiangamers.net/cms/index.php/2012-12-30-22-09-12/positionstatement .
Chu, Eric. "Android Marketplace Update: Support for Priced Applications." Accessed January 24,
2014. http://wayback.archive.org/web/20140106225843/http://android-
developers.blogspot.com/2009/02/android-market-update-support-for.html .
Church of England, Board for Social Responsibility. Cybernauts Awake: Ethical and Spiritual
Implications of Computers, Information Technology, and the Internet. Church House
Publishing, 1999.
Church Web Works. “Web Freedom.” Archived by the Internet Archive, October 11, 2003.
Accessed January 11, 2014.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20031011145435/http://www.churchwebworks.com/site/w
eb_freedom.php .
CK. Comment on “Important Update for PC, Mac, iPad, and iPhone.” Accessed January 24, 2014.
http://globible.com/blog/?p=1826&cpage=1#comment-59996 .
Clubey. “The SNES Version and the SFC Version.” Archived by The Internet Archive October
30, 2011. Accessed January 20, 2014.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20111030062857/http://www1.linkclub.or.jp/~clubey/
other%20platforms/snes2.html .
Corellianrogue. “Kinect 2 Support for Xbox One Indie Games Confirmed!" Accessed January 24,
2014. http://123kinect.com/kinect-2-support-for-xbox-one-indie-games-confirmed/41479/
“Computer Exchange Spreading Christian Message.” New York Times, August 24, 1984.
Covenant Eyes. “Danger Signs of Internet Addiction.” Archived by the Internet Archive,
December 11, 2001. Accessed March 8, 2014.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20011211181344/http://www.covenanteyes.com/
addictionsigns.php .
---. “Purpose Statement.” Archived by the Internet Archive, April 7, 2003. Accessed March 8,
2014. http://wayback.archive.org/web/20030407062654/http://www.covenanteyes.com/
about.php .
Crockford, Douglas. “Now You're Really Playing With Power: The Expurgation of Maniac
Mansion for the Nintendo Entertainment System, The Untold Story.” Accessed January 20,
2014. http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/maniac.html .
352
CSPAN. “Video Game Violence (December 9, 1993).” Accessed January 21, 2014. http://www.c-
spanvideo.org/program/52848-1 .
Clarens, Carlos. An Illustrated History of Horror and Science Fiction Films: The Classic Era
(1895-1967). New York: Putnam, 1967.
Cobb, Nathan. “'Gleelok's is Four' 'Digdogger's Five' Toys Go Back to the Future as Home Video
Games Return in a Big Way.” Boston Globe, March 13, 1988.
Dahl,Roald. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1964.
Daily Mail Reporter. “Over 60 Percent of Internet Traffic Now Generated by BOTS that Can
Distribute Malware, Steal Data and Swipe Passwords.” Daily Mail Online, December 13,
2013. Accessed March 3, 2014. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2531021/Over-
60-percent-internet-traffic-
generated-BOTS-distribute-malware-steal-data-swipe-passwords.html .
Dasal, Bob. “The Olive Tree Bible Software Story – Using PDAs to Study the Word.” Pulpit
Helps, March, 2004. Accessed January 30, 2014.
http://www.pulpithelps.com/www/docs/1090-6962 .
Day, Vox [Theodor Beale]. The Irrational Atheist Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins,
Harris, and Hitchens. Dallas, Tex: BenBella Books, 2008.
---. “Halo and the High Art of Games: A History of the First Person Shooter.” In Halo Effect: An
Unauthorized Look at the Most Successful Video Game of All Time, edited by Glenn
Yeffeth and Jennifer Thomason, 153-164. Dallas: BenBella Books, 2006.
Dennett, D. C. Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1995.
DeMoss, Robert G. (Bob) Jr. “Media Play: Violence at School.” Home Life 52 (November 1999):
60.
---. “Media Play: When You Haven't Got a Prayer.” Home Life 53 (December 1998): 60-61.
353
DeMoss, Robert G. (Bob) Jr. and G.W. Austin. “Media Play: The Games People Play.” Home
Life 51 (June 1998): 60-61.
Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Detweiler, Craig. “Born to Play.” In Halos and Avatars: Playing Video Games with God, edited
by Craig Detweiler. Louisville, KY: Westminster 'John Knox, 2010: 190-196.
Digital Praise. “Dance Praise PC Dance Game Adds Global Flavor Through Expansion Pack
Volume 5: Praise and Worship.” Archived by the Internet Archive, November 19, 2008.
Accessed February 15, 2014.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20081119151804/http://www.digitalpraise.com/pr/062720
07.html .
---. “Dance Praise: Over 50 Songs.” Archived by the Internet Archive, August 18, 2007. Accessed
January 18, 2014.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070818201931/http://www.digitalpraise.com/flash.php .
Dillon, Roberto. The Golden Age of Video Games. Boca Raton, FL: Taylor and Francis, 2011.
354
Dyer-Witheford, Nick and Greig De Peute. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video
Games. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Eller, Claudia. “FTC Playing Parent or Big Brother?” Los Angeles Times, September 29, 2000.
Emmerich, Tim. "An Interview with Two Guys Software, the Producers of Eternal War: Shadows
of Light." Accessed January 23, 2014.
http://www.christiananswers.net/spotlight/games/2002/interview-eternalwar.html .
---. “Shepherd’s Staff.” Archived by the Internet Archive February 14, 2004. Accessed June 4,
2011.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20040214141745/http://www.graceworksinteractive.com/S
hepStaff/index.html .
Entertainment Software Association. “Sales, Demographic, and Useage Data 2013.” Accessed
March 16, 2014. http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/esa_ef_2013.pdf .
Erdozain, Dominic. The Problem of Pleasure: Sport, Recreation and the Crisis of Victorian
Religion. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2010.
Family Based Internet, L.L.C. “About us.” Archived by the Internet Archive June 24, 1998.
Accessed March 10, 2014.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/19980624014153/http://www.safeplace.net/home/aboutus/
aboutus.htm.
Fraenkel, Aviezri. “The Responsa Storage and Retrieval System: Whither?” Accessed November
25, 2013. http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~fraenkel/
Ferguson, Christopher J. “Evidence for Publication Bias in Video Game Violence Effects
Literature: A Meta-Analytic Review.” Aggression and Violent Behavior 12 (2007), 470-
482.
355
Galloway, Alexander. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2006.
“Gametrailers.com: Best & Worst Games.” First broadcast November 14, 2006 on MTV.
Garreau, Joel. “Office Minefield: Computers Make Work a Lot Easier. They Make Play Easier
Too.” The Washington Post, March 9, 1994.
Genesisworks LLC. “What is Heaven?” Archived by the Internet Archive, April 5, 2013.
Accessed March 14, 2014.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20130405055943/http://www.heaventhegame.com/ .
Geraci, Robert. Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual
Reality. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
“Germany lifts Doom sales ban after 17 years.” BBC News. September 1, 2011. Accessed January
1, 2014. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14748027 .
Gibson, James. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New York: Taylor and Francis
Group, 1986.
Gilbert, Ben. “Sony Lifting Development License Fee on Playstation Vita and Mobile Starting …
Yesterday.” Accessed January 24, 2014. http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/08/sony-ps-
mobile-licensing-fee-lifted/
The Gold Country Girls. “Then and Now #10: Underwood Deviled Ham.” Accessed January 25,
2014. http://goldcountrygirls.blogspot.com/2008/09/then-and-now-11-underwood-deviled-
ham.html .
Golden, Daniel. “In Search of Princess Toadstool.” The Boston Globe, November 20, 1988.
356
Golding, Torin. “SL Humanism Group.” Accessed March 12, 2014.
http://slhumanismgroup.blogspot.com/.
Goldstein, Jeffrey. “Violent Video Games.” In The Handbook of Computer Game Studies, edited
by Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005: 341-357.
Goodale, Gloria. “Video Game Offers Young Recruits a Peek at Military Life.” Christian Science
Monitor, May 31, 2002. Accessed March 2, 2014.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0531/p18s01-algn.html .
GreyPawn. “Vas Rel Sanct – Church in UO.” Accessed March 12, 2014.
http://stratics.com/community/threads/vas-rel-sanct-church-in-uo.162454/.
Grant, Wilson Wayne. “Your Teen's Health: Can My Teen Overdose on Video Games?” Living
with Teenagers 15 (April-June 1993): 41.
Grossman, Cathy Lynn. “Faithful Build a Second Life for Religion Online.” USA Today (online),
April 1, 2007, accessed January 29, 2014,
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/gaming/2007-04-01-second-life-religion_n.htm .
Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Harbin, Duane. “Fiat Lux: The Electronic Word.” In Formatting the Word of God: An Exhibition
at Bridwell Library, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University (10/1998-
1/1999), edited by Valerie R. Hotchkiss and Charles C. Ryrie. Bridwell Library, Dallas TX.
Harmon, Amy. “Yosef Kazen, Hasidic Rabbi and Web Pioneer, Dies at 44.” The New York Times
December 13, 1998. Accessed January 19, 2014.
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/13/nyregion/yosef-kazen-hasidic-rabbi-and-web-
pioneer-dies-at-44.html.
Hartz Søraker, Johnny. “Virtual Worlds and Their Challenge to Philosophy: Understanding the
‘Intravirtual’ and ‘Extravirtual.’” Metaphilosophy 43.4 (July, 2012): 499-512.
Hayse, Mark. “Ultima IV: Simulating the Religious Quest.” In Halos and Avatars: Playing Video
Games with God, edited by Craig Detweiler, 34-47. Louisville, KY: Westminster John
Knox, 2010.
357
Heaven the Game. “Enter.” Archived by the Internet Archive, October 17, 2002. Accessed March
14, 2014.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20021017103929/http://www.heaventhegame.com/ .
Heaven the Game. “Time Dome.” Archived by the Internet Archive, October 24, 2002. Accessed
March 14, 2014.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20021210220305/http://heaventhegame.com/
timedomet.htm .
Heistand, Jack. “Video Rating System.” Testimony before U.S. Joint Congressional Committee.
Rating Video Games: A Parent's Guide to Games, Witness Panel #7. HRG-1993-SJS-0035.
Dec. 9, 1993; Mar. 4, Jul. 29, 1994. Text in: ProQuest Congressional Hearings Digital
Collection; Accessed: January 21, 2014.
Heller, Helmut. “Hello, Welcome to My Psion Page.” Accessed January 30, 2014.
http://heller.userweb.mwn.de/psion/psion.html .
Hendershot, Heather. Saturday Morning Censors: Television Regulation Before the V-Chip.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.
---. Shaking the World for Jesus : Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Herwig, Adrian and Philip Paar. “Game Engines: Tools for Landscape Visualization and
Planning?” Accessed January 20, 2014.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.134.75&rep=rep1&type=pdf.
Himalayan Academy. “1994: Year in Review.” Hinduism Today, December 1994. Archived by
the Internet Archive, November 5, 1996. Accessed January 19, 2014.
https://web.archive.org/web/19961105222607/http://www.hinduismtoday.kauai.hi.us/
Dec94.html
---. “Nine Mac II's Enhance Hawaii's Hindu Network." Hinduism Today Magazine (Web Edition)
October 1988. Accessed January 19, 2014.
http://www.hinduismtoday.com/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=561.
Hindman, Matthew Scott. The Myth of Digital The Myth of Digital Democracy. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2009.
358
“Hmmm: User Review.” Last modified June 5, 2000. Accessed January 22, 2014.
http://download.cnet.com/The-War-In-Heaven-demo/9241-2095_4-1498884.html?
messageID=781233 .
Hollerith, Herman. “An Electrical Tabulating System.” The Quarterly (Columbia School of Mines)
X.16 (April 1889), 238-255.
Holvast, René. Spiritual Mapping in the United States and Argentina 1989-2005: A Geography of
Fear. Boston: Brill, 2009.
Hoover, Stewart. Religion in the Media Age. New York: Routledge, 2006.
“Hot Holiday Season Anticipated for Microsoft Home.” PR Newswire, November 14, 1994
Howard, Robert Glenn. “Crusading on the Vernacular Web: The Folk Beliefs and Practices of
Online Spiritual Warfare.” In Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital
World, edited by Trevor J. Blank, 159-174. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 2009.
Howe, Arthur. “Warner Slump May Signal End of Video-Game Craze.” Philadelphia Inquirer,
Friday, December 10, 1982.
Hui, Yuki. “What is a Digital Object?” Metaphilosophy 43.4 (July, 2012): 380-395.
IBJamon. “The Legend of Spyro: The Eternal Night,” Accessed January 24, 2014,
http://www.christcenteredgamer.com/index.php/reviews/19-console/4943-the-legend-of-
spyro-the-eternal-night-wii-ps2 .
Illinois Senate (94th General Assembly, 2005). SR 0041. Accessed March 18, 2014.
http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/fulltext.asp?DocName=&SessionId=50&GA=94&
DocTypeId=SR&DocNum=41&GAID=8&LegID=15758&SpecSess=&Session=
"immerse, v." Oxford English Dictionary Online. December 2013. Oxford University Press.
Accessed January 24, 2014. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/91880 .
India NIC. "Holy Bible – King James Version." Accessed January 20, 2014.
http://appgravity.com/android-app/lifestyle/indiaNIC-android-TheHolyBible .
359
InsideOut Studios. "Granny's Bible Dojo." Accessed January 24, 2014.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/grannys-bible-dojo/id438317978?mt=8 .
“Integrity Online Bouncing Back from the Online Bombs.” Mississippi Business Journal
September 9, 2002. Accessed March 8, 2014,
http://msbusiness.com/blog/2002/09/09/integrity-online-bouncing-back-from-dotcom-
bombs/
The International Arcade Museum. “Moppet Video: Noah’s Ark.” Accessed November 25, 2013.
http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=10620 .
“Internet.” Dictionary of Information Science and Technology. Hershey, PA: Idea Group
Reference, 2007.
Internet Christian Library. “Not Just Bibles: A Guide to Christian Resources on the Internet."
Accessed January 7, 2014. http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/christian-
resources.text/cres-04.txt .
Internet Movie Database Contributors. “The Magic Door.” Accessed November 25, 2013.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368521/ .
“Interview with Game Developer Patrick Frye.” Accessed January 18, 2014.
http://mlarcherstories.blogspot.com/2008_09_01_archive.html .
Ishii, Hiroshi. “Tangible Bits: Beyond Pixels.” In Proceedings of the Second International
Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction, edited by Albrecht Schmidt, Hans-W.
Gellersen, Elise van den Hoven, and Ali Mazalek, xv-xxv. New York: Association for
Computing Machinery.
Jackson, Leah. “Vic – The Next Generation.” Accessed January 25, 2014.
http://news.nsula.edu/home/vic-the-next-generation/ .
360
“Jaguar Version of Wolfenstein 3D Restores Original Plot, Unleashes the Power of 64-bit
Technology; 64-bit Technology of the U.S.-Made Jaguar Flexes its Muscle Once Again.”
Business Wire, August 1, 1994.
Jarvie, Ian. Philosophy of the Film: Epistemology, Ontology, Aesthetics. New York: Routledge,
1987.
Jenkins, Doug and DeAnn. “Palm LDS Resources.” Archived by the Internet Archive, Feburary 2,
2001. Accessed January 12, 2012.
http://web.archive.org/web/20010202024400/http://www.palmlds.com/ .
Johnson, Herrick. A Plain Talk About the Theater (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company,
1882). Accessed January 20, 2014.
http://books.google.com/books?id=1wIOAAAAYAAJ&dq .
Keret, Yalon. “Game Programming & Graphic Design.” Archived by the Internet Archive, June 5,
2008. Accessed January 18, 2014.
http://web.archive.org/web/20080605115400/http://www.yalonkeret.info/index.php?option
=com_content&view=article&id=5&Itemid=6 .
Kerr, Peter. “Issue and Debate: Should Video Games be Restricted by Law.” The New York Times,
June 3, 1982.
Kent, Stephen. Ultimate History of Video Games. Roseville, CA: Prima Publishing.
King, William E. “Why a Blue Devil: The Story of the Duke Mascot.” Accessed January 25, 2014.
http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/uarchives/history/articles/bluedevil .
Knopf, Jim. “The Origin of Shareware.” Accessed March 30, 2013. http://www.asp-
software.org/users/history-of-shareware.asp .
KR155E. “Exclusive: Nintendo 3DS Dev Kit Prices Leaked." Accessed January 24, 2014.
http://www.planet3ds.net/news/nintendo-3ds-dev-kit-prices-leaked/ .
361
Kushner, David. Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop
Culture. New York: Random House, 2003.
Laetz, Brian and Joshua J. Johnston. “What is Fantasy?” Philosophy and Literature 32.1 (April
2008): 161-172.
LaHaye, Tim. A Quick Look at the Rapture and the Second Coming. Eugene, Oregon: Harvest
House Publishers, 2013.
Larsen, Elena. “Wired Churches, Wired Temples: Taking Congregations and Missions into
Cyberspace.” Washington D.C.: Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2000.
Last Days.org. “LD2: Music Internet Video.” Archived by the Internet Archive, May 1, 2002.
Accessed March 14, 2014.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20020501115907/http://www.lastdays.org/ld2lowt.htm .
---. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Latour, Bruno and Couze Venn. “Morality and Technology: The End of the Means.” Theory,
Culture & Society 19.5/6 (2002): 247- 260.
The Lausanne Movement. “The Lausanne Covenant.” Accessed Feburary 14, 2014.
http://www.lausanne.org/en/documents/lausanne-covenant.html .
Lawless, Charles. “Pharisees and Video Games.” Proclaim 22 (April – June, 1992): 48-49.
Lem, Stanislaw. "The Eleventh Voyage." In The Star Diaries: Further Reminiscences of Ijon
Tichy. New York: Seabury Press, 1979: 38-73.
362
Lenoir, Timothy and Henry Lowood. “Theatres of War.” In Collection, Laboratory, Theater
Scenes of Knowledge in the 17th Century, edited by Helmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte,
and Jan Lazardzig, 427-457. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005.
Levy, Luis and Jeannie Novak. Game Development Essentials: Game QA & Testing. Clifton Park,
NY: Delmar/Cengage Learning, 2010.
Lewis, James R. Satanism Today. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2001.
Lightside Games. “Journey of Jesus: The Calling.” Accessed January 26, 2014.
https://www.facebook.com/appcenter/journeyofjesus .
Lin, Jennifer. “Toys: Video Games Zapped by Lure of the Traditional.” The Philadelphia
Inquirer, Wednesday, August 29, 1984.
Linne, Aaron. "B&H Introduces 'Bible Navigator X' for XBOX 360." Accessed January 20, 2014.
http://hcsb.org/hcsb/b/authorjournal/archive/2009/11/10/b-amp-h-introduces-bible-
navigator-x-for-xbox-360.aspx .
Lubeck, Scott. “Scrolling through the Bible.” Texas Monthly December 1984: 206-208.
Lundberg, Christian O. “Enjoying God's Death: The Passion of the Christ and the Practices of an
Evangelical Public.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 95: 4, 387 – 411.
---. “Left Behind: Eternal Forces Statement from LB Games Inc.” Archived by the Internet
Archive May 26, 2013. Accessed January 19, 2014.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130526172019/http://www.leftbehindgames.com/
controversy.php
---. “Using the New Media for Good.” Accessed March 15, 2014.
http://www.leftbehindgames.com/blog/?p=3
Mace, Scott. “In Focus: Spiritual Software.” InfoWorld, December 27, 1982: 15-16.
Mack, Stephan. “Two Worlds.” Archived by the Internet Archive, February 14, 2008. Accessed
January 24, 2014.
363
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20080214123805/http://www.plaingames.com/games/revie
ws/review.asp?id=241
Manlove, C. N. “The Image of the Journey in Pilgrim's Progress: Narrative versus Allegory.” The
Journal of Narrative Technique 10.1 (Winter, 1980): 16-38.
Martin, C. Dianne. “An Alternative to Government Regulation and Censorship: Content Advisory
Systems for Interactive Media.” In The V-Chip Debate: Content Filtering from Television
to the Internet, edited by Monroe Edwin Price, 179-194. Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1998.
Maruska, Petr. “My Lucasarts Collection: Maniac Mansion.” Accessed May 4, 2011.
http://collection.maruska.cz/detail.php?id=01&name=Maniac_Mansion .
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
Media Watch Blog. “Teaching Boys to Kill.” Archived by the Internet Archive, March 13, 2005.
Accessed January 22, 2014.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20050313213900/http://www.mediawatch.com/
wordpress/ .
Mitchell, Ellen. “Video Game Rooms Targeted by Towns.” The New York Times, December 13,
1981.
364
Monnin, Alexandre and Harry Halpin. “Toward a Philosophy of the Web.” Metaphilosophy 43.4
(July, 2012): 361-379.
Moore, Kay W. “Parents: Sharing and Supporting.” Living with Preschoolers 21 (October –
December 1993): 26-27.
Moore, Robert Lawrence. Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Moret, Ross. “Beyond Sola Scriptura: Open Theism within American Cultural Trends.” Stone-
Campbell Journal 10 (Fall 2007): 213-229.
Morgan, David. The Sacred Gaze. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2005.
---. Visual Piety. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998.
Morrison, David E. et al. Defining Violence. Lutton, UK: University of Lutton Press, 1999.
Murawski, John. "Hunt for the World's Oldest WWW Page Leads to UNC Chapel Hill." News &
Observer, May 24, 2013. http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/05/24/2915835/hunt-for-
worlds-oldest-www-
page.html .
Mullen, Nancy. “Nintendo Reigns in Toyland, but Parents Rule at Home.” Christian Science
Monitor (Boston, MA), December 5, 1988.
Nappa, Mike. “Media Minutes.” Living With Teenagers (October 1999): 32.
Napier, David. “The Use of Video Games in the Church.” Church Recreation Magazine 15 (Jan.
– Mar. 1985): 47-48.
“Navy Ponders Move to Virtual Reality.” Defense and Aerospace Electronics 1.20 (November 4,
1991).
---. “Beyond Digital.” Wired, June 12, 1998. Accessed March 25, 2011.
http://web.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/Wired/WIRED6-12.html
Neusner, Jacob. “Scholars and Machines.” In History and Torah: Essays on Jewish Learning.
New York: Schocken Books, 196: 68-75.
365
Newgren, Kevin. “BioShock to the System: Smart Choices in Video Games.” In Halos and
Avatars: Playing Video Games with God, edited by Craig Detweiler, 135-149. Louisville,
KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010.
Nielsen, Martin. "The Story of Color Dreams." Accessed January 20, 2014.
http://www.nesworld.com/colordreams2.php .
N'Lightning Software Development, Inc. “Mission Statement.” Archived by the Internet Archive
January 7, 2001. Accessed March 3, 2014,
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20010107205200/http://www.n-lightning.com/corp.htm .
Nuttycombe, Dave. “Pac-Man, Tetris -- and Now It's Doom's Day; Here's a Game on the Cutting
Edge. And the Slicing Edge. And Hacking. And Gouging…” The Washington Post ,
October 10, 1994.
Ojeda-Zapata, Julio. “Christian Video Games: Teen-Age Gamers Pick Up the Battle of Good Vs.
Evil.” The Vindicator (Youngstown, OH), October 14, 2000.
---. “Take a Sip of the Future at Hot Java Sites.” St. Paul Pioneer Press, Monday, December 11,
1995.
Olive Tree Bible Software. "The Dominant Animal in Mobile Bible Publishing." Accessed March
15, 2014. http://blog.olivetree.com/2009/08/12/olive-tree-in-the-newspaper/ .
Olson, Roger E. “American Christianity and Semi-Pelagianism.” Accessed January 22, 2014.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2011/02/american-christianity-and-semi-
pelagianism/ .
Orsi, Robert. Between Heaven and Earth. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Oxford, Nadia. “Ten Facts About the Great Video Game Crash of ’83.” Accessed November 25,
2012. http://www.ign.com/articles/2011/09/21/ten-facts-about-the-great-video-game-crash-
of-83
366
“Pac-Man Fever.” Time, April 5, 1982.
Parish, Jeremy. “Illicit Thrills and Dubious Pleasures.” Accessed January 19, 2014.
http://www.gamespite.net/toastywiki/index.php/Games/
G5-IllicitThrillsAndDubiousPleasures .
Pasto, Nick. “Why a Redesign?” Blog post January 6, 2008. Archived by the Internet Archive,
September 10, 2010. Accessed February 1, 2014.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20100918172645/http://bomtoons.com/index.php?
start=35 .
Peckham, Matt. “Unholy MMO-LY” sidebar to “God Mode: Fragging for King, Country, and
Creator.” Accessed March 16, 2014. http://www.1up.com/features/god-mode .
Pemberton, H. Earl. “The Curve of Culture Diffusion Rate.” American Sociological Review 1.4
(August, 1936): 547-556.
Pinnock, Clark H. et al. The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional
Understanding of God. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1994.
Pohl, Frederick. The Tunnel Under the World . Project Gutenberg ebook collection, April 14,
[1955] 2010. Accessed January 24, 2014. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31979/31979-
h/31979-h.htm.
Pontifical Council for Social Communications, “Pope 2 You.” Archived by the Internet Archive
May 25, 2009. Accessed March 11, 2014.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20090525104517/http://www.pope2you.net/index.php?id_t
esti=6
Poole, W. Scott. Satan in America: The Devil We Know. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers, 2009.
367
Pontifical Council for Social Relations. “Pope2You.” Accessed March 18, 2014.
http://apps.facebook.com/popetoyou .
Promise Keepers. “This is a Movie You Have to See!” Archived by the Internet Archive,
February 13, 2004. Accessed January 20, 2014.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20040213013151/http://www.promisekeepers.org/paff/pas
s/paffpass20.htm#fortsonarticle .
Propadeutic. “Super 3-D Noah's Ark 'Walkthrough.'” Accessed January 20, 2014.
http://www.gamefaqs.com/snes/563038-super-noahs-ark-3d/faqs/18347 .
PR Web. “Trilogy Studios Announces Launch of 'Movie Mask' Website.” PR Web, January 23,
2002. Accessed January 31, 2014.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2002/01/prweb32292.htm.
The Prophecy Club.“ “Stephen Dollins, Occult Holidays Revealed.” Accessed January 25, 2012.
http://www.prophecyclub.com/meetings_dollinsholidays.htm .
Pulling, Pat. The Devil’s Web: Who is Stalking Your Children for Satan? Lafayette, LA:
Huntington House, 1989.
PureFun. “Games.” Archived by the Internet Archive, December16, 2004. Accessed March 2,
2014. http://wayback.archive.org/web/20041216173324/http://www2.pure-
fun.com/modules/games/ .
Quantified Self Labs. “About the Quantified Self.” Accessed January 24, 2014.
http://quantifiedself.com/about/.
Ratrap99. “Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening (PS2).” Accessed February 2, 2014.
http://www.christcenteredgamer.com/index.php/reviews/19-console/4478-devil-may-cry-3-
dantes-awakening-ps2 .
Raschenbusch, Walter. A Theology for the Social Gospel. New York: MacMillan, 1917.
Rauss, Robert. “Video Games: Another Perspective.” Church Recreation Magazine 15 (Jan. –
Mar. 1985): 49.
Reasoner, Mark. “What Does the Bible Say About the End Times?” In Rapture, Revelation, and
the End Times: Exploring the Left Behind Series. Edited by Bruce David Forbes and Jeanne
Halgren Kilde, 71-98. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
368
Reaves, Ken. “Video, Computer, and Internet Games (Review).” Living With Teenagers (Parent
Ministry Edition) 22 (March 2000): 31.
---. “Video, Computer, and Internet Games.” Living With Teenagers (Parent Ministry Edition) 22
(July 2000): 31.
---. “Video Game Violence.” Living with Teenagers 22 (September 2001): 31.
Reimer, Jeremy. “Total Share: 30 Years of Personal Computer Market Share Figures.” Accessed
November 25, 2013. http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/12/total-share.ars/ .
Religious Gaming Wiki Contributors. “Online Game Suites.” Accessed January 11, 2014.
http://religiousgaming.wikia.com/wiki/Online_Game_Suites .
Rice, Elmer. “A Voyage to Purilia – X.” The New Yorker, December 14, 1929.
Rifkin, Ira. “Kibitzing in New Tongue: by Computer: Valley New Age Synagogue Operates
'Bulletin Board.'” Los Angeles Times January 7, 1988. Accessed January 9, 2014.
http://articles.latimes.com/1988-01-07/local/me-33963_1_bulletin-board.
Roemhildt, Rachel. “Family Fare Folks Find Ways to Clean Up Offending Films.” Insight on the
News, December 25, 1998. Accessed March 18, 2014.
http://theeditedmovieencyclopedia.blogspot.com/1998/12/family-fare-folks-find-ways-to-
clean-up.html .
Robbins, Joel. “The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity.” Annual Review of
Anthropology 33 (2004): 117-143.
Rogers, Everett. The Diffusion of Innovations. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1962.
The Romero (John Romero). Comment on “Ultima Underworld: The Sygian Abyss's Influence on
Wolf3D.” Accessed January 20,2014. http://rome.ro/smf/index.php?topic=2798.0;wap2.
Romero, John. [Adrian Carmack modeling Doom's Baron of Hell, ca. 1993]. Accessed March 16,
2014. http://romero.smugmug.com/Video-Games/The-
Archives/480_BdMqY#14482_rE9zd .
Salmans, Sandra. “P.& G.’s Battles with Rumors.” The New York Times, July 22, 1982.
Saltshakers Messianic Community. "That Amazing Week." Archived by the Internet Archive,
October 11, 2004. Accessed January 19, 2014.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20041011062937/http://www.saltshakers.com/mall/
ama.htm .
369
---. "Unity." Archived by the Internet Archive, October 29, 2000. Accessed January 20, 2014.
http://web.archive.org/web/20001029151630/http://oursalvation.com/unity.htm.
Sanchez, Dina. “Evangelists Work to Spread the Gospel in Cyberspace – Ministy Leaders are
Teaming Up With Technology Professionals to Harness the Power of the Internet.” The
Orlando Sentinel November 2, 2000.
---. “Saints Hall of Fame (May 1999- May 2000).” Accessed January 22, 2014.
http://saintsofvirtue.com/hallfame2.html .
The Shluchim Office. “Tefillin: Jewish Wrap (2004).” Accessed January 29, 2014.
http://www.shluchim.org/content/img/mivtzoim/tefillin.pdf .
Schnoebelen, William. “Straight Talk on Dungeons and Dragons.” Accessed January 25, 2012.
http://www.chick.com/articles/dnd.asp.
Schreibman, Susan, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, eds. A Companion to Digital Humanities.
Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Accessed March 18, 2014.
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/ .
Shea, Tom. “Linkletter: Computers for Church.” InfoWorld October 11, 1982.
Silverman, Dwight. “`Doom' Bursts Onto College Computer Networks.” Houston Chronicle,
December 15, 1993.
Sisler, Vit. “Middle Eastern and Islamic Video Games.” Accessed January 27, 2014.
http://www.digitalislam.eu/findInSection.do?limit=50§ionId=1115&page=1.
370
Soma Games. "About Us." Accessed January 23, 2014.
http://www.somagames.com/about_us.php .
---. "G: Into the Rain." Accessed January 23, 2014. www.somagames.com/ARC/index_g.php
Spinelli, Martin. “Democratic Rhetoric and Emergent Media: The Marketing of Participatory
Community on Radio and the Internet.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 3.2
(August 2000): 268-278.
The Staging Point. "Sin." Archived by The Internet Archive, August 19, 2001. Accessed March 2,
2014, http://web.archive.org/web/20010819180654/http://www.stagingpoint.com/games/
sin.shtml .
---. “Game Ratings.” Archived by the Internet Archive, February 6, 2002. Accessed March 2,
2014, http://wayback.archive.org/web/20020206221424/http://stagingpoint.com/games .
Stivers, Richard. Technology as Magic: The Triumph of the Irrational. New York: Continuum
Publishing, 2001.
Stone, Harold S. Introduction to Computer Organization and Data Structures. New York:
McGraw Hill, 1972.
Sunday Software Inc. "Sunday Software's Somewhat Infamous 'NO' Shelf." Accessed January 18,
2014. www.sundaysoftware.com/noshelf.htm.
Sutton, Kenneth. “Going to Church in Second Life.” UUWorld Magazine (Feburary 2, 2007).
Accessed January 29, 2014. http://www.uuworld.org/life/articles/16206.shtml .
Swirve.com. “Games.” Archived by the Internet Archive, October 6, 2000. Accessed January 19,
2014. http://wayback.archive.org/web/20001006230832/http://games.swirve.com/.
Taylor, John G. “Spiritual Battlefield: Fresno Man Creates a Computer Game that Puts Right
Over Might.” The Fresno Bee, September 11, 2000.
Tench, James. “Review: Call of Duty 3.” Archived by the Internet Archive, February 10, 2007.
Accessed January 24, 2014.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20070210175825/http://www.plaingames.com/games/revie
ws/review.asp?id=215
371
Therrien, Carl. “CD-ROM Games.” In The Video Game Explosion: A History from Pong to
Playstaion and Beyond, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, 121-126. Westport, Conn. : Greenwood
Press, 2008.
The Ticalc.org Project. “TI-85 Basic Games.” Accessed January 29, 2014.
http://www.ticalc.org/pub/85/basic/games/ .
ThyWorks.com. "About Us.” Archived by the Internet Archive October 29, 2007. Accessed
March 13, 2014.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20071029134513/http://thyworks.com/about_us.php .
Todd75238. Comment on "NIV Bible (Tecarta): Customer Reviews." Accessed January 24, 2014.
http://app-
store.appspot.com/?url=viewContentsUserReviews%3FpageNumber%3D0%26type%3DP
urple%2BSoftware%26id%3D310295776%26onlyLatestVersion%3Dtrue .
True Grace Ministries. “Online Bibles and Commentaries on Bible Versions.” Archived by the
Internet Archive, December 25, 1997; August 7, 1997; November 16, 1999; December 16,
2000. Accessed January 19, 2014.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://www.auburn.edu/~allenkc/bible.html .
Turing, Alan. “Computer Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind 59 (1950), 433-460. Digital version
accessed March 3, 2014, http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html .
Turner, Victor. Forest of Symbols. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1967.
---. “From Liminal to Liminoid in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology.”
Rice University Studies 60.3 (1974): 53-92.
Twain, Mark. “Letters from the Earth.” Accessed January 25, 2014. http://www.sacred-
texts.com/aor/twain/letearth.htm .
372
Universal Videogame List. “Hellraiser.” Accessed January 20, 2014. http://www.uvlist.net/game-
7863-Hellraiser .
U.S. Congress. 109th Congress. “Family Movie Act of 2005,” Section 202: Exemption from
Infringement for Skipping Audio and Video Content in Motion Pictures. Accessed January
20, 2014. http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/pl109-9.html .
Valesh, Jon. “Nintendo, America!” Archived by the Internet Archive, February 20, 1999.
Accessed January 19, 2014.
https://web.archive.org/web/19990220025116/http://www.valesh.com/~jon/computers/
nintendo.html .
Via Tech LLC. “Topics.” Archived by the Internet Archive, October 20, 2003. Accessed March
11, 2014. http://wayback.archive.org/web/20031020124556/http://www.cgdc.org/pages/
topics.htm .
Victor, Jeffrey S. Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend. Peru, IL: Open Court,
1993.
Virtual Advisor Inc. “Gamesville.com: Wasting People's Time Since 1996.” Accessed January 19,
2014. http://www.va-interactive.com/inbusiness/editorial/biztech/articles/gamesville.html .
Voloj, Julian. “Virtual Sanctuary,” Jewish Daily Forward, February 16, 2007. Accessed February
11, 2014. http://forward.com/articles/10101/virtual-sanctuary/ .
Warner, Michael. “The Evangelical Public Sphere.” Accessed March 18, 2014.
http://repository.upenn.edu/rosenbach/2/ .
---. “The Evangelical Public Sphere.” Presentation and written notes. Critical Speakers Series.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, September 22, 2011).
Willis, Brett. “Movie Review: The Passion of the Christ.” Accessed January 20, 2014.
http://christiananswers.net/spotlight/movies/2004/thepassionofthechrist.html .
373
Wright, Antoine R.J. Mobile Ministry Magazine 1.1 (2004). Accessed March 1, 2014.
http://www.mobileministrymagazine.com/Issues/mmm_v1.pdf .
Wagner, C. Peter. “The AD2000 United Prayer Track.” Accessed February 15, 2014.
http://www.ad2000.org/re00623.htm .
---. Spiritual Warfare Strategy: Confronting Spiritual Powers. Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image
Publishers, 1996.
Wagner, Rachel. “The Play is the Thing.” In Halos and Avatars: Playing Video Games with God,
edited by Craig Detweiler, 47-62. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010.
"Welcome to Future Soft: Products." Archived by the Internet Archive, January 28, 1999.
Accessed January 19, 2014. http://web.archive.org/web/19990128161335/http://
www.future-soft.com/newweb/Products.htm .
Wesley, David T. A., and Gloria Barczak. Innovation and Marketing in the Video Game Industry
Avoiding the Performance Trap. Farnham [Surrey, England]: Gower, 2010.
Wikipedia Contributors. “Dance Pad Video Games.” Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. Accessed
January 18, 2014. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_pad_video_games .
---. “List of AO Rated Products.” Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. Accessed January 21, 2014.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AO-rated_products.
---. “List of Christian Video Games by Release.” Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. Accessed
January 27, 2014. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_video_games_by_release
---. “Veggietales." Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. Accessed January, 20, 2014.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VeggieTales.
The Wild Divine Project. “The Game.” Archived by the Internet Archive, December 16, 2003.
Accessed February 1, 2014. http://wayback.archive.org/web/20031216014946/http://
www.wilddivine.com/content.php?cont_id=2 .
Williams, Dmitri. “A Brief Social History of Game Play.” In Playing Video Games: Motives
Responses, and Consequences, Peter Vorderer and Jennings Bryant, eds., Taylor & Francis
e-library, 2009: 229-247.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Society and Culture. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1983.
374
Winchester, Rev. Samuel Govern. The Theater. Philadelphia: William S. Martien, 1840. Accessed
January 20, 2014, http://books.google.com/books?id=v5MVAAAAYAAJ&dq .
Woeger, Robert. "New Bible Internet Extensive File Library." Accessed January 19, 2014.
http://www.theoblogical.org/dlature/itseminary/Dialogue/mail/msg00112.html.
Woodyard, Chris. “Nintendo Keeps Color Dreams Up Worrying : Video Games.” LA Times
October 24, 1990. Accessed January 19, 2014. http://articles.latimes.com/1990-10-
24/business/fi-2859_1_video-game-market.
Wren, Celia. “Point, Click & Cheat: 'War in Heaven,' the Computer Game [Software Review].”
Commonweal 127.6, March 24, 2000.
Xbus Games. “About.” Archived by the Internet Archive, April 9, 2012. Accessed January 23,
2014.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20120409093949/http://www.xbusgames.com/about-xbus-
games .
Young, Jason. “Eternal War: Shadows of Light." Accessed January 18, 2014.
http://www.plaingames.com/games/reviews/review.asp?id=59 .
Zimmerman, Erik. "Kabbalah Trainer V1.99." Accessed January 19, 2014. http://www.qabalah-
trainer.com/ .
375
Zingerbug.com. "Customizable MySpace Angel Comments."Archived by the Internet Archive,
November 7, 2007. Accessed January 24, 2014.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20071107083211/http://www.zingerbug.com/Comments/C
ustomizable/angels_page1.htm .
376