A recent academic study into religion within video games by University of Missouri doctoral student Greg Perreault took a look at a wide range of games including Mass Effect 2, Final Fantasy 13, Assassin’s Creed, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, [...]]]> Interesting piece on the topic of Religion in Video Games:

A recent academic study into religion within video games by University of Missouri doctoral student Greg Perreault took a look at a wide range of games including Mass Effect 2, Final Fantasy 13, Assassin’s Creed, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and Breath of Fire. Although he set out to explore the depictions of organized religions to spiritual religions, what he instead found was an emphasis on violence.

“In most of these games, there was a heavy emphasis on a “Knights Templar” and crusader motifs,” Perreault said. “Not only was the violent side of religion emphasized, but in each of these games religion created a problem that the main character must overcome, whether it is a direct confrontation with religious zealots or being haunted by religious guilt.”

Read the whole thing here.

“Kaio Interactive was [...]]]> Some friends of mine who I got to hang out with at the Christian Game Developers Conference last summer have recently launched a campaign on Kickstarter to raise the funds they need to create a great game based on the Codebearers series of book. They describe the project like this:

“Kaio Interactive was formed out of the determination of its founder to establish a game development studio to produce great games with engaging stories. Specifically great games that would appeal to all ages. A major element of any great game is having the great story to go with it, in securing the license for games based on the award winning books by the Miller Brothers (Chris & Allan) Kaio now hold the keys to a fantastic realm of allegorical story telling, which appeals to both young and old alike.

In association with Lance Priebe one of the original founders of Club Penguin, we’re bringing these great stories to the game-playing world.”

The guys behind this are all deeply professional and know what they’re doing, so you can be sure that your money will be put to good use. They’re also Christians who are committed to making family-friendly games – it would be great to see more people like them succeed in bringing quality games to market, so do make a contribution if you can!

Os Hillman kicked off the day talking about the Seven Mountains that influence our culture: arts & entertainment, business, education, family, government, media and religion. He outlined how crucial [...]]]> The Christian Game Developers Conference 2011 is now well under way, and it’s been a great day of fascinating talks and top notch company.

Os Hillman kicked off the day talking about the Seven Mountains that influence our culture: arts & entertainment, business, education, family, government, media and religion. He outlined how crucial the media and entertainment industries are in shaping how we think and respond to issues, and how historically the church has abandoned Hollywood and given up trying to work with them. Os gave us the challenge to use our creativity and inventiveness to exert a positive influence on culture.

Next up was Gary Barkalow, talking about identifying your calling and finding the way that God has for you to serve him with the gifts and passions he’s given you. Gary used the metaphor of the need to find your bearings when you feel disoriented. When a medical professional is seeking to assess your level of disorientation she’ll use the “Alert and Oriented x3”: who are you? where are you? what day is it? Personally I think I enjoyed his metaphor maybe more than the way he actually applied it, but I think these are great questions for us to ask ourselves when seeking to live to the glory of God – this triplet of identity, situation and place in salvation history. Knowing who we are, that we’re children of God saved by grace, where we are, that we’ve got a specific set of gifts and a specific set of opportunities before us, and when we are, that the time is short and Jesus could come back any moment, gives us a great framework for making decisions about our lives. As an aside, Gary closed with a great example from Apollo 13 – sometimes we just “need more time in the simulator” – God knows that we need to be refined by the trials of life for a while before leading us to where we’ll eventually end up.

After lunch there were various workshop options. I went along to one by Mark Soderwall, a game industry veteran whose worked on a lot of the Star Wars games, on various issues related to industry best practice and how to get into the industry. I also went along to one by Tim Johnson on “games that reflect God’s glory” – how to employ game mechanics themselves (rather than story) to reflect aspects of God’s character such as grace. The four values he particularly focussed on were cooperation (that two is better than one), individuality (that God has made each one unique), sacrifice for future gain (as per the parable of the treasure hidden in a field) and “eucatastophe” (a word coined by Tolkien to mean a “good catastrophe” – a sudden joyous turn in the midst of seeming disaster, ultimately a reflection of the resurrection of Jesus), but naturally there are a tonne of others. The nature of my game, Ebenezer, like Monkey Island before it, is that I’m much more focussed on story rather than gameplay mechanics, so I really enjoyed thinking about this different perspective for a while.

I wouldn’t say I agreed with everything said today, and I’d probably have but a few emphases in different places, but they were all wonderfully thought provoking and led to some great discussions. It’s fair to say that a real highlight of the conference has been turning some virtual online friends into real life buddies, and it’s been great to be able to chat through the stuff we’ve been hearing.

Time now for Barlow Girl!

After weeks of anticipation, it’s finally time for the Christian Game Developers Conference 2011 to begin! It’s been terrific so far, great to finally meet a whole bunch of people I’ve known online for some years now, mostly through the Christian Developers Network.

Besides the burritos, the conference began [...]]]>

After weeks of anticipation, it’s finally time for the Christian Game Developers Conference 2011 to begin! It’s been terrific so far, great to finally meet a whole bunch of people I’ve known online for some years now, mostly through the Christian Developers Network.

Besides the burritos, the conference began with a brief intro by Chris Skaggs of Soma Games and one of the organisers of this year’s conference. Chris was setting out some of his vision for the conference, as a place where Christian in the games industry and developers of Christian games can come together and find refreshment for their souls before being sent back out to be salt and light in their industry. He spoke of how our world, and the games industry in particular, is crying out for meaning, something that Christians are uniquely placed to provide. He laid out the challenge for us all, that if we don’t step up to the plate and provide it, other people will – games like El Shaddai, based upon the apocryphal Book of Enoch. The fact that it’s not canonical means nothing to the world at large, and the fact that it’s based upon a broadly Christian mythology, with angels and demons and so on, means that to most people, it may as well be Christian. If we don’t put our message out there clearly then it opens the door for a lot of confusion.

And yes, I am wearing my T-shirt and handing out lots of business cards

I have to say that I’m a little disappointed with the print quality of the T-shirt [...]]]> In preparation for this year’s Christian Game Developers Conference, I ordered a T-shirt and some business cards to advertise my Christian video game, Ebenezer. Well, yesterday they both arrived in the post – exciting times!

I have to say that I’m a little disappointed with the print quality of the T-shirt from SpreadShirt. The factor that made me choose them over their competitors was that they allowed a design on the sleeve – although after I mentioned that on my blog, I discovered that you can only actually have text on the sleeve, and only in the limited selection of fonts that they provide. The reason for this is that they use a different technique for applying the text, and so the sleeve itself came out really very high quality. The rest is a bit wishy washy, although it’s certainly good enough to achieve its purpose.

As for the business cards, Moo really excelled themselves – these are top notch in quality. They’ve got a really good feel to them, and the print quality is fantastic. Awesome.

You can click on the thumbnail below to see a full-size image:



This post is part of a series attempting to blog every day in the run up to the Christian Game Developers Conference

I had a specific vision for my cards that was possibly unnecessarily showy: I was arrogant enough to want them to be [...]]]> It’s not only promotional T-shirts I’ve been ordering for this year’s Christian Game Developers Conference – naturally, I’ve also ordered a bunch of that all-important networking tool, the humble business card.

I had a specific vision for my cards that was possibly unnecessarily showy: I was arrogant enough to want them to be double sided – gasp! shock! awe! Seriously – am I really being that demanding? It turns out to be really expensive – at least in comparison to single-sided business cards. I tried Vistaprint and some other place that my boss recommended, but they all wanted to charge me an absolute fortune for it, plus ludicrous amounts for very slow postage (and having left it a bit late in the day, they wouldn’t have arrived in time anyway).

I ended up going with my old friends Moo. Admittedly their cards are relatively pricey, but they’re solid quality and come double-sided by default. Not that I used this feature, but the nice thing about Moo is that you can submit multiple card designs, and for instance if you submit two they’ll just print half of one and half of the other (or submit three designs and get a third of each, etc. etc.)

Because we’re in the 21st century apparently I had to add a QR code to it so that people with these new-fangled technologies can quickly reach my website. I don’t really know what it is, but it looks cool. The other funny thing is that I thought Moo was being all trendy and making my text appear in capital letters, but when I got home I found that the caps lock key was on on my laptop. Classic.

A quick suggestion: if you’re enjoying following along this series attempting to blog every day in the run up to the Christian Game Developers Conference, do yourself a favour and subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog so that you can be automatically kept updated.

With only 15 days to go until the Christian Game Developers Conference, I thought it was worth taking a step back and asking why on earth I’d fly half way around the world to visit Portland, Oregon – what am I hoping to get out of attending [...]]]>

With only 15 days to go until the Christian Game Developers Conference, I thought it was worth taking a step back and asking why on earth I’d fly half way around the world to visit Portland, Oregon – what am I hoping to get out of attending this year’s CGDC? Here are my top four reasons:

1. Meeting Others in the Christian Video Game Community

As I mentioned yesterday, the Christian video game space isn’t huge – we’re still talking about a small handful of passionate people mostly doing it for the sheer love of it. In that kind of environment, I think it’s really important that those of us who are doing it don’t work in isolation, but that we stand shoulder-to-shoulder and share our ideas and our enthusiasm. I’m hugely excited about finally meeting some of the people whose names I’ve been aware of through the Internet, or friends from the Christian Developers Network, who I’ve never previously had the privilege of meeting in person.

2. Seeking the Wisdom of Older and Wiser Developers

We all know that iron sharpens iron, and another key reason why I’m heading off to the CGDC is to try and benefit from the wisdom of some of the veteran game developers. I feel like I have so many decisions ahead of me this year as to the future of Ebenezer, and I’m really hoping and praying that I’ll be able to get some sound advice whilst I’m out there.

3. Getting Some Feedback

It’s fair to say that in many ways I’ve been operating somewhat in the dark on Ebenezer. The nature of an adventure game means I don’t want to reveal too much about the storyline and the puzzles in advance, since that pretty much is the game – there needs to be some incentive to actually play the finished article. But the major downside of that is that it’s very hard for people to give feedback – there’s no way for people to give an honest assessment of what I’ve done so far. I’m hoping that, as painful as it may be, CGDC will be a great opportunity to find out what people really think. Maybe they’ll say it stinks and I need to keep working, or maybe they’ll like what they see.

4. Because it Sounds Like a Huge Amount of Fun

It’s also fair to say that it just sounds like it’s going to be a real riot. It’ll be awesome to visit Oregon and hopefully get to explore a little bit in the few days before the conference. Then during the conference itself there’ll be a tonne of opportunities to hang out with fun and interesting people, plus there’s going to be a live worship set from BarlowGirl and things like that.

If you’re going to CGDC this year, what are you hoping to get out of it?