Somebody pointed me towards this article on How to design a Christian-themed game recently. Admittedly it’s focussed on board games rather than video games, but a lot of the principles are still very relevant.
A lot of his thinking seems to gel quite closely with stuff I’ve said previously. In particular, he picks up the idea that you can inadvertently end up teaching a kind of “salvation by works” that’s just about morality and being nice:
“a mechanic where VP rewards are provided for some “good” action seems at first glance to be right on-message, but in fact, this directly contradicts the message of Christianity, which is that none of us can merit God’s favor with our goodness alone.”
Another theme which is very close to my heart that the article majors on is this idea of the idea of hunting down the source of tension in the Bible passage:
“A well-themed game needs to find a game-mechanical source of tension that feels comparable to the tension in the story.”
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