One of the great advantages of developing Ebenezer, my Old Testament adventure game, is the excuse it gives me to periodically “do research” by playing other adventure games that are out there and seeing some of the different approaches that people take. For a while now I’ve been eager to play Machinarium, a game I’ve only ever heard good things spoken of, and the perfect opportunity presented itself just before Christmas when it was available as part of the Humble Indie Bundle #2. Here are my vague musings after playing it through.

Machinarium is set in some kind of dystopian city populated entirely by robots and robotic vermin. It is at once haunting and adorable, fearsome and yet whimsical. The whole game proceeds without any dialogue, but the story is gradually revealed through a series of memories represented by scribbled animations. It’s brilliantly done and all leaves you with a smile on your face. You can’t really help but fall in love with the main character, a little robot apparently called Josef, as he goes about his business.

Everything about Machinarium is gorgeous to look at. The background art is painstakingly detailed and a real treat to behold, and all of the characters and animation are excellent too. The soundtrack is top notch too, and really serves to set the atmosphere at key moments in the story – it’s almost a character in its own right.

The puzzles in Machinarium are a combination of classic adventure game fare and various minigames that suit the robotic theme – such as when you have to play on various old arcade games like space invaders. The twist on the usual adventure game puzzles is that you can only interact with items within immediate reach of your character, and exactly what results you will get depends on when you are standing. This adds a new dimension to things, although at times it makes the classic problem of pixel-hunting even worse as you physically need to move around the scene to discover what you’re able to interact with. A sign of the times is the fact that built into the game itself is a hint system and also a full-on step-by-step walkthrough for each room, which you unlock by playing another silly little minigame (wisely, they make you play the game again each time you want to consult it, helping you to avoid the temptation to give up too easily on attempting to solve the puzzles yourself). In my experience it seemed to strike the right balance between making the game too easy on the one hand and risking me giving up in frustration on the other, but I’m sure there are some purists out there who’d object to the fact that I had to use the hints.

All in all Machinarium probably lasted me about a day of sporadic gameplay during my holidays, making it a little on the short side. On the other hand, it was as long as it needed to be, and it’s so perfectly crafted that I think to make it any longer would have spoiled it. It was a real joy to play through, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys adventure games. If I could come anywhere close to creating an experience as delightful as Machinarium when developing Ebenezer, I’d be very satisfied indeed.

What is a Graphic Adventure?

But first, what do I mean by a graphic adventure, or Point & Click adventure game? The classic examples I’ve used in the past have been Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle. The creator of Monkey Island, Ron Gilbert, described the graphic adventure in this way: “games in which the pace is slow and the reward is for thinking and figuring, rather than quick reflexes.” The element that brings adventure games to life for me is the stories around which they are woven. They’re games in which the characters and the story are the focus, and players move forwards by solving puzzles and interacting with those characters. So what is it about them that make them so great for teaching the Bible? Here are five reasons that I’ve come up with, but maybe you have more!

1. A Focus on Narrative

It hardly needs saying that a large chunk of the Bible is in the form of narrative, stories in which we see the character of God in the way that he interacts with his world and his people. Teaching such narrative involves two things: the events themselves – what is actually happening – and then the significance of those events. It’s not enough to know that David killed Goliath – what is the narrative teaching us about God’s character when this unarmed Israelite shepherd boy slays the mighty pagan warrior with a single shot of his sling? When I tell people I’m making a Bible-teaching Computer Game, their first instinct is to assume I’m making some kind of First Person Shooter, “David the Giant Slayer”, in which you run around with your sling shooting pebbles at people. But even if such a game could succeed in teaching people that there was a guy called David who killed another guy with a rock (which is a problem in itself, given the possibility that you might miss!) it would be very hard to explain the significance of those events in an FPS game. Contrast that with a graphic adventure, however, where your character could watch David kill Goliath, and then go and talk to him afterwards and ask all sorts of questions about why he was so angered by Goliath’s defiance of the armies of Israel and what the source of his courage was.

2. Stories Take You On a Journey

One of the common objections to the idea of Christian computer games is the assumption that nobody other than Christians would ever want to play them. Looking at some of the games already out there, I’m inclined to agree! But one of the brilliant things about telling a story is that it lets you take your player on a journey – from disinterest to curiosity, from unbelief to faith in Jesus Christ, or from faith to ever more wholehearted living. Every great story involves a character changing in some way, learning from their mistakes and ultimately overcoming adversity. It’s exactly the same with great Bible teaching – it should never be a merely intellectual exercise, the imparting of knowledge without changing the way you think and behave. At the start of Monkey Island, Guybrush Threepwood had no idea what was involved in being a pirate, but by the end he’d learnt how to swashbuckle with the best of them. The whole point of a Graphic Adventure is to take the player on a journey, and that makes them an ideal medium for teaching the Bible.

3. Puzzles Make You Think

It probably sounds tautological to say that puzzles make you think, but that makes them fantastic as a way to help people apply what they’re learning from the Bible. Suppose you’ve been hearing a sermon about the sovereignty of God – how he is completely in control of events. The exact question your Bible teacher is wanting you to start asking yourself during the week is “how should I act in this situation if God is sovereign?” The puzzles in an adventure game can encourage you to do just that – find a way forward given the premise of the game, in this case that God is sovereign. Figuring out what those puzzles might be and thinking of suitable solutions for them is the tricky bit, but my experience so far is that when it’s done well it can be a really powerful tool for application.

4. They’re Fun To Play Together

When I was a kid, before the days of the Internet and multiplayer gaming, I used to invite one of my friends round to play on the computer with me, and inevitably one of us would be pretty bored for most of the time, as we sat there watching the other person playing. As other people have noted,
most games give you a certain sense of satisfaction simply from interacting with them – steering your car, firing your gun, jumping between platforms. That means that gaming is really not a spectator sport – it’s boring for the person watching who is not getting that constant stream of satisfying feedback. By contrast, virtually all of the adventure games I played as a kid were played together with somebody else, without being the least bit boring for the one observing. That’s because the emphasis is far less on the basic interactions of gameplay – there is little thrill in instructing your character to pick up an inventory item. The reward comes from solving puzzles and making progress – something that can be shared equally by both the person doing the pointing and clicking, and the person by their side giving the ideas. Some people have highlighted this style of gameplay as a downside of adventure games – and it certainly does mean a certain amount of patience is required, meaning these games are not for everybody – but I think it’s the key to making them fun to play together. Parents might enjoy playing a Bible-teaching adventure game together with their child as a shared experience, or two siblings could enjoy it together.

5. People Grow to Love Them

This final point is a result of all that has gone before – rich stories with vibrant characters, taking you on a journey as you think through puzzles, perhaps in a shared experience with another person – all of these factors mean that people grow to really love adventure games. When I talk to people who’ve played Monkey Island, their eyes suddenly light up and their whole body language exudes an enthusiasm that I don’t often see when talking about computer games. Like a good novel or a beloved movie, great adventure games seem to capture a space in people’s hearts. Imagine if people were being made to feel that way about a game based on a Bible story – what a fantastic positive memory to leave people with.

So there you have it, my top five reasons why adventure games would work brilliantly as a way to teach the Bible. It’s my hope and prayer that my own Bible-teaching computer game will be able to put these ideas into practice and help people to learn how fantastic God’s word really is!

I Don’t Play Games to be Preached At

There are many people out there who consider the very concept of an explicitly Christian computer game to be fatally flawed. “Surely,” they say, “the whole reason I play games is to relax and have fun, not to learn, and certainly not to be preached at.” But to say that learning and having fun are mutually exclusive is simplistic in the extreme. Anyone who’s ever played LucasArts’ classic adventure game “Day of the Tentacle” will remember the scene where one of your characters, Hoagie, gets stuck in a hotel 200 years in the past with America’s founding fathers.

They’re all busy drafting the Constitution, and by talking with them you can learn all sorts of useless trivia. For instance, I learnt about George Washington’s penchant for chopping down cherry trees, about his wooden teeth, and about John Hancock writing his signature extraordinarily large in order to impress the ladies. Okay, so maybe it’s not all true, and teaching history probably wasn’t forefront in the minds of the designers, but the truth is that I did learn. What’s more, far from making me groan as though I was back in the schoolroom, it was tremendous fun and instilled an interest in that period that’s still with me to this day. I’m sure that we learn a massive amount by subconsciously soaking in information in this way from games and television and what have you, not to mention their cultural values. A Christian computer game that does this well could have a wide-reaching influence on a large number of people, with them genuinely enjoying playing it and without them feeling preached at.

Morality is Boring

An overreaction to the first problem, however, has lead some games designers to put less emphasis on Bible-teaching, worrying that it will feel preachy, and focus instead on promoting Christian values and morality. On the one hand, I don’t have a major problem with games like this, so long as they’re well made. After all, it’s probably better that our young people are playing something based on a Christian worldview than something that reinforces our culture’s distorted value system. On the other hand, they make me a little uneasy, since they just seem to be perpetuating one of the most pervasive fallacies about the Christian faith: that it’s first and foremost about rules and regulations, and being a “nice” person – and ultimately that’s pretty boring. The Bible, on the other hand, is clear that no amount of Christian morality will save you if it doesn’t flow out of a relationship with Jesus Christ. In the book of
Colossians, for instance, Paul reminds his readers of the pre-eminence of Christ, the one in whom “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:20). He shows how his ministry is shaped by seeking first and foremost to proclaim Christ (1:28), toiling and struggling to make sure that people are mature in their relationship with him. He goes on to warn of any alternative teachings based on “philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition…and not according to Christ” (2:8), and berates those who insist on asceticism and the worship of angels, but without holding fast to Jesus, the Head (2:18-19).

So you see, the goal of all authentic ministry is way more exciting than encouraging people to be more like Ned Flanders – it’s about introducing people to the person of Jesus Christ, and helping them get to know him better and better. A game that focuses on the awesome character of God is automatically going to be more engaging than one which just tells them how to behave.

Are You Worthy?

One of the main obstacles that stands in the way of people growing to know Jesus better, of course, is the sense that they have no need of knowing him better. Only people who know they can’t earn their own way into God’s good books are going to truly cry out for a saviour. My relationship with Jesus is constantly blighted by a sense that I don’t really need him – absurd as this is. It seems to me that this is one of the biggest danger areas in making a Christian computer game, since typically the aim of most games is precisely to earn your way to the finish line, proving your worthiness for all to see. That’s what the glamour of the High Score Table is all about, and it’s in direct conflict with the Christian message we’re wanting to promote. One Christian game even made it their official tagline: “Are you worthy?” It’s clear that a good deal of thought is going to have to be put into the game mechanics to make sure that our dependence on grace is not undermined, as well as other Biblical doctrines such as God’s sovereign control over the outcome of events.

Point & Click Bible Games

You may have guessed from my earlier reference to “Day of the Tentacle”, but I actually believe pretty strongly that a genre with great potential for solving some of these issues is the Point and Click Adventure Game. If you don’t have a clue what I mean by that, a good place to start would be the Monkey Island fansite The International House of Mojo, or the ScummVM project. These intensely story-driven games give the writers plenty of scope to teach in a more subtle way, as well as making it possible to feature a less-than-perfect lead character. LucasArts has a long tradition of rather weedy protagonists, like Guybrush Threepwood, Bernard Bernoulli, and (if your memory stretches that far back) the somewhat second-rate reporter Zak McKracken. Such down-to-earth characters allow you to easily convey the fact that there’s nothing remotely worthy about them, and to keep the spotlight firmly on God.

I’ll confess that I may be biased by the fact that I just really love adventure games, but I can see enough reasons to at least give it a try, and pray that God can use the results to bring glory to his name as people come to know his son more deeply.