I wonder if often we end up using the Bible stories as a setting for our games, but essentially ripping the characters and the little details out of the narrative, and throwing away all the good stuff. What you can end up with is something that’s a derivative Mario clone, only not as good, which clearly isn’t in anybody’s interests.

The more I’ve worked on Ebenezer, my Old Testament adventure game, the more I’ve realised I need to get the drama within my game to line up as closely as possible with the central drama in the passage. The tension within 1 Samuel 8-12 seems to centre on the character of Saul, whom God names as Israel’s first king, and whether people are going to trust him to deliver them or not. There’s a bunch of people, “some worthless fellows”, who wonder how on earth this guy is going to be able to save them – and it lots of ways they’re right to doubt! So I’ve worked hard to make that the central tension of the game, and I hope that the result is going to be something really fun and engaging.

A note of explanation: For the last five years I’ve been working on an Old Testament Adventure game, named Ebenezer: a point & click adventure game in the style of Monkey Island. This post is an attempt to explain some of the convictions and thinking that lies behind the project.

1. Education isn’t the problem

You don’t have to look very hard to notice that we live in a desperately broken world. You also don’t have to look very hard to discover that we’re the cause of it: despite our tremendous potential for good, human beings time and time again demonstrate a remarkable capacity for evil, constantly inflicting hurt on our environment, our fellow man and even those closest to us. It’s not because we don’t know how we should behave, either: even when we want to do what’s right, so often we find ourselves unable to live up even to our own standards, let alone God’s. Education isn’t the problem. The human heart is marred by sin, the product of a creature in rebellion against its Creator. It’s not just that we commit ‘sins’, rather it’s that we are sinful, and so our sin is our world’s greatest problem. Simply telling people how they should behave and expecting them to change will accomplish nothing.

2. Morality is useless

By implication, if education isn’t the problem then morality is useless. ‘Morality’ tells you how you’re supposed to behave and berates you when you fail, beating you with a stick and expecting you to try harder next time. It provides no power to change, and frankly it’s just plain boring.

3. People need brand new hearts

When he met a bunch of people who thought they were ‘good’ and moral, people obsessed with living righteous lives, Jesus told them that they were like people who spent ages washing the outside of their mugs and never noticed that inside they were full of sewage and filth. Cleaning up our outward actions is pointless and hypocritical when inwardly our hearts are like poo pumps constantly gushing forth a stench-ridden stream of foul and unclean thoughts. If you disagree that you’re like this, try going just one week without thinking a single unkind thought about someone, without a single lustful look, without the faintest hint of envy or pride. Try going just one day, even!

The problem isn’t external to us – forcing women to cover their figures with a burqa or removing all of the violence and immorality from our video games won’t stop those thoughts welling up inside us. The problem lies within: our hearts are desperately wicked, and people need brand new hearts if they’re ever going to change.

4. New birth comes through the word of God

The wonderful hope held out by Jesus in the gospel is that he promises to give new hearts to all those who trust in him – it’s as though we were born a second time as whole new people, starting again from scratch. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!”, says Paul. How does the Holy Spirit work to bring about that new birth? Again and again in the Bible comes the same answer: new birth comes through the word of God. Of all the ways he could do it, God has chosen to work first and foremost through the Bible, faithfully taught, explained and applied. As people recognise the Bible as the word of God and respond to its message, putting their faith in Jesus for salvation, God works a miracle as great as the miracle of creation to remove their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh, beating to his drum and not their own.

5. There’s nothing boring about the Bible

If the word of God brings about new birth for sinful people, then there’s nothing boring about that! Anybody who has ever found themselves dozing off in a boring sermon or Sunday school class only has their boring teacher to blame – it’s an impressive feat to take something as electric as the word of God and turn it into something dull!

The message of the Bible deserves to be presented in a way that does justice to how incredibly exciting it is – this is the hope of eternal life for sinful human beings! It’s the solution to our broken and decaying world! It doesn’t need anything added to it to make it interesting and engaging and relevant, it simply needs to be explained clearly and faithfully. What could be more relevant than something that meets our deepest needs?

6. Christian video games should teach the Bible

A Christian understanding of the world governed by these principles has led me to pour countless hours over the last five years into making an Old Testament adventure game that first and foremost seeks to teach the Bible. Education isn’t the problem, so the world doesn’t need more games that teach us how to live. Morality is useless, so the world doesn’t need more games encouraging us to pull our socks up. People need brand new hearts, so the world won’t be helped by games without the violence and immorality. New birth comes through the word of God, so Christian video games should teach the Bible. And there’s nothing boring about the Bible, so Christian video games shouldn’t be boring either – they should be the most exciting games on the market, since they have the potential to change your life! As I’ve written previously, I’m convinced that point & click adventure games can do this extremely well, so that’s what I’ve been concentrating on.
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Perhaps, then, a computer game is “Christian” if it’s based on Christian content – perhaps a Bible trivia quiz or a memory verse game that gives you points for demonstrating your superior knowledge of the scriptures. The trouble with this is that it bears little resemblance to Christianity – no-one ever got saved by knowing their Bibles well, and there’s no spiritual browny points for being able to recite the book of Jude from memory (although you might earn yourself a high five from me!) After all, the scribes and the Pharisees in Jesus’ day knew their Old Testaments better than anyone, and all it did was make them puffed up with self-conceit and hardened their hearts against realising their desperate need for the forgiveness Jesus was offering. As James tells us, if Christianity were a competition to see who knew the most right answers, we’d all be left for dust by the demons.

Maybe, then, a Christian computer game is an evangelistic tool – a game that helps educate people about Christian things and challenges them to think about their lives and about matters of eternity. The Bible trivia quizes and their ilk tend to work on the premise that you already know the answers (either that or it’s going to be a really depressing experience!), so they’re not much good in this respect. I could imagine that many of the so-called “Christian” games out there see themselves in this light, and I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to assess whether they succeed or fail on this front. One of the big challenges in pulling this off is that people don’t typically play games to be educated, they play games to relax and blow stuff up. There’s a bit of work to be done to really make this approach succeed.

For my money, I’m not sure the label “Christian computer games” is very helpful at all, and I’ve done my best to avoid using it all together. The underlying conviction behind my Old Testament adventure game is that God works in his world through his word, the Bible. The Bible is the sword of the Spirit, it’s sufficient for every good work, and the spiritual milk by which we grow up into mature adulthood. As God says in Isaiah 55:10-11:

As the rain and the snow
come down from heaven,
and do not return to it
without watering the earth
and making it bud and flourish,
so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,

so is my word that goes out from my mouth:
It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

And so, trusting that it’s the teaching of God’s word that changes people, my point & click adventure game, Ebenezer, is designed to explore the events of a short section of the Old Testament and tease out their significance, both in history and for today (in this case, I’m covering 1 Samuel 8-12, although if it’s a success I hope to make lots more about other passages!) It’s also designed to be a lot of fun in the process, and not to take itself too seriously (I take a lot of inspiration from Monkey Island on this front, as well as on many others!)

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