catmao1536

God's PR Problem: The Role of Religion in Videogames

catmao1536 | 14 janvier, 2010 08:22

Writing about videogames is not generally the stuff of Woodward and Bernstein. Occasionally, a hostile public relations manager will make your life difficult, or you'll lose a scoop to a rival publication. Trying to get a good interview while a game's in development can be challenging, especially if that game isn't in its official PR swing yet. But for the most part, this is the entertainment industry: The consumers want to read about it, the producers want to talk about it, and the rest is just details.

So it was with some surprise that I encountered a wall of fear and paranoia when I called around, asking developers to talk about religion in gaming. What I found is a small handful of people who think about the issues a lot, and silkroad gold wanted desperately to be part of the conversation...and a vast, silent majority who didn't want to touch the topic with the proverbial 10-foot pole.

"There cannot be a hotter potato than this hot potato," explains Peter Molyneux, Creative Director of Microsoft Game Studios Europe and Lionhead Studios, and one of the brave few not only willing, but eager, to talk about issues of faith. "Religion is one of those things where -- if you're specific about it -- you're going to get yourself into a mountain of trouble," he suggests. "You have to be very, very careful."

It's a touch ironic that he wow gold paysafe seems so cautious. As one of the earliest developers of so-called God games (the Populous and Black & White series), he started his career in the realm of belief. In those games, players take on the role of God, seeking to engender belief in the hearts of primitive populations, and generally messing with their lives through divine intervention. But Molyneux is quick to point out a critical difference between talking about faith and talking about organized religion.

"If you look at what Assassin's Creed or a lot of Japanese games do, I think they're talking about how Man has corrupted a pure and simple and wonderful message: 'Hey, be nice! Someone loves you! God loves you!'" he says. But how carefully can developers dance back and forth across that line in the sand, between commentary and offense?

Clearly, God -- the divine as a concept -- plays a huge role in modern gaming. Virtually every fantasy role-playing game, from World of Warcraft to the simplest roguelike, explicitly includes the divine in the form of priests calling down healing prayers or smiting evil foes. How, then, does this square against the subtext of games like Assassin's Creed II, which -- on close reading -- can be parsed as a kind of atheist screed? (Unsurprisingly, after aion kinah extensive e-mail negotiations, AC2 developer/publisher Ubisoft refused to discuss the matter in any way, sticking to the disclaimer that runs at the front of their game -- which states that it was crafted by people of many backgrounds and faiths.)