Virtue Magazine

Picture this, if you can: You’re living in New York City. One-third of the population has recently vanished. A war has suddenly devoloped between Tribulation Forces and the Anti-christ’s Global Community Peacekeapers (formerly the United Nations), and you’re directly involved in it. As a soldier for Tribulation, you have at your disposal a wide variety of equipment, including guns, tanks and helicopters. Armageddon is fast approaching.

Your mission? To “save” as many of the enemy as you can. In the process, you might have to slice, dice, shoot and destroy an unspecified number of the enemy as well, but that’s okay—you’re doing it all in the name of the Lord. And this isn’t “real life,” anyway; it’s just a video game based off the bestselling Left Behind books by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.

The name of the game is Left Behind: Eternal Forces, and it made its debut last month at the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. The game, which features “real-time strategy,” will be released to the general public in December of this year. It apparently has the full support of LaHaye, who said, “We hope teenagers like the game. Our real goal is to have no one left behind.”

Similar statements have been made by others involved in the creation of the video game, including Troy Lyndon, co-founder and CEO of Left Behind Games. According to Lyndon, video games “will be a new tool to get the two-minute generation to think about matters of eternal importance in a way that isn’t religious” [emphasis author’s].

Lyndon has been involved with other “Christian-themed games,” including Catechumen, a first-person shooter set in the Roman Empire where one plays as a soldier “converting” heathens to Christianity. His comment begins to reveal what is wrong with the thinking behind Eternal Forces.

This mistaken thinking becomes more clear when we hear the thoughts of Eternal Forces co-creator Jeffrey S. Frichner, who said: “’Left Behind’ has the Antichrist, the end of the world, the apocalypse. It’s got all the Christian stuff, and it’s still got all the cool stuff.”

“All the cool stuff” would probably be a reference to the game’s real-time strategy, the reportedly excellent graphics that depict New York City in impressive, block-by-block detail, the destruction of buildings and the blowing away of bad guys. (Eternal Forces “doesn’t shy away from showing corpses, and lots of them,” a review at GameSpy.com notes. “[B]odies in this game don’t disappear, making for some gruesome landscapes as corpses pile up in the streets of New York.”

In addition, one can play as the Anti-christ’s forces in the game.

But don’t worry! The game also has all that “Christian stuff,” and characters in the game sometimes even say “Praise the Lord” after shooting an enemy.

Some have taken LaHaye and the creators of Eternal Forces to task for this very reason. Jack Thompson, an author and critic of video game violence, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying:

“We’re going to push this game at Christian kids to let them know there’s a cool shooter game out there. Because of the Christian context, somehow it’s OK? It’s not OK. The context is irrelevant. It’s a mass-killing game.”

Objections over violence are certainly valid, but violence isn’t even the major problem with this game. As an avid video game player himself, this author occasionally played games that feature battles, war, and shooting and killing the bad guys. It is possible, after all, to make and play war-based games that feature non-graphic violence but don’t promote immorality like the Grand Theft Auto games do. The same goes for movies and television shows.

The bigger problem here is the transparent attempt to cash in on the Left Behind series’ success, create a secular video game with all the cheap thrills and gimmicks of other video games, and pass it off as an acceptable way for Christians to appeal to unbelievers or other believers.

Nor are the Left Behind folks alone in their attempt to do this. According to the L.A. Times, another publisher is marketing games based off of the Veggie Tales series of videos, which already contain questionable content the way it is. (See Theresa Moss’ article “Veggie Tales: Does ‘Cute’ Equal ‘Harmless’?” in Vol. 1, Iss. 23 of Virtuemag.org) Another idea currently being pitched is “Bibleman: A Fight for Faith,” which would feature a superhero “who stands up for the word of God with his sidekicks Cypher and Biblegirl.”

Somewhere in all of these video games and movies, superheros and villains, animated vegetables and cartoons, jaw-dropping graphics and entertaining plot lines, something is being lost. That something is the Bible itself.

Sources:

1. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-godgames10may10,0,1260114.story?page=1&coll=la-home-business
2. http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/left-behind-eternal-forces/700684p1.html