Why Christian Video Games Must Suck

This may come as a big surprise for you all, but I’m not really big into Christian Rock music.  Not really my thing.  The closest I get is maybe some old Neil Diamond and even then, he seemed to lean towards the secular side of things and may have been Jewish.  I don’t know.  

But I can at least see why Christians might kind of like that stuff.  I personally think that musicians should let the songs write themselves, and not limit themselves by insisting that every song should have one particular topic, but whatever.  With that stuff, it’s not really about the music as much as the nice feeling people get when they listen to it.  Much like how little kids can watch that Barney crap.  And if it makes them feel better, more power to them.  I don’t have anything against victimless enjoyment, even if it is a tad dorky.  As I said, I listen to Neil Diamond.

But videogames are an entirely different matter.  Music doesn’t necessarily have to be good or make your booty shake to be enjoyable.  Music can do lots of things.  But video games are pretty much limited to entertainment and education, and even the educational stuff needs to be fairly entertaining.  And the motivation for making a successful game should be that it’s entertaining.  That’s the entire point, and any other ultimate goal is a conflict of interest.  Hell, even as things are, most video games suck and they do have entertainment as their ultimate goal.  So a video game maker with other priorities is going to have an even bigger disadvantage when it comes to selling games.

And so it just figures that a Christian video game would totally suck it bigtime.  Because they’ve got the wrong idea.  You’ve got to go with what sells.   Supply and demand, market forces, etc, etc.  I’m already tired of writing this and I just got started.  You can make up this middle section.  I just need to get out more product and I already have too many unfinished posts.

So in conclusion, the whole thing was a bad idea from the start.  Were Christian Rock music entirely dependent upon traditional rock listeners for their audience, there wouldn’t be Christian Rock.  It’s got an entirely different audience with an entirely different motivation for listening.  But video games can’t do that.  People play games for one reason and there aren’t major media sources to pimp unentertaining games the way that the music industry can.  People can be inoculated into liking bad music if they hear it enough, but gamers already know what they’re looking for in a game.  And you’re not going to have many non-video game people start playing video games simply because it has a Christian theme.  Particularly not a violent Christian theme like Left Behind.  It just doesn’t work like that.  

Christian Rock is for people who like the idea of rock music, but don’t really get into it.  But anyone who can’t already find a video game that they like isn’t going to start liking them because it’s got a specific theme that appeals to them.  Hell, I’m old enough to remember before video games had stories, and even now consider a good story to be the icing on a good game; not the point of it.  So the idea that they’d be able to sell a video game based solely on its theme was entirely lamebrained.  Particularly when the bulk of the medium’s customers would be offended by that theme.  So I laugh at them, ha ha ha; and now conclude this post.