An excellent read: The Game That Let Me Mourn My Lost Faith. A former Christian describes his gradual abandonment of faith in the context of a video game about religion that he’s playing, and it’s subtle and complex…both the game and his loss. The games weren’t actively forcing atheism down his throat — they often had fictional religions embedded in them — but they did make him think about alternative explanations, and realize that maybe there were other ways to understand the world outside that bubble of Christianity.
That’s really what about atheism should be about: popping the bubble and making people question and think, and then arrive at a better solution for them. That’s also the two-step that has been interesting me for some time. Bubble-popping is fun and entertaining, and atheists are very good at it. Now we also have to think about what will draw people to us after they’ve been freed from that Christian cocoon.
Also, the game sounds fun.
That sounds like the perfect way to get the actual workings of religion into a person’s head and get them thinking.
It does look like an interesting game. Unfortunately Steam is involved, which is a definite minus for me.
Intriguing game concept, though the trailer doesn’t give me much of a window into how it plays. If there’s no divine intervention to aid in spreading your game cult, I can see how that’d break down the notion that one’s own religion is somehow different from all the others.
“Unfortunately Steam is involved, which is a definite minus for me.”
May I ask why? I have been using Steam for many years and have found no reason to call it a minus.
Anyway the article is quite excellent. I like that the games pictured are primarily games that deal with religion in some way (Assassin’s Creed and Final Fantasy X in particular)
For years I’ve been loving the way religion was handled in the Dragon Age series. Specifically the way that atheist characters are able to shoot down religious arguments with ease.
I find religion in fantasy worlds (including those in video games) fascinating because they try to make the world relatable to our world, but with the fantasy elements it’s wouldn’t be easy to be skeptical in those universes.
That depends on how the fantasy world is set up. In a traditional D&D style world where a cleric can pray to their god for a Flamestrike so that an enemy, being naughty in thine eyes, shall snuff it, yes, you’re correct that it’s difficult to be a skeptic.
If the world is set up so that there isn’t such direct cause and effect (for example, no clerics or divinely granted magic), or the setting is done in a way in which the nature of the gods isn’t as clear (like Planescape did), then it’s much easier.
I find Final Fantasy X is to be wonderfully applicable to atheism and humanism. I’m going to spoil if you haven’t played.
The characters are on a religious pilgramage, and along the way the they discover that the religion is corrupt and the pilgrimage is based on lies. Based on the new evidence, the characters reject the religious dogma and find a solution to the problem that works, declaring that it’s better to live with unpleasant truths than pleasant lies.
optimusshr @4
My problems with Steam have to do with their customer service. For instance they offered a Fallout collection (Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics) for $4.99. I did the download and just got Fallout 2. I contacted customer service and was told the offer was in error. I pointed out they still had the offer posted and should either take it down or give the customer the three games mentioned. I was told I should be happy to have got Fallout 2 for such a low price (usually it’s $19.99). They didn’t give me the other two games. I had a couple of other similar experiences with Steam customer service.
Also I prefer my games to be DRM free. But I realize that’s unlikely to happen nowadays.
The Civilization games are utterly cynical about religion.
Its a tool for earning money, making your people happy and productive, and acquiring diplomatic influence.
Spreading your religion far and wide is one of the winning strategies.
The Newhon style of atheist (such as the folks on Rime Isle) is interesting. To paraphrase, it’s not that they didn’t believe in gods (pretty much impossible in Newhon), it’s just that they didn’t worship them.
They thought gods were (at best) interfering busybodies and (more generally) assholes. It being Newhon, of course, they were right.
Al Dente #9
All games from GOG.com are DRM-free and available in simple downloads that you can install on how many devices you want, which is why they can no longer sell Fallout games.
Come to think of it, pretty much all games with interactable or choice-related religious elements (i.e. everything other than the bible games where you must follow a single path with no say in the matter) are very cynical of religion. Sometimes it’s intentional, but often it’s a product of gameplay design – it’s very hard to create a game with truly meaningful choices for the player. This means that in almost any gameplay the player would default to see every game element as a means to an end, and if one of those elements is religion then that’s how it will be seen as well.
600 years of stifled education during the Dark Ages
200 years of killing religious rivals during the Crusades
600 years of torture and murder during the Inquisitions
And he needs a computer game to show him that religion is up to no good ! Not the sharpest tool in the box is he ?
I perfectly agree; a shining example is Crusader Kings II, where every religion-connected action actually has very practical means: if you go on crusade/pilgrimage it’s because you gain new shiny traits, if you declar a holy war on someone it’s just a pretext to grab their land, if you spread your religion it’s only to avoid rebellions and you always end up fighting the pope for the right to appoint your bishops.
Even FF XII is similar, where you have a bunch of amoral, uncaring gods who just want to use the main character Ashe as a tool to control humanity, until she rebels and foils their plans.
Not necessarily – that adds up to 1400 years of theory but only one game of actual practice. Games are very good at teaching through actual interaction.
No book in the world can teach you how to bash your skull into the underside of a block of bricks just right to make it spill money.
Paolo #15
Another Paradox Interactive fan? Cheers!
Markus Schäfer #16
Mario does it with his fist.
grumpyoldfart #14
An interactive medium can be superior particularly when the person isn’t sufficiently religious (or brought up in sufficiently religious household) to care to read about religious history and dogma in great detail. Crusades and the like are meaningless to soft/liberal religious people because they see their own version of religion as more moderate (not just than that of the Inquisition, but than that of many contemporary faiths) so they feel no need to engage that side of religion. A game, a movie, a book of fiction (just ask how many atheist began their journey with SciFi novels) – can force a person to rethink his or her position if it’s engrossing enough.
That’s why we need culture and art in the first place.
Final Fantasy Tactics had a similar “Fuck religion, it’s built on the lies and greed of powerful people” story line as well. (And it was a better game IMHO)
Of course ! As a history student how could I miss their games ?
Actually I think you may be wrong here: what you describe may have worked in the past, but now not anymore. Nowadays they simply justify the past that what they did was right and good, and it’s far too common to hear the pathetic excuse “but but, Crusades were the only tool of defense of Christianity against the rising tide of muslim imperialism ! Those dirty arabs were the bad ones who wanted to invade/kill/convert/enslave us, crusaders were nice people who were forced to defend themselves”: it’s bullshit in its purest form, but in these last years it has rampaged in the web and you can find it almost everywhere.
The very same mechanism also apply to the Inquisition: in the last 30 years academic research has repeatedly shown that the Inquisition was far from being what the so-called “black legend” says, and its rates of tortures and death-sentence were much lower of what is commonly believed. It’s a field that really fascinates me, I’ve done some work myself directly on the original manuscripts about some processes in XVII° century Pisa and it’s extremely interesting to see how it really worked (the inquisitors themselves were more like bureaucrats drowned by papers, who actually spent more time writing letters right, left and centre than persecuting people), but the dispelling of the black legend has just given way to the rise of a “pink legend”: there are many italian catholic sites who allegedly misrepresent this research (I don’t know whether in bad faith or by sheer ignorance, they’re both possible; judging by what they write I don’t really think they’even read any serious book about it), tricking its readers into thinking that it all was a flowering meadow full of shiny butterflies and little tender lambs.
P.S. don’t judge too harshly my clumsy phrasing ;-)
FF XIII too, now that I think about it. The older games don’t really feature gods of any kind, however.
Paolo #19
I’ve never heard the “pink legend” argument before, but the “crusaders were our saviors” is mainly used (in my experience, at least) by people who are either very religious or (surprisingly enough) conservative atheists. Both are entrenched in their views (so a game or other medium wouldn’t affect them much) and neither are likely to be playing an indie strategy game like Cults & Daggers. People with those views usually prefer Call of Duty and the like.
AlexanderZ @21
Hardly surprising, if you’ve never lurked any catholic-fringe blog. Honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if heard that argument’s never been pulled outside of Italy or any european catholic country.
Here we have some journalists called “devout atheists”: they’re more or less atheists/agnostics, but they still support the Church in eveything (gay marriage, abortion, interferences in our politics: in these topics they’re even hardline than most believers) since it’s convenient for them.
The term “black legend” was created by historian Henry Kamen, a Catholic apologist who considers the high point of his career not the publication of any particular book but being received by Pope John Paul II in the Vatican. His argument is that not everyone in the Spanish Inquisition was involved in torture and execution, that many of the ordinary prisons in Spain were even worse than the Inquisition’s, and that most of those convicted of heresy were handed over to secular authorities for execution and therefore were not really executed by the Inquisition.
You might notice that every single one of those arguments is a distraction. Kamen himself estimates that the Inquisition executed around 2000 people in Spain up to 1530. Why stop at 1530? The Spanish Inquisition executed its last victim in 1826 — a school teacher who promoted Deism! In 1826! The only reason I can think that Kamen would choose to stop counting at 1530 is that it’s *just* before the Inquisition really ramped up its persecutions in response to the Protestant schism.
In all its history, I can think of only one thing the Inquisition did that it should be recommended for, and that was rejecting the witch-finding manual Malleus Malleficarum — not that this is a great recommendation given Pope Innocent VIII had already acknowledged the existence of witches, that they were to blame for unusual weather, crop failure, diseases in cattle and other superstitious nonsense, and recommended that the Inquisition persecute witches “without right of appeal” in response to a request by a Dominican priest complaining about how local authorities were not taking his witch-finding seriously (and that priest went on to be the author of the MM).
In short, fuck Kamen and any fellow apologists for torture and murder.
@23 Chris
Historical research on the Inquisition isn’t apology, it’s apology only when intended to downplay it and what it did for ideological purposes. It’s just as bad as studying the Inquisition with the precise intention of slandering it even further because we’re atheists and we don’t like the Church.
If we find out that in the 1478-1530 lapse of time the Spanish Inquisition killed 2000 people (I would question the numbers, since it was the period of most virulent activity in Spain) instead of untold millions it doesn’t suddenly become innocent: they’re still 2000 killings.
The Inquisition tribunal in Pisa (the one I know better) never killed anyone in all its century of activity, but that doesn’t make it better: it still was a secret police with the sole purpose to rule and keep in check the conscience and religious/spiritual life of its subjects.
The fact that most other secular and religious tribunals of the early modern age were even worse, and that in the XVI° century the Inquisition increasingly became skeptic about witchcraft (the numbers of witches burnt at the stake after the Counter-reformation are ridiculously low in Italy, Spain and Portugal) DO NOT justify it.
To look at these facts and justify the Inquisition by saying “oh look, so they were actually good people who really cared for others, it’s all fault of the Illuminist/atheist/laicist/anti-catholic bad press” it’s quite the same thing as saying ” but they were a bunch of bloodthirsty, genocidal sadists bent on torturing and burning whoever they didn’t like, and if you don’t agree you must an apologist and f*** you”: they’re both ideologically driven behaviours suppressing and distorting the historical facts to make them fit one’s personal ideas. That’s what believers do.
P.S. I didn’t read Kamen, I am comprehensibly know way more about the roman Inquisition rather the spanish one.
Doh, I forgot:
Extremely likely.
Wouldn’t know, in Italy most inquisitorial prisons had to be built by scratch but no-one has ever thought of comparing them to the ordinary ones.
Oh, absolutely true, technically the Inquisition never killed anyone, they just said “We sentence him to be a recidivist heretic of the worst kind whose soul is lost forever, now it’s the turn for secular judges to act and apply the law”, who unmistakably never failed to sentence him to death. There’s just one word for this: hypocrisy.
SPANISH INQUISITION?!?!?!?!? NO ONE expects the Spanish Inquisition!! Bring out the ComfyChair!!!
/Python-nerd
derail (kinda):
So that’s why Chick (et al) was so opposed to D&D, and scribed a comic portraying it as evil. Not for advocating devil worship, nor witchcraft advocacy, nor depicting magic use, nor teaching violence, but because it portrays Clerics so poorly; as participants in the mayhem, and not the pure, clean, healers he wants to propagandize.
[Sunday warps my thinking ;-) ]
It’s not as illustrative of religion and more personal but, since we’re talking about games, Dreamfall has a nice allegory written in to it. So Spoilers I suppose.
It’s a fantasy/sci-fi adventure type game, for background’s sake. As part of the plot the main character uncovers the story of a tormented child named Faith, who died under experimentation designed to expand her consciousness. Instead of completely disappearing Faith ‘uploads’ to the global network and, long story short, causes lots of problems.
To resolve this the main character Zoe has to go and reason with Faith in the network itself. There Faith is essentially trapped as a child in an empty world constructed of her own consciousness. Zoe must convince her to let go and essentially die so that life can continue. Which is naturally quite difficult and tragic.
The creators of this game have said the allegory is pretty much as it seems, the notion being that faith is self supporting but also imprisoning and ultimately in order to progress – personally, psychologically etc – faith always has to die.
(never actually played it myself, but it sounds pretty arty and interesting I thought)
PZ:
Well, here’s a nice start:
Remember, nerds and atheists alike: Comic Book Guy is not our role model.
Wasn’t that the real reason behind the fundy hysteria over D&D and other such games? Creating fictional worlds with fictional religions can lead you to asking all sorts of difficult questions in the real world.
No, that was the reason for Fundy panic over science. The panic over D&D was because it was the late 70s/early 80s, and everybody was crazy about Satan.
Videogames are like that a lot, especially JRPGs. In Xenoblade Chronicles, the message of the game can be summed up by this quote by the protagonist at the end: I wish for a world with no need for gods.
“The crusaders were our saviours”
-Actually, the Byzantine empire and their allies, the Chazar empire were our saviours. They took something like 99% of the brunt of the onslaught from the caliphate.
The battle of Poitiers cannot be compared with that.
If you like the books of Glen Cook, I would recommend “The Instrumentalities of Night” books as well as the Garett books: The religions are consistently depicted as parasitic. The gods (especially in “Petty Pewter Gods”) can exist independently, but get their power by belief and are the worst kinds of malign critters.
Ooook, let’s try it again:
Do you honestly think these people would ever care to acquaint themselves with “real” history ? They’re much happier quoting Poitiers and Lepanto as great victories against Islam, when they actually were almost useless. Besides, the Khazars were jews !