Christian Video Game Developers

Blurred Edge Magazine recently talked to representatives from three of the current crop of Christian interactive video entertainment developers; Mr. Peter Churness, CEO of Rebel Planet Creations, creator’s of The Axys Adventures: Truth Seeker (the winner of last years Christian game of the year award); Mr Brandon Lewis, CEO and founder of 3^rd Day Studios (Captain Saint); and Mr Scott Wong, CEO of Brethren Entertainment.  About their companies, games, the future of today’s interactive entertainment industry and the role Christian developers are hoping to play in the coming drama.

• 1. Good morning sir. Could you give our readers a brief description of you’re company’s highlights and disappointments for the year 2007?
• 2. Christian games are continuing to reach an ever increasing audience, what message is your company trying to send to the video gamer with the choices you have made while developing your video games?

Well it really depends on the type of game and the context.  But in a nutshell, as we design games, we often surround the content around a certain principle or issue that we think is important.  For example, in our children’s games we know the most common issues with young children are lying, sharing and obedience issues.  So we created a game that focused on teaching those lessons while at the same time having a fun context to teach it.

For games with an older audience we are looser with our design and consider the game as a medium for artistic expression.  Being Christian guides and shapes how we interact in the real world and those same sensibilities are likely to exist in our virtual worlds as well.  CS Lewis appeared to craft his stories and creative energies in this fashion and we have that philosophy as well.  In fact Lewis is quoted as saying when asked the question of whether the Chronicles of Narnia were intentional allegory:  “If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair [a character in The Pilgrim's Progress] represents despair, he would be an allegorical figure.  In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, What might Christ become like, if there really were a world like Narnia and he chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as he actually has done in ours? This is not allegory at all” (Martindale & Root 1990: ISBN 0-8423-5115-9), I think by having this philosophy in how we create games will provide the basis for making great games, which happen to have Christian themes.  Undoubtedly by doing this, we will provoke healthy discussion and dialog and that we think can be a good thing if our games are an example of how things are done well.  We’re of course not there yet, but definitely this is our ultimate goal.

• 3. Christian games have evolved since the first Christian genre games first hit the market, what is your opinion of the direction taken by Christian game developers? Are there any games marketed as Christian interactive video entertainment that you don’t think are particularly Christian from your point of view?

Well of course many of the games have progressed mainly due to market and technology forces more than anything else.  Better engines, better tools, lower financial thresholds to getting tools and easier access to the market has helped, however, most companies including us, lack the huge marketing budgets required to get people to hear about the games and also get them distributed widely.  It costs a lot of money to undertake a “brick and mortar” retail distribution effort, so the natural tendency will be for Faith based games to be distributed more digitally.  We are in fact doing that now and will have a portal up soon.  Many other content holders are attempting to do this as well.  It’s definitely the direction things are heading, especially because retailers are pushing more console content because they make more per sale.  Shelf space for PC games is dwindling, so the most attractive alternative is digital.  It’ll be interesting to see how all of that unfolds however, it also takes capital and savvy to distribute on the internet.  We do hope that our efforts will become popular however because it funds us better and we then build capital to improve and make better and better games.  Who knows, someday we may even have enough to make a console game.  But that’s a ways off.

That said, I think in order to be successful, the games themselves have to improve too and simply be better designed within the given budgets of each team.   In order for the space to become really successful there needs to be the breakout game that sells a ton of units, that’s basically what, attracts retailers.  I don’t think it really matters to them that it’s Christian or not, they just want to clear shelf space and developers need to make money.  It’s just simple economics.  Since the competition is fierce, it’s very difficult to know what will sell and what won’t.   So I think a studio has to realize that it not only has to know how to create good games, they may have to create a bunch of them so one can hit it big. 

We think this is the natural direction.  Although we play many of these games, the most popular game in the studio isn’t Halo, nor is it Ratchet and Clank, nor is it even Gears (or God of) War… it’s actually  Geometry Wars.  The graphics are amazingly basic and the game is so beautifully balanced, it’s ridiculous.  One of our younger programmers describes it as, “Sooooo good, its epic.”  Economically any developer in the Christian space could have made a game that cool, and if they attached simple Christian hooks to it, it could be minimally defined as a Christian game.  Now I’m not telling people to go out and copy a game like that, be original.  But I’m saying that there’s value in being creative and one doesn’t necessarily have to raise a small fortune to create an amazing game.

 As far as Christian games out there considered not “Christian enough”, I just think that games companies like ours need to simply refine our skills such that when other Christians who might even care to buy our games won’t be embarrassed by it.  To them, having to play a less-cool game that has good content may be far worse than playing a cool game with horrible content.  Peer pressure is a big influence and I think it’s up to Christian developers to figure out how to make these games more relevant and cool, while at the same time providing a strong Christian worldview.

• 4. Tell our readers about your current games and what they can expect when they play them or try the demo?

Sure, people can go to our website at www.brethren-et.com.  We created a children’s game called the Light Rangers and we have a much older game called Victory at Hebron based on the Redemption Card series from Cactus Game Design.  We’re currently working on a whole slough of smaller games while we are raising funds for bigger games.  We’re hosting a lot of casual games from other companies to provide “long tail” content.  These are basically secular games, but we screen them to ensure that they’re at the very least family safe; you’ll find old favourites like Diner Dash, Virtual Villagers and Sudoku.  We get commissions for these and all of the proceeds from the sales of these will go toward the creation of more Christian content.   This might be a stretch, but if anyone wants to help us out and are buying these games anyway, by all means buy them off of our site.  We’d really appreciate it.  Or they can simply buy our products on our web store.  That would be great too.

• 5. When I first started playing video games as a youngster, I remember video games use to be more of a challenge then the graphics and audio dominated games of today. The interactive video entertainment of today immerses the human senses in a separate universe from the thinking mind, is more in tune with creating a sensual world for the gamer to escape into, rather then challenge the human mind. Creating separate realities in which gamers can do anything they wish, with no regard for possible consequences of such actions outside the video screen. They are then forced to function in a society where sex and violence are influences requiring maturity to understand and comprehend in proper context. Do you think this puts the young, easily-influenced, mind in a conflicted position as concerns their conduct and possible rewards of such actions, considering the rewards and punishments involved in the video games they play? In video games you are often rewarded for things that in normal society would get you killed or incarcerated for life.

Sure, I think what you’re saying has some truth to it.  I think that developers try to prevent younger kids from playing those types of games, but in truth they’re all playing.  Violent and sexual content exposure is pervasive in our society; you’ll even see aspects of it in things generally considered safe like Disney channel.   And, I think it is definitely true that some videogames can contribute to these problems.  For some it may create numbness to situations that normally require action to prevent; like, beating someone to death with a bat or running over someone with a car.  I think in the past people would be horrified by the news that someone was beaten to death with a bat or run over with a car.  Now, it’s not surprising to hear on the Tonight Show, Jay Leno making a joke about it or kids hearing it laughing about it.   There’s nothing much to do about stopping the production of games like these because they have a constitutional right to make them, parents have a right not to buy them and the government has the power to enact laws to prevent exploitation, however we feel that to help with some of this is to create alternative content to compete for their time and attention.  Of course this won’t be sufficient to remedy these issues, but possibly it could help. 

• 6. Tell our readers a little about yourself and your company for those who are interested?

Well there’s not a whole lot to say.  We’re a bunch of guys who were not trained in the games field who woke up one day thinking, “I think we’ll start a faith based game company”.  That was nearly 10 years ago, and we’ve kind of navigated the waters a bit and found out that making games for a living is hard work.  Initially we thought we’d only make Faith Based games, but now we found we need to find a happy medium between billable work and making Faith Based games, which is ok with us.  Over the years, we’ve learned a lot about the industry, made a lot of amazing friends in the industry and hope that as we gradually introduce more products into the market, one of them will take off and we will have enough funding to do the games we really want to make.  But for now, we’re just a small company in the Pacific Northwest just trying to keep up with the middle sized development houses around here.

• 7. What are your long term plans for your company and the direction and games you would like to product?

Our plans for our company are to become one of the premiere Faith Based entertainment companies in the country.  Our products will include Manga, Anime movies and games.  Our ultimate goal someday is to create a console game, but they are tremendously expensive, so a more realistic one is to make a great PC RPG game.   But for the time being, we’re also happy with making high level family friendly content and do art work for hire projects to pay the bills until we make enough to create the games we want.  Unless they are really high quality, we’ll keep working until we make enough to create them.  We have a title in development that we hope lots of people will enjoy, but we’re going to keep in mum until for sure we have enough funds and manpower to do it right.  

• 8. How does a Christian game developer draw the line between preaching to the gamer and trying to provide them with alternates to violence and sex?

Well we can’t speak for the other developers out there, but our philosophy is that the preaching should be done by the pastors.  What we try to is provide a context where people can either be challenged about how they think about the world around them and ask themselves how well God fits into it or not.  This isn’t a blatant thing, but more of a by product of playing the game.  Its human nature to be curious and if we pose a context where something is wrong in the virtual world, the natural inclination is to fix it.  How does it get fixed?  What is the philosophy behind fixing it?  We will provide one way to do it, but it’s up to the player to agree or disagree with how we decided the end of the puzzle or task is determined.  Then a player can leave and agree or disagree with that approach.  They can say “this is stupid” or “this is dumb” and some may even articulate very well why they disagree with it.  That is fine, we’re providing a source of discussion and that’s basically what we’re hoping to do.   Conversely the content could really resonate with the player at a deep level.  For example in one of our upcoming games, we have a character which is an anti-hero.  There is much entertainment out there that says you have to be the best to succeed, and if you fall short, your chances of being a “winner” in life is severely diminished.  If you throw the winning touchdown, you’ll get the girl.  If you have a 47″ vertical leap and can slam dunk the ball, you’ll be an All Star and your life will be awesome.  If you’re amazingly handsome, athletic and smart, you’ll have the American dream.  But, these depictions are often far from reality.   Many youth don’t fit that mould and because they feel societal pressures have some performance expectation, they get discouraged. But I think it’s nice to demonstrate creatively that is an alternative.  And happiness can be attained without these things.  The Christian message has many examples of these alternatives and for some, including us, is indeed a source of our happiness, especially when times are tough.  Saying that there’s still hope in the world and hope to people when it seems to be going all downhill, I think is encouraging to people.  So I don’t consider this preaching, but I do think that it is an important aspect of Christian game design that may be an important differentiator when compared to a secular game.

Do you think there is and can be a contextual component to violence in Christian genre interactive entertainment?

Sure.  There’s never a place for Gratuitous violence, however conflict can contain violent acts or violent events.  Without conflict, there is no drama.  And I think great lessons can be taught through drama and many of them had an epic battle between good and evil, for example, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and even the highly controversial, Passion of the Christ, used violence as a backdrop to contrast the difference between good and evil, and it’s an effective tool.  It provokes a response from people.  When used gratuitously, it has a numbing effect and I think that anything in excess has its problems.  But a skilful use of that tool in story telling and game design can be very effective.  Violence in games has been highly politicized and I think that each case needs to be assessed in context whether it’s bad or not.  In Christian games, there is a context where I think its ok, but the manner and method to how it’s used needs to be finely tuned such that the overall message does not highlight the violence.  If it highlights the good, it’s done its job. 

• 9. For inspiring Christian or any game developers out there could you describe your journey to where you are today? What advice would you have for inspiring game developers as a whole?

I think I’d say to all developers, work hard.  Know your craft and be amazingly good at what you do.  Listen to advice people give you, even critics that are fair and balanced.  Ignore critics who just want to pull you down, to make themselves feel better, or because have a bone to pick.  Make great games, play lots of them and take notes, study control, study technology, study motion, study immersion, understand the economics of development.  Read books, watch movies, but just don’t be a consumer, ask lots of questions, be curious.  If you end up making an amazing game, be smart and make sure you set up your business structure properly.  Seek legal advice early.  Most of all …. Be careful of NET royalty publisher deals.  Lastly, in the beginning, no one will know you, so when negotiating royalties, remember in the beginning a little bit of something is better than 100% of nothing.  Be prolific!

Additionally, to the young budding Christian game developers:  Remember that with any art form including game development that is an extension of ones own personal spiritual engagement with God so make sure that you’re making Christian games for all the right reasons.  God’s imprint is in everything you do.  So be a good representative in what you say and do, yes that means in your games too.  Be authentic in your business practice and in your games and you’ll do ok.  Lastly, don’t get too tied up with religious legalism.  Be smart and know the issues, but don’t force yourself into making a bad game either by ignoring core doctrine or adhering to it to such an extent that the game you end up with is really weird.  Weirdness can be a good marketing tool however, but at the end of the day you’ll have to be a good sport if you end up as well known for your weirdness, like a William Hung, a Tay Zonday or a Dennis “Danger” Madalone. 

• 10. The blurred edge between Christian interactive entertainment and mainstream developers appears to be coming clearer in recent times. Some Christian game developers have stepped over the blurred edge and are bravely attempting to bring Christian interactive entertainment into the mainstream. Do you think the blurred edge will continue to merge into one, or will the blurred edge between the two groups become even more blurred in the years to come in the industry?

Well as things are going, I have a feeling that this market will segment.  One segment will become a niche area to keep people who want to keep games as innocent and clean as possible, which I think there will be a need for; whereas, the other segment will stretch the definition of what will be considered Christian.  I think that’s already happening with Christian music with groups like U2, Switch foot and P.O.D, even singers like Amy Grant, Stacy Orrico and others have crossed over and done well.  In Movies, long ago movies like the Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston, Brother Sun, Sister Moon by Zefirelli and King of Kings were huge studio pictures, and then there was a quiet period until Passion of the Christ, followed by Chronicles of Narnia came out.  Pop culture Christian media outlets began talking more about Tolkien’s faith and tie-ins to Lord of the Rings, as well as the spiritual references in both the superman comics and Superman Returns, seemed to galvanize the Faith-based movie making community.  I think from this, there will be higher quality Christian movies coming out.  In like manner, I think Christian gaming has this potential, but it will take some time.  It takes time for the public to wrap its brains around the idea that Christian games can be more like Lord of the Rings, albeit done properly.  Granted there will always be people who will think Christianity in state of the art videogames makes as much sense as chocolate syrup on a pork chop, but I think over time as games get better; the blurred edge between the secular and Christian games may one day merge.

• 11. Your company has been over in Japan recently can you give our readers an update on your company’s current activities in the Japanese interactive entertainment market?

Basically, we have relationships with many of the artists in Japan who worked on the Digimon anime series and some of the 3d artists who worked on final fantasy XIII.  There are friends of mine in the movie industry that knew people from USC in Japan and I connected with them and the rest is history.  Currently, we’re producing and anime series created in Japan based on our Light Rangers video series.  It’ll cater to the Pokémon and Jetix, from toontown, Disney age group.  We’re nearly finished with principle artwork and later this fall we’ll have some preview clips of the animation up on our website for those who are interested. 

• 12. MMO’s appear to be the direction millions of gamers and some of the current developers are headed in, does your Christian developing company plan on any future Christian MMO’s for gamers to check out in the future?

Yes, there are plans for a Christian MMO by a few companies, however they are quite expensive, and hard to monetize and upkeep if you don’t have the right team and staff.  I’m not at liberty to say much more than this as far as our plans at this time on MMO development, but we are working closely with Microforte and Bigworld Technologies on a possible project.  The CEO, John DeMargheriti, is on my advisory board.  John’s company creates MMO middleware for large MMOs such as the for the upcoming Stargate Worlds, based on the popular Stargate SG1 TV show, and Tian Xia II, one of the largest MMOs in china.  Another partner of mine is working on MMO development in India.  As things solidify, we’ll update all our fans on our website as to whether our plans will work out in this space and what we’re going to work on if they do.  But for now it’s a little too premature.

• 13. When you were going up Scott did you have any idea what you would be doing for a living presently or did you have other directions in mind and kind of accidentally fell into video game development?

Well I definitely wanted to go into game development which was a dreadful thought to my parents when I was growing up.  I went to a game development camp for apple computer in the 80s run by Ken and Roberta Williams.  Richard Garriott was our counsellor and he taught the game programming class.  He just finished Ultima I in Applesoft basic and he was working on Ultima II, which I believe was published by Sierra On-line before he founded Origin Systems.    After that I was hooked and played all types of games, my favourite games were the Nintendo Mario games and pretty much any Japanese RPG game, like Final Fantasy, ChronoTrigger, Secret of Mana and Dragon Warrior.  This is what motivated me to want to work on RPG games and prompted my desire to work with the Japanese anime, manga and games community.  Many are beginning to see we’re building a lot of our properties around that.

• 14. Many game developers are creating episodic game content with some of their games today, does your company have any plans to develop any episodic games with content added as time passes. Considering the book format of the bible, do you think that Christian game development could head in this direction in the future? What I’m saying is that considering the way the bible was constructed episodic game structure maybe a way to go for future Christian developers? The format of the bible may lend itself to episodic content is what I’m asking?

Well episodic content is definitely a direction many of the bigger development houses are going because the development times and budgets are much better, and companies like Valve who can digitally distribute certainly can benefit form that model.  I think though that the release velocity needs to be faster for that model to work well.  Casual games have even shorter development cycles and much smaller budgets, yet have the same MSRP.  So, I’m not sure how long the bigger companies will be able to sustain marquee episodic game development, but for now it’s working.  As for doing it for the bible, I’m not really sure.  I think someone may be able to do it, but the bible isn’t exactly a blueprint for making a video game, and the game that would come out will have the views and perspectives of the development team, which will surely be different than many other people’s interpretation.  The format of the bible too, I don’t think necessarily lends itself well to that model either because the content is very eclectic in content, theme and intent.  I think some of the stories of the bible may lend itself to that model better.

• 15. What is your opinion of the current ESBR set up and the way they currently rate the interactive video entertainment available on the market today?

Well, I think it has its flaws, but unfortunately it’s the main thing out there that the retailers recognize as risk mitigating.  I think the dove foundation and other groups have tried to establish their own rating system for the Christian market, but it’s not widely known or used, except for in Christian retail.  I was surprised that they raised their rates for evaluation.  I think someday I have to figure out what they spend all their money on.

• 16. Looking down the road for your company and its goals, what is next for your company that we don’t know about yet?

Well just keep improving our techniques and skills, and keep producing great inspirational content.  Aside from that, we have a lot of things in the hopper and just stay tuned on our website to what’s new later on down the road.

  We would like to thank Mr Scott Wong for talking with us today and allowing us to reach into his life and the current activities of Brethren Entertainment within today’s interactive video game industry.