I love it when parodies come true. Like the Onion predicting a 5-bladed razor, The Simpsons joked about a video game where you convert infidels into conservatively dressed Christians. Well Left Behind Games is bringing just that to a computer near you.
Apparently, your task is to save the world from the forces of the anti-Christ, which in New York City turn out to be gays, Catholics, Muslims, basically anyone not packing a bible. You can also play as the anti-Christ’s cloven-hoof warriors.
What’s interesting here, is not the underlying message, or even that it depicts violence against specific groups. GTA came under fire for targeting Haitians, Chinese, Italians, and more. Ghettopoly was a huge faux pas. True Crime advocated cop-killing, even though the statistical correlation between the release of that game and the spike in constabularicide is still in question. No, what’s interesting is that the outraged group in all these cases is the Religious Right, and they are precisely the ones behind this game.
It’s not really surprising that they would hypocritically stoop to the level of using violence to pander to kids and sneak their message across. I mean how many times have we seen bigwig conservatives get caught doing exactly the things they advocate against? Limbaugh, Falwell, to name just a few. But I hope other groups will show some outrage, not so much at the game itself, but the hypocrisy behind it.
I don’t believe video games influence kids to violence. I think there are kids prone to it already, and choose to imitate a game or TV show instead of coming up with something brutal on their own. You don’t stop selling baseball bats when someone’s beaten. So I don’t think this game is going to convert kids to Christianity anymore than GTA is telling kids to carjack. Kids see through this shit much more than they get credit for.
Bonus: Billy Graham’s Bible Blasters game
Click on “F-H”, then “Flanders, Rod”, then Bible Blaster. The navigation is all in Flash so there’s no direct link to the game.
I know Rush is a doper, but what did Falwell do besides being a big fat idiot?
Onion predicting a 5-bladed razor? It’s been done. Early episodes of “Saturday Night Live,” back in the days when one blade was enough, spoofed the new “twin blade” razors with their announcement of a 3-blade, including animation of how the third blade snapped up the beard hair after it sprang back from dodging the second. Closing line, “Because…you’ll believe anything.” Still true…
No shit! That’s awesome. I’ll have to loook that up. Must’ve been when the show was still funny…
Whenever you start a sentence “I believe…”, SHUT UP. It’s precisely what we object to in the religious right. If you know, you have the data, and it will convince anyone who looks at data. If it’s your opinion, you don’t have all the data, and are interpolating or extrapolating. If it’s your belief, it’s because the facts say you’re wrong, but you aren’t budging. If there weren’t facts saying you’re wrong, it wouldn’t BE a belief, but an opinion or an observation, depending.
I don’t think the game will convert them to Christianity. If you hold the possibility of a personal relationship to the Christ archetype to be legitimately spiritual, I suspect the game will, if anything, drive people AWAY from Christ.
I do suspect, though, that it will, in general, move them towards a belief in violence as a legitimate way of achieving their own ends. And frankly, it doesn’t really matter whether they practice it literally, like drug gangs, or metaphorically, like, say Enron. The end result is the same.
Christ bears about the same relationship to Christianity as music does to the music industry, or sex to the sex trade.
I agree there’s nothing surprising (though perhaps poetically amusing) about it. Projection might be the single most useful observation Freud made in his life. OF COURSE extremists/fundamentalists accuse their enemies of exactly what they are doing, and OF COURSE they do exactly what they most claim to hate in their enemies. This is what “reactionary” means.
If you look at the neocons’ rhetoric about “haters of America”, it is much clearer when you understand they are talking about themselves. The things that make America great - it’s constitution & legal framework, its richness and diversity of natural resources, its cultural diversity within a shared language and economy, its stunning natural beauty, its love of freedom and communication, its people’s fearlessness towards life and change, its robust system of interlocked local economies, its traditions of self-sufficiency and mutual aid - these are exactly the things the neocons have targeted for destruction from the beginning.
Children are the nation’s greatest natural resource - and you know what we do with natural resources, right?