Religious groups are uniting in condemnation of a violent video game where players try to convert everyone to Christianity. Haven't they heard of the prayer button, asks Seán O'Driscollin New York
It is a quiet January evening in Manhattan. The winter has been extraordinary mild, bringing people out to enjoy the evening sun. There is a small fender-bender on 14th Street and most people are busy making their way home.
On my computer screen, however, the city is in flames. Smoke is pouring from skyscrapers (a nice hint at recent history), panic has gripped the populace and the CBS television headquarters lies in ruins. Across the city, Satan is doing his worst. Cunningly disguised as the leader of the Global Community Peacekeepers (read, the UN), he is planning to destroy the world.
I am playing Eternal Forces: Left Behind, the most controversial Christmas present this year. If I had believed the hype about this game in the European papers, I would have thought it was available in every store in the US and was brainwashing kids into fundamentalist Christianity. Instead, I find it very difficult to get in New York, available in only a few outlying stores of the Target chain, with few copies available in the whole of Manhattan.
It's selling much better in the mid-west, but is still dwarfed by Grand Theft Auto and more traditional shoot-up video games, despite being endorsed by Focus on the Family, America's largest Christian family group.
Marketed for players from ages six years and up, it has been condemned by the Anti-Defamation League and various Jewish, Muslim and Christian groups that abhor its use of violence and attempts to convert secularists and non-believers before they are claimed by Satan.
In a plot taken from the Left Behind series of poorly reviewed Christian novels (which have sold more than 60 million copies), the good Christians have already been "raptured" into heaven, leaving only sinners, some of whom have seen the light and are fighting for Jesus.
The players must convert members of the public to Christianity, build up an army, open churches and rebuild the infrastructure, all of which builds points.
It should be noted that women characters cannot become soldiers or builders and are labelled separately from the men with tags such as "medic woman" or "friend woman".
Players lose "spirit points" for killing people, but these are quickly restored by pressing the prayer button, which is limitless but can be used only every 11 to 12 seconds. The game manufacturers say that all killing is in self-defence but with the forces of the anti-Christ attacking while you are trying to build up a civilisation, confrontation is both inevitable and sensationalised.
In between the rounds of titanic struggle between good and evil, there are mawkish messages of Christian solidarity that I had previously imagined came only from the mouth of the Bible-loving Ned Flanders from The Simpsons. Some are harmless enough "did-you-know" info chunks from the Bible, others are flat-out anti-evolution propaganda.
After one strenuous battle with evil-doers, I clicked on a screen with a backdrop of a giant shell. "There is a deception going on in the popular media about so-called proof for evolution," it reads, before suggesting that micro-evolution within species could not lead to the macro-evolution of apes into humans. And then it's back to more blood-letting in New York.
I wanted to find out more about what the game's users thought, and spoke to 11-year-old Camden Davis and his father, Tim, who ministers with the His Calling Ministry in Salem, Oregon. Tim is strongly against evolution, and believes that gays can be converted to the "true way" of Christ. He is mild-mannered and is concerned about coming across as a "conservative Christian freak".
He and Camden have reached level 12 of the game, which takes at least 20 hours, making them very advanced players.
According to Camden, many of his friends have been unable to get past level one and might just skim-read the Christian texts between each mission.
He has never been to New York, but believes the game's reproduction of the city is very accurate, at least compared to other video games he has played. He finds the time pressure most difficult. If the spirit level drops below 60 then the forces of good start to turn neutral. "We can win them back but the time you put into training a builder or soldier is lost," he says.
For Tim, the game's violence can be justified as self-defence and teaches kids about the realities of life in a non-Christian world. He believes that there "will always be strife in this world until Jesus comes back" and "that's where games like Left Behind come in."
But for Jonathan Hutson, a "progressive Christian" who operates a website called Talk To Action, the game is offensive to Jews, Christians, Muslims and atheists. He has carried out exhaustive research on the company's finances and has received legal letters from the makers of Left Behind, forcing him to take down screen shots of the game from his website.
"I'll say one thing for this game," he says. "It has united Jews, Muslims, Christians, non-believers, secularists, evolutionists, liberals and conservatives like no other issue I've seen. Maybe they had a secret agenda all along to unite the world. If that's the goal, the game's a total success."
