by Levi Ritchie

Created on: June 10, 2008   Last Updated: November 03, 2008

Honestly, if you are looking for an answer to the question of why there are no good Christian games, I can answer that in a few of sentences. So, to provide an unnecessary sense of completeness to this article, I will:

Christian games are difficult to make because of the stereotypes from the Christian community about video game violence. The large organizations with the funding needed to make a decent Christian game all understand the touchiness of the subject, so we get these awful Bible trivia games and the occasional "Angel vs. Demon" sort of thing that is underfunded and lazily made. Non-Christian groups don't usually don't want to make Christian games, and the ones that do can't get funding from their publishers because limiting the target demographic to a single Religion would wreck sales.

Wonderful. Now that we have that question out of the way, I would like to discuss something a little bit less obvious, but possibly more important that still technically fits the subject matter: Whether or not it is a good thing that there are not many Christian games available.

Wait, don't send me hate mail just yet. I say this with good reason. An outbreak of Christian games (should that ever happen) could easily be fatal to the hearts of young Christians in the long run. This, mind you, is coming from someone who plays video games way too much for his own good and would LOVE a decent Christian game.

Assume there was some sort of "outbreak" of popularity for Christian gaming. There are two major issues here:

1. The gaming industry, just like the movie and television industries, is ultimately reliant on money. In other words, this would be one more nasty little thorn of greed in the Christian world. Lazily done Christian games with weak (or even false) messages would haunt the market, simply because unwitting parents find the idea of a Christian game for their game-obsessed son too good to pass up. The more money the Christan games industry made, the dirtier tactics they would be capable of using. If it made little money, but enough to still be considered profitable, we would have on our hands a worst case scenario: Companies obligating Christians to buy Christian games instead of other video games unless they want to be considered faithless heathens. Essentially, it would be a massive blow to the Church, as public opinion of Christians being total hypocrites became more justified. That leads me my next point...

2. A sense of right and wrong would be watered down to allow

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