Book Review: Papal Teaching on Private Property – 1891 to 1981
within Church circles:
- My home parish, (!) Holy Family Kirkland, has started an ad campaign in the Seattle Area to try and bring lost Catholics home. I dig it.
- I am buying this game when it comes out. I mean c’mon, really? Guitar Hero is on this guy’s list, what little credibility he had for crying “Satanism!” at every corner is shot. I will play Inferno, & I will like it. I am not of the breed of Christian that thinks every medium with violence, sex, or other moral debauchery is automatically Satan’s work and should be ignored in totality.
- Where I will defend a Christian is here, in a story breaking north of the US border, where a pro-life student group is being silenced for speaking out against abortion. Nothing new under the sun…
I think part of the problem here is that people just ask whether a game is "satanic"–by which they apparently mean "anything that involves demons at all, even if you're not on their side"–without asking what the game's story actually condones and/or doesn't. Yes, being able to kill the souls of unbaptized babies is perhaps a bit much, but given that the game doesn't exactly aspire to theological correctness (and this fact should be obvious) it's not the worst thing in the world, especially considering that within the world of the game you are freeing them from eternal torment and whatnot.
I think it would be almost as productive to just ignore the thing entirely, or look at ways in which the game might be unintentionally much more spiritual than it was intended to be. I don't particularly think it's satanic, but even if that were shown to be the case my second question would be "is it instructively so?" In other words, even if options of being self-centered and 'bad' are given to the player, do those options really play out well for them? Do they get heavenly rewards for hellish deeds?
Morality does get more complicated in games!
Too many errors on the last two comments…
Oh I totally agree…
In this game, they actually stuck with the good/evil theme quite well, from what I understand. Though some of the bad guys are quite violent or over the top, you are given a scythe and a cross. The former you use to kill, the latter you use to exorcise and send the bad guys to Purgatory. Now I think that is kinda novel and fun, and the Inferno imagery can barely be used in the first place without someone crying "evil!" Morality does get quite complicated, as you say. But to reflect reality, games will have to contain much more than the 4.7 gigs available to a DVD presently…