When I told my son that I was working on this running series about the theology of video games, he suggested that I check out a game called Gris. Gris is a highly stylized platform game where the character, a mysterious girl named Gris, gracefully wanders a ruined wasteland trying to bring life and color back to the landscape. Aesthetically, Gris is unlike any game I’ve ever played. The graphics, music, and gameplay somehow work together to create a haunting experience, one where, although it’s not immediately clear what you are trying to do, you have no doubt that it's weighty, and tragic, and important.
As the game unfolds, the deeply spiritual nature of the quest in Gris becomes clear. Wandering from scene to scene, Gris gathers enigmatic points of starlight scattered around the world. Together these create constellations that help her ascend higher and higher into the heavens. Gradually she is able to restore color to the monochromatic landscape, and eventually she regains her ability to sing, which allows her to bring life back to the world.
In the last scene of the game, the girl faces the final boss, which turns out to be a monstrous version of herself, one that drags her down into an ocean of black sludge, and tries to prevent her from escaping. In the end, she is able defeat her inner shadow only by using the power of her voice and singing light and life and color at last into the world.
Apparently the game won all kinds of awards when it was released, including the 2019 “Games for Impact” award, and the 2019 Game Developers Choice Award for Best Visual Art. It's especially notable that the game contains none of the traditional shoot-em-up, hack-and-slash, romp-and-stomp elements that are so ubiquitous in the traditional platformer genre. The quest in Gris is mystical, not militarized, visionary, not violent.
I’m mentioning Gris because even though it is not specifically Christian in theme, its subject matter—over-coming our inner darkness and grief to bring light and life to the world and so ascend to a beatific vision of the heavenlies—certainly touches on profoundly Christian ideas, though the Christian would want to add, I think, that it is not by mechanical effort that we overcome our inner darkness, rather by the gracious working of the Spirit of God upon us. But be that as it may, I think a game like Gris has all kinds of potential to open up all kinds of conversations about Christian spirituality.
This potential stands out all the more beautifully when it is held up against video games that are specifically Christian in theme. You may in fact be surprised to learn that there have been some games designed over the years, packaged and marketed for an explicitly Christian audience. Of course, most of these are bizarre and embarrassing disasters, in my opinion, failing both as expressions of the Christian worldview, and as video games in their own right.
Some games just slap a Christian veneer on a traditional form, like this early example of a Super-Mario-style platform adventure, themed around the story of Noah’s Ark. It’s probably just harmless fun, but Mario himself was probably more fun than this, and the final boss fight, where Noah goes head to head in an shoot-out with Lucifer himself, is pretty cringy.
But a game like Noah’s Ark is relatively harmless. Not so the video games in the Left Behind Series. A blog series on the theology of video games is maybe not the place to unpack all the problems inherent in the Left Behind franchise in general, because there are so many it’s hard to know where to start—the movies, the books, the theological underpinnings of the whole concept—all of it is bad, in my opinion. So maybe it's no surprise that it also created some bad video games.
I haven’t done a careful-enough study of Christian video games to state this categorically, of course, but my limited experience with this sub-genre suggests that we risk all kinds of dangers when we try to take our faith and “bottle it” in a video game format. If Mashall MacLuhan was right, and the medium is the message, there may be something inherent to the medium of the traditional video game that clouds the message of the Gospel.
It doesn’t have to be this way, though. It’s one of the reasons I’ve spent the last three months exploring video games from every theological angle I can think of. As a gamer friend of mine once said: the Spirit is speaking in the world, and the Spirit can speak through a carefully-crafted video game.
The operative word there is "carefully." It won’t happen simply by slapping a sloppy coat of “Christian whitewash” onto a traditional hack-and-slash shooter, and believing that somehow you’ve “sanctified the medium.” Better to play God of War and read its story as a Christian, than to take God of War and try to convert it, by over-laying a distorted picture of the Christian God on top of it.
If a video game is going to be distinctly Christian, in fact, I would argue that it will mean reinventing the very conventions of the genre, finding brand new ways to express within the particular bounds of the medium, the deepest truths of our Gospel: that beauty is sometimes found best by longing for it, that joy is mysteriously present in the heart-ache, that life paradoxically comes through death, and death paradoxically colors every aspect of life. These truths are not going to be expressed through a Christianized “version” of Doom, perhaps, but if you're wondering how they might be expressed, perhaps an hour or two playing Gris will stir your imagination up.
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