Spiritual RPGs--summary

Do RPGs have to be spiritual? If you mean, "Do they have to feature witnessing and prayer meetings?" then the answer is No. But I doubt a Christian will (yes, or "should") feel comfortable participating in a world that by its nature excludes God. I'm not advocating "Church: the Roleplaying Game!" (that happens too much as it is), just RPGs that are open to my faith. And as I discovered in my writing, not only does giving God the best seat at the table leave plenty of story lines, it also leads to better ones.

A narrative (purposeful, creative) emphasis is more in tune with Christian views than a random, mechanistic one.

Immersive games are more likely to affect your views and behavior. An old-fashioned dungeon-crawl game on the computer isn't as likely to harm you as a first-person shooter or a game where you're stealing cars and beating people up.

On the other hand, it would be interesting to see some games that feature a Christian premise without trying to mechanize the spiritual aspect. For example, a Christian version of Dogs in the Vineyard set either in early times or perhaps in a "post-Apocalyptic" (Hollywood sense) period would be good. (An RPG based on on Frank Creed's Flashpoint is under development.) I would tend toward a "rules-lite" approach such as Risus for general gaming and narrate the spiritual phenomena.

I'd like to hear about any games you come up with along these lines. Perhaps if we can pioneer instead of just cloning secular games, we'll get some useful, even evangelistic, dialog going. For a truly Christian RPG that encourages thoughtful, biblical narrative could make it Satan's turn to ask whether RPGs are "threat or menace."

Spiritual Roleplaying II

Since a more narrative approach can reinforce a Christian worldview, is that good enough? Not always.

Back in high school, I knew a lot of gamers who seemed to think that the vicarious experience they gained from games was roughly equivalent to life experience. It isn't. For one thing, it's possible to be fooled. I pulled an apparently clever trick in a D&D game once that I later discovered was physically impossible--yet the justification that I used and my DM/ref accepted was physics!

Free Clue #1: You can fool the ref, but you can't fool God.

But sometimes the very nature of the game situation is contradictory. For example, a lot of Christian groups (especially youth groups) roleplay witnessing and similar situations. It makes sense: by playacting the situation, newbies get used to the unfamiliar aspects in a safe environment.

This is why it's a catastrophically bad idea:

Witnessing (like the other things they enjoy roleplaying) is a spiritual phenomenon. Sound familiar? The great weakness of RPGs is handling spiritual matters--and here it is far worse. When you are really witnessing, you can count on God to inspire you. Will he inspire you with the hypothetically right approach to a hypothetical situation? No. (God doesn't seem to like hypothetical questions, probably because on spiritual topics in particular, they turn from reality to unreality.)

So what do you learn from these exercises? Well, if God isn't helping you, you learn to rely on your own wisdom rather than God's. Does that sound like a good idea? Yet this sort of exercise is extremely common, at least in the U.S. (and thus probably in many other places). The proper way to learn witnessing is either to jump out and do it or pair up with someone more experienced. (This used to be called discipleship.) If you pair up, you give prayer and other support to the guy who's doing the main work, and then you trade off, and your mentor can help you when you get into trouble.

Of course, we aren't going to do that, because like parents reading to their kids instead of plunking them down in front of the tube, it takes time and effort.

You might try it anyway.

In the next post, I'll try to sum all this up.

Spiritual Roleplaying

Last time we ran into a problem: even if you try to incorporate spiritual matters into a game, you wind up with an underlying non-spiritual worldview. Salvation can apparently become a die roll.

So what's the alternative?

Well, we can try to sidestep the randomness problem by using a diceless game, but that alone can be a superficial answer. I'm going to consider possibilities based on GNS Theory--yes, I know it's old in some ways, but it gives us some useful terms. (For a more general overview of theories, check here.) Specifically, a game or player may be

Gameist--looking at the game as a problem to be solved by improving stats, gear, etc.
Narrativist--looking at the game as a storytelling experience
Simulationist--trying to recreate the world or a genre faithfully.

I would suggest that Gameist systems are no more problematic than chess or go. Even if they are technically RPGs and immersive, they are pursued at a fairly superficial or abstract level. These can be a lot of fun, too.

Simulationist systems can be a problem, because they are very immersive (though abstraction still matters). There is no way to simulate spiritual phenomena, so I would have a problem with a strictly Simulationist system. (But see below.)

Narrativist systems are the most promising. The Bible itself is mostly a collection of stories, and Jesus was fond of parables. So Narrativism closely matches what God has revealed about the world. There's a good intro here. Although it's technically possible to play most games from a Narrativist perspective, it seems to me that rules-lite/non-Simulationist systems would work the best. (On the other hand, I always admired Chivalry and Sorcery in High School and early college...)

So instead of using dice to figure out whether a character converts, why not do what I would do in one of my stories? Consider the character and the situation (and the effect on the story as a whole) and act accordingly. We do not live in a random universe but in an authored universe. Modelling that in a roleplaying game could open the door to God.

Next we'll look at a problem that arises even from a non-random, Narrativist activity, however.

Christian RPGs

I originally meant to name names in my example of a Christian RPG, but then, I also meant to give the people in question fair warning, and the last week has been too hectic.

The RPG in question has a "Spirit" attribute (along with the usual ones such as Strength and Dexterity); it "measures the PC's ability to do things according to the Spirit, such as preaching the Gospel." And that's where the trouble begins, in my view. One example involves a character preaching the Gospel to an elderly woman outside an inn. He is a Specialist in such preaching, and he also has a "Belt of Truth" Rhema (note: the rhema/logos bit usually yanks on my gag reflex), all of which tells him what kind of dice to roll to figure out whether he succeeded.

Now the question is, what does "success" mean in this context? That the woman converts? That the PC doesn't make a fool out of himself presenting the Gospel? Who knows? For me, the important point is that a spiritual matter (witnessing) has been reduced to a mechanistic matter (rolling dice and comparing the result to a table). That's not how witnessing works.

This puts us right back where we were last time: how can we have spiritual phenomena (perhaps even God) in a roleplaying game? I'll try to answer that in my next few posts.

God and Randomness

The big difference between RPGs and other games is that RPGs are immersively interactive: you aren't just moving a token on a gameboard; you are a character in a gameworld. So a problem arises that doesn't occur in chess or Monopoly: Where is God?

Option 1: Ignore the problem. Since God seldom commits miracles, to some extent whether Ugg the Barbarian will connect using his club works the same in a Christian or agnostic universe. (We'll not go into the problem that some gameworlds are inherently non-Christian.)

Objection: If Christ is at the center of your life, he will naturally affect everything else. At the very least he should be allowed, and I would think a Christian would prefer to play as close to a Christian as possible. (Even Plato knew, as mentioned in the Republic, that role-playing a bad guy--in our case, a pagan--will have negative effects.)

Option 2: Christianize the game. This is harder, because spiritual phenomena don't lend themselves to simulation. Many attempts have been made, and we'll look at one tomorrow.

But this leads to the second problem: randomness. You see, there must be rules of some kind, and most RPGs resolve conflicts (the player wants to do one thing, the GM another) by randoming, usually involving dice. From a modern standpoint, this is reasonable, since we are supposed to live in a mechanistic, rule-based world.

But God is personal, not mechanistic, and the rules are less important than the Ruler. So the mechanics of most RPGs reinforce a secular mindset, not a spiritual one. Is there a way to Christianize RPGs even on the philosophical level? I think there is. We'll get to that post after next.

Role-playing Games: Threat or Menace?

Okay, neither one, really--at least not inherently. I played D&D in high school, and I did eventually quit the regular pen-and-paper RPGs for spiritual reasons. But those reasons may no longer hold, and I'll spend the week examining the matter.

In case you somehow don't know what RPGs are, check here. I think we're at last beyond the stage where "Dungeon Master" or "Game Master" is treated as a kind of rank, like 33rd-degree Mason (some of the early anti-RPG writing made claims like that), and I hope we can pursue more important points.

To simplify matters, I'll ignore genre, so I won't spend any time on whether Christians may play wizards or psychics. It's a complex matter involving the distinction between literary and occult magic.

But there are two aspects of RPGs that do trouble me. I don't think they're inherent problems--in one case, I'll give an alternative. Nor do I think I have the final answers; in fact, I'm hoping for some helpful, informed opinions. But I do want to ask some questions that will make people squirm. Fair warning. Also, given my personal schedule, my posting this week may be erratic, so please be patient.

Tomorrow, we'll look at randomness and the presence of God.