37 Comments on “The Purpose Driven Humvee”   rss feed

1. Michael on May 30th, 2006 at 8:48 pm

   Wow… This is very scary. And its sad that it appears after the upllifting, hopeful post from Sean about Obama…

2. Mark on May 30th, 2006 at 8:53 pm

   We like to keep balance Michael I agree it is terrifying.

3. A on May 30th, 2006 at 9:19 pm

   Proof of the obvious fact that it is at least nearly as easy to find less than exemplary Christians as it is to find not so heroic examples of any other people group that one might possibly think of.

4. Mark on May 30th, 2006 at 9:52 pm

   I agree with that A. I guess the point is that the people behind this have a very large following and are well plugged into our political leadership, so I’m interested to see what the responses are for that reason.

5. Sean on May 30th, 2006 at 9:57 pm

   Well, it does say that you can choose to play the role of Antichrist, blowing away all the Christians.

   Paging Dr. Freud…

6. A on May 30th, 2006 at 10:16 pm

   Hey Mark. The connection to Rick Warren seems to come from
   

   [The game's] creators are linked to the empire of mega-church pastor Rick Warren

   which is a little on the wishy-washy side. I’d be surprised to hear any real endorsement from Rick. The game’s creators even expect some flack from the both “sides of the aisle”, as the CEO says,
   

   We’ve thought through how the Christian right and the liberal left will slam us

7. Mark on May 30th, 2006 at 10:27 pm

   Yeah, I saw that also. I’ll have to come back and revisit this after I see what responses there are, if any. Personally, I don’t care about the game - I doubt that it does any harm - but it provides an interesting (and scary) insight into the mindset of some among the Christian right.

8. Vince on May 30th, 2006 at 11:53 pm

   “Well, it does say that you can choose to play the role of Antichrist, blowing away all the Christians.”

   Come on, Sean. Be nice. I’m a Christian. You wouldn’t want me to be blown away. If it makes you feel any better, I’m Canadian.

9. Sean on May 31st, 2006 at 12:08 am

   Vince, I have no desire to play the role of the Antichrist. I am practically a saint, reluctant as conventional religious power structures may be to admit it. I’m just pointing out that the game designers have given you the option. The obvious psychoanalytic conclusions are for you to draw.

10. ecostudent on May 31st, 2006 at 12:09 am

    “Art” imitates life - there was an episode of The Simpsons where Rod and Tod Flanders were playing a game where they would shoot the heathens to convert them.

    There is a great post on this at talk2action.org, but right now the site seems to be down. The link to Warrens empire seems pretty solid to me.

    Onward Christian Soldiers…

11. damtp_dweller on May 31st, 2006 at 2:09 am

    Apart from the psychoanalytic mumblings, surely the obvious question now is “Will Hillary Clinton still claim that all violent video games should be banned, or would condemning this one risk alienating potential voters?”

12. hackticus on May 31st, 2006 at 2:34 am

    Is it going to be available for Xbox 360?

13. B on May 31st, 2006 at 5:49 am

    The wording of the last sentence surely suggest it is a hoax?

    I think if one were being serious the sentence would be more likely to end along the lines of ‘taken out without mercy’. Nobody views prejudice as a good thing, and anyone who advocates a ‘convert or kill’ approach wouldn’t call it ‘prejudice’ but ‘right’. It seems to me more likely that this is making fun of the extremist Christians who almost have this kind of attitude to other religions but try to pull the wool over people’s eyes and don’t make it explicit.

    Or am I being overly optimistic?

14. B2 on May 31st, 2006 at 6:09 am

    Sorry. I realise there’s already a B on the site. I’ll be B2 from now on.

15. Mark on May 31st, 2006 at 7:11 am

    Hi damtp_dweller. Yes, this is what I ws getting at in the post. Hillary has disappointed me before by lashing out at certain media to score political points. I wonder if she can at least be consistent, as you say.

    B(2). I’m hoping for a hoax too, but I read around for a while and couldn’t find a smoking gun (no pun intended)

    ecostudent. The talk2action.org post is what I linked to at the beginning af the post. It is definitely worth reading.

16. damtp_dweller on May 31st, 2006 at 7:23 am

    Mark,

    I’m blushing right now. Here I was, feeling smug about giving a suitably pithy comment, only to realise that I’d said almost exactly the same thing you had in the post.

    That’ll teach me to post a comment before having a coffee.

17. Arun on May 31st, 2006 at 7:26 am

    http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/left-behind-eternal-forces/700684p1.html

18. Pingback from Zooglea » otro video juego… ¿otro? on May 31st, 2006 at 7:29 am

    [...] Estaba yo trabajando y me he parado un momento para descansar. He abierto Cosmic Variance y me encuentro con un post titulado The Purpose Driven Humvee. [...]

19. Arun on May 31st, 2006 at 7:32 am

    From the link I provided:

    The game’s resource model is interesting in that these buildings aren’t used to “produce” units. Rather, the major resource in the game is actually the “neutrals” — people who haven’t yet chosen their side in the great war. Every unit in the game has a name and their own life and faith history (written in text in the unit information), along with a “Spirit Level” rated from 0-100. Spirit levels between 40 and 60 are considered neutral. As a unit’s spirit rises, their faith increases until it reaches 60, at which point it becomes a “friend.” Friends are basic units who can then be trained in a particular profession at a converted building. A unit whose Spirit falls below 40, however, becomes a member of the enemy camp and can be likewise trained.

    It’s this wrestling back and forth for the souls of the people that makes the gameplay dynamic so interesting. Players aren’t competing to kill the enemy army — rather, they’re trying to save them, and each person killed represents a failure rather than a success. “We found that adhering closely to Biblical philosophies made the game more interesting rather than less,” Lyndon said. “One of the key elements of that is to make sure that the player sees that every life is important and precious.”

    Translated to gameplay terms, much of the game involves the management of unit morale, represented in the game as the Spirit resource. Being converted to one side or the other isn’t the end of the struggle. A unit’s spirit level will continue to rise and fall depending on outside circumstances. Certain events — being asked to perform immoral actions (such as killing civilians), being seduced by the enemy, witnessing good or evil miracles — lead to adjustments in units’ Spirit ratings. That means that managing one’s army and shepherding one’s flock are essentially the same thing. Units can and will lose faith during battle, and those that fall below the threshold will immediately become neutral and walk away from whatever they were doing. That can be pretty bad if they’re in an Abrams in combat, which takes three units to run.

    Players won’t be able to rely solely on the killing power of conventional military force, because every skirmish in combat drives units back toward neutrality. They’ll need spiritual units to both keep the faith and hopefully recruit, rather than kill, enemy armies.

    and

    As for the violence in a game built from a Christian perspective, Lyndon doesn’t shy away from that either, pointing out that the Bible itself is quite a violent book. “The point of morality is that people have a choice in how they react to situations — and one of those choices is always going to be violence.” While the game itself has no blood, it doesn’t shy away from showing corpses, and lots of them. In fact, one of the things people might find surprising is that bodies in this game don’t disappear, making for some gruesome landscapes as corpses pile up in the streets of New York. “Violence has consequences — even justified violence,” Lyndon said. “You can behave morally and still cause harm. Most people tend to do evil unconsciously because they’re shying away from the consequences of their actions. Making moral choices — good or bad — have costs associated with them. We want to make sure we show that.

20. adam on May 31st, 2006 at 8:58 am

    Still sounds fake to me (or, at least, not really serious, maybe). Developing games costs a lot of money and I can’t see this surviving a storm of protest, let alone making its money back.

21. Mark on May 31st, 2006 at 9:01 am

    That was my response also, but I see no evidence as yet.

22. michaeld on May 31st, 2006 at 9:15 am

    I’m worried that it might be the creation of someone who, like me, is anti-religious, in order to discredit religion through misrepresentation. If that is the case I hope the “chorus of condemnation” arrives from the anti-religious community.

23. JC on May 31st, 2006 at 9:32 am

    There’s already really nasty games of this sort, such as the very politically incorrect “Ethnic Cleansing” which was designed by some white supremecist guys. In “Ethnic Cleansing” you go around as a Nazi or KKK type guy killing blacks, mexicans, and jews. To top it off in political incorrectness, the “end boss” is a giant Ariel Sharon armed with a rocket launcher.

    http://www.adl.org/videogames/default.asp

    Years ago on BBS’s (before the internet was popular), occasionally I came across really nasty video games portraying things like “managing” a Nazi concentration camp.

    I suspect the main reason these sorts of nasty video games were never really all that popular, was that they were largely an underground thing. I couldn’t imagine any of them being made for an Xbox, Playstation, or Nintendo. This could be a first if this “Left Behind: Eternal Forces” game ever becomes popular.

24. Robert McNees on May 31st, 2006 at 11:12 am

    You can play “Billy Graham’s Bible Blaster” online. Go to
    http://www.thesimpsons.com/characters/home.htm

    and click on the “F-H” section of the filing cabinet. When it opens, click on the folder marked “Flanders, Rod”. When his file opens up, click on the “Bible Blaster” image.

25. ronan on May 31st, 2006 at 11:19 am

    B (err, B2?) in response to comment #13: the term “with extreme prejudice” is a piece of clandestine-ops double speak. It does not refer to the idea that the ‘agent’ has improper prejudices. It means that the agent’s target doesn’t have to do anything wrong, or be a threat. The target is to be killed.

26. ecostudent on May 31st, 2006 at 1:22 pm

    Thanks Robert! I hadn’t seen that episode in ages, so I couldn’t remember exactly how that Simpsons game went.

    I think this Left Behind game is not a hoax. Maybe for an encore they can do a historical role playing game where the player can be Col. Chivington smiting down heathen women and children at Sand Creek.

    Scary.

27. Dug on May 31st, 2006 at 2:31 pm

    Eh, can’t believe everything you read on the internet, can you? I find this hard to believe…who really thinks this way?

    But anyway, if some poor bloke out there thinks this is cool, lets be careful not to paint everyone with the same brush. I’ve been hearing about these scary caricatures for years, but I’ve never met one myself…

28. Eugene on May 31st, 2006 at 7:07 pm

    Haha!

    This game must be doing something really awesome to be able to even raise the ire of Jack Thompson, who is pretty nutcase himself!

29. Charles Martel on Jun 1st, 2006 at 10:03 am

    MT’s post said:

    One can’t help but think of the following. Suppose that a fundamentalist Muslim game designer came out with an analogous game in which the goal was to systematically exterminate Christians and Jews until they were wiped from the face of the Earth. I expect we’d see outrage on a national level.

    =====

    This does in fact exist, but it’s not a game. You see precisely this sentiment expressed in many passages from the Koran (particularly Sura 9) and hadith (sayings and actions of the prophet, as compiled in ‘Bukhari’, ‘Daud’, ‘Muslim’, etc.) Of course, there is no national outrage against the “Religion of Peace”. Simply bringing up the violent scriptural foundations of Islam would make you an Islamophobe, right?

    But at least we have brave warriors here who are selflessly protecting us from those dastardly Christians, who are well known for their bomb belts, suicide pilots, car bombs, videotaped beheadings… oh wait, that doesn’t describe Christians at all!

30. tooliroukus on Jun 1st, 2006 at 11:01 am

    Surely the whole thing is a joke, taking the p*ss out of extremists of all faiths, and overly credulous and Godless liberals who might take it seriously.

31. Mark on Jun 1st, 2006 at 11:50 am

    Hi tooliroukus. As you’ll have read in my post and in the comments, this is certainly the first thing that springs to mind. However, I’ve yet to see the evidence that it is a hoax. If you find it, I’m begging you to let us know.

32. The Anonymous Coward on Jun 1st, 2006 at 12:45 pm

    Simply bringing up the violent scriptural foundations of Islam would make you an Islamophobe, right?

    Because there are absolutely no scriptures in the Bible that are violent at all. Nothing there about killing unbelievers. Nope. Especially not in, say, the Book of Joshua, the part concerning the Israelites’ entry into the Promised Land.

    But at least we have brave warriors here who are selflessly protecting us from those dastardly Christians, who are well known for their bomb belts, suicide pilots, car bombs, videotaped beheadings… oh wait, that doesn’t describe Christians at all!

    Not today, but in the past there’ve been plenty of Christians using scriptural justification for terrible things–not car bombs and videotaped beheadings, obviously, but…well, at the risk of beating a dead horse, the Spanish Inquisition was able to find plenty of scriptures that they thought justified what they were doing.

    Yes, today there are Muslims who justify their terrible acts through the Koran, and there are no comparable Christian terrorists justifying themselves through the Bible. This is true, and this is obvious. But I don’t think this can be attributed to anything about the Koran and the Bible themselves. I’ve read both the Koran and the Bible, and I’m pretty sure the latter actually has more violence in it. If someone wanted to pick verses from the Bible that seemed to justify killing innocents with car bombs and suicide pilots, it wouldn’t be hard to do.

33. Mark on Jun 1st, 2006 at 12:51 pm

    Or perhaps murdering doctors who perform abortions. This is an act of terrorism that is often justified through the bible.

    It actually was in no way my intention to compare the violent content of these two religions. Rather I wanted to point out the hypocritical responses one would get when confronted with violence justified through one, as opposed to that justified through the other.

34. Layman on Jun 1st, 2006 at 6:24 pm

    This report was very inaccurate. The game does not have the player try to establish a theocracy or kill people who don’t convert. In fact, you are penalized for killing people, even though Christian forces are fighting against the anti-Christ’s army. See more about the nature of the game, with quotes from secular reviewers who have actually played it:

    http://christiancadre.blogspot.com/2006/06/truth-about-left-behind-video-game.htm

35. adam on Jun 1st, 2006 at 7:12 pm

    Linkee no workee.

36. Layman on Jun 1st, 2006 at 7:15 pm

    Sorry, forgot the “l” somehow:

    http://christiancadre.blogspot.com/2006/06/truth-about-left-behind-video-game.html

37. Bruce Wilson on Jun 11th, 2006 at 6:47 pm

    There’s a rebuttal of “Layman’s” assertions on Talk To Action.

    http://www.talk2action.org/story/2006/6/9/32014/83270

    Excerpt:

    ”
    Layman repeatedly states on Wikipedia that his core concern is Talk to Action’s report that the Christian militia - called the Tribulation Force in the Left Behind novels, graphic novels, and video game — uses the power of prayer and modern military weapons to conduct physical and spiritual warfare, which means converting or killing New Yorkers.

    “It is inaccurate, untrue, not factual, to say the game calls for people to `convert or kill.’ That’s simply anti-Christian propoganda [sic],” writes Layman. “The secular reviews by people who have played the game completely contradict the nonsense espoused by Talk2Action.”

    Enough. Let’s go fishing for facts - in the very waters where Layman claims to have caught his “whopper”. Let’s see if we can catch a real whopper. Layman has searched Technorati.com (a web site that aggregates information about blogs) for days, he says, posting on dozens of blogs that Talk to Action has spread inaccurate information, and this is his key contention, his claim to fame. Layman thought he hooked the big one, and he’s bragged to everyone about it for days. Let’s see what kind of whopper he really reeled into the Christian Cadre boat.

    Layman asked for reviews by credible people who have actually played Left Behind: Eternal Forces, and which document the “convert or kill” claim. Here are two.”

    But, I’m a visual thinker - the issue seemed fairly cut and dry to me simply from the promotional images of the game -as it’s being played- that were released by the game’s makers :

    Those image appear to depict paramilitary forces firing close range at civilians, and civilians dropping to the ground - apparently from being shot.

    Here’s a collection of images:

    http://www.talk2action.org/comments/2006/6/7/41835/37829/5#5

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