Christian missionaries use video games targeting Jews
Jews In The Virtual Cross-Hairs

New Evangelical video game has message for non-believers: convert or die.

Liel Leibovitz - Staff Writer
http://www.thejewishweek.com/
Friday, October 20, 2006 / 28 Tishri 5767

Manhattan’s skyline is smoldering.

In the streets, the true believers are fighting to the death against the forces of evil, consisting of rock stars and atheists led by the anti-Christ, the leader of a UN-like organization.

Ordinary New Yorkers, Jews included, have little choice: They can either convert or be killed.

All this is taking place in a new video game, “Left Behind: Eternal Forces,” created, ironically, by a team consisting of Jews who now say they believe in Jesus.

Based on the wildly popular Evangelical “Left Behind” book series, which details the struggle between good and evil once the Rapture occurs and true believers in Christ are whisked away to heaven, the game is due out early next month and poised, some industry analysts say, to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. A million copies are also slated to be distributed to churches nationwide.

As members of the Tribulation Force, the game’s protagonists, the player must roam the streets of a carefully rendered Manhattan and interact with passers-by, many of whom come equipped with “life stories” stressing their biography and spiritual state.

New York being New York, a large number of these computer-generated characters are Jewish. One of the game’s major goals is to convert as many of these characters, winning them over to the side of good. Although the game doesn’t mention Christ or Christianity specifically, it does contain bits of scripture and offers, as a reward for completing each level, the opportunity to be directed to a Christian ministry’s Web site.

Those characters that are not converted are won over by the dark side, thereby finding themselves facing death from the player’s array of high-tech weaponry.

To some in the Jewish community, the game and its Evangelical message are troublesome, especially as they are being marketed, as most video games are, to teenagers and young adults.

While the Anti-Defamation League has always expressed concern about the “Left Behind” series, said Deborah Lauter, the director of the organization’s Civil Rights Division, “our concern is escalated by the fact that this game is being targeted primarily to teenagers.”

“Does it pose a problem to Jews?” Lauter added. “Of course it does. Would teenagers who play this game be motivated to proselytize? We don’t know that. Maybe they’ll play out their faith in the game. But I’m not that optimistic. I think teenagers are very impressionable, and when they score points on a video game for converting Jews, that’s a positive message, and I’ll be concerned they’d want to play out the same scenario on the playground.”

Scott Hillman, executive director of the Baltimore-based counter-missionary organization Jews for Judaism, concurred.

Although he has yet to see the game, Hillman said, “Books and movies have been used to help create an atmosphere where people feel its more incumbent upon them to go out and evangelize friends, neighbors, and colleagues,” convincing them that conversion to Christ is the only path to salvation.

The video game, he added, is just another entry in that campaign. “It certainly wants to encourage people they have an obligation to share Jesus with the non-believers,” Hillman added. “Otherwise, the non-believers will be taken by the anti-Christ.”

Even more than books, however, video games, a fundamentally interactive medium, may induce a more personal, emotional experience, said Joost van Dreunen, a doctoral candidate at Columbia University who studies video games.

“Playing a video game is a more ‘lean-forward’ experience than the ‘sit-back’ passivity of reading a book,” he said. “Without pressing the buttons, the story doesn’t move ahead. And so irrespective of the genre or particular narrative, it draws people more into the experience.”

The criticism, however, is not limited to the Jewish community. John B. Thompson, a Christian author, lawyer and activist against obscenity and violence in media in general and video games in particular, has made strong statements condemning the game. He has even severed his relationship with Tyndale House, his publisher as well as the publisher of the “Left Behind” series, for allowing the game to be made.

“The notion that people are to be killing one another on the basis of their unbelief is absurd,” he said. “I think it’s very hurtful for the people who aren’t Christians for the so-called Christian game people to be coming out with nonsense like this.”

The game, he added, might also enforce the notions, expressed by America’s radical Islamist enemies, that “we’re entertaining ourselves with a crusade against people who don’t believe [in Christ]. This is madness.”

But Jeff Frichner, president and co-founder of Left Behind Games, the company which developed the game, disagreed with the criticism.

“I would agree with Thompson’s statement,” he said, “but that’s in no way what the game is about. In the game, you have to defend yourself against the perpetrators of evil, who take over the world and want to kill you because you don’t convert to their worldview. It’s very similar to what happened in Spain, where the Jews were forced to become Maranos, or else were tortured or killed.”

Frichner used another example from Jewish history to describe the Tribulation Force soldiers. Rather than murderous Evangelists, he said, the game’s protagonists were akin to the Righteous Gentiles who saved Jews during the Holocaust.

“That’s kind of what the Tribulation Forces are like in our game,” he said. “It’s the Nazis trying to get you and you have to fight for your life.”

In defense of his view, Frichner drew attention to several elements in the game that mitigate the violence. First of all, the game includes no graphic depiction of any violent acts, and was awarded the relatively mild “Teen” rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board, indicating that the game is suitable for children 13 and older.

Second, one of the game’s features is a spirituality meter, which is greatly depleted whenever a player kills an opponent, evil or not. After each killing, therefore, the player is advised to press the “Pray” button and increase his character’s spirituality.

“I was listening to an Israeli general on C-Span during the recent conflict in Lebanon,” Frichner said. “He was making a statement about how there really is no winner when you have to fight. I thought that was incredibly thoughtful, and proof that Israel truly has its motives in the right place.” Similar compassion, he said, conveyed through reluctance to commit any violence, exists in the game as well.

Addressing the game’s basic premise — that characters must either convert or, eventually, be killed — Frichner sounded a more ambivalent tone.

“The game is actually agnostic,” he said. “The ‘Left Behind’ series is a Christian series, and it has a motive of wanting to convert people to Christianity. But in the game itself, we don’t even mention the word Christian. We use the ‘Left Behind’ premise as a backdrop. We have a good force and an evil force, and [the player’s] job is to influence agnostic people.”

All that, he added, was not to say that converting people to Christianity is “not important to us.”

“I’m a Jewish believer in Y’shua,” said Frichner, who was born in Rego Park, Queens, and attended Hebrew school before finding Christ in the 1980s. “I attended Yom Kippur services in a messianic synagogue in San Diego. I still maintain my Jewishness even though I’m a believer in Messiah. It’s something that has changed my life deeply, and I hope to share that with people. Whether they decide to be followers or not, that’s their decision.”

By giving players the option to be directed to a ministry’s Web site and learn more about the faith, Frichner added, the game, far from proselytizing, aims to educate and allow players to “discover the faith in Messiah, if that’s their choice.”

Far, then, from severing the budding ties between the Jewish and Evangelical communities, ties based largely on support for Israel, Frichner said the game’s motives are “bridge building, creating dialogue, and helping people to think and talk about matters of internal importance.”

Set for release on Nov. 17, the game, industry analyst Michael Pachter estimated, is slated to sell between 250,000 and a million units, a significant number, especially considering the game’s faith-specific theme. The game will be sold in more than 10,000 retail locations, including Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target, Circuit City, Costco and others.

The first entry in what some experts estimate will shortly be a niche market as prosperous and popular as Christian rock, “Left Behind: Eternal Forces” was born out of a partnership, in 2001, between Frichner and Troy Lyndon. Lyndon, a celebrated veteran of the video game industry whose credits include such popular games as the Madden Football series, also identifies as a Jew who believes in Jesus, and was born on the Upper West Side to a Jewish mother.

The two, Frichner said, realized the need for Christian-themed video games, and began searching for existing popular brands to license. “Left Behind,” he added, was a natural choice, although C.S. Lewis’ “The Chronicles of Narnia” and the mega-popular “Veggie Tales” series, which recreates biblical tales starring animated vegetables, were considered as well.

There really is little difference, Frichner said, between his game and the Narnia story, the subject of a popular 2005 film adaptation by Walt Disney Pictures.

A Narnia game, Frichner explained, would be very similar to his current release. “In the movie, there are battles, and in our game there are battles,” he said. “The real-time strategy game, our game’s category, is basically a war category. It’s almost like a computer-generated chess, just a strategic game where you have one side fighting against another, and ultimately you have a victor, and that’s how you win the game. Same is true for our game: You have the force of good and the force of evil, you battle against evil and hopefully you can figure out and manage your resources to win each level and, ultimately, the game.”
- posted by Izak @ 3:53 AM