I confess I did not expect much of the game. The history of Christian computer entertainment is not particularly, uh, blessed. The games have tended to be numbingly boring side-scrollers in which the action serves merely as a clumsy deus ex machina to entice kids to reading dollops of in-game scripture. [...]

Play is an incredibly precious thing, and an extremely difficult thing to craft. Forcing it to serve moral instruction is like dipping it in formaldehyde.

(I love that analogy.)

So the great surprise of Left Behind: Eternal Forces is that it actually kind of rocks. It's a classic real-time strategy game: Starting with a single "recruiter," your job is to proselytize followers, level them up into an army of soldiers, medics and "spirit warriors," then bring a hard rain down on the forces of the Antichrist [...].

But what's particularly intriguing is how the developers incorporated prayer as a central game mechanic. Each of your team members has a "spirit" ranking. If you let them get too fatigued or hurt, their spirit drops into "neutral" territory and you lose them. [...] And if your forces accidentally kill neutral innocents, their spirit drops further: The act of murder actually has a moral dimension in this game.

Yet as I clicked away on my spirit warriors, and the glowing balls of spirit shot through my team members, the gameplay began to feel oddly familiar: It was rather like casting an endurance-boost spell on fellow guild members in World of Warcraft. Traditional elves-and-sorcery video games are pagan, of course. But the worldview neatly overlaps with Christianity: In both cases, the world is controlled by magical, invisible forces that only potentates can understand.

(Any proper dominionist would probably curse him to hell and back for making that comparison, but it's so spot-on.)

Thompson's next comment is worrisome, though:

That's the paradox of making a really good Christian strategy game. If you pull it off, it'll have more in common with other strategy games than with the official message of Christianity. Gameplay always overshadows cultural content. In the thick of a really hectic Left Behind battle, I'd click the prayer button so instinctually that I pretty much forgot I was, well, praying.

I'm inclined to disagree with his assertion that gameplay "always overshadows cultural content." The real-world atmosphere of Grand Theft Auto and other such realistic shoot-em-ups is a major reason for their popularity.

I wonder: If a well-informed, seasoned adult professional gameplayer (nice work if you can get it) can get so involved in the play as to "forget" he's praying in the context of the game, how will it affect younger players, for whom it's far easier to get wrapped up in games, and what will they "learn" from it in a society where it really is possible to identify with the corresponding supposed "good guys" in the real world?