Here's a video game I find troubling - for reasons expressed by some in the article.
http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/53592.html
'Left Behind' mixes God, warfare
David Crary | The Associated Press
December 13, 2006
NEW YORK -- Targeted largely at conservative Christians, it's a violent video game with a difference: Combatants on one side pause for prayer, and their favored interjection is "Praise the Lord."
Critics say Left Behind: Eternal Forces glorifies religious violence against non-Christians. Some liberal groups have been urging a boycott, and on Tuesday, they urged Wal-Mart to withdraw the game from its shelves.
However, Troy Lyndon, chief executive officer of Left Behind Games Inc., defended the game as "inspirational entertainment" and said its critics were exaggerating.
Lyndon's company has a license to develop games based on the popular Left Behind novels, a Bible-based end-of-the-world-saga that has sold more than 63 million copies.
Lyndon, in a telephone interview, said Eternal Forces has been distributed to more than 10,000 retail locations over the past four weeks.
The real-time strategy game has received a T (for teen) rating, as its makers had hoped.
"Our game includes violence, but excludes blood, decapitation, killing of police officers," the company says on its Web site, noting a player can lose points for "unnecessary killing" and regain them through prayer.
The game's story line begins after the rapture, when most Christians are transported to heaven. Earth's remaining population is faced with a choice of joining or combating the Antichrist, as embodied by a force called the Global Community Peacekeepers that seeks to impose one-world government.
The game's critics depict the ensuing struggle, set in New York City, as one fostering religious intolerance.
"Part of the object is to kill or convert the opposing forces," said the Rev. Tim Simpson of Jacksonville, Fla., who heads the Christian Alliance for Progress. "It is antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus Christ."
Simpson, a Presbyterian Church USA pastor, said he was dismayed by the concept in Eternal Forces of using prayer to restore a player's "spirit points" after killing the enemy.
"The idea that you could pray, and the deleterious effects of one's foul deeds would simply be wiped away, is a horrible thing to be teaching Christian young people here at Christmas time," Simpson said.
Simpson's group was formed last year to counter the influence of the religious right, joined in a news conference Tuesday at which he and other speakers urged Wal-Mart to discontinue sales of Eternal Forces.
Wal-Mart indicated it would continue selling the game.
Focus on the Family, a Colorado-based Christian ministry often critical of violent video games, published a positive review of Eternal Forces on one of its Web sites.
"Eternal Forces is the kind of game that Mom and Dad can actually play with Junior and use to raise some interesting questions along the way," wrote the reviewer, Bob Hoose.
Other online reviewers have been less impressed.
"Don't mock Left Behind: Eternal Forces because it's a Christian game. Mock it because it's a very bad game," wrote GameSpot reviewer Brett Todd.