Nick

For the influence it has on culture and politics, American Christianity feels underrepresented in video games. And it's not like there aren't successful Christian game developers:

• Five Nights at Freddy's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Cawthon, he had some controversy for doing anti-abortion stuff in an earlier game
• The brothers that created Myst (Rand and Robyn Miller) also count themselves as Christians.

For me, it's not that Christians can't make video games that do well, but that the Christianity I grew up with, especially as a religion and philosophy, feels difficult to translate to video games, at least directly.

It's certainly not for a lack of evocative imagery. DMC and Bayonetta pull directly from Christian imagery, but with the sort of irreverence that most folks don't apply to their own faith, and Doom and Diablo and Dante's inferno pull from Christian tradition. But those games aren't claimed by most American Christians as exemplars, the way, say, C.S. Lewis or Toby Mac are.

There's a lot about it (like how US Christian culture claims to dislike violence in video games, for example) that seems ill positioned for it, and there's a certain sort of closed-mindedness that is often a part of the culture that seems to cut against the sort of creativity that is needed to investigate a lot of the themes of the Bible.

I think the canonicity of the Bible, actually, has a big influence there. Most Christians wouldn't be comfortable making a game set directly in the events of the Bible, because putting a person with agency in the middle of that story would allow it to potentially tell the story differently than it's written. Much of American Evangelical intellectual culture (a bit removed from the lay culture) has a lot of basis on being correct, and that being the basis for their moral authority. Being able to claim authority that specific details are that way for a reason part of that milieu.

Playing games with the Bible feels like it would have been sacrilege to my exvangelical brain. I think this might be why we haven't we seen a notable "Messiah in Palestine" game, about navigating all of the various politics and religions that were swirling around 1-30AD in Israel. We've seen a lot of stuff like that related to Dune, which does grapple with similar themes. Most churches would disown a game that used David as the protagonist of a God of War style character action game, even if it followed the plot as laid out in the Bible beat for beat, because of how it'd make the violence of David's story a lot harder to sanitize. To say nothing of a game that simulated, say, the stations of the Cross and put you in the role of Jesus, or of his torturers.
(there are some exceptions, like Super Noah's Ark 3D, but they aren't common)

So, since the Bible can't be the object of play here, other stories have to act as the frame, and the Bible ends up featuring in the game, usually as a source of moral instruction, or the like. Here, I think, the main blocker in terms of video game output is a general de-valuing of entertainment as a valuable pursuit in American Christian culture, that traces back to the Puritans and/or Quakers, as I understand things

There are Christianity influenced stories that have made for some good video games, Lord of the Rings possibilty being the most influential work there, with games that retell the plot of the books, to games that retell the movies, to roguelikes like Angband and Moria and Tales of Maj'Eyal. There are others, like Veggie Tales, and the Chronicles of Narnia, but most of those games aren't about Christianity as such. Like, the movie tie in Narnia games aren't about Christianity the way the books they retell are. And the Veggie Tales games tend to be mostly tie-ins, rather than deeper games. Most of the energy to build those titles, comes in from outside the American Christian subculture.

Then there's the "X but Christian" games that imitate Guitar Hero or DDR, but with sanitized music. Alternative versions of existing games like this certainly require some skill to execute. But, they're explicitly alternatives, rather than being about Christianity

And, like, it's not like someone couldn't do something with the ideas, theology and philosophy of American Christianity in a video game. Bioshock Infinite certainly is about a lot of that, (though it kinda blunts the message by not committing to the criticisms it raises in the beginning.) The more you tangle with that, though, and embody and enact it in play scenarios, the more you have to stray from the puritanical media culture that is expected of Christian things.

Go too far in that direction, and it wouldn't be claimed by American Christianity

BTW huge shout out to El Shaddai, which is certainly not a "Christian" game but is easily the game I would most want to write a paper if I were, say, in a religious studies course that was studying representations of Christianity in video games. El Shaddai engages relatively deeply, for a beat-em-up, with pseudepigraphic writing, especially the Book of Enoch. (This class of literature is, among other things, the birthplace of the concept of the "devil" as we know it today.)¹ It also captures the surreal, outright trippy vibe of that genre of apocalyptic religious literature.

Re: why there is limited exploration of Christian themes from a Christian perspective in video games (outside of totally cheesy propaganda), I think fundamentally, religions which have tightly defined doctrines of salvation are hostile to narrative fiction, because ultimate stakes and ultimate outcomes are predefined, which results in sterile, stagnant feeling plots. Related: Narnia is boring, and I think that it is even harder to cover that kind of religious material in a game, because stuff like failure states and the illusion of player agency open up a lot of cans of worms that you can avoid when you're just writing a whole manuscript and you can make your little twists and turns add up to, "it was god all along!"²

(I do think for this reason that if you wanted to make a Christian game as a worshipful work, a walking simulator or something of that kind would be the way to go. In that genre you can have as fixed a narrative as you need while giving the player the freedom to explore a space and experience things in different orders.)

I don't think this is necessarily specific to Christianity. Like, are there games that are "Buddhist"? There are definitely games that take elements from Buddhist iconography and Buddhist-tinged folklore. You could point to something like Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, which is referencing literature that is ultimately embedded in a Buddhist religious context, but I don't know that I would say that game is really any more Buddhist than Diablo is Christian.

All that being said, I would love to see like the video game equivalent of CBS's Evil, i.e., a playful and WEIRD work that is set within a context of people's lived experience of faith and doubt. Somebody make that. And then somebody tell me about it, because I probably won't actually play it, I just play Battletech and Slay the Spire over and over again.

1. I really wish cohost had text search of your own posts, because I'm like 85% sure I did a post about this. Anyway tl;dr in the tanakh/hebrew bible, there is a class of angel which is designated as satan, which just means prosecutor, which appears a couple of times to make a case against someone, in a context where god is the judge. The concept of a significant malignant metaphysical entity which is opposed to the will of god appears roughly nowhere in the bible; it's a concept that's primarily developed in writings that are not part of either Jewish or Christian canon, during a period when competing cosmologies and philosophies were flourishing. And El Shaddai is a more informed take on that literature than the vast majority of depictions of the devil and demons, in any medium.

2. Narnia sucks, but The Man Who was Thursday kind of rules, in some ways.