Allow, Incorporate, Celebrate

The most intriguing aspects of faith to me are those requiring wrestling. For example, what does it mean to be in the world but not of the world? Questions like this contain tension and ambiguity. They require our intellect, time in the scriptures, an intimate relationship with our Maker, and humility.

This paradoxical problem of being surrounded by sin but not approving of it or falling into it follows us into our work. As Christian game designers, we must wrestle with questions like, can I include sinful activities without sinning myself, or how do I allow freedom of choice without condoning immoral behavior? This is where the rubber meets the road to becoming mature in our faith and craft. These are hard questions that lack simple, universal answers. Nevertheless, I want to share a conceptual framework I am using. Hopefully, it will be of some value to you as well.

Allow -> Incorporate -> Celebrate

When thinking about the presence of an action or activity that could be considered sinful (killing, lying, stealing, etc.), I picture a continuum. On the left side is what I'm labeling Allow. In the middle, we have Incorporate; on the far right side, we have Celebrate. To help explain each category, I will use a real-world example of underage drinking and then some equivalent game examples. 

Allow 

When I was growing up, underage drinking was a thing. I didn't drink, nor did my parents, but some of my friends' parents regularly enjoyed alcohol and had it in their homes. My friends knew that underage drinking was against the law, and their parents taught them as much. However, none of the parents had locks on their cabinets or fridges to physically prevent the minors from stealing a swig. Because the parents weren't taking active measures to ensure underage drinking did not occur in their home (beyond teaching and instruction), it could be said that they allowed the possibility of the event to occur. To say it another way, it was not out of the question that a beverage or a sip could have been stolen.

Many things could fall under this label in games because of emergent behavior. When you have multiple complex systems, interacting unexpected results occur. For instance, you might not have intended to have theft in your game, but it naturally appeared because you create items, programmed the ability to pick up things, and you have more than one player in the game. 

As a developer, when something like this comes to your attention, you can work to prevent it from happening or choose to allow it. Allowing something into the game does not necessarily mean you condone, approve, endorse, or encourage it. A variety of factors may weigh in your calculation to allow something, including time, budget, effort, reproducibility, and severity. A real-world example of something being allowed comes from a friend who, after much prayer, decided to allow same-sex relationships in his game. His rationale was that disallowing the choice would be more work than allowing it. 

Incorporate

The next category along the continuum is what I'm calling Incorporate. To continue the underage drinking example, at a certain point in high school, one of my friend's parents decided to allow their child and a few of his friends to have a few beers on a Friday night as long as everyone stayed in the basement and no one drove home. In this instance, the parents moved from allowing the possibility that their child may drink to acknowledging their son's drinking and deciding to incorporate it into their life (within specific controlled parameters). 

In my mind, the distinguishing factor that moves something from the Allow category to the Incorporate category is the deliberate decision to integrate it into the game's design. This decision is a conscious decision to do extra work. Whether engineering, art, sound, or writing, additional work will be necessary to make it fit meaningfully into the game's systems.

It's important to point out that choosing to incorporate an immoral activity into the game doesn't necessarily mean that you need to encourage the activity. You can choose whether to encourage or discourage it through positive or negative feedback loops. If we return to the theft example from before, you could create severe penalties for players caught stealing to discourage the behavior. It could also lead to meaningful moments for teaching and character growth.

Celebrate

The final category is Celebrate, and if you attended a high school graduation party with a keg, you have witnessed this firsthand. 

In my small midwest town, it was common for some graduates' parents to throw keg parties during graduation. To celebrate something goes beyond simply enabling or condoning an activity and moves to encourage it actively. If you had stopped by one of these parties, you would have seen the graduate's parents, their extended family, and a group of young people having a good time drinking together. Eventually, when they noticed your arrival, you would have been offered a cup and encouraged to join the festivities.

In games, a celebration could mean creating achievements like driving over 100 pedestrians, or in GTA 5, requiring the player to pick up a prostitute to unlock the 100% achievement. Beyond achievements, celebrating could be something as elaborate as a unique ending or creating rare, coveted items that require theft or murder to acquire, or something as simple as a particle effect. 

There are no hard and fast rules when working through these questions, and I wish I could tell you that celebration is always a step too far. The Bible clearly says, woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter (Isaiah 5:20)! However, what if you're making a game like Stick Fight, is it okay to have achievements for cartoony violence? I don't, maybe. My spirit feels comfortable with cartoony violence, but others may not. If you are uncomfortable with it, you should not be working on a game containing it, which is a different conversation. 

The best advice I can share is to stay attentive and open to the Holy Spirit's prompting because, at some point, He may tap you on the shoulder to let you know that your game is starting to look too much like the world.

** I want to give a special thanks to my friend and brother, Adam Buchweitz for inspiring this post. We recently recorded a conversation for the Faith Forms Podcast and this topic came up at the end. I don’t know if it will be included in the final edit of the podcast, but Patrons can watch our unedited conversation on our Patreon.