Warning: Rant Ahead. Proceed With Caution.

Today while catching up on some game industry news, I happened across a link to Project X, an initiative to create a text-based, multiplayer “Christian” game. This project really seems to epitomize much of what I find abhorrent about the American Christian subculture. These are some of the reasons I think this is a terrible idea, both as a Christian and as someone who works in the gaming industry.

First off, we Christians have a command from Jesus to be in the world, but not of it. We are elsewhere called to be the salt of the earth. Now, by creating a “Christian alternative” to the mainstream gaming scene, we remove ourselves from contact with the rest of the world, and thus deprive ourselves of the chance to obey these mandates. Christians need to be fully engaged with the world. We don’t need to encyst ourselves within a protective layer of isolation. Want to apply your faith to your gaming? Then go buy Ultima Online, Everquest, or Asheron’s Call and see what it’s like to live and play as a Christian among real people. (I’d vote for Ultima Online myself, but that’s probably because it keeps my kids in peanut butter and diapers.)

Second, if you’re going to market something as “Christian”, you’d better be dang sure that it lives up to the highest standards of quality in the industry, and is compelling in its own right. Putting a fish on a crappy product doesn’t honor God. Believers created much of the finest art in history. Bach signed all his music SDG, which stood for Sola Dei Gloria – To God Alone Be The Glory. But you know what? Most people don’t buy The Goldberg Variations because they see it as a way to practice their faith. They buy them because they’re fine, compelling, well-crafted pieces of music. And if you’re a Christian designing a game, your responsibility is to make it a fine, compelling, well-crafted game. Your responsibility is not to swipe intellectual property from Bunyan and Lewis so that customers with more money than sense recognize it as “Christian”.

The fact that Project X is being designed as a text-based game, a genre generally considered passé in the industry, and that the page describing it is rife with misspellings doesn’t bode well for the quality of this product.

Third, the very concept of a “Christian Game” seems to me an elusive one. What makes a game qualify as “Christian”? That it has angels in it? That it swipes a setting from authors who write from that understanding of the world? That it says it is? That it has the word “Jesus” in it at least 58 times? Bah. Even if they design their game as “Christian”, by their nature Role Playing Games give players the chance to behave in ways anathema to that world-view. The only way to keep an RPG “Christian” is to severely limit the player’s choices, and thus make the game less compelling once again. Double-bah.

So, what’s the ultimate motivation for this project? The chance for Christians to feel a little better about themselves while playing a feeble, watered down version of what the rest of the world is playing (and enjoying more)? The chance to make money off the same individuals who buy golf balls and swizzle sticks with WWJD emblazoned on them? The Project X site says that the organizers want to “[create] a deep, online gaming environment in which Christians can immerse themselves in a world that honors the Christian world view and nurtures a Christian’s faith.” But it seems to me that if you’re relying on a game to nurture your faith, then you’re already in a bad place, and withdrawing into a fictional world isn’t likely to help that.

So after examining all of this, I’m still left wondering – what’s the point? This sort of undertaking seems bound to be at best a disappointment, both to gamers and to any but the most undiscriminating of Christians. And at worst, it seems the sort of thing that would get one driven out of the temple with a whip.

End of rant.

My first exposure to Caleb Carr’s work was The Alienist, the engaging, if graphic, story of an murder investigation in late 19th century New York. Rooting through the books at the library to see if Carr had done anything more, I came across his latest publication: Killing Time

Killing Time contrasts sharply with The Alienist. Though the lead characted is still a phychologist, he isn’t involved with a murder mystery in the past, but instead a disinformation campaign in the future. I’ve always enjoyed the “Person Living Normal Life is Plucked Out of His World By An Unusual Vehicle and Discovers that Things Aren’t As They Seem” genre (The Matrix, Sewer, Water, Gas: The Public Works Trilogy, Atlas Shrugged), and this is a worthy addition to that body of work.

Carr’s story is an incisive reflection on a love-hate relationship with information technology, and its uses and abuses. He paints a vivid picture of how it can lead people away from the truth, or even to lose touch with what truth is — some of the same themes he explores in a recent article for Salon. The book also manages to be an engaging adventure story at the same time, deftly combining social critique with good storytelling.

Finally, it’s a bit shorter that The Alienist, so if you’d like an introduction to Carr, this is a great entry point.

As per my earlier resolution upon having to buy jeans with a 38 inch waist, I’ve been hitting the gym pretty regularly for a while now, and have started to see some results. I’ve dropped a few pounds, redistributed a few more, and am fitting comfortably into some of my older pants again. I’ve been doing a mix of hikes through the hill country, time on the treadmill, and some work with weights. Now, if I can only convince myself that I like salads better than cheeseburgers, I’ll be in excellent shape.

When I was in middle school, the first album I ever blew my own money on was 90125 , by Yes. At the time, I was convinced that it was one of the most spectacular collection of songs I’d ever laid ears on, and played the vinyl to extinction on my parents’ old stereo. Just tonight, I got it in digital format and have been listening to it again. To my surprise, unlike many of the fondly remembered watermarks of my young life, the album is every bit as good as I recalled, with some spectacularly well-arranged and tightly performed tracks, creative use of stereo (much better on headphones), and a great sound. What a treat for the ears! I’m excited to have this one back in my listening queue.

For those of you who haven’t yet been sucked in by the temporal black hole that is The Sims, let me describe it for you so that you can keep away and continue to have something resembling a normal life: basically, the premise is that you create a little pretend family on your computer and tend to their needs — bathing, going to the bathroom, getting better jobs — all the while failing to do the same things yourself.

Though usually immune to the insidious draw of computer games, Kathy has fallen victim to the cunning charm of The Sims, and has been enjoying relaxing in the evening with it from time to time. Now, in spite of her enthusiasm for the game, she was unaware that it was possible to create and add new objects to the game. So as a small practical joke, I stayed up after everyone else had gone to bed on Tuesday and created several paintings that you can buy to go in your Sims’ houses featuring photos of our children on them, and then scattered them liberally throughout her Sims’ home.

The unfortunate thing turns out to be that the game is difficult to play when zoomed in all the way, but the pictures are difficult to discern unless you’re looking at the game at its largest size. So instead of being surprised and delighted at finding pictures of our children in the game house, she was vaguely puzzled by the mysterious paintings of unknown children that had appeared while she wasn’t looking. Sigh.

Anyway, if you’re another Sims junkie, and for some strange reason you’d like to have pictures of our kids in your Sims’ home, you can download the set of four right here. Enjoy!

Since coming to work for Electronic Arts, one of the titles I’ve been most excited about seeing brought production is Majestic, an ambitious projects that aims to immerse its players into a conspiracy-theory-driven adventure. The interesting thing about it is not so much the plot as the ways the plot is communicated to the player: by phone calls, faxes, emails, pages, and Instant Messages. There’s an excellent article that gives some idea of the visceral impact of this method here. My favorite part is that you can set the game to not use the phone at all, to put a tag on the messages to make it clear that they’re part of the game, or to just mix them in with your other phone calls so the line between reality and the game starts to blur.

Only a few short months to wait…

My apologies, gentle reader, for the lack of updates here lately. Our family has been embroiled in several projects that have sucked up most of our available time and energy, including working through some post-Christmas financial issues, helping with the church’s first Sunday service, and dealing with some nasty illnesses. (Liam at one point had both pink eye and a viral GI infection that was causing him to expel unpleasant substances from both ends with a great deal of vigor.)

In any case, we have a lull now, as everyone seems to be returning to good health, and extra resposibilities are few for the next couple of weeks. I’m still preparing for a gig in Iowa the weekend after Valentine’s day, but it’s mostly familiar music, so shouldn’t be too taxing.

So, how are you?

I always enjoy the Superbowl — nominally for the football and the opportunity to choose a team at random about which I know nothing and talk schmack to everyone rooting for the other team, but mostly for the ads.

This year featured a reasonably good crop. There was a notable tendency toward fat-man humor, with a significant subset of fat-man-dancing visual jokes. (Budweiser Blow Dryer, Dr. Pepper Hudson River Dance, etc.) The Budweiser What Are You Doing, E*Trade Dot Com Graveyard, and EDS Running with the Squirrels were also personal favorites. I also took a personal pleasure in booing the Accenture ads, because I have to maintain their foul code at work.

Visit Adcritic’s Superbowl Site to see all of the ads for yourself.

Not here, unfortunately. Though the design at The McMains Chronicles is long enough in the tooth to earn it scorn at a Bucktoothed Anonymous meeting, I still haven’t gotten around to updating it. I have, however, worked over the in-progress site for Three Rivers Community Church. (Yes, the template is plagarized.) If you users of sundry browsers could take a look and let me know if it looks ok from where you sit, I’d appreciate it!

I mucked about with the Points of Interest. (Over there in the sidebar. No, down a bit. There you go!) Now, when you’re in most of the site, you only see links to the strictly family oriented stuff. When you hit the Ruminations page, however, a passel of new links appear for the Sean-only sections.

So, does this make it less overwhelming for the people who think my kids are cute, but say about me “he will ramble on, won’t he?” Or is it just annoying not to be able to go straight to the amazingly insightful essays on topics that only 8 people in the entire world care about? Let me know what you think.