Churches and computer games

  • (via Drudge) The Church of Eng­land is con­demn­ing Sony for a com­puter game in which Man­ches­ter Cathe­dral is the loca­tion for a big shoot-’em-up.

    The Church of Eng­land accused Sony Corp. (SNE) on Sat­ur­day of using an Eng­lish cathe­dral as the back­drop to a vio­lent com­puter game and said it should be with­drawn from shop shelves.

    The church said Sony did not ask for per­mis­sion to use Man­ches­ter cathe­dral and demanded an apology.

    The pop­u­lar new PlaySta­tion 3 game, “Resis­tance: Fall of Man,” shows a vir­tual shootout between rival gun­men with hun­dreds of peo­ple killed inside the cathe­dral. Church offi­cials described Sony’s alleged use of the build­ing as “sick” and sacrilegious.

    Well, good for them, I guess. But good luck try­ing to get that mes­sage heard cor­rectly. They’re bound to come off as mak­ing a big stink over noth­ing. When pop cul­ture low­ers dig­ni­fied or ele­vated things down to its gut­ter, it invari­ably defends itself by say­ing that it’s all just a bit of fun and the keep­ers of these higher val­ues shouldn’t be so uptight about it. It’s an unfair argu­ment, of course, but it throws every­one off long enough for them to con­tinue get­ting away with exploit­ing the few sacred things left in our cul­ture for cheap laughs or thrills.

    In this case, I’m a lit­tle sur­prised that the Church of Eng­land is tak­ing such a hard stance. “Sick and sac­ri­le­gious”? Well, no doubt, but when’s the last time they used those words to refer to any­thing? Gay laity — no prob­lem. Gay priests — no prob­lem. Gay bish­ops — no problem.

    They’ve been steadily erod­ing what it is that the word “church” stands for and why a cathe­dral isn’t just a library or museum. And they’re going to sud­denly rear up and say that it has a mean­ing that should exempt it from being por­trayed as a vir­tual loca­tion in an ado­les­cent time-waster of a game? They sound to me like peo­ple who have been steal­ing the sil­ver­ware for years but then get furi­ous when some­one TP’s the yard.

    Well, what­ever. Their self-respect may be late in com­ing, but if there’s some sense of the dig­nity of cathe­drals behind it and not just wounded pride, then maybe it will lead to some small increase of integrity.


    Related posts:

    1. If Eng­land were Orthodox …
    2. Anti­ochian Vil­lage — almost heaven, almost Pittsburgh

    June 9th, 2007 | Grace | 9 Comments |

9 Responses and Counting...

  • hand­maid Mary-Leah 06.09.2007

    Its just the antichrist paving he way for mass mar­tyr­dom. When peo­ple are shut up inside said Cathe­dral and it is burned to the ground, they will blame it on the video game. See they were desen­si­tized poor sods.
    Crike, as they say!
    Per­haps if they had whined about muse­ums being impor­tant, and not just as back­drops for may­hem, then just maybe more peo­ple would like them for what they are; repos­i­to­ries of our past. Cathe­drals and Churches are too impor­tant and need respect– but this anar­chist world has no respect for any­thing, not even and espe­cially for life.
    The games, time-wasters, you call them? Just so, are noth­ing but how to prac­tice death and destruc­tion. The demons rejoice.
    Good points, great post, too bad it is all just a tad too late for the Angli­cans, they have lost their author­ity…
    Christ is in our midst!
    the hand­maid,
    Mary-Leah

  • Robert Mahoney

    I would think with the Church of Eng­land being the way they are, I am tempted to think that this is a dig­i­tal expres­sion of a spir­i­tual real­ity of what is hap­pen­ing to the souls of those who dare to set foot in their houses of worship.

  • Grace

    Mary-Leah:
    You’re prob­a­bly right about the darker nature of these games. I think the most trou­bling aspect of them is that it is turn­ing out gen­er­a­tions of young peo­ple who think that because they have a fast trig­ger fin­ger and know some cheat codes they need fear nei­ther man, God nor evil spirits.

  • Grace

    Robert:
    I feel like all my info is pretty light on the C of E sit­u­a­tion, but what I know looks very bad. And those who do have per­sonal expe­ri­ence seem to see no hope for things improv­ing. That’s really too bad. I won­der what C. S. Lewis would’ve said.

  • Word­mama

    Grace —

    The sav­ing grace (so to speak) of the cheat code men­tal­ity is that it also makes peo­ple think they can always restore a saved game if they get killed. It’s one way to get them out of the gene pool, I suppose …

  • Grace

    WM:
    All right, that’s just crack­ing me up. You deal with these lit­tle rugrats more than I do. Any chance they’re think­ing that risky behav­ior isn’t a prob­lem because you can just restore your last saved game?

  • Word­mama

    Don’t know that I qual­ify as an expert in the realm of vio­lent first-person shoot­ers — most of the inter­ac­tions I have are with 10-year-olds play­ing the Nancy Drew games (for which I write hints, for those who don’t know), which aren’t known for explo­sions in cathe­drals. I will say that they seem to have a fas­ci­na­tion with com­put­er­ized death, though; after the first one, I started includ­ing a sec­tion in each game on how many ways there are to get killed and/or booted out of the game.

    And then there’s their grammar/spelling, of course. I had one tell me that my hints were “horibal,” which didn’t bother me since the next one said they were “the BESAT.”

  • Word­mama

    On a more seri­ous note, the worst part of that protest from the C of E is that is looks as if their real objec­tion is that they aren’t get­ting any money from the game — if Sony had paid them a fee, it wouldn’t have been a problem.

  • Grace

    Death in games: That’s kind of fright­en­ing, though my lit­tle Obliv­ion addic­tion leaves me in no state to judge how weird oth­ers get after long infu­sions of these alter­nate real­i­ties. I do think that that state of mind has some­thing to do with the way that young kids com­mit ser­ial mur­ders, but I don’t think the answer is to ban the games. The answer is to give the kids a life that they don’t have con­tempt for. Kind of a Church thing, really. (But maybe that’s just me mak­ing sure I’m not off-topic for too long.)

    C of E: (sigh) I think I had won­dered about that as well. I really don’t know how things are in that branch of Chris­ten­dom — the news you hear is awful, of course. And so you won­der whether their out­rage is fueled by some ves­ti­gial sense that there are some things that shouldn’t be tol­er­ated, or just that — as you say — they’re hos­tile that they didn’t get a share of the action.

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