Christian Influences in Games

Q: Do you think that Christian influences can and/or should become more prevalent in games as they have in other forms of digital media?

Nearly half of the Christian respondents entered positive feedback that there should be more Christian influences in games whereas non-Christians were adamantly opposed to the idea with nearly three in four giving negative responses. The overall average of all participants showed a relatively equal amount of positive feedback (37%) to negative feedback (41%).

Q: If games were developed to teach scriptural, biblical, or traditional Christian history, teaching, and morals would they be effective teaching tools?

The data shows that that the majority of respondents feel that video games should or at least could be effective tools at teaching Christian history, teachings, and morals. Over half of the total population gave positive responses to the question with close to three quarters of Christians responding positively.

Q: Can or should games be developed as tools for evangelization and conversion?

Only a small minority of 11% of non-Christians agreed with the statement that games could/should be used effectively to evangelize and convert. This response from non-Christians might center around the inclusion of the word 'should' in the survey question as they are more likely to be opposed to being converted. In hindsight this should have been two separate survey questions. Christians on the other hand saw a positive response rate of close to 50% with under 20% responding negatively.

Q: Would you seek out games that taught scriptural, biblical, or traditional Christian history, teachings, and morals to play?

Non-Christians very clearly state here that they would not seek out Christian games to play. Christians as well had an overall negative reponse, meaning they would not seek out Christian games for themselves.

Q: Would you seek out games that taught scriptural, biblical, or traditional Christian history, teachings, and morals for your children to play?

This graph excludes the responses of respondents that also indicated they had no children or none of their children played video games.

Christians were far more enthusiastic about their children playing Christian video games than about playing them themselves. Also, non-Christians do not seem as strongly opposed to their children playing games with the overall negative response rate falling from nearly 90% when it came to playing the games themselves to only about 67% for their kids.

Summary:

Perhaps unsurprisingly Christians were much more enthusiastic about Christian influences in games than non-Christians. However, some non-Christians also felt that video games could be effective tools to teach and evangelize Christianity.

One surprise, though, was that many Christians expressed that Christian influences should be more prevalent in games and that they would buy Christian games for their children but would not actually be all that motivated to play such games themselves.

When designing for a Christian game a designer should keep these things in mind. Christian games will, without a significant shift in popular public opinion, need to be marketed for children or in such a way as to entice parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents and other older relatives to buy the game for children. Also, considering the fact that most respondents felt that Christian games held some teaching potential it might be advantageous for local churches, communities, or parishes to sponsor development of fun, instructional, and evangelical video games that can teach and evangelize with the Gospel message in an interactive way.