When it comes to controversial subjects, nothing leads to shouting matches quite like introducing religion into the mix. While the video game industry is usually willing to court controversy when the potential payoff is worth it, concepts of spirituality and faith have generally been avoided by both developers and publishers.

In fact, religion seems to be such a taboo subject to include in video games that the only type of faith that really appears in titles here in the US is Christianity. Even then, the subject is often poorly addressed in games that are themselves poorly made. But why is it that religious content is so sparse in the realm of video games? The reasons are largely based on contention between religious and industry leaders, as well as the fact that you'll rarely find a topic as personal as faith.

You just can't please everybody

Christianity isn't the only religion to appear in games, nor is it the only one where spiritual leaders have been offended by their faith's presentation on consoles and/or PCs. Sony recently learned this with the launch of LittleBigPlanet, which was delayed when it was revealed that one of the game's background music pieces —"Tapha Niang," performed by Toumani Diabate's Symmetrical Orchestra— featured quotes from the Qur'an, the Islamic religion's holy text.

When an Islamic gamer heard the song and noticed some Arabic words from the Qur'an, he verified that he wasn't hearing things and then notified Sony via the company's forums. After pointing out the specific instances of the Qur'an quotes, he explained the problem this represented for Muslims. "We Muslims consider the mixing of music and words from our Holy Quran deeply offending," he explained. "We hope you would remove that track from the game immediately via an online patch, and make sure that all future shipments of the game disk do not contain it."

Sony took the issue very seriously. After investigating the claim, the company wound up delaying LittleBigPlanet's worldwide release for and then releasing a patch that removed the vocals from the song track. Media Molecule, the game's developer, publicly apologized and stated that it the studio felt "gutted" for the controversy it caused.

Funnily enough, this action was loudly criticized by the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. "Muslims cannot benefit from freedom of expression and religion and then turn around and ask that anytime their sensibilities are offended that the freedom of others be restricted," the group said. "The free market allows for expression of disfavor by simply not purchasing a game that may be offensive. But to demand that it be withdrawn is predicated on a society which gives theocrats who wish to control speech far more value than the central principle of freedom of expression upon which the very practice and freedom of religion is based."

Of course, it isn't only religious content from Islam that has wound up getting developers in hot water; recently, on game in particular managed to raise the ire of the Hinduism community. The first PS2 game to be exclusively developed and released in India, Hanuman: Boy Warrior, was criticized by Rajan Zed, the president of the Universal Society of Hinduism. According to Zed, Hanuman: Boy Warrior was blasphemous because, "reimagining Hindu scriptures and deities for commercial or other agenda was not okay as it hurt the devotees. Controlling and manipulating Lord Hanuman with a joystick/ button/keyboard/mouse was denigration. Lord Hanuman was not meant to be reduced to just a 'character' in a video game to solidify company/products base in the growing economy of India."

Zed even went so far as to call for a worldwide boycott of Sony products if the publisher didn't respond to the Hindu community's concerns. Little else was heard about the protest after the initial news broke, but the game is still listed on Sony's PlayStation India website, so it seems safe to assume that Sony wasn't didn't consider the game offensive to the majority of the religious community in India.

Animosity leads to hesitation

Part of the problem is that the game industry is often toted as being a corrupting influence for the youth of the world. Criticism against the game industry has come from leaders as high up as the current Pope, and many of us who have been exposed to sermons bemoaning the influence that games and movies have on kids. Even when groups like the Christian Game Developers Foundation put out a video encouraging developers to create wholesome titles for kids, the attitude conveyed towards current members of the industry was contemptuous at best. Needless to say, games with heavy religious content are usually fringe projects, independently created and oftentimes sporting dodgy production values, because publishers wisely don't want to risk boycotts from legions of the faithful.

Theodore Beale managed to develop his Eternal Warriors series into a video game, but available footage of this title shows that it was little more than a generic first-person hack-and-slash title, The War in Heaven. Unsurprisingly, even the game's divine and infernal settings, as well as regular Scripture quotes, did little to wow even the most devout of gamers. Meanwhile, John E. Nelson's Tribulation Knights seeks to put gamers in a stealth/adventure-based post-Apocalypse setting. Following a series of natural and economic disasters, a corrupt politician's administration takes control of the globe and manages to convert most of the remaining population into a mindlessly-loyal legion. Some citizens, however, do not convert and find themselves without any rights in the new world society; accordingly, a group called the Knights rises up to protect these rebel citizens from the Gestapo-like Enforcers and gather enemy intel, all while staying hidden and avoiding armed conflict.

"I wanted to create a game that had both an entertaining adventure but also hold true to the commandment of 'Thou Shalt Not Kill.'" Nelson explained to Ars. "It was important to do so, and it is not easy. You can defend yourself by stunning Enforcers, or thugs for a very brief time. The goal is the mission, and to avoid direct contact with the enemy as much as possible." Nelson also believes that more independent games with focused on religious plots will be coming to systems in the future, because, "In this digital download age, we really don't need big publishers to help us. If we take their big publisher money they will make us change our stories. So for now it will be us tiny indie developers trying to make something that will be enjoyed by someone."

Some, but not much, mainstream involvement

This isn't to say that there haven't been some big games based on religion that have seen commercial release. Widespread releases for major systems, however, have been few and far between. The problem is that even these titles tend to not be much fun to play. Publisher Wisdom Tree, which has been involved with religious games since the late 1980s (when the company was still Color Dreams), gained notoriety for titles like Bible Adventures and Super 3D Noah's Ark, which have been widely criticized as being shallow clones of bigger hits like Super Mario Bros. 2 and Wolfenstein.

Modern religious games haven't been any better. Left Behind: Eternal Forces bears special note, since it arguably saw the largest release of any Christian video game, but also received some of the most criticism. The game, based on the Left Behind series of novels, was a dubious RTS title that many people faulted because of weak play mechanics and they claimed it encouraged a "kill-or-convert" attitude towards people who don't believe in Jesus. Even Jack Thompson, the man who included Biblical passages in many of his legal filings, claimed that, "the game is about killing people for their lack of faith in Jesus," and subsequently ended his publishing deal with Tyndale House.

Nelson agrees with this sentiment: "In these days of being so inclusive, I have a feeling that if a religion is included into a major publishers game it will not be of my Christian beliefs." Instead, major developers and publishers seem only willing to adapt the sexy part of religion into games—namely, the bloody combat. Seraphim, an action title by Valkyrie Studios that languished into obscurity earlier this decade, was based around aerial combat between different factions of angels. Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which was going to let players control survivors left on Earth after the Rapture, was supposed to be a big-budget action title that seemed to dwindle into obscurity for no discernable reason. Meanwhile, the fact that Resistance: Fall of Man had a scene that took place in a destroyed Manchester Cathedral managed to invoke such vocal criticism from the Church of England probably made developers wary of including any religious content whatsoever in their games.

Electronic Arts' upcoming Dante's Inferno is easily the biggest game to include Christian themes in it, though Ben's preview points out that these connections are more of a superficial similarity instead of a serious and thoughtful adaptation of The Divine Comedy. At the same time, though, one has to wonder if EA just decided to make a God of War clone with some tenuous connections to Catholicism simply because they were banking on the attention the ensuing controversy would generate.

Reverend Thomas Trutner, a minister based out of the San Francisco Bay Area, suggests that the fact that video games tend to only be based around bloody, combat-based events isn't really all that unusual, since many movies and books do the exact same thing. "I just think it’s the nature of... media in general," he said in an interview with Ars. "They must go for the larger and more sensational types of things at least that’s my impression."

The personal nature of the beast

Mark Twain once observed that, "Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion— several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight." Twain was right: religion, no matter what religion, is something that multitudes of people believe in, but no two people seem to believe in exactly the same thing. As a result, any religious content included in games is going to be interpreted on a very personal level by anyone who considers themselves devout.

According to Trutner, who has been ordained for over four decades, "[Religion] goes to the deepest feelings for several things in our lives: What is the meaning in our lives? What is going to happen to us we die? What are the moral values we should follow? When this gets attached to a moral authority, that’s when you start to get problems, like when you have the fundamentalists who say you need to follow the Bible literally and those... who say It’s a story about truths, that you can’t take literally. It’s ripe for debate."

Maybe that's why making religious games is so tough: by including anything that's that goes even remotely beyond basic concepts or happens to be even a bit controversial, developers risk the ire a lot of people who could easily be offended enough to boycott the title. Whatever the reason, it doesn't seem likely that we'll be seeing any religious content in the near future, though the possibility of storylines with serious spiritual themes remains.