Christian Game Developers Conference Plans Gathering

Thanks to GamerFeed for its story noting the Christian Game Developers Conference has announced its third annual gathering, to be held in Portland, Oregon on July 30th-31st. The official CGDC site has more information on the expo, which "officially expands to include card, board and paper game developers alongside interactive electronic entertainment." There's also word from conference organizer Tim Emmerich of GraceWorks Interactive: "We... plan to examine the variety of games currently on the market and successes in other media such as 'The Passion of The Christ' and the 'Left Behind' series, which proved that Bible-based products can do well in the market if they are well made."

Yay.

[josh glaser]

I don't think most Christian stuff can hold a candle to the non-Christian stuff. It might be because all Christian games applarently must be a sermon in disguise. It could also be that they usually have exponentially lower budgets (I remember a Christian film bragging about its budget of "nearly one million dollars"). Other people have also discussed there reasoning, and I agree with it, to the most part.

Ever noticed how everybody talks about how great, say, "Left Behind" is? It's really not that great of a book - compare it to other popular (not-Christian) books out there, and, well, it's pretty...meh. But it's supposedly the best Christian book ever (well, besides the Bible ^_^). I think that it's not because all Christians are awful writers, but there just in a smaller pond - rarely is Christian stuff compared to non-Christian stuff, and Christian stuff is usually lower quality. I guess what I'm getting at is, well, being the best author ever on your block isn't saying as much as the best in the country.

And I think this "Christian games" thing is blown out of proportion - in all my life, I've seen around 10 Christian games, never at "big" stores, just at Christian bookstores and the like. But its supposed to be the next "Christian music" - which has hundreds of singers and stuff, and can be found at my local Wal-mart. It could very well be because lots of Christians (NOT ALL - don't take me the wrong way) usually take a bit longer to "warm up" to new stuff, in my opinion (and in a LOT of personal experience).

I'm not expecting Christian games to be anything big anytime soon. I mean, I've still seen Wisdom Tree's NES games for sale. And if and when Christian games are anything more than ripoffs of other game and Disney-style "activity centers", I doubt they will be as good, simply because there's fewer people interested in making them and buying them.

Just my two cents.