Content here, content there

So here’s an interesting twist on the question of whether content matters in video games. According to the NY Times (sign up required) churches are using the video game Halo as a recruiting tool, depite its violent themes.

Thou Shalt Not Kill, Except in a Popular Video Game at Church

The latest iteration of the immensely popular space epic, Halo 3, was released nearly two weeks ago by Microsoft and has already passed $300 million in sales.

Those buying it must be 17 years old, given it is rated M for mature audiences. But that has not prevented leaders at churches and youth centers across Protestant denominations, including evangelical churches that have cautioned against violent entertainment, from holding heavily attended Halo nights and stocking their centers with multiple game consoles so dozens of teenagers can flock around big-screen televisions and shoot it out.

The technique is pretty straightforward:

Witness the basement on a recent Sunday at the Colorado Community Church in the Englewood area of Denver, where Tim Foster, 12, and Chris Graham, 14, sat in front of three TVs, locked in violent virtual combat as they navigated on-screen characters through lethal gun bursts. Tim explained the game’s allure: ‘It’s just fun blowing people up.’

Once they come for the games, Gregg Barbour, the youth minister of the church said, they will stay for his Christian message. ‘We want to make it hard for teenagers to go to hell,’ Mr. Barbour wrote in a letter to parents at the church.

The approach–using a game with violence as a means to get kids involved in is church activities–is controversial, as one might imagine. But advocates argue:

The idea that Halo is inappropriately violent too strictly interpreted the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ ‘I’m not walking up to someone with a pistol and shooting them,’ [says one advocate]. I’m shooting pixels on a screen.’

The approach is apparently quite widespread, with hundreds of churches using Halo.

One interesting aspect of this particular game is that the violence is combined with religious themes as well:

Complicating the debate over the appropriateness of the game as a church recruiting tool are the plot’s apocalyptic and religious overtones. The hero’s chief antagonists belong to the Covenant, a fervent religious group that welcomes the destruction of Earth as the path to their ascension.

However:

Advocates of using the game as a church recruiting tool say the religious overtones are sufficiently cartoonish and largely overlooked by players.

In other words, both the violent themes and the religious themes–the “positive” and “negative” content–are less important than that kids are playing the game in church, and therefore with adults who have an opportunity to turn play in the game into understanding about the real world. The Southern Baptists for example:

recently sent e-mail messages to 50,000 young people about how to share their faith using Halo 3. Among the tips: use the game’s themes as the basis for a discussion about good and evil. At Sweetwater Baptist Church in Lawrenceville, Ga., Austin Brown, 16, said, ‘We play Halo, take a break and have something to eat, and have a lesson,’ explaining that the pastor tried to draw parallels ‘between God and the devil.’

In this sense, “Halo in church” exemplifies one of the important themes of How Computer Games Help Children Learn: That a game is always more than what appears on the screen. Rather it is all the things you do, the people you talk with, the things you think about, the things you care about while playing the game.

But it also suggests how powerful it can be to create epistemic games, where content and context–action and the way players think about that action–are aligned around a way of thinking that matters in the world.

After all, at one church:

quarterly Halo nights were such a big social event that he had to rent additional big-screen TVs.

At another:

using Halo to recruit was ‘the most effective thing we’ve done…. We have to find something that these kids are interested in doing that doesn’t involve drugs or alcohol or premarital sex.’

And as any educator might agree:

‘Teens are our fish… so we’ve become creative in baiting our hooks.’

Amen.