Reconstruction Vol. 10, No. 1, 2010




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Gaming at The End of the World: Coercion, Conversion and the Apocalyptic Self in Left Behind: Eternal Forces Digital Play  / Deborah Wills and Erin Steuter

Abstract: Left Behind: Eternal Forces is a real-time strategy game based on Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' best-selling eschatological novels, an immensely popular series featuring embattled Christians fighting evil at the world's end. The spin-off game allows players to "wage a war of apocalyptic proportions" against the Antichrist's minions. The players defend themselves with prayer and hymn-singing; if spiritual means fail, however, more violent tactics are invoked as Christian alliances evolve into the military units of the "Tribulation Force." This merging of what the game's website calls "physical and spiritual warfare" has generated among critics the label "kill or convert"; the conflation of the two lies at the center of an ideological controversy that intensified when ABC News announced an evangelical group's plans to send the game to US troops in Iraq. This article explores eschatological representations like Eternal Forces as a way to instill, consolidate, and hierarchicalize identity by creating an apocalyptic self that is figured in violently contestatory terms. It addresses conservative evangelical leaders' mobilization of that apocalyptic self in order to re-invest twenty-first century evangelicals in a renewed "combat myth" tradition that sees those of differing beliefs as fodder either for conversion or for annihilation in an ultimate battle between God and Satan. Left Behind: Eternal Forces is explored as a contemporary pop-culture expression and a new form of soteriological play in which that two-pronged choice is embodied and enacted, situating its players as divine co-strategists in an either/or world of forced and often punitive affiliation.

Key words:Culture Studies; Media; Religion

Throughout history, men and women have chosen one of three paths:
those who daily seek a personal relationship with God;
unbelievers and believers who don't seek after God;
and those who choose to ignore God.
And as the prophets foretold, God will come to take his people home . . .
for those left behind, the apocalypse has just begun.

Promotional trailer, Left Behind: Eternal Forces

The most important aspect of this game is the choice that you will make for either good or evil.
Jerome Mikulich, Director of Outreach, Left Behind Games

<1> In 2006, following the remarkable success of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' best-selling evangelical novels, known collectively as the Left Behind series, the PC real-time strategy game Left Behind: Eternal Forces was launched. The novels were the foundation of a growing franchise for publisher Tyndale House; sequels and prequels expanded the original twelve novels to sixteen, and spin-off products include films, DVDs, comics, clothing, calendars, mugs and children's stories. Since 1995, the novels enjoyed an unprecedented cross-over success, gaining entrenched places on both Christian and secular best-seller lists; while offered to Christian readers as books that nourished faith and aided in witnessing, they were "marketed to a mainstream audience as doomsday exotica" (McAlister, Epic 167). Since 9/11, their popularity increased dramatically: the ninth novel, Desecration, was released six weeks after September 11, 2001 and became the year's best-selling hardcover novel, unseating John Grisham from the number one spot he had monopolized since 1994. While game creators could thus capitalize on a well-established readership, they also wanted to expand the game's audience beyond existing readers of the novels. They saw in the books' dramatic representations of biblical end-time prophecy an epic dimension that would translate effectively to digital gaming; the novels' depiction of the violent tribulation years of the post-Rapture world, with its titanic conflict between the globally powerful Antichrist and the tiny, heroic band of underground post-Rapture Christians making up the Tribulation Force, offered a narrative compelling enough to attract a new constituency of players. Eternal Forces promises gamers a chance to "wage a war of apocalyptic proportions" and to "command [their] forces through the streets of New York in one of the most realistic recreations ever seen in a video game" (www.lbgstore.com). The cast of characters is divided into what the game manual calls "good guys" and "bad guys"; these include, on both sides, soldiers, military commanders, "recruiters" and "influencers." Good-side recruiters are called "Disciples," "Evangelists," and "Missionaries " and are trained at Chapels, Churches, and Cathedrals; their counterparts on the bad side are labeled "Followers," "Influencers," and "Secularists," and are trained at "Gadget Shops," Supermarkets and Colleges. Single players must play on the Tribulation Force side, and win the game by converting indistinguishable, gray-colored "neutrals," who have no status until recruited by either army. The central, necessary dynamic of game success is recruitment; without aggressive campaigns of conversion, even an ideally-skilled player cannot win the game. The centrality of conversion is echoed in promoters' emphasis on Eternal Forces as a proselytic tool. Left Behind creator Tim LaHaye promotes Eternal Forces as a conduit for an evangelical message that pits the absolute truths of conservative evangelical Christianity against the absolute falsehoods of a secular, "unbelieving" world; in politically resonant language, LaHaye promises that for the "generation of young people that are into video games," Eternal Forces "is the number one most powerful vehicle for their hearts and minds that's been invented in our lifetime" (www.eternalforces.com). Troy Lyndon, CEO of Left Behind Games, echoes this: with its "ultimate battle between good and evil," the game will "expand the message of the books to a whole new generation" (www.eternalforces.com).

<2> This missiological focus has invited concern; critics of the game have denounced its elaborate weaponry, military apparatus, and violent confrontation employed in support of evangelical proselytizing. One commentator notes,

Left Behind Games tells gamers its product is ‘not too preachy,' but it tells Christian audiences that the game is an evangelistic tool that wins souls for Christ. They cannot have it both ways. The game indoctrinates children that certain New Yorkers deserve to die, that it is your Christian duty to kill them, and that God will be pleased when you do a deadly deed to defend your creed (Hutson).
Left Behind Games strenuously denies this charge, insisting that "contrary to misinformation on the web," there is "no killing in the name of God, and no convert or die missions" (www.eternalforces.com/features.aspx). The company has sent cease-and-desist letters to on-line reviewers and commentators who denounce the game's proselytic violence (DailyKos). Gamers, however, have collectively challenged this stance, arguing that game designers' claims are disingenuous or outright deceptive. Eternal Forces promoters note, for example, that "never does a player click a key or press a button to activate a first-person violent act" (www.eternalforces.com); however, since Eternal Forces is a strategy game with a "top-down isometric," players instruct game figures to perform such acts on their behalf (Durocher). The Eternal Forces website likens the game's strategic isometric to lower-tech forms of strategy gaming: responding to the question "Does anyone get killed in the game?", the page notes "the gamer controls his forces just like you do in a chess game" (www.eternalforces.com/features.aspx). Many gamers and reviewers, however, challenge promoters' claims that the game isn't violent. Keith Durocher writes that
You not only can and do proactively kill, the only consequences to this behavior occur when you don't pray after every murder. I experimented with this myself, taking seven of my newly re-born Christians out on the street to go kill one of those wretched musicians. Not only did I "press a button" to make my mob of faithful thugs go beat the guitar-player to death in broad daylight, the only penalty to this was the loss of just two spirit points, regained by tapping the ‘pray' command once (Durocher).
The presence of overt violence, military-grade weaponry, and mass confrontation in a narrative centered on the articulation and consolidation of Christian identities has understandably become the focus of attention for many gamers, critics, and media commentators. However, beyond this overt violence, Eternal Forces evidences a covert violence that operates in more oblique, yet perhaps more significant, ways.

<3> The debate over the presence or absence of physical violence in Eternal Forces masks a subtler but more significant ideological violence: the game's violence of forced affiliation is played out across a game scenario which deliberately subsumes players, like game figures, into its deeply binarized world view. Players become not only directors of the action but co-architects of the world, reinforcing with every action its limited possibilities for belief and behavior. The most significant violence in Eternal Forces game-play is not therefore the implied or overt violence of the game's confrontation scenarios but its soteriological violence, the unexamined premise that ultimately violence in the cause of saving souls is not only acceptable but necessary. Moreover, this article proposes that this particular form of violence is embedded in and justified by the game's key theological premise of soteriological play, that is, play that both narratively embodies a particular understanding of salvation and that figuratively performs and replicates this understanding through the experience of game play and its programmed rewards.

<4> In this way, the game’s eschatological mise-en-scène conflates with its play experience, and both conform to the binarism of conservative evangelicalism’s strong structural divisions. At the center of prophecy belief, as at the center of contemporary conservative evangelical theology, lies the same obsession with oppositional, binarized identities that is typically crucial to conflict-based digital play. In his fiction and his political and theological writing, LaHaye has repeatedly employed an overtly adversarial metaphor for this binarism, the martial framing that pits "believer" against "unbeliever" as military as well as spiritual foes. Echoing the broader militaristic framing of the "culture wars," the "battle over whose beliefs and values should serve as the guiding force in the nation" (Gormly 252), LaHaye asserted on Jerry Falwell’s radio program that "we're in a religious war and we need to aggressively oppose secular humanism; these people are as religiously motivated as we are and they are filled with the devil" (Lampman 14). This persistent metaphor of inimical difference and oppositional identity finds its fullest and perhaps most extreme expression in Eternal Forces. Like apocalypticism itself, digital gaming is inherently engaged with issues of identity. It delivers, like many genres of popular culture, a "shared stock of symbols" that embody not only "people’s hopes and desires" but also their "fears and hatreds" (Morgan 21). Perhaps more than any other contemporary pop-culture artifact, the digital game, with its ability to adopt, adapt, simulate and discard characterizations, dramatizes questions of identity. Debates about the way games construct identity shaped the early years of the still-emerging field of game studies, and continue to fuel its scholarly exchanges. Some scholars see gaming as challenging traditional, rigid conceptions of identity; its avatars and other forms of digital masquerade enable a postmodern unsettling of stable identities, allowing players to create changing or transient selves by participating in "identity tourism" (Nakamura 714). Karen Hall suggests that the interchangeable narratives of certain kinds of game play work to diminish the player’s sense of self: in the "frenzy of the combat spectacle," any "self-reflective impulse is blotted out (¶9) and players are encouraged to "experience pleasure in the loss of self"(¶6). Others argue that this loss of identity is illusory, and that the protocols of play, or the cultural or market influences that ensure certain narratives dominate game design, actually re-entrench players in newly-solidified identities. Ben Hourigan, for example, insists that digital games affirm rather than threaten identity. As a medium, Hourigan argues, video games are overwhelmingly conservative because they figure the player as a defender, holding fast against the threat of an intrusive, external Other (Hourigan 1-2). Anthony Sze-Fai Shiu argues that the workings of identity in digital games are complex: even while gaming’s use of masquerade can approximate a sense of "disidentification," it can also securely "suture" player to character and "redeploy or reinvest in" more fixed or essential notions of identity (109).

<5> In its focus on identity as the primary ground for conflict, and in its enacting of identity dramas across the epic dimensions of narratives of cataclysm, digital gaming thus seems to offer a perfect vehicle for the apocalyptic narratives that engage the same issues. John Martens suggests that apocalypse literature found its perfect pop-culture expression in film and television, media that perfectly elaborate prophecy's rich imagery and vivid symbolism; apocalypse, says Martens, seems "so right for adaptation to the movie and televison screen" that "one is tempted to say that these ancient . . . prophecies had been waiting for the twentieth century technology to find their fulfilment" (2). Even more apt than the meeting between prophecy narrative and film is that between the complex technologies of digital gaming and the complex matrix of apocalyptic thought. This article will explore the intersections between these phenomena: first, prophecy belief as a way to instill, consolidate, and hierarchicalize identity in creating an apocalyptic self that is figured in violently contestatory terms; second, conservative evangelical leaders' mobilization of that apocalyptic self to re-invest twenty-first century evangelicals in a renewed "combat myth" tradition that sees those of differing beliefs as fodder either for conversion or for annihilation in an ultimate battle between God and Satan (Martens 15-16); and third, Left Behind: Eternal Forces as a contemporary pop-culture expression in which that two-pronged choice is embodied and enacted, situating its players as divine co-strategists in an either/or world of forced and often punitive affiliation.

Prophecy and The Apocalyptic Self

<6> In many religious traditions, prophecy functions as the remedy of history. If history documents the descent from a primordial perfection and confirms the slow deterioration marked by human sin, error, and the lapsarian moment of departure from the divine plan, then prophecy narrative works to repair that trajectory of decline. Eschatological narrative offers in effect a promissary note, a redemptive roadmap by which the lost paradise may someday be regained. While many religions offer narratives of origins and endings, "alpha and omega mythologies" that typically situate the span of human time between the parenthetical sweep of an inaugural perfection and a concluding paradise (Cobb 262), it is those with the most well-developed or prescriptive visions of the world's last days who employ their eschatology as an organizing principle, using it to create meaning, instill identity, confirm belief, and justify actions. Like other models of prophecy belief, evangelical Christianity's Premillennial Dispensationalism, the belief in an imminent Rapture of the redeemed followed by the Tribulation years of the Antichrist's rule and culminating in Christ's millennial return, effectively accomplishes all of these. As Amy Frykholm observes, prophecy belief creates "order out of seeming chaos, put[s] God in charge of human history, and designate[s] a privileged place for believers (16).

<7> Belief in prophecy, according to historian Paul Boyer, is a way of "ordering experience": it imbues even chaotic events with significance and gives "a grand, overarching shape to history, and thus ultimate meaning to the lives of individuals caught up in history's stream" (Boyer xi). A well- developed eschatological framework provides its believers with a way to understand the past as well as the future; historical events are seen as precursors to the eventual unfolding of divine intervention in the future. In this way, with the help of sacred predictions, what is to come can be known and what has already happened can be understood. The pop-cultural texts that express in fictional form the tenets of prophecy, however, while offering an account that justifies the past in light of a projected future, are also very much concerned with and responsive to the cultural conditions of the present (Walliss ¶2). As well as organizing experience and shaping perception, prophecy beliefs may also critique the status quo and catalyze action, offering believers strategies not just for surviving the end times but also for mobilizing the "rhetoric and modus operandi of proselytic zeal" to effect social change (Morgan, "Studying" 32).

<8> For evangelical Christians, whose defining characteristics include a literal belief in Biblical prophecies and a conviction that we are living in the world's last days (Balmer 228), the Great Commission, the mandate for Christians to go into the world and preach salvation, is thus a central, urgent, and foundational task. The "defining mythos" of evangelicalism, then, is "the hopeful drive to convert lost souls" (Shultze 63), and belief in the coming apocalypse offers both the justification for an evangelical program of conversion and the missiological means to carry it out. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, evangelicals have been aware of the persuasive power of a dramatic end-of-the world narrative; as early as 1905, novels about the Rapture and the rise of the Antichrist appealed to readers' fears of being left behind to face Satan's reign on earth (Frykholm 193). Such narratives are characterized by their sense of urgency; they insist that delay in conversion for even a moment can result in an unbeliever's eternal damnation, and emphasize not just the imminence but the instantaneousness of the Rapture moment. The suddenness of this moment allows no time for reflection or recantation, but is immediately divisive, simply and abruptly cleaving the saved from the unsaved, and projecting that division into eternity. The Rapture's moment of rupture must be prepared for in advance, because the moment of revelation happens, in biblical language, in the "twinkling of an eye" (Corinthians 15:56). The moment that divine truth is revealed is thus the very moment that it is too late for unbelievers to profit from it. This irony constitutes a central motif in eschatological lore. In one scene from Donald Thompson's film A Thief in the Night (1972), for example, a Christian man is abruptly translated to Heaven; as he disappears in the instant between arranging two letters on his church's signboard, the unfinished sign is left for eternity proclaiming "THE END IS NEA" (A Thief in the Night). In its instantaneous and irrefutable division of true believer from false, saved from damned, prophecy prefigures an apocalyptic self in which all ambiguity about identity is clarified and resolved.

<9> End-time prophecies circulate, multiply, and evolve over time, shifting, in their "mapping of prophecies onto contemporary world events," alongside our shifting "cultural values, ideologies, and historical contingencies" (Monahan 816). Amidst this evolution, however, prophecy's privileging of believers over unbelievers and its assuaging of anxieties of identity even while cultivating renewed anxieties about membership in the elect have been a constant focus. Prophecy fictions consistently offer a simplified, formulaic, and highly-binarized understanding of identity and community. Prophecy-based belief communities simultaneously proffer reassuringly clear rules for community membership while implanting the fears about incursion, threat, and exclusion that are the necessary accompaniment to such bluntly oppositional formulations. The contemporary cultural productions of prophecy narrative, such as Rapture fiction, music, and film, consolidate the essential connection between the individual Christian and the evangelical community, while commensurately heightening the antagonistic difference between evangelical communities and the secular world which they metaphorically frame as surrounding, out-numbering, and encroaching upon them. Crawford Gribben notes that contemporary Rapture novels such as the Left Behind series appeal to evangelical readers because they "emphasize the existing dichotomies between faith communities and contemporary life, as apocalypse literature always has" (Gribben 91).

<10> Recent Rapture fiction reflects this dichotomous perspective. Its emphasis on the fundamental and antipathetic difference between "believing" and "non-believing" individuals and groups has proved, as Torin Monahan argues in "Marketing the Beast," uniquely profitable. As a genre previously confined primarily to church libraries and Christian bookstores moved into the expanded markets of big-box stores and mainstream best-seller lists, the "polarization of the sacred versus the secular" intensified. Stories adversarially pitting saved against damned, suggests Monahan, "apparently sell better than books delving into the heterogeneity of Christian and other religious beliefs" (819). Early Rapture narratives, despite their potential for shocking non-Christians into conversion, remained the province of the converted, their evangelizing possibilities largely dissipated because they never reached mass markets or mass audiences. It was not until the mid-twentieth century, when a crucial shift began in evangelical culture's attitude toward popular culture and mass media, that apocalyptic narratives began to merge in new ways with popular culture to more broadly exploit their proselytizing potential.

Apocalyptic Territories

<11> The shift in evangelical attitudes to mass media occurred gradually over the middle years of the twentieth century, and was largely consolidated by the century's end. By this time, evangelicals had moved in large part from seeing popular culture solely as something that undermined "the values and beliefs of evangelical faith" to viewing it as a potent vehicle for "spiritual persuasion" (Schultze 65, 63). Evangelical leaders endowed mass media with a "persuasive priority" that derived directly from their "theological convictions regarding the need for personal salvation" (Schultze 63). While many evangelical groups still called for boycotts of pop-culture products they found offensive, the condemnation shifted from medium to message: while content might be excoriated, the media of popular film, television, music, etc. were no longer rejected wholesale. This represented a shift from evangelicalism's earlier, profound distrust of popular media. In 1946, Wendell P. Loveless urged Christians to beware of radio's appeal to "the lust of the ear" (15-16). Motion pictures were similarly denounced as sensually appealing to the eye. In 1938, evangelist John. J. Rice distributed the pamphlet "What is Wrong with the Movies?", in which he fulminated: "[They are an] unmitigated curse...the feeder of lust, the perverter of morals, the tool of greed, the school of crime, the betrayer of innocence" (qtd in Bendroth 76). By 1949, however, Theodor Elsner, president of the fledgling National Religious Broadcasters organization, was urging Christian leaders to embrace the proselytic potential of television, warning "we must not make the same mistake we made with movies! We should have stepped into this field in the very beginning, and prepared Christian films for the proclamation of the gospel" (qtd in Bendroth 80, 81). Elsner's use of the territorial metaphor introduced a trope common to evangelical discourse about popular culture, which presents popular culture as a field of contestation upon whose victory depends the safety of another key territory, the domestic landscape of the American home. Within this metaphoric framing, the Christian home is depicted as a contested territory that must be defended from the encroachment of a hostile secularism, and the home of the non-believer is represented as a key strategic territory that must be fought for and won. At its most explicit, this framing is evidenced in the dominant evangelical metaphor of television as a "home invader," popularized in "Evangelical Woman of the Year" Rebecca Hagelin's book Home Invasion: Protecting Your Family in a Culture That's Gone Stark Raving Mad. Evangelicalism's long-standing ambivalence about television is reflected in the binarized formulation proposed by Fuller Seminary professor Edward Carnell, who noted in 1950 that it can transform the contested domestic territory to the gain or the detriment of the evangelical project: "TV, while it may threaten to convert every home into a theater, can also turn every parlor into a church" (qtd in Bendroth 81). Pop-culture and mass media, then, was seen increasingly through the second half of the twentieth century as something that could be turned against its secular roots and mobilized in service of the gospel message, reversing its influence from corrupting to salvific. Although Christian fundamentalism in general had long segregated itself from secular life and saw "resistance to worldliness" as a key part of its repudiation of modernity (Bendroth 75), media's missiological possibilities won out. Evangelicalism's intensifying end-times fervor increasingly allowed it to generate new iterations of prophetic narrative using once-castigated forms of popular culture to disseminate its message. The mainstream success of novels like the Left Behind series documents the dramatic extent of this shift. They represent a "remarkable mainstreaming of evangelical pop-culture, one in which non-evangelicals seem to be willing to read overtly proselytizing messages, as long a they are delivered in readable form (McAlister, "Prophecy" 775). In their unprecedented "crossover audience," argues Frykholm, the Left Behind stories suggest that not only have evangelicals been influenced by mainstream culture, but that the reverse is also true: "evangelicalism is an increasingly significant part of American popular culture" (25).

<12> The Left Behind novels and the Eternal Forces digital game represent the contemporary apex of evangelicalism's new pop-cultural sophistication, resulting in the paradox of what Melani McAlister calls "evangelical worldliness," a deliberate and purposeful "melding of traditional sub-cultural views with a mass-culture style and a broad, mainstreamed appeal" that works simultaneously to promote a spiritual and a political message, re-energizing the "political and cultural power of a Christian Right that in the late 1990s had seemed to be in retreat" ("Prophecy" 777, 775). Its appropriation of mass culture forms and media makes Premillenial Dispensationalism a significant social force: "a lone individual who proclaims that the end of the world is near is of relatively minor importance . . . apocalyptic prophets become socially significant only if and when people hear their message and respond to it with belief and support" (Brasher163). As pre-millenial dispensationalism became more doctrinally central to evangelicalism over the course of the twentieth century, the urgency of its end-time mission fueled its willingness to appropriate new mass cultural vehicles for the promulgation of its message. Among the earliest adapters of radio and television as media for the Christian message, evangelicals also entered cyberspace precipitously; Brenda Brasher notes that "they began launching websites before ninety percent of Americans knew what a website was" (176).

<13> While the tenor of early twentieth century Rapture novels was "virulently antimodern and antiworldly" (Frykholm 29), the Left Behind novels are, as many scholars have pointed out, much more ambivalent about many of the things that early Rapture fiction dismissed as deeply implicated in modernity, particularly technology. Whereas, in early Rapture fiction, technology was the province of the Antichrist, in the Left Behind novels it is deftly appropriated by Christian converts who use it to evade and contest the Antichrist's power; the novels are not technophobic but "technophilic" (Hendershot 195; McAlister "Prophecy" 777). In the hands of the godly, then, technology is a potent mechanism that may be used to outwit enemies and defeat evil. In each of the novels, technology is expertly co-opted as both a source of power and as a proselytizing tool. This pragmatic orientation to the exploitation of technology finds a provocative parallel in Eternal Forces; not only does the game itself represent a deliberate co-optation of a genre that is often excoriated by evangelicals for its innate violence, but, exemplifying what Bendroth calls fundamentalism's "innovative, entrepreneurial spirit in the service of world-wide conversion" (75), it employs some of the newest and most controversial aspects of that technology. Game reviewers Williams, Hutson, and Krampus all observe that the game's software is equipped with "spyware" that is automatically enabled with play: "Developers have incorporated software from an Israeli firm called Double Fusion. It incorporates video advertising and product placement into the game, and reportedly records players' behavior, location, and other data" (Hutson). The spyware "cannot be blocked or removed," and tracks players' game patterns, links visits, even geography and demographics (Williams). Both within and outside of the fictional Left Behind world, then, evolutions in media and communications technologies have enabled apocalyptic visions to assume compelling new forms and reach enlarged audiences.

Apocalyptic Witness

<14> One of the most intriguing recent intersections between religion, technology, and popular culture occurred when the evangelical Christian association "Operation Straight Up" arranged, in 2007, to send "Freedom Packets" to U.S. troops stationed in Iraq. These packages included socks, snacks, baby wipes, an Extreme Sports DVD, and New Testaments, as well as evangelical proselytizing material in English and Arabic and a copy of Eternal Forces (Schecter). Although the U.S. military had originally approved the Freedom Packets maildrop, media exposure forced the Pentagon to distance itself from Operation Straight Up. For many critics, the tri-partite juxtaposition of real-life soldiers with a game framed as a highly militarized Holy Crusade and a religious organization that publically claimed that "the forces of heaven have encouraged us to perform multiple crusades" in the Middle East (Blumenthal) was an inflammatory combination. Commentators saw the game, with its frank depiction of a salvation theology in which all non-Christians are damned, as promoting a "crusade rhetoric" that was particularly dangerous in the midst of a non-virtual war persistently framed as a contestatory and essentialized clash of religions (Weinstein and Aslan). Gamers responded with similar vehemence to the rhetoric and ideology of Eternal Forces; one on-line reviewer called it a "gnarled cancer of code that propagates murderously violent intolerance," full of stereotypes and "default enemies" (Durocher). Another notes that the game promotes a "radical, apocalyptic fundamentalist view" and offers "propaganda disguised as entertainment" (Allen).

<15> The basic narrative premise of Eternal Forces, in which players must convert neutrals to win the game, is fairly straightforward, although it is complicated by its cross-connections with the Left Behind novels' convoluted plot, the elaborate characterizations of its key characters and, especially, by the moral assumptions which, despite designers' attempts to downplay them, are only thinly veiled within the game. A strong family values orientation is evident, for example, in characters' musings over the value of having a stay-at-home mother (LB:EF Manual 10) and in the fact that every key Tribulation Force or "good guy" player is married while every member of the evil Antichrist side is single or divorced. While sacred institutions like marriage are revered, the institutions of the secular world are intimately tied to the forces of darkness. The university trained "Secularist" is one of the Antichrist's most powerful servants, as is the "One-World Government," a diaphanously-disguised United Nations. Even trivial, benign or apolitical events have a spiritual price attached; for example, a single riff of secular rock music can fatally lower a player's spiritual defenses, as can overhearing someone swear.

<16> For the Left Behind creators, these things are not trivial: the novels and game embody an urgent Truth, and are thus intended not only to amuse but to instruct and redeem. They express a distinct soteriology, a way of understanding deliverance and the means by which "the faithful may avail themselves of it" (Cobb 229). This structuring belief accounts for the coherence of the Left Behind cosmology, as expressed across all its texts and merchandise. Creators LaHaye and Jenkins have said in interviews that, while the novels' characters are inventions, they consider key events of the novels to be both literally true and eschatologically imminent (LaHaye and Jenkins). This conviction is materially expressed in Left Behind merchandise, such as calendars that keep viewers focused on the rapture's approach. In one convoluted moebius strip of narrative self-referentiality, the novels, themselves based on LaHaye's non-fiction books of prophecy interpretation, reference a video made by a raptured Christian minister for those left behind; the sermon from the novel's fictional account has since been recorded on DVD and produced for sale to real-life believers who are urged to keep the video in their homes so that the real-life unsaved will find it after the Rapture (Hendershot 235). The imaginative universe from which the game emerges, then, is in the minds of its creators far from being merely an entertainment; it is most urgently a tool of persuasion. Eternal Forces is intended not for ludic but for instructional and, ultimately, salvific purposes. It functions therefore as a means of soteriological play: play by which, in pursuing the stated game goal of saving others, players may save themselves.

<17> Salvation is a polarizing, high-stakes enterprise in the Left Behind universe, and like Eternal Forces, with its unapologetic division of the world into Good Guys and Bad Guys, salvation is a zero-sum game. There are no nuances or degrees of redemption, only the absolutes of saved or damned. The inclusion of the game's apparent third character category of "undecideds" or "neutrals" might seem to complicate the game's foundational binarism. The Eternal Forces website offers an answer, however: it insists that all neutrals are "poised to make a decision. They cannot remain neutral" (http://eternalforces.com/faq.aspx). It is this belief that programs Eternal Forces, superseding its apparent tertiary logic of Good Guy, Bad Guy, and Undecided with its dominant binary logic of saved and damned. This deep-seated assumption underpins the Left Behind cosmology and informs all its cultural expressions. What distinguishes Eternal Forces from other Left Behind productions, however, is something in the nature of the play experience itself, which rewards the forced conversion or destruction of neutrals, those liminal figures who exist outside the narrative's decisive binaries. For players to win, neutrals must be transformed into Tribulation Force members. If they do not become members of the Tribulation Force team, they are subject to attack. In the game's version of spiritual warfare, no one may remain a civilian. At lower levels of play, the process of conversion appears benign: neutrals are converted through prayer, witnessing, and hymn-singing. But as players progress to higher "missions" and more complex levels of play, encounters become increasingly confrontational and violent. While lower-level play features underpopulated streets with one-on-one or small-group encounters between Tribulation Force members, Antichrist forces, and neutrals, higher-level play features crowds, large-scale attacks, and ambushes. Tribulation Force weaponry evolves from witnessing and testifying in early levels of play to giant gun-turrets, Humvees, snipers, and Apache helicopters in higher levels. The gamer's role evolves in the course of play from that of a missionary-like recruiter gathering converts to a commander mobilizing combat units. Neutrals who have not been recruited to join the Tribulation Force, or who have joined but were wooed away to the dark side because their "spirit points" dropped, are considered to have "chosen" the Antichrist, and thus must be eliminated. Los Angeles Times columnist Joel Stein described playing on the Antichrist side in the multi-player on-line mode of Eternal Forces at the 2006 Electronic Entertainment Expo: "As Satan, I of course had the United Nations on my side. As my peacekeeping Hummer and some of my followers rolled down Sixth Avenue, the Christians outflanked me and started firing, immediately taking out several of my nurses. The apocalypse, I was learning, was a good excuse for Christians to just go nuts" (Stein). WarCry Network's Jay "aiuax" Miller also reviewed the game, praising the "compelling schema" of its real-time combat system, but noting that "many gamers" would likely be disturbed by its "black-and-white polarization of good and evil . . . The only way to accomplish anything positive in the game is to 'convert' nonbelievers into faithful believers, and the only alternative to this is outright killing them" (Miller). Undecideds are stranded in a latency from which conversion may rescue them and which, in both the game's diegetic and extra-diegetic worlds, is antagonistic. A state of disaffiliation is never permitted; as Jonathan Hutson observes, "the game's designers declare: ultimately, there is no such thing as a neutral ground" (Hutson).

<18> In its proselytic purpose, Eternal Forces' closest relation is America's Army, a classic "propagame" or "strategic communications tool" (Nieborg). Both games were designed for purposes of recruitment, and both employ remarkably similar language and structures, including embedded advertising both commercial and ideological. Eternal Forces' vocabulary is clearly derived from a military lexicon, including words like "command," "units," "mission," "weapons," "soldiers," "armor," "recruit," "train," "order," "duty," "sniper," "protect," "battle," "engage," and "attack." The prevalence of this martial register points to the almost indistinguishable co-existence of what Eternal Forces calls "physical warfare" and "spiritual warfare." The game's powerful conflation of the two reflects a significant re-casting of the Great Commission, the gospel's command to go into the world and save souls. Mainstream North American Protestantism has traditionally interpreted this mandate as invitational; like the church's alter call, it proffers a moment of appeal. In contrast, both the play experience and the soteriology narrative of Eternal Forces replace appeal with confrontation, invitation with force. It casts the non-capitulation of the "undecided" as hostile; for example, character biographies describe Hattie, the resiliently neutral character imported from the novels, as full of "indecision and stubborn individualism" (Manual 13).

<19> The game's superimposition of a militaristic, confrontational, anti-individualist frame over the more traditional, highly-individual mode of invitation profoundly changes the essential role played by human volition. In Eternal Forces, volition is paradoxically both over-valued and negated. It is over-valued as central to the identity-defining act of choosing an affiliation; "neutrals" are suggestively described as those who "haven't allied with anyone yet" (Manual 24, 23). As is often the case in Eternal Forces, an essentially spiritual choice is thus framed through a military metaphor of alliance. Choice is highlighted by game rules; at the same time, there is a strong narrative current of incredulity about unaffiliated characters; Buck, a Tribulation Force hero, asks wonderingly, "How can anyone be neutral?" (24). Another Tribulation Force leader insists "the choice for a Neutral person to choose the light of truth or the dark shadows of the Antichrist's lies is purely their own decision" (24). Volition is thus repeatedly stressed, and, in the game's martial framing, an incorrect choice is figured as an act of aggression. This hostility to neutrality is also reflected in some readers of the Left Behind novels; one avid evangelical reader surprised her interviewer by reserving her greatest anger not for the Antichrist or his minions but for the perpetual undecideds, such as Hattie: "Hattie makes me angry," she asserts, then broadens her anger to all those who resist conversion: "they won't convert. They are given every chance . . . they could die tomorrow, locusts could suck the life out of them or whatever. They are being slapped in the face with God and they are going ‘I don't know'" (Frykholm 55). Evangelical readers of the series often speak of their "disgust and annoyance" with conversion resisters; one interviewee, "Jill," a new convert to Christianity, registers physical, not just spiritual revulsion: "Hattie, she just gave me the chills...I do read it and think, ‘Oh, she is making me ill'" (Frykholm 95). When asked which character she most disliked, reader "Carissa" observed that "besides the Anti-Christ, Hattie really got on my nerves!" (Frykholm 95).

<20> The game's emphasis on volition is double-edged, however. Choice is seen as essential to defining game characters, hardening and solidifying the lines of oppositional identity around which the game is structured. Paradoxically, however, volition is also negated, since the moment of decision is depicted as inevitable: no-one may choose not to choose. Just as no player may play from a "third term" position, but must choose a simplified, oppositional, and binarized good guy or bad guy stance, no character may remain unaffiliated. There is no position for a conciliator or mediator in game play: in fact, the closest the game has to such roles, the secular "Persuaders," are allied with the Antichrist, and employ their tools of propaganda to spiritually deceive the masses. Pursued through the crumbling, post-apocalyptic streets of New York, neutrals are then sent to religious "training centers" once converted. The relentlessness of the pursuit of neutrals embodies one of Eternal Forces' deep-seated assumptions: that the world is a place of antagonistic dualities and necessary enmities. As the game's title suggests, these antithetical forces are represented as eternal, a claim reflected in LaHaye's repeated assertion that "there are two kinds of people on the earth: Christians, and unbelievers" (LaHaye 9). In Eternal Forces, this assumption is evidenced in the structural binarism of play: at the most obvious level, it is impossible to win the game through rapproachment, cooperation, or multilateralism. More subtly, the binaries of play point to difference as something so deeply-seated as to be innate, so oppositional as to require eradication: crusades replace co-existence.

<21> Like the Left Behind novels, Eternal Forces reflects the binarism cultivated by LaHaye and other evangelical leaders; they are thus "a powerful political tool bent on rendering more a fear of God than a love of God," a fear of anything "outside this line of belief and a love of destruction of all that is outside of it," an embracing of "God's master plan" to destroy all unbelievers and usher in the "hero of history" in the form of a militant Jesus Christ (Standaert 16). Chris Hedges observes that militant evangelical leaders use Revelation as their "go-to text" because it is "arguably depicts a violent Jesus: rarely mentioned these days is the Jesus of the four Gospels, the Jesus who speaks of the poor and the marginalized, who taught followers to turn the other cheek and love their enemies, the Jesus who rejected the mantle of secular power" (Hedges 4). Barbara Rossing agrees, noting "how Revelation, indeed the entire biblical apocalyptic tradition, with its important critique of imperial injustice, has been hijacked to provide a platform for violence" ("Prophecy" 554). In emphasizing the war-like Jesus, Left Behind creators echoed earlier Christians who, at the turn of the twentieth century, bemoaned the feminization of images of Christ and the "falsetto appeal" of an emasculated Church (Morgan 201). Eternal Forces acts as an answer to this fear of a weak, effete, effeminate Jesus is echo. Tim LaHaye echoed this fear 60 Minutes when he observed that "liberals have created this loving, wimpy Jesus . . . we need the judgmental, warrior Jesus." (qtd. in Rossing, Rapture 141).

<22> Eternal Forces' ambivalent, self-contradictory, and often disingenuous relationship to violence is grounded in its broader, more foundational ambivalence about Others and outsiders. Promotional materials celebrate and market Eternal Forces's freedom from the excessive gore of secular video games and yet consistently employ a rhetoric of absolutism and judgment that supports the game's more deeply-embedded violence, the violence of forced affiliation. There is, at first glance, a certain permeability to the make-up of the Tribulation Force community, and a certain fluidity to characters' identities that initially might appear emancipatory: game characters can adapt and change as they gain skills, experience, and resources, and, in lower levels of play, at least, even the pawn-like characters who have been recruited by the Antichrist can be converted back to the godly, or, in the game's vernacular, the "Truth-knowing" side. Players are admonished in the game manual that these would-be enemies are still human beings; the Tribulation Force's task, gamers are reminded, is not to eliminate but to "save" them. However, the game's apparent benign fluidity masks a resolute commitment to a hierarchy of value, identity, and community that easily overrides and negates it, replacing the slippery tertiary structure of good guys, bad guys, and "neutrals" with one of rigid, oppositional, enforced, and ultimately violent binaries. The permeability of the Tribulation Forces community is also problematic: while it welcomes expansion through seeking converts, those converts do not hybridize, alter, or enrich the community they enter. Instead, they must enter on terms of their own homogenation: even the clothes of players change upon conversion from signifiers of difference like black leather jackets to homogenized outfits resembling a bland, suburban uniform, what one reviewer called "a Ned Flanders-like sweater ensemble or a sensible skirt and pumps" (Todd).

<23> These identifying binaries are not, of course, unique to Eternal Forces; most video games rely on variations of the "I/Thou" or "Us versus Them" model to provide the basic field of conflict. The "defense motif," as Hourigan calls it, has persisted in games with varying levels of sophistication since 1978's Space Invaders; it features protagonists protecting "existing institutions from traitors, usurpers or invaders" (Hourigan 14). The defense motif, Hourigan argues, is central to the "conservative impulse to preserve" that is often present even in overtly transgressive games (15). Where Eternal Forces differs from Hourigan's definition of conservativism, in which the defense of the "existing" is privileged "at the expense of visions of the new" (16), is that the game, like the Left Behind imaginative universe, is paradoxical in its relation to the "existing." Its purpose is not a preservation of existing modernity but its destruction in favor of a fantasized return to a utopian past of a conservative, Bible-based Christian nation and, simultaneously, a fantasized future projection of the millennium. Modernity, with its materialist logic and pluralistic allowance for competing perspectives, is often considered in evangelical circles as evangelicalism's chief opponent, a state of moral decline and loss of certitude that is an expression of Satan's corrupting influence on the world.

<24> The debate about the importance of the game's evangelical content relative to its play experience echoes the larger debate in game studies about the role of narrative in gaming. Peter Buse, for example, highlights the "story" level of the diegetic world when he describes video games as "narrative machines"; in contrast, Hall argues that, in First Person Shooter games at least, the format of the game excises its narrative content. She notes that "the similar base engines that FPS operate on make skills and understanding highly transferable from one game to the next regardless of what the surface level narratives of the games are designed to deliver." There is little semiotic distinction to be found, then, between attacking "zombies, androids, or killer frogs" (Buse 38; Hall ¶5). Similarly, players and reviewers who respond positively to Eternal Forces see its narrative premise as relatively unimportant, urging players to overlook narrative set-dressing as irrelevant to play experience; they see themselves as robustly impervious to the game's proselytizing strategies. "Boy of Tomorrow," for example, posts that "if the game's good, I can probably bring myself to overlook objectionable story material" (Boy of Tomorrow). A Gameshark.com reviewer notes that gamers who can "look past" the game's "overtones about religion" would have "a pretty good time" (McAllister).

<25> Other reviewers, however, do not separate the game's narrative ground from its field of play. They see something unsettling in the links to "non-fiction material" that appear between each mission or level of play. These include screens offering challenges to Darwinism and Bible-study guides allowing readers to "delve into the biblical truth" behind the Rapture (Allen). The numerous "Learn More" links that punctuate play are intended to address issues outside the game's diegetic world: players intrigued by the game's issues are urged to click on the links to go "beyond the scope of the game" (Manual 69). This deliberate blurring of textual boundaries between game and world complicates Eternal Forces, making it an irresistible locus of study, while making it difficult to address in purely ludic terms.

<26> On the levels of both text and play, Eternal Forces represents a perfect nexus in which three different but mutually supportive narratives of binary opposition and inherent enmity converge. First, the game's central premise plays out the "I/Thou" plot of hostile difference espoused by extreme, reconstructionist evangelism, as embodied in its leaders' claims that "there is an eternal religious war in effect, one without possibility of resolution or reconciliation" (North 20). Ethnographers' interviews suggest that the long-standing war metaphor trickles down from leaders' martial-inflected public discourse to the perceptions of private individuals. Since the culture wars, however, this self-construction has shifted, for extremist groups, from figurative to literal. Militant evangelical groups like BattleCry and Acquire the Fire cultivate an overtly martial identity as Christian soldiers fighting an enemy they see as very literal; as BattleCry leader Ron Luce says, "This is war. And Jesus invites us to get into the action, telling us that the violent—the 'forceful' ones—will lay hold of the kingdom" (Taylor). Extremist dominionist and reconstructionist evangelicals are open in their rhetoric of enmity and seclusion; Christian Reconstructionist Gary North writes that "the long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise. Those who refuse to submit publicly to the eternal sanctions of God by submitting to His Church's public marks of the covenant - baptism and holy communion - must be denied citizenship" (North 87). This fierce exclusivity echoes the vehemence of the Eternal Forces play scenario, in which all character roles are subordinated to an encompassing military structure dedicated to eradicating difference through its conversion or suppression. This structure has increasingly informed the language not just of evangelical leaders but of their followers. One evangelical Christian told ethnographer Lynn Clark that "there are two opposing views, a Christian world view and a secular world view. And one is going to be crowded out. . . They are impinging on us. There is a war going on, and when you're in warfare, you battle to take ground, not just to hold it. They're not just trying to hold ground, they are trying to take ground, which is our right to live in a Christian society" (Clark 36). In this way, the martial metaphor is used to justify both defensive and offensive strategies; as in the Left Behind cosmology, evangelical Christians figure themselves as under attack by forces out to obliterate them, while using military language to further their own recruitment efforts and expansionist policies.

<27> The militaristic framing of the Church's missiological enterprise is not new; Christian groups such as the Salvation Army, with its military rankings of Cadet, Lieutenant, Captain, and General, and the late-nineteenth century Victorious Life Movement, with its battleground lexicon of "victory," "surrender," and the "Morning Watch," are characteristic of a long-held Protestant tradition of understanding the role of God's people as Christian soldiers and the effort to live a Christian life as a battle. Revivalist Billy Sunday (1862 –1935) told stories of military heroes at his popular men-only "rallies" and "campaigns," and evangelist John Roach Straton (1875-1929) told congregations that to win souls, Christians must "wage a new warfare of aggression within the devil's own territory" (qtd in Frank 172). Douglas Frank, building on the work of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, postulates that evangelicals have "consistently rendered their allegiance" to "heroic" religious figures who "define the enemy and then symbolically slay that enemy": "pugnacious leaders like Billy Sunday and Jimmy Swaggart who take on and conquer the enemy, and who in so doing vindicate the power and righteousness of their followers," have historically been the most influential figures in popular evangelicalism (Frank interviewed in Balmer 217-218).

<28> The battle metaphor, like other ways of framing identity, allowed the Christian Right to elaborate "its own classifying distinctions to assert . . . what it stands for and what it opposes" (Kintz and LeSage xii). When evangelicalism seized on the doctrine of Premillennial Dispensationalism as a defining tenet of belief, it intensified the division not only between Christians and non-Christians but between evangelical and other forms of Protestantism. Through it, evangelicals "identified themselves as the only moral people left in the world," believing that "they knew what others, whom they labeled non-Christian, did not - namely, a plan for the ages, as revealed in the recondite passages of Scripture, that identified evangelicals as the righteous remnant" (Balmer 224). The scripture that sustained martial metaphors of opposition, however, overtly emphasized the spiritual nature of both battle and enemy: "For our struggle is not against human opponents," writes Paul the Apostle to the Ephesians, " but against rulers, authorities, cosmic powers . . . and evil spiritual forces" (Ephesians 6:12 International Standard Version). In marked contrast, since the culture wars, conservative evangelical leaders have rhetorically and explicitly conflated spiritual enemy with human enemy, "non-believer" with satanic foe. The Christian Right imported this notion into the realm of the political; in the first national strategy conference of his Christian Coalition in November 1991, Pat Robertson told his followers that in entering the secular political arena they would be arrayed against "satanic forces": "We are not just coming up against human beings to beat them in elections. We're going to be coming up against spiritual warfare" (qtd in Clarkson 127, 128). This spiritual warfare is repeatedly conceived and articulated, however, in the terms of physical warfare; Gary North suggests that, as a politically strategic step, the Christian Right should appear to be open to, and even advocate, religious pluralism, but that once the Right successfully achieved the Reconstructionist ideal of an American state based on a literal reading of the Bible , with a legal system derived solely from the Ten Commandments, "pluralism will be shot to pieces in an ideological (and perhaps even literal) crossfire" (qtd in Clarkson 85, emphasis in original). In his 1989 book Political Polytheism, North predicts that "Christians and Humanists" will entrench their positions in "an escalating religious war" ( 227). For prominent Pentecostal evangelist Dr. Lester Sumrall, many secular politicians are emissaries of Satan; in his 1993 book Demonology and Deliverance: Principalities and Powers, he calls resistance to the devil a "military action" (112). This "military action" finds its digital corollary in Eternal Forces gaming. Eternal Forces publicity echoes this persistent conflation of religious and military conflict, promising players both "spiritual and physical warfare." In the course of game play, scenes that begin as traditional witnessing scenarios, featuring a handful of people in earnest conversation, quickly escalate into scenes of physical conflict, in which rifles replace bibles and hovering helicopters replace prayer. Similarly, as game figures gain power and resources through successful strategy play, their transformation into more potent game figures is a martial one. Players earn their way up military as well as priestly ranks, so that at the highest levels of play, missionaries become militiamen, and game scenarios look little different, with the exception of the glowing halos atop the members of the Tribulation Force fortifying their fight with prayer, from the intense military conflicts found in battleground games.

<30> In Eternal Forces, this overtly military framing is echoed in a game-play experience in which all character roles are part of an encompassing military structure, so that both missionary and military enterprises share the goal of erasing difference. The Rapture itself, both as the game's founding event and more broadly as a "social text" (Frykholm 11), reinforces this antagonistic binarism by offering its own rhetoric of distinction and division. The Rapture projects a final confirmation of conservative evangelical beliefs about salvation. Rapture eschatology offers a potent rhetoric of inclusion and exclusion, and the moment of Rapture, within this eschatology, precisely resolves all the uncertainty and doubt of a "disorienting" and complex social arena by unambiguously clarifying questions about identity through its unanswerable division of saved from unsaved (Frykholm 19). It is no accident that Eternal Forces begins with the Rapture; since the Rapture's occurrence confirms all the assumptions of Premillennial Dispensationalism, the entire game is played out on a landscape of certitude and justification. The Rapture moment as the starting point in all the Left Behind cultural productions, then, confirms evangelical assumptions about the illegitimacy and dangerousness of difference, justifying the game's soteriological violence in the cause of eliminating a fatal pluralism. Throughout history, apocalyptic stories have relied upon the distinction between "a righteous microcosm and an evil macrocosm" as "crucial to the formation of the apocalypse" (Frykholm 14); apocalyptic movements create "an insular social world" of the like-minded united in their opposition to a macrocosm "perceived as evil, decaying, and doomed" (Barkun).

<31> The deepest narrative of binary opposition that informs Eternal Forces is implicit in the experience of game play itself, which depends on clear distinctions of identity, distinctions locked into patterns of innate and inherent antagonism. Ed Halter suggests that often, in gaming, ideology need not be overt to be operating. Even in what feels like "free play," he maintains, in which the player seems to experience a heightened activity and autonomy by "moving through corridors, exploring buildings, and destroying enemies," the player's actions are more precisely reactions: "in a larger sense, the player is being trained according to a larger narrative already determined by the game's programming. It feels like free play, but the story cannot change...your character's self-actualization is contingent on your ability to obey the directives of the game, and in a larger sense, to complete the program's circuit, to satisfy its algorithm" (161). In Eternal Forces, the "story [that] cannot change" is the story of the essential binary opposition that dictates identity and allegiance, the threat of incursion, and the Christian Warrior's duty to nullify that threat. The algorithms of play and the content of the game's narrative are so coherent as to be mutually supportive: the plot of Christian expansionism literally plays itself out upon the game's platform, just as the game's digitalized binaries reinforce the divided world of the Armageddon plot.

<32> Part of Eternal Force's effectiveness as a proselytic device, therefore, is its perfect collaboration between genre, platform, and eschatological mis-en-scène, which together comprise a mutually reinforcing narrative of oppositional identities and inimical difference. Just as computer games rest upon a byte-driven logic of mutually exclusive ones and zeros, an either/or programming that informs the digital protocol, so the Left Behind plot echoes and reinforces the larger, binary plot of evangelical prophecy, with its story of the redemption of the saved and the annihilation of the unsaved as expressed through mutually exclusive categories of damnation and redemption.

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