Back

Adventists Look to Gaming in New Digital Missions Strategy

Heroes game adventist

If you want your ministry to stay relevant, you must constantly evolve and innovate to keep up with the times. While God’s Word is timeless, Gospel presentations are not. You know this; that’s why you’re Indigitous. Still, I was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled upon an article about how the Seventh-Day Adventist Church is looking to gaming for their ministries.

An article on the Adventist News Network highlights a fascinating gamification discussion that took place on the last day of February’s Global Adventist Internet Network (GAiN) conference. The online conference had almost 4,000 attendees from 100 countries and during the last day of the conference, the main topic was gaming and how to evangelize in a way that is fun and interesting for today’s youth.

DP Harris, the President for Information Systems at Loma Linda University, said that because “games are now at the forefront of reaching people all over the world,” it is imperative that the church use games to share the Gospel.

One must be careful when doing this, though. As you may recall from our interview with Bret Staudt Willet, InterVarsity’s Virtual Campus Ministry Director, “games do not equal gamification.” Harris agrees. “’Gaming’ is when it’s designed to be fun and I try to sneak in teaching,” he says. “’Gamification’ is when it’s designed to teach and I try to make it fun.’”

The caveat

And therein lies the challenge. Make a game that is obviously designed for evangelism and it’s unlikely that anyone will enjoy playing it, particularly the nonbelievers who you are trying to reach. It reminds me of a game that we played in math class in middle school called “How the West Was One + Three x Four.” Clever title aside, it was a game that tried to teach us math by putting the equations and word problems in a Western setting. It didn’t work. As students, we only liked playing the game because it was slightly more fun than what we normally did during math class. If given a choice between playing the game or, say, staring at the ceiling doing nothing, I would have rather spent my time staring at the ceiling. The game felt like learning, not like a game, so it was ineffective. Similarly, as this article points out, at one point another company bought the videogame “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego” and made it more overtly educational. As a result, kids hated the game and it flopped.

Whoa there! Are you trying to teach me?
Whoa there! Are you trying to teach me?

The lesson from this is that any games that are designed for evangelism needs to be fun, because playing a game simply for the sake of learning isn’t something most people want to do. Using the “Carmen Sandiego” example, children learned a lot more when playing a fun game that happened to include a lot of geography than they did when it was modified into a game intended to teach geography.

In the conference, they also talked about the innovative trivia game “Heroes.” The game, which is available as an iPhone or Android app, presents Bible trivia in a comic book style. The goal: Make reading the Bible fun. From the board game Trivial Pursuit to trivia night at bars to the aptly named Trivia Crack app, it’s clear that trivia is considered a fun means of learning, primarily because it doesn’t seem like learning. Combine that with comic books, which due to Marvel’s popular movies and a whole slew of TV shows are more popular and mainstream than ever, and you have a potential winner. So how can your ministry use this gaming principles to share the Gospel more effectively?