Yesterday, John Walker, Private Eye’s blogger-de-jour, sends over a link to a Youtube video with the comment: “The Christian videogame we’ve all been waiting for”.

It’s an eight minute montage of jaw-dropping footage from a game called ‘Zoo Race’ from independent ‘Christian’ developer Cougar Interactive.

At its heart the game is a straightforward animal racing game that, rickety visuals aside, reminds me a bit of recent Xbox 360 title, Viva Piñata Party Animals. What marks the indie title out though is the bonkers premise which imagines this race is what happened when Noah gathered the animals together, two by two before the flood… or something.

In an excruciating introductory cut scene we see a librarian who doubts God’s ability to do the impossible get turned into a racehorse; we watch farm animals sprint through fields and streams while wearing bowler hats and we marvel at a minigame where all of the animals dance at a disco lit by a fountain of neon colour emanating, apparently, from the Ark of the Covenant itself.

Oh, and God (and we know it’s God because he speaks veeery slooowly because he’s soooo biiiiig) commentates on the race, interspersing his progress reports with scriptural quotations.

Throughout the day the video spread like wildfire across the internet, attracting derision and incredulity from the gaming community. The ridicule is, of course, well-deserved. The game is technically a mess with disastrous 3D modelling, patchwork animation, drab colouring, unforgivable texture pop-in and ruinous voice acting. This is not a kid sitting at home learning how to code but rather a bona fide, commercial project and as such it deserves all of the pitying criticism it’s received.

Zoo Race would have hung unnoticed from the coattails of subculture, dismissed as the output of a rank, disturbed or misguided amateur, unworthy of comment were it not for the fact that it’s being marketed by Cougar as a ‘Christian’ game.

The word Christian is, in the strict sense, a noun. It literally means somebody who follows the teachings of Jesus Christ. People get themselves in all manner of trouble when they turn the noun into an adjective to describe their work, community, bookshop, painting, tee-shirt, videogame or song. A book or song cannot ‘follow Christ’. As an adjective the word is mostly vacuous other than targeting a product specifically at Christian people, in essence, a term of marketing.

Problematically people ascribe deeper, ideological significance to an object when it is prefixed by the adjective ‘Christian’. They might quite reasonably expect that, for example, a Christian book promotes the teachings, moral stance or ethical position of Christ. However, in many of cases this is simply not true or, at least, the book promotes only a very narrow reading of those teachings. A ‘Christian Book’ is instead a book that is being marketed to a particular demographic. ‘Christian’ as an adjective is a label of marketing dressed up as a label of message, identity or instruction.

The problem is exacerbated when the Christian adjective is ascribed to more abstract, aesthetic and non-instructional things such as music, art or videogames. Rob Bell in his excellent book Velvet Elvis explains it like so:

‘Something can be labeled “Christian” and not be true or good. . . It is possible for music to be labeled Christian and be terrible music. It could lack creativity and inspiration. The lyrics could be recycled clichés. That “Christian” band could actually be giving Jesus a bad name because they aren’t a great band. It is possible for a movie to be a “Christian” movie and to be a terrible movie. It may actually desecrate the art form in its quality and storytelling and craft. Just because it is a Christian book by a Christian author and it was purchased in a Christian bookstore doesn’t mean it is all true or good or beautiful. A Christian political group puts me in an awkward position: What if I disagree with them? Am I less of a Christian? What if I’m convinced the “Christian” thing to do is to vote the exact opposite?

Christian is a great noun and a poor adjective.’

This problem is not peculiar to Christianity. ‘Gay’ is a noun in the strict sense signifying a homosexual person. However, it’s increasingly used as an adjective in order to sell product to that specific niche, again a kind of marketing malapropism. So we have gay bars, gay car insurance companies and gay holidays etc . Some Christians, like some gays, for all of their insistence they be accepted and integrated in seamlessly into society, still want to feel distinct and part of a subculture. And there’s always money to be made in providing content that explicitly appeals to that subculture with a simple and mostly meaningless marketing label.

When religions engage in this kind of spin it always feels a little insidious. Indeed, the following text, used at the end of the Zoo Race shareware demo, demonstrates just this:

“Buy the fun game that the big name publishers refused to finance or even show you. Why wait? You can do it, because you are a fun loving creation of god.”

Post Passion of the Christ, big name publishers are only too happy to publish and promote ‘Christian’-targeted content if there enough money to be made. In the case of Zoo Race big name publishers refuse to finance it not on ideological grounds but simply because it’s awful. As Kieron Gillen points out over at RPS: ‘Fucking big name publishers. We hate those guys too. Clearly, it couldn’t have anything to do with the glitchy animation, complete lack of physics, my-first-quake-level geometry and the fact the whole thing is completely batshit insane.’

Indeed, anybody who knows anything about videogames or aesthetics can see how bad it is and so the game is being sold on the strength of its label rather than it’s inherent worth. This practice happens all the time in PR and marketing, but it feels especially wrong when practiced by Christians, people who should surely aspire to not lie or sell things under false pretense.

Christians should not be demanding videogames prefixed with a faith label, as if that cheap and easy classification provides some kind of invisible moral safety net for their and their children’s media consumption. Rather, believers should simply be demanding good and beautiful games that delight in creativity, make people happy, present or explore the world in interesting ways and maybe, just maybe enable someone to catch a glimpse of their God, from whom all good things are claimed to flow.