Rod Humble's Cults & Daggers Inspires Deep Thoughts on Religious Belief

The Game That Let Me Mourn My Lost Faith is a good long weekend read by Nathan Grayson on Kotaku that as it happens, is how Rod Humble's new Cults & Daggers game inspired Grayson to think long and mournfully about losing his faith. This reflects something Rod told me about the game when it launched: "This is a game about the religions that did not make it and the people who devoutly believed in them. It takes a view point that individuals make a difference in the trajectory of a belief. My hope is that people of faith and non believers will both enjoy it, there is nothing in here which is likely to offend anyone, but some I hope to provoke thought."

For Grayson, thought is often provoked by the game's very user interface:

Religious experiences are, in some ways, as personal as they are universal. The underlying systems [in Cults & Daggers] might function similarly—might even lead to similarly dire ends if misused or mismanaged—but the rest is as much behind your eyes as it is in front of them. Viewed in that light, Cults and Daggers' minimal window dressing functions as a strength. Players can layer their own experiences, their own values, on top of the no-frills menus and numbers. They can think more about the religions they practice or preach. Or the ones they used to.

Grayson mentions the religious aspects of Black & White, the classic PC game lead developed by Peter Molyneux, and as it happens, I once wrote how that game provoked thoughts about religion in its own way:

In Lionhead Studios’ Black & White, the player takes on the role of a god, who must care for the needs of his worshipful tribe. But as the game goes on, these needs expand, forcing the player to micromanage his or her everyday wants ever more attentively. According to Richard Evans, the game’s artificial intelligence programmer — who based much of it on concepts he learned while he was a philosophy student at Cambridge — this was entirely intended by Peter Molyneux, the game’s lead designer. “Peter wanted the villagers to be increasingly reliant,” Evans once told me, “so that the more you helped them, the less self-sufficient they are, so that you are drawn into a spiral of dependency. He was trying to make a point about human nature.”

Evans, you may recall, joined Linden Lab when Rod Humble was the CEO there -- a nice coincidence, or if you're religious, maybe good karma.

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Comments

[Will]

He ran Second Life into the ground while alienated the entire population then just left & never came back even as a resident..many still waiting for the promised return of last names.

Hard to see this game as nothing more then so little innovative that it needs to burrow a derivative name from Cloak and Daggers series.

[iisingh]

Put a fork in her SL is done.

[irihapeti]

@Will

the thing most asked of him by SL users was that the viewer be fixed. He re-organised how SL development was done and put it on a professional basis. Like devs had to work to a schedule prioritised by the dev team managers. Instead of like under the previous regimes where employees could pick and choose whatever they wanted to do dev wise

so for that I am grateful and happy. Me and pretty much everybody else who plays on SL