Curated by It’s That Part™ — Originally published by Faith and Proverbs on .
Bible-inspired computer games aren’t a new concept. The Christian gaming genre has been around for a long time. But arguably, no game has matched the artistry and narrative brilliance of The Serpent and the Seed, a new mobile game free to download in Apple’s App Store or on Google Play.
The game is the brainchild of London-based developer Andy Geers, who attends Euston Church (an offshoot of Dick Lucas’s St. Helen’s Bishopsgate). I’ve spent time exploring the game, which includes gorgeous animation and original music by Poor Bishop Hooper. If you’re looking for an edifying, theologically solid new game for your kids (or yourself), this is a solid option.
A lot of content you might consume on your phone will poison your soul or at least provide “empty calories” of wasted time. But nourishing, soul-enriching mobile content exists. The Serpent and the Seed is a prime example.
Geers recognizes the dangers of technology—but also the redemptive possibilities.
The son of a mechanical engineer, Geers grew up in a Christian home where “there were always computers and there was always Jesus.” After studying computer science at Cambridge, he worked as a software developer for a number of companies before becoming the IT manager for The Proclamation Trust. During this season, Geers also enrolled in the Cornhill Training Course for vocational ministry. He read Tim Challies’s The Next Story and caught a vision for innovation at the intersection of faith and technology.
Geers found success earlier than anticipated when, in 2011, he developed and launched a popular app called PrayerMate. Inspired after reading Don Carson’s A Call to Spiritual Reformation, Geers wanted to create an app to help bring organization and consistency to his prayer life. With notable plugs from the likes of Paul Tripp and Tim Challies (who said the app “revitalized [his] prayer life”) PrayerMate quickly became a hit, reaching more than 100,000 downloads in the first year. Geers formed partnerships with Christian charities whose prayer requests users could subscribe to in the app. Churches started using the app to share prayer requests for their congregations. It kept growing. Soon, PrayerMate was Geers’s full-time job.
It’s a great option if you’re looking for an edifying, theologically solid new game for your kids.
PrayerMate’s success inspired Geers to form a charitable organization in 2018, Discipleship Tech, as the “home” for PrayerMate and future apps that would help people grow in their faith. The next app Geers developed was called Redeeming Time, and it helps users turn their spare moments into opportunities to read Scripture instead of aimlessly scrolling or swiping on their phones.
The Serpent and the Seed has been Geers’s most ambitious project yet. In full-time development for the last four years, the mobile adventure game—which takes users on a journey through Scripture’s overarching narrative—just released as a free app this spring.
I met up with Geers last year when I was in London. We talked about his heart for the game, the challenges and opportunities of video games as a discipleship tool, and his hopes for the broader world of Christians in the video game app space. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.
Tell me your quick pitch for the game as if I’m skeptical of the idea of a Christian video game.
It’s an adventure game exploring one of the oldest stories in the world, which is the story of the Bible. Even if you’re not a Christian, this story has really shaped our world and our culture. It’s the most exciting story in the world. It’s a story of hope for a world crying out for it.
The first part of the game takes place in the paradise of Eden, which you can explore (even naming animals alongside Adam!). But then you witness the fall and the exile from Eden. Where does the game take you from there?
We want to really engage people’s emotions, so you actually feel how heart-wrenching it is to have experienced the beauty and the wonder of the garden of Eden, that it actually feels tragic being wrenched out of that. But it ends with that promise of the seed: that the seed of Eve will one day crush the head of the Serpent. The rest of the game is tracing that promise through the rest of the Bible. Who’s the seed going to be?
Chapter 2 is like the whole rest of the Old Testament, looking at different characters like Abraham or Moses or David, who each come with their own seed promises. And then in chapter 3, we start to see how the seed promises come together in Jesus. Then finally in chapter 4, we see fulfillment in the new creation: back to the garden city and the tree of life.
You’ve described the game as fitting within the ‘cozy games’ genre. What is this, and what are a few examples of other cozy games?
Cozy games are chill and relaxing. They are different from the intense violence and warfare of popular games like Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto. One example is a game called Stardew Valley. It’s a farming game where you’re sick of the rat race, so you move to the countryside where you’ve inherited your granddad’s farm. You get a packet of seeds, and you have to clear the grounds of rocks and weeds and stuff, and you plant the seeds.
Another game in the genre, made by some Christians who I met at a Christian game developers conference, is called Bug and Seek. It’s about as cozy as they come. You’re catching bugs, basically.
So are cozy games a recent trend? Does it dovetail with Gen Z’s struggles with anxiety and desire for low-key vibes and chill experiences?
I think so. I don’t think it’s necessarily a completely new concept for games. But certainly the terminology is quite recent.
Video games are a form of technology that, I think, for fairly good reason, many Christians view with suspicion. How do you answer skeptics who think video games don’t do much more than condition kids to be zoned-out screen addicts?
First, there’s just a massive spectrum of video games. Some of them do pour huge amounts of money into making them as addictive as possible. I’ve known people whose job it was to increase the minutes of engagement per player by moving buttons around to make the gameplay more addictive. I don’t deny that it’s a real thing.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are people creating games with the goal of giving users a profoundly meaningful experience. I’ve always preferred story-driven games. One of the reasons I like them is that when you reach the end of a story, there’s like a natural break point where the game is kind of done and you can walk away.
When you’re making Bible-based video games as a Christian, what do you see as the unique storytelling opportunities? What are the potential hazards?
The wonderful opportunity of video games, and the real challenge, is the element of choice and freedom. Something that always excited me about the prospect of a Bible adventure game was that you can take a player who’s not necessarily used to reading the Bible, and they can explore at their own pace. If they don’t understand something, they can go talk to the characters and say, “Tell me what this is about.” I suppose it’s the difference between a sermon and a Bible study. In a Bible study, you can go at your own pace and explore one specific detail no one else is interested in. You can meander.
But it’s also the challenge, because how do you maintain some editorial control over where the story goes? Some people love games full of branching narratives, where every action you take changes the outcome. But I actually prefer a curated story where it just always pans out the same way, more or less. That’s the sort of game I tried to make.
Whom do you see as the audience for this game? Is it primarily for kids?
Well, not just kids. Ultimately, I’m trying to make the kind of game I would enjoy playing or anyone would enjoy playing. In the playtesting, 11-to-14-year-olds particularly seem to have enjoyed it, which I’m thrilled to see. But we’ve also had plenty of adults playing it and enjoying it too. The songs by Poor Bishop Hooper are something else, and there’s a lot of really profound truth in there.
Were there any artistic influences outside of video games that inspired you in creating Serpent?
I love Kevin DeYoung’s The Biggest Story. It’s so captivating, and the artwork [by Don Clark] is fantastic. It just feels like a real work of art. But there’s also a sense of an overarching narrative progression through the book. The structure and aesthetic of our game probably owes a lot to that.
Would you like to see more Christians in the video game development world?
I think there’s a real opportunity for Christians in the video game space to let their worldview shape what they create. We could do with many more games made by people with Christian values, even if they have nothing to do with the Bible. But it’s hard, you know. There are a lot of cultural pressures on believers in these industries that do make it quite hard if you want to stand out from the crowd on certain moral issues. But we don’t just want to completely abandon those worlds. I think it’s good to have Christians in positions of influence in every sphere.
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Originally sourced via trusted media partner. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/serpent-seed-video-game/
