A new Christian online gaming platform aims to provide uplifting programming in a sea of secular — and sometimes violent — games.
TruPlay offers “hours of engaging Christian games, digital comics and animated shorts,” CEO Brent Dusing said. Players are encouraged to discover biblical truths, sometimes along with the in-game characters who go on adventures.
The idea, he said, is to connect with people (especially children) where they live, learn — and play.
“There has been this sea-change generationally in America — and really throughout the world — of people playing games as a common part of entertainment and cultural understanding,” Mr. Dusing said. “The challenge is there’s a lot of neutral content, there’s a lot of awful content, terrible content. There’s almost nothing that delivers God’s truth or hope or joy or Jesus Christ to children at all in the gaming space until we just launched.”
Based in Austin, Texas, TruPlay is a subscription-based service that bills $12.99 monthly or $119.99 yearly. The games are available on iOS and Android platforms.
In several games, youngsters participate in a “RhymVerse,” an alternative universe in which gamers use “biblical themes such as prayer, faith, truth, and God’s miracles” to advance and combat evil.
One RhymVerse game, “Maple and the Forest of Words,” is a side-scroller — one in which a side-view camera angle follows the player. Characters journey through a forest, caves and mines on a “rescue mission” and discover a plot by an evil queen who has corrupted the meaning of truth.
Another — “Oliver and the Vindictive Vines” — is an endless runner game in which the main character dodges dangers and seeks answers about himself and his family. Oliver “learns what it means to be adopted into God’s family,” Mr. Dusing said.
Some games “are explicitly based on Bible stories,” he said. In “Stained Glass,” users complete a jigsaw puzzle of a stained glass window, which then “comes to life and a character from the Bible tells you their story from a first-person viewpoint,” he said.
Mr. Dusing, a video game industry veteran, noted that older folks relied on books or comics, then movies and TV shows as a cultural framework, adding that young people today have turned to video games and online services. He said children and young adults can’t help but be affected when they spend as much as 52½ hours a week in front of screens.
He says the stakes are high for what children see online and how it affects them.
“Anxiety, suicide and depression rates are at all-time highs for children. That statistic was true, by the way, before COVID. It exactly mirrors the rise of social media on smartphones,” he said. “If you take in a lot of negative hyper-violent, you know, overtly sexual content, your mind, and your life starts to go down that road as well.”
Mr. Dusing’s previous venture, Lightside Games, was the first to introduce a video game featuring Jesus in 2012. That game and other titles reached “over 7 million people on Facebook,” he said, “with a third of our audience that played were not Christians. We had 25,000 people come to Christ through a relationship with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.”
• Mark A. Kellner can be reached at mkellner@washingtontimes.com.