Losing (or Winning) My Religion

When I first heard about the game Mass Effect, I wondered if it had to do with church. What can I say, I was raised Catholic.

But after learning that Mass Effect isn’t about that kind of Mass, I realized that there’s a yawning gap in the videogame market. There are fighting games, sports games, mystery games, music games, cooking games, and games that don’t seem to have any point at all (cough-Animal Crossing-cough). Gaming allows you to be almost anyone or anything. Yet there are no games that simulate the experience of being a spiritual leader.

So here’s our idea, and any enterprising game developer out there can have it for free. Create a game where you get to be a religioust leader: a priest, or a rabbi, or an imam, or a yogi, or the fanatic guru of your own start-up cult. You start with a tiny congregation in some hole-in-the-wall place of worship. You craft a doctrine, fashion your own set of sacraments, and choose your tactics for evangelizing the masses and whipping your congregation into a frenzy of holy zeal. As the game progresses, you will build your flock until you reach international prominence in your chosen faith, whether it’s a TV megachurch, the Vatican, a national religion, or a separatist community holed up in a compound in Texas.

Read more after the jump!

Long-term strategy would coincide with day-to-day activities: leading meditation, collecting offerings, speaking out against societal ills, chastising wayward parishioners, or building a loyal body of elders. We're thinking this would work best on the Wii, where you could use your Wii-mote for tasks like sprinkling holy water or performing a bris.

As for the name of this game? Wii-ligion, of course.

Sounds pretty good, eh? Now that we think about it, you can have the idea in exchange for some back-end royalties.

So what do you think? Is Wii-ligion the next blockbuster in gaming?