An Analogy: The Progression of Gaming According to Michael

by Michael Harnest

**Author's Note: This is a mere analogy; the commentary on a profound coincidence in events in two very separate cases. In no way am I suggesting that the video games discussed are equal in greatness to the things/persons they come to represent in the quasi-parallel Christian/Jewish tale.

In the beginning there was the Word, literally. Text-based adventures, a la Zork, infiltrated the schedules of many a person, establishing the earliest foundations in what would become one of the largest entertainment industries in the world. Enough about that.

There were three great prophets: Jeremiah, Elijah, and Isaiah. They were honoured for their faith and their splendour. They defined many things, sharpening the edges of a religion and holding it together, aiding it, through an unspeakable history. There were others, but to these three, history had been most kind. Perhaps their greatest difference was their offering of a promise; a Messiah. The foundations had been laid, the lifestyle had been rooted; The faith had been maintained, and the promise of something greater had shed light on the horizon. And so the Messiah came.

The Messiah was a mixed success. To most of the earlier believers in the religion, the ones so diligently loyal to the teachings of Jeremiah, Elijah, and Chrono Trig– err, Isaiah –, the Messiah had not come to their liking. He had not been what they had thought he would be. They openly persecuted him, damning his teachings as blasphemy as they were in direct opposition to laws suggested by those before him. His thought was deemed too rash, too untamed, too non-traditional. And so the Messiah was slaughtered like a lamb, for all to see.

But there were others; Some who had faith in the old religion and regarded the Messiah as the Messiah prophesied by Square's earlier works. And still yet, an unexpected twist: Gentiles, ones who had no regard for the earlier religion, no thought of the prophesies, the promise, were still compelled by the grand vision of the Messiah. These people had crossed an un-crossable border: They refuted their own earlier teachings, their own founded religions, their strive for popularity and earlier beliefs in the system, and took the leap into role-playing games. It was this mass, teamed with the believers of old, that gave rise to the greatest religious revolution of the role-playing genre.

And so there is a split. Jews do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah promised by the prophets; Christians believe this an error and herald Him as the greatest man to have ever lived.