You may have seen our booth or attended a worship service at Gen Con. You may have come across our Facebook page or seen something from us on Twitter. You may have encountered one of us talking about the Guild at Fans for Christ or heard us mentioned by the Geek Preacher. Maybe you were curious about us or wanted to connect, so you looked up our old web page.
I am dreadfully sorry.
I’m sure you thought we were just a dying remnant of a community with no outlook for the future. Based on the appearance of that page, you could certainly be forgiven for thinking so! But a new day has dawned, and God willing, this new page will help us to expand the scope of the Guild’s activities. Already the response to the redesign has exceeded my expectations, which tells me that you have been eager to see us do more than we have been.
So let’s start by talking about what the Christian Gamers Guild (CGG) is all about. We began as a gaming advocacy group to defend the hobby from attacks by uninformed Christians eager to blame Dungeons & Dragons for a variety of horrors. Even if you didn’t live through the “Satanic Panic,” you have probably at least heard of the Chick tract “Dark Dungeons” and maybe experienced a little of the mistrust that some Christians have for fantasy fiction. These days, attacks on role-playing and fantasy fiction are fortunately much less common, so we have shifted most of our focus to ministering to gamers, who remain a subculture ignored by the majority of the church. Our history means that most of us define “gaming” as tabletop role-playing, but by no means do we close the door on other games. Many of us also enjoy board games and video games. I myself am currently spending my evenings with Fallout 4’s new survival mode (Level 20 and still terrified every time I leave camp!)
The joint booth for CGG, Fans for Christ, and Gamechurch at Gen Con 2013.
We usually run a booth at Gen Con and organize Sunday worship services there and at Origins. When we can, we partner with other Christian geek communities such as Fans for Christ and Gamechurch to ease the financial burden and extend our reach.
Faith and Gaming Expanded Edition is available in print.
In addition to convention outreach, we also offer publications to aid Christian gamers in ministering among their own gaming communities. You will surely have already seen that the first article in this new format is a republication of Chaplain M.J. Young’s Faith and Gaming series. Although Faith and Gaming continues to be available both on our old website and in print, it is my hope that by reposting it in this blog format we can attract new readers and discussion. That column will post every Tuesday until the entire series has been reissued. Thursdays will be more eclectic. You can expect additional reposts of important articles of the past, game reviews, introductions to other Christian geek communities and personalities, play reports, and hopefully many other kinds of article.
But only a small part of our activity happens here on the web page. Our primary discussion vehicle is an email distribution list hosted by Yahoo! Groups. Joining the Guild is as simple as sending an email to Christian_Gamers_Guild-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.
Or you can join at the Yahoo! Groups portal. If you don’t want to receive conversations in your email box, you can turn off email delivery at the portal and just read there. Rumors of a magical button that would subscribe you to the list from this post were greatly exaggerated. You’ll have to do the hard work of clicking that mailto: link up there, instead. Sorry about the confusion.
One last note on the topic of comment moderation: Comments on all articles on this site will be moderated (hopefully lightly) for appropriateness and civility. For details about our moderation policies, please consult the Guild’s Code of Conduct. In broad strokes: Be respectful and don’t spam.
Once again; welcome to the Christian Gamers Guild!