Premier Childrens Work magazine this month had an interesting article on a new game launched by Scripture Union. It's called Guardians Of Ancora and is aimed at 8-11 yr olds, I thought it looked pretty cool but being in the wrong demographic I encouraged my 11 yr old daughter to download it onto her tablet and let me know what she thought.
Although we are a church going family and she attends Sunday School, she is not, how can I put this, a keen Biblical scholar. There was an embarrassing episode a while back in church where she volunteered to go to the front and take part in a quiz, it became awkward when the quiz master started to get the congregation to shout up the answers to her while I slowly sunk down in my chair amazed at just how little she was able to to answer! It was all taken in good humour though and a few heckles were thrown about how the Sunday School teachers were obviously not doing their job.
But there the point was perhaps made that if church going kids aren't taking in Bible stories, how on earth do we expect non-churched kids to have a clue who David was and why his story is important today?
And this is where Scripture Union did their research and hit upon designing a game that can be downloaded for free onto a tablet, to engage children from all walks of life and bring the Bible alive, whether they're church attendees or not, and Guardians of Ancora was the result.
I had actually forgotten I'd suggested it to my daughter and I honestly thought she'd be put off by it being Bible based, but after about a week she came up to me and said "that game you told me to download, it's actually pretty good!" She even told me that she didn't know the story of Jesus filling Andrew and Peter's nets with fish and now she did!
I mean, come on! Eleven years of Sunday School and they haven't covered that story?! Nearer to the truth it's probable they've told that story dozens of times but she just hadn't taken it in, we certainly are living in an era where children engage with the world differently, we are the immigrants and they are the natives of this digital age!
The game is in its infancy so could do with a few glitches tweaking, occasionally your character can get 'stuck' in the graphics and you have to exit and start again, and I personally found it almost impossible to get the timing of the characters jumps right, meaning it got very frustrating and repetitive, the advantage being you don't lose lives, so the jumps could be attempted until you crossed the gap or threw the tablet in frustration, whichever came soonest; but as my daughter pointed out, I struggled to play it because I'm not 11!
Having said that, the graphics are great, the story's easy to follow and there are lots of extras like quizzes, missions, audio stories and places for you to make your own notes and drawings which can be shared with other players or kept private.
Also at the moment there are only 2 playable quests, which she has now completed, hopefully the others will be unlocked soon or the game may lose momentum for its early players.
I think my daughter is looking forward to the next quest. (And I must admit, I am a little bit too!)
I have opened up the broken laptop in order to post, having not done so in a few months I really wanted to be able to give my thoughts on the much anticipated tv series to come over from America. The Bible.
So while my laptop dies and whirs away in the background, so for me did the tv drama.
I am not reviewing the sponsorship, but what on earth were they thinking? Do Christians not already have a hard enough time showing others that actually they can be intelligent people, who are able to run a perfectly normal life and yes, believe in an almighty God in Heaven, a man in the sky if you will, without then having to sit through dozens of ad breaks while some patronising puppet asks kids 'what's in the Bible?'......Honestly atheists, this isn't a made up kids story we believe in.
I was hoping this drama would be one that would be very watchable for Christians and non Christians alike; apparently in the US it went down a storm with many people becoming Christians after watching it, Pastor Rick Warren of Saddleback church in South California did 3000 baptisms as a result of the show!
The opening scene with Noah telling his children the story of creation as the Ark rocked to and fro was a good idea, after all how are they going to fit the Bible into 10 hours? But almost immediately it felt like a students short film as Noah narrated and clips of wilderbeast and birds and whales appeared as if cut and pasted into the production from a David Attenborough documentary.
We then move swiftly on to Abraham, and it's at this point I start to feel disappointed in the programme, while at the same time enjoying it?! I love the stories and was keen to see how they would be translated to television in 2013, trouble is it felt very 70's to me, the characters were lacking, well, character! It was around this point about 15 minutes in that I thought, if I wasn't a Christian there's no way I would still be watching this, it became boring and slow, not unlike some sermons I have sat through, where you cringe thinking I hope if there's a visitor to church today they understand it's not always like this.
Skipping straight past Joseph? (According to some tweeters he was busy doing a song and dance somewhere) We move to Moses in Egypt and I really start to feel I've seen it all before, which I guess if you're making a show of a film that's been made more than once, from the best selling book of all time that you don't want to deviate from, you will have seen it all before! So what was I expecting? How do you produce a modern tv show of the Bible while keeping true to it's word?
I don't know, but the BBC do - they got it spot on only a few years back with both The Passion and The Nativity.
Will I be tuning in next week? Absolutely! I just may not watch it on Saturday night prime time viewing! Maybe Monday morning when I'm doing the ironing!
Did you watch it? Are you Christian or not? As always the book's better than the film!
COMING SOON
