Here’s a moral puzzle for you. Do you believe it is acceptable to use religious figures as characters in video games?
It’s a question that has come up in the past week, one that raises many difficult issues about freedom-of-expression, the responsibility of avoiding giving offense and the diverse nature of faith.
Smite is an online multiplayer combat game from Georgia-based Hi-Rez Studios, best known for shooting-MMO Global Agenda and Tribes: Ascend. Players take on the role of various characters from historic-mythical pantheons such as the ancient Greek, Norse and, more controversially, Hindu traditions. The Hindu deity, Kali, is a playable character, prominent in the game’s pre-release promotions.
Very few people today worship Thor or Aphrodite. But there are one billion Hindus around the world, with an estimated 1.5 million in the United States, according to a2004 State Department report. And many of them care deeply about their revered deities.
Nevada-based Rajan Zed describes himself as a “Hindu leader” and is head of an organization called the Universal Society of Hinduism. He has slammed Smite, saying, “[Hi-Rez] should be more understanding of the hurt feelings of Hindus worldwide over the mishandling of their revered deities like Kali. [The] purpose of online games is to entertain and not to offend a large chunk of world population.” He called for Kali and other Hindu deities to be removed from the game.
Zed today released a new statement including supporting opinions from a Jewish and a Buddhist associate. Rabbi ElizaBeth W. Beyer, described as a “prominent Jewish leader in Western USA” said, “We join the Hindus in requesting the company developing this online video game to avoid trivializing the deeply held beliefs of Hindus by changing the product accordingly”.
In the past, Zed has condemned various entertainment outlets for disrespecting Hindu figures, and has counted on the support of Beyer. In 2011, for example, he criticized a SNL skit featuring Jim Carrey that, he said, mocked the deity Lord Ganesh.
Earlier this year he took aim at the game Asura’s Wrath saying its use of Hindu imagery was guilty of “trivializing and re-imagining of highly revered symbols and concepts of Hinduism”.
Zed declined to be interviewed directly by IGN, instead supplying us with various emailed statements. I spoke to Hi-Rez’s co-founder and COO Todd Harris and to Amit Kumar, a blogger of Hindu culture.
Harris claims that Zed’s opinion is not shared by many Hindus, arguing that Hinduism is “embracing and tolerant” and that Hindu’s ancient stories have often been used for entertainment purposes. , “He [Zed] is certainly entitled to outrage if he personally feels that. To my knowledge there's no word or concept for ‘blasphemy’ in Hinduism, because at least in my understanding of it, all deities are considered to be a manifestation of the essence within Hinduism.”
He adds “These particular deities are seen in pop culture, not just in the west, but within India as well, as icons, in comics, depicting the battles between these gods. Smite is basically a game about battling deities, and so we're looking for inspiration from an authentic tradition that has rich stories about deities battling.”
There is one obvious question here, which is that while the game features Hindu deities, it features no religious iconography or reference to other great religions such as Judaism, Christianity or Islam.
I ask Harris if he simply wouldn’t dare to address these religions, because the reaction from large numbers of followers of those traditions would be extremely negative and possibly even dangerous to the safety of the game's makers.
Choosing his words carefully, he acknowledges that, yes, “the reaction would be much more predictable. And again, from a group of believers that believes perhaps, in one truth, versus a faith that is known for its plurality of ways to get to truth.”
Harris argues that the mythology associated with those religions do not include deities battling with one another and would not be appropriate from a story-telling point-of-view.
Here is an excerpt from a Hindu text, the Devi Mahatmya, that gives some flavor of Hindu story-telling traditions. Kali “decorated with a garland of skulls, clad in a tiger's skin, very appalling owing to her emaciated flesh, with gaping mouth, fearful with her tongue lolling out, having deep reddish eyes, filling the regions of the sky with her roars, falling upon impetuously and slaughtering...that army, she devoured those hordes of the foes”.
Very beautiful. And, for those of us raised in Abrahamic traditions, quite different from the religious stories we likely learned from our teachers.
Harris adds, “In the Abrahamic traditions, the main figures are all human. They never overlapped or battled with one another. They're actually positioned as prophets within a monotheistic tradition. There are no stories there of deities battling one another. So it doesn't necessarily provide an inspiration for a game about deities battling one another.”
Put another way, the prophets of Abrahamic traditions make way less interesting video game characters than the deities of the Hindu tradition
Harris says, “There are many stories of gods having dramatic encounters and fights and battles between one another, and what we're doing is trying to take the essence of those deities as we understand it from those stories, give it a unique twist within Smite, and then put them on a battleground with deities from other pantheons as well.”
He rejects Zed’s argument that the depiction of Kali is “pornographic” and a story in The Times of India that pointed out that Kali is “scantily clad”. “I've traveled to India personally three times, and I can tell you that Kali and other goddesses represented on Hindu temples are often much less clothed than the depiction in Smite.”
The Hindu tradition is unfamiliar to me, something exotic and gorgeous and strange. Armed with such ignorance, I wanted to get the perspective of a follower of Hinduism (if that is even the correct phrase). Amit Kumar is a 25-year-old software developer based in Mumbai. He runs a Twitter account devoted to discussing Hindu culture. Talking to IGN, he stresses that he does not speak for Hinduism’s one billion followers.
He says, “It's not right to assume that the Hindus will not be offended if their Gods are portrayed in a video game. The Gods are after all highly revered by the Hindus and are worshiped much like Jesus Christ of Christianity and Allah of Islam. But it's less serious in our case because at the end of the day, we believe that God is within oneself. The life giving force within each one of us is what Hindus refer to as God. This life giving force is what we call Consciousness or Soul or Spirit.”
He does not agree with Harris’ distinction between Hinduism and other religions. “Not fair at all. God is God. Whether it is the God of Islam or Christianity or Judaism or Hinduism...There are stories about the lives of Prophet Muhammad and Jesus Christ. Why would it be inappropriate to have them as characters in a video game when it's appropriate to trivialize Hindu Gods as video game characters? Beats logic.”
Perhaps Hinduism’s all-embracing view means that reaction from the faithful is not as hot as it might have been from adherents to other faiths. He explains, “There is no concept of eternal hell or heaven in Hinduism and hence there is no dogma attached to the religion. I'm allowed to question, criticize and reject any of the teachings that don't suit me without having to face any backlash from the community. As a Hindu I can carve my own path for myself which means I'm allowed to revere Jesus Christ and his teachings while still being a Hindu.”
Back with Hi-Rez, I ask Harris if it wouldn’t have been better to simply avoid offending anyone, and to stick to those pantheons that are not active today as a focus of devotion. Did the team sit down to debate leaving aside Hindu deities? “Yes," he says, "we did have that conversation and debate as a development team, because we recognize that certainly deities that have an active following and set of faithful believers is a different categorization. But we decided that, when there's a rich tradition of deities authentically battling, that would be good inspiration for a game about battling deities.”
Finally, I ask if this controversy has been a useful piece of PR, or an unhelpful distraction. He says, “I think it's probably not too much of either. We're pretty comfortable with our position. I honestly don't think that there is an outrage beyond this one particular organization [Zed’s]. I guess it's enabling a conversation around belief systems and tolerance and that’s a good thing.”
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