Last month, I noticed that PZ Myers had written a Pharyngula post about a videogame called CellCraft. I didn’t bother reading it, though, since I prefer it when he’s writing about topics he both likes and knows a lot about, such as biology and religion. Games are not usually one of those topics.
Then I got a private message from a friend who knows I’m a gamer, and who expressed his opinion that PZ was “way off the mark.” Intrigued, I stopped reading immediately to go play, so I could form my own opinions. I found a cute little educational game about cell biology that had some good jokes and an earnest enthusiasm to connect with the player. And then I read the Pharyngula post about it, as well as the comments.
The controversy was interesting to me, because it ranged from very legitimate concerns to issues of game design. But I found PZ’s condemnation of CellCraft as “a creationist game” to be over the top, and the subsequent dismantling of one of the game’s developers in the comments to be unfair. I might have moved on, but this sentence from that developer just stayed with me:
“We knew that we didn’t all agree about evolution, creation, etc., but it didn’t matter — we wanted to teach about the science.”
Being what the hardliners would consider an accommodationist, I thought this notion of “bipartisanship” in science education through games was fascinating, and I wanted to know more. So I present my interview with Anthony Pecorella, who is quoted above, and Lars Doucet, the developers of CellCraft. It’s long, but I hope you will stick with us as we talk about the creation and evolution of the game, its mistakes and misconceptions, issues of science game design and whether people of faith can be scientists. I believe that while there are undeniable red flags concerning the game, they are in the end red herrings, and if you read this interview and remain convinced that CellCraft was designed to teach creationism, I also believe you should apply your own skepticism to that conviction.
