"I am Jesus Christ" and Other Games About Jews

0:01 Just before Christmas in the long-ago year of 2019,

0:05 the gaming world was rocked by an announcement unlike any other:

0:10 Jesus Christ was coming to PC.

0:14 In a minute-long trailer for a game called

0:18 “I Am Jesus Christ,” the player-as-Jesus heals the sick,

0:22 produces a dozen fish, and quells the stormy sea,

0:26 all with first-person, magical hands action.

0:29 In a classic example of the preview revealing too much,

0:34 it also shows us the climax of the story– Jesus crucified,

0:39 alongside the good and unrepentant thieves.

0:41 In the logo reveal, Jesus himself forms the “I” in the game’s title:

0:47 “I” am Jesus Christ.

0:49 We even get a sneak peek at his hands

0:52 rolling open the door of his would-be tomb.

0:55 No wonder this trailer has seven million views, it’s a greatest hits collection!

1:02 There were…a variety of reactions to this trailer.

1:05 Most of the comments on YouTube are laughing at its obvious absurdity–

1:09 one of them says “can’t wait to see where the story goes,

1:13 hopefully one of my party members won’t betray

1:16 me near the end.” On a Christian subreddit,

1:18 reactions are largely negative —“cash grab,” “blasphemous,”

1:21 “an opportunity for the hardened to bitterly

1:24 mock and repudiate the gospel and the Lord.”

1:27 But I saw this trailer and thought…hey,

1:31 they’re finally making a video game about a guy like me!

1:34 Sorry no, not the messiah— they’re finally making a game starring a Jewish guy!

1:39 Eight months before I Am Jesus Christ was announced,

1:42 I made a video called “Judaism and Whiteness in Wolfenstein,” which— among other

1:47 things— discussed the Jewish Identity of BJ

1:51 Blazkowicz in MachineGames’ modern Wolfenstein series.

1:53 Towards the end of that video, I said “there aren’t many Jewish game characters,

1:58 almost none,” and showed this user-made list

2:01 from GiantBomb’s website –the description of the list reads,

2:05 and I quote, “If you ever know if there are jewish characters in videogames

2:10 that this list is for you.” The first three entries on the list are biblical,

2:15 the next ten are mostly x-men,

2:17 and then the list descends into hilarious entries like Ron Stoppable,

2:21 Tommy Pickles, and Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer–

2:24 all of whom are technically characters in video games.

2:28 Determining Judaism in games often stems from technicality:

2:32 Gaige, a DLC character from Borderlands 2,

2:35 will occasionally say “it’s like chanukah” when opening a chest,

2:39 and so she’s been permanently given a spot

2:41 on the short list of Jewish game characters.

2:44 There are times when Judaism can exist as more

2:47 than a throwaway line in a video game.

2:50 B.J Blazkowicz is one example.

2:51 An even higher profile character might be Dina from The Last of Us 2.

2:55 That game features a whole level in a synagogue

2:58 that spurs multiple conversations about Dina’s identity.

3:01 We learn that, despite not being much

3:03 of a “believer,” Dina still thinks of herself

3:06 as coming from a long line of survivors– which is a very Jewish feeling to have!

3:12 But for every Dina, there’s also an Otacon from Metal Gear Solid,

3:17 who is apparently Jewish based on the 1998

3:20 “Metal Gear Solid Official Mission Handbook,” and nothing else.

3:24 The more interesting question than simply “are there Jewish characters” is,

3:29 does it mean anything in-game?

3:31 Dina’s Judaism isn’t core to The Last of Us’ narrative,

3:35 but it does clearly influence how she thinks of herself.

3:39 But Otacon, the otaku dork who pisses himself?

3:43 What depth does his character gain by being silently, invisibly Jewish?

3:49 Which brings us back to I Am Jesus Christ,

3:52 a game where the protagonist is not just a Jew,

3:56 but probably the most famous Jew of all

3:59 time— or at least tied with Adam Sandler.

4:02 The only problem, at least based

4:04 on that first trailer is…what is the game, exactly?

4:08 Although the scenes of Jesus performing miracles are

4:11 accompanied by some sort of meter going down,

4:14 everything we’re seeing is obviously pre-rendered;

4:16 if this was at a major games conference,

4:19 it would have “not in-game footage” slapped on the bottom of the screen.

4:23 This preview really feels like the beginnings

4:25 of a thought experiment “what if someone made a game

4:28 about Jesus,” turned into a commercial without any

4:32 further consideration of what the mechanics would be.

4:35 But Me of Little Faith, a mere three years after that initial trailer,

4:41 “I am Jesus Christ” became available on steam!

4:44 Well, the prologue did, at least.

4:48 There have, in fact,

4:50 been two different prologues for “I am Jesus Christ.” The first,

4:55 released in 2022, has since been delisted.

4:58 The second, rising again in 2025,

5:00 contains similar content to the first but features an entirely new map,

5:04 gameplay mechanics, and— judging by the banner

5:07 image and voice-acting— a newfound love of AI.

5:11 [“When they had seen him,

5:12 they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child”] Each

5:16 demo gives you the ability to play a surprisingly hefty chunk of Jesus’ life,

5:22 complete with far more mechanics than I expected.

5:25 “I am Jesus Christ colon Prologue” features dialogue choices,

5:30 an open world, missions, combat, a hunger meter, a fishing minigame.

5:35 Much like Rock Band or Watch Dogs 2,

5:39 completing missions awards Jesus Christ with new followers.

5:42 Much like Geralt or Batman,

5:44 Jesus Christ can shift into detective vision to follow a blood trail.

5:51 And uhh, don’t worry gamers… everyone is white.

5:55 Mary looks like she’s about to doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.

6:00 It is weird, in the way that a game

6:04 about Jesus Christ would necessarily be weird.

6:06 It’s also cheesy in the way that gamifying miracles would necessarily be cheesy.

6:12 In maybe the silliest section,

6:14 immediately after resisting Satan in the desert for 40 days,

6:18 the player-as-Jesus arrives at a wedding, only to learn of a CRISIS!

6:23 The guests have already drunk all the wine.

6:26 “Please, use your powers for good,” Mary begs you.

6:30 The wedding party only has these big jugs of water,

6:34 but as a popup tutorial informs us, you can turn water into wine by first

6:39 pressing right click and then holding left click!

6:42 Do it three times in order to complete the miracle!

6:47 After playing this section I was flabbergasted

6:49 that the game had contextualized one of Jesus’ most

6:52 famous miracles in this way— and then I

6:55 went and read John 2:1 and realized that, oh,

6:58 this is almost exactly beat-for-beat what happens in the book.

7:01 Many of the sections of the game are like this, goofy

7:04 in the same way that the bible can be goofy.

7:07 I haven’t found the verse that details Jesus’ skill

7:11 at solving minor physics puzzles by controlling gravity and hurling cubes,

7:15 but maybe an extension of his carpentry?

7:18 Who’s to say?

7:19 With this in mind, the weakest part of the game is, forgive me,

7:24 the weakest part of the Jesus story writ large— that is,

7:28 how little we know about him.

7:31 After briefly touching on the manger, the game immediately skips ahead 30 years,

7:36 fast forwarding to just before Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist.

7:41 So much for character development!

7:43 Stephen Mitchell’s book “The Gospel According to Jesus”

7:46 grapples with the challenge of understanding who Jesus was,

7:50 stripped back from thousands of years of additions and translations.

7:54 “We know so little about his life,” Mitchell writes,

7:58 “A very few facts and no more.

8:00 He was baptized by John the Baptist.

8:02 He taught.

8:03 He healed.

8:04 He was crucified by the Romans.

8:06 The rest is silence, probabilities,

8:08 and hints…we know nothing about Jesus’ enlightenment experience,

8:13 which changed him from carpenter to Master,

8:15 from ‘son of a whore’ to a son of God.” What that means for the game,

8:21 a game as bluntly titled as “I Am Jesus Christ,”

8:25 is that the player controls a character with essentially no interiority.

8:29 Although levels may send Jesus on Magic School Bus-esque adventures,

8:33 to heal the son of a royal official

8:36 by zapping the virus inside him with holy power,

8:39 it only succeeds in telling us what Jesus did,

8:42 without giving us any insight into what being the “son of god” might have,

8:47 you know, felt like.

8:49 Which you’d think would be what an interactive

8:52 version of the Jesus story might excel at.

8:56 The contradiction that “I am Jesus Christ” faces is that creating an engaging

9:00 game in which you play as Christ is going to require some interpretation,

9:05 a “take” on the son of god.

9:07 But “I am Jesus Christ” is intensely uncurious about the man at its center,

9:12 content to play those greatest hits over and over.

9:15 In fact, a 2023 communication from its

9:18 developer advertised that you can now buy quote,

9:21 “a beautiful book based on the stunning images from the game,

9:24 along with AI-generated quotes from the Bible,” perhaps

9:28 the single most creatively bankrupt sentence ever written.

9:33 A year later, the developer’s official Discord was overrun with pornbots.

9:41 To state the obvious, despite starring a Jew,

9:44 “I am Jesus Christ” is not a Jewish game, nor is it made for a Jewish audience.

9:50 Finding Judaism in “I am Jesus Christ” is an exercise

9:53 in the kind of interpretation the game refuses to do.

9:57 You could see Tikkun Olam, the Jewish concept of repairing the world,

10:01 in Jesus’ drive to heal and help the people around him,

10:05 but even that is an assumption of motivation

10:08 beyond anything the game actually gives us.

10:11 Instead, I Am Jesus Christ exists in the same realm

10:15 as “The Brick Bible,” “Veggie Tales,”

10:17 or “Chick Tracts;” utilizing a popular medium

10:20 in an attempt to make classic Christian teachings exciting for “the youth.”

10:26 This is not the first time video games have attempted such a thing.

10:29 In fact, “I am Jesus Christ” follows in the footsteps of some

10:33 of the most famous— or, infamous— games of the 20th century.

10:37 A short history lesson: Back in the days of the NES,

10:41 Nintendo controlled access to their megahit console in a very physical way–

10:46 every game cartridge for the system had to include a special microchip,

10:51 only known to Nintendo.

10:53 This meant that it was impossible to produce any NES

10:56 games without Nintendo’s blessing and outside of their content guidelines.

11:01 Or I should say, almost impossible.

11:05 In 1988, two men– James Chan and Dan

11:09 Lawton– developed a second kind of NES cartridge.

11:12 Instead of including the special microchip,

11:15 their design literally shocked the authenticator with a voltage spike,

11:19 momentarily disabling it and letting non-Nintendo

11:21 Approved games be played on the NES.

11:25 Dan Lawton used this workaround to make unlicensed games about Jews.

11:31 Although Lawton’s original development company,

11:34 “Color Dreams,” published a few unremarkable unlicensed titles for the NES,

11:38 its fate was ultimately set in motion by a joke.

11:42 According to Gabe Durham’s reporting on the subject,

11:44 one day Lawton riffed that they ought to “make

11:47 a game with Jesus jumping around.” A year or two later,

11:51 “Bible Adventures” for the NES hit store shelves,

11:54 and sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

11:56 [“Do you ever wonder if they’re playing too much Nintendo?” “Oh, not anymore.

12:01 See, Matt has Bible Adventures.

12:02 They’re actually learning bible stories while they’re playing Nintendo.” “Quick,

12:05 get that bible quote,

12:07 before you run out of power!”] The success of Bible Adventures

12:10 is inextricably tied to its bizarre status as an unlicensed NES game.

12:15 It is, on its face, ironic that a game theoretically espousing the virtues

12:20 of the bible would use an electric shock to bypass content censors.

12:24 But those unlicensed cartridges weren’t technically breaking any laws.

12:29 It was just heavily frowned upon by Nintendo.

12:33 Most game stores, afraid of losing Nintendo’s good graces,

12:37 only stocked licensed games.

12:39 But you know who didn’t care about the good graces of a video game company?

12:44 Christian book stores!

12:45 Lawton and co.

12:46 rebranded their development studio to the appropriately devout-sounding “Wisdom

12:50 Tree” and started marketing their games directly to Christian retailers.

12:55 And yet, despite Lawton’s original joke about Jesus jumping around,

12:59 the most famous of Wisdom Tree’s games are firmly old-testament.

13:04 Bible Adventures, released in 1991 for the NES,

13:09 is actually a collection of three games.

13:11 The first game, according to biblical chronology,

13:14 is “Noah’s Ark,” in which the player-as-Noah holds large stacks

13:18 of animals above his head and throws them onto the ark.

13:21 There’s not much else that happens in the game, and more importantly,

13:25 Noah is technically pre-Abraham and thus not actually Jewish,

13:29 so I am DISQUALIFYING Noah’s Ark from further conversation.

13:33 Next up is “Baby Moses,” which is maybe the most conceptually interesting

13:38 of the three because you don’t actually control Moses but his mother, Jochebed.

13:43 Set within Exodus, “Baby Moses” takes the two biblical sentences

13:47 about hiding Moses among the reeds on the Nile and blows

13:51 it out to a daring escape scene in which Jochebed

13:54 holds the infant Moses above her head and sprints through Egypt,

13:59 dodging guards, dive-bombing birds, and piles of spiders.

14:02 Much like Noah could lift and hurl animals,

14:05 Jochebed can lift and hurl her own son,

14:08 even chucking the baby prophet directly into the river.

14:12 There is, for the record, no reason to do this.

14:15 But the option is available!

14:17 In fact, the game doesn’t even end if you prematurely

14:20 drop Moses in the Nile— you can finish out the level,

14:24 only to be informed “Good work,

14:26 but you forgot baby Moses.” Ascribing overt intentionality

14:30 to the situations picked for Bible Adventures would be a mistake.

14:34 Developer Dan Burke said, in conversation with Gabe Durham,

14:38 “It was like doing a game about Cthulhu.

14:40 What’s the Cthulhu lore?

14:42 They would just crack open the Bible and there was your story.

14:46 Noah’s Ark.

14:46 There’s a story right there.” But I

14:48 do find it interesting that, however accidentally,

14:52 Bible Adventures is engaging in something almost like Talmudic commentary.

14:56 Jochebed is mentioned by name only twice in the Old Testament,

15:02 both in those long lists of family trees the Torah is so good at.

15:06 Even when she births Moses, she’s described only as a “Levite

15:10 Woman.” Additional information about Jochebed– for instance,

15:13 that she was “conceived on the way to Egypt”– is extratextual writing,

15:18 added by biblical scholars like the illustrious Rashi.

15:21 “Baby Moses,” as a game,

15:23 teaches almost nothing about the literal text of the Old Testament.

15:27 But its incidental fleshing out of Jochebed as not simply a “Levite

15:31 woman” but a mother with some level of agency and sense of responsibility,

15:37 feels…almost Jewish?

15:38 I mean, of course it’s a stretch but look at what I’m working with here.

15:43 In the last game in the collection, “David and Goliath,” you play as David,

15:47 the young Shepherd who kills Goliath and eventually becomes King.

15:51 Finally, an exciting story for a game!

15:53 I can only imagine the boss fights that– oh,

15:56 it’s a game about carrying animals again?

15:58 Alright.

15:59 You do get to throw a rock at Goliath at the end, at least.

16:05 What I haven’t said explicitly yet is

16:07 that Bible Adventures is not a good video game.

16:11 You could call it terrible.

16:13 It controls poorly, the levels feel near-random,

16:16 there’s very little interesting design.

16:18 The most fascinating thing about Bible

16:20 Adventures— and the later Wisdom Tree games,

16:23 which include the trivia-based “Bible Buffet,” a Zelda-esque

16:27 “Spiritual Warfare,” and the infamous first person shooter,

16:30 “Super 3D Noah’s Ark,” is the fact that they exist at all.

16:36 A key difference between Judaism and Christianity

16:39 is the Christian directive to convert nonbelievers,

16:42 to evangelize, to spread the good news.

16:44 Even though many of these games star Jews, they are games based in Christianity,

16:49 purchased by parents and churches in the Christian hope of using

16:53 faith-based pop culture to grab the attention of the young and non-converted.

16:58 Although there is plenty of Jewish pop culture,

17:01 vanishingly little of it is actually made

17:03 with the intent of converting the goyim.

17:06 No one jumped in the mikvah because of Mel Brooks.

17:10 Instead, what defines Jewish media is more nebulous,

17:13 the indefinable idea of a Jewish perspective,

17:16 one of those things that often boils down to “I know

17:19 it when I see it.” In the realm of video games,

17:23 it’s often easier to “see it” when the project

17:26 comes from a single person or small team.

17:29 In my own vibes-based research,

17:31 I’ve found the most commonly cited “Jewish video game” might be

17:36 “The Shivah,” a 2006 indie point-and-click

17:38 detective game from developer Wadjet Eye Games.

17:41 And I just want to say that again, the most commonly cited example is

17:46 an independent point-and-click detective game from 2006.

17:50 That is not a combination of words I associate with popularity.

17:55 But The Shivah’s impact as a game is due

17:58 as much to its subject matter as its genre— it is,

18:03 undeniably and completely, a very Jewish game, one of the only of its kind.

18:09 In The Shivah, you play as a rabbi-turned-private eye in a sort

18:13 of noir-pastiche set between two synagogues

18:16 and various other locales in New York City.

18:19 It feels very basic, especially in the context of today’s indie games.

18:24 The environments are small and static, the puzzles feel a bit random,

18:28 the voice acting leaves a lot to be desired.

18:31 [“Today in my sermon I’d like to discuss suffering.

18:35 Why do bad things happen to good people?”] But there’s

18:38 also stuff in The Shivah that, for some reason,

18:41 I just didn’t think could be in a game.

18:44 Things like “Adon Olam,” being sung with the tune I recognize from my synagogue.

18:48 Or a computer in the game that just gives you an endless stream of Jewish jokes,

18:53 and not jokes about Jews but jokes that I tell to my non-Jewish friends

18:58 and they go “wait what’s the punchline?”

19:00 There’s the entire conversation shtick of the game,

19:04 in which one of the dialogue options available to you is always

19:08 “the rabbinic response,” which just means

19:10 answering a question with another question.

19:13 The game, in its 2013 re-release,

19:15 even features a bonus commentary track from its director,

19:19 Dave Gilbert, in which he provides

19:21 additional insight on its creation and meaning,

19:23 which is such a hilariously Jewish impulse that it

19:26 also describes both the Talmud and my own book, How a Game Lives, available now.

19:31 It’s also a great genre match.

19:33 For a culture like Judaism,

19:35 so obsessed with asking questions and finding meaning,

19:38 a detective game makes a ton of sense.

19:41 Also, like many detective stories and many Jewish stories, it stars…an asshole!

19:48 You play as Russell Stone, a gruff rabbi in charge of an ailing synagogue.

19:53 You’re tasked with investigating the murder of a former congregant,

19:56 an investigation complicated by the fact that Rabbi Stone himself

20:01 threw out this congregant years prior for getting an interfaith marriage.

20:07 It’s a decent story, one that grapples with the familiar Jewish

20:10 themes of what one owes to their faith,

20:13 their own community, and the outside world.

20:16 It’s nothing groundbreaking though,

20:18 except for the fact that, as previously stated,

20:21 it has become the go-to example of a “Jewish video

20:25 game.” Dave Gilbert— the game’s creator— seems uncomfortable with this status.

20:30 He’s posted since that he didn’t want it

20:32 to be the go-to example of a Jewish video game,

20:35 that he feels like he got a lot of things wrong,

20:37 that he himself isn’t that religious and is only culturally Jewish,

20:40 and I hate to say it Dave but that’s kind

20:42 of the most Jewish thing you could feel about your video game.

20:46 Fortunately and despite its reputation The Shivah

20:49 isn’t the only overtly Jewish game ever made.

20:52 A venture into the fiercely independent and unpolished

20:56 archives of itch.io uncovers many more Jewish games, of all different sorts.

21:01 On one hand we have something like “Who

21:04 Shall Wander,” in which you navigate a desert,

21:07 avoiding Christian missionaries and answering quiz questions on Jewish values,

21:10 in order to earn “mitzvah points.” This is

21:13 a game I could imagine playing at Hebrew school,

21:17 silly and light but technically more fun than a lecture.

21:20 On the other hand, there’s the game “From the Earth.” This is

21:24 a horror retelling of the Golem of Prague story in which you,

21:29 as the Rabbi, rip out your eyes, teeth, lungs,

21:32 and heart in order to animate the clay protector.

21:36 It is cool and gnarly and distinctly

21:39 something we would not play in Hebrew school.

21:43 And then there are the personal explorations of Jewish culture and history,

21:48 like “Hineini,” a story of an awkward

21:51 teen boy wrestling with ideas of queerness, family, and faith, or “Onthecht,”

21:55 a documentation of the developer’s great-grandparents

21:57 being torn from their home in Amsterdam and killed in Sobibor.

22:02 These are beautifully small and specific games,

22:06 interested more in a sense of legitimacy than broad appeal.

22:10 But the best versions of this style that I’ve

22:13 played do not bill themselves as Jewish games at all.

22:17 They are the point-and-click memoirs “Perfect Tides” and its sequel,

22:21 “Station to Station,” which depict the trials and tribulations

22:24 of a fictionalized version of the game’s director Meredith Gran.

22:28 The first game, Perfect Tides, takes place on a small east-coast island

22:33 while protagonist Mara Whitefish is in high school.

22:36 But despite being literally named Whitefish,

22:39 Judaism is not a huge part of Mara’s life.

22:42 It is mainly something that happens to her— like her fear that Hitler may

22:46 have faked his death and escaped to the woods of her island where he,

22:50 now over 100 years old, waits to ambush her.

22:53 Or her rage that her brother’s new insistence on celebrating

22:57 Sukkot is interrupting her plans [“Since when do WE celebrate Sukkot?

23:03 The holiday NO ONE cares about, even more useless than Purim?”].

23:07 Judaism is something inherited from her dead father,

23:10 a cocktail of identity and traditions that only exist to inconvenience her.

23:15 When she tells her friends that she can’t hang,

23:18 she IMs “it’s a long story but basically I’m Jewish.”

23:22 The island itself has the same sense of fading identity.

23:26 A long defunct hotel on the island was once a “haven

23:30 for the Jewish population of the state,”

23:32 but now it’s a beautifully graffiti’d husk,

23:35 a place to sit and think about what’s slipped away.

23:38 The game ends with the first night of Chanukah,

23:41 a full recitation of the prayers by Mara’s brother.

23:44 You get the sense that he is attempting

23:46 to absorb the role of his father and his faith.

23:49 Mara can’t find it— “If only you didn’t stand outside belief,

23:54 looking in from this lonesome void,” the narrator commiserates.

23:57 But there is something she finds in the tradition,

24:01 a comfort despite her feeling of alienation.

24:04 Mara is 16 in the first game.

24:07 In the next, Station to Station, she’s 18.

24:10 She’s going to school in the city— in essentially New York.

24:14 There are similar ways Judaism “happens to her” here— discussions of who

24:19 is or isn’t “goyish,” a story about her brother hiding the afikomen,

24:23 an acquaintance who goes on birthright and gets, like, way too into it.

24:28 But where Perfect Tides was largely a game where

24:31 Mara struggled to decide what to think about herself,

24:34 Station to Station is a game where Mara is learning how to think,

24:38 how to think as an adult and a writer and an independent person.

24:42 How to think about love, about art, about the wider world.

24:46 And in this pursuit, the threads of Judaism re-emerge in her life.

24:51 In Station to Station, you will read many books— real books,

24:55 books by Freud and Ursula le Guin, Camus and Langston Hughes.

24:59 These texts will expand your ability to understand and interact with the world,

25:04 and improve your skill at getting your own thoughts down on paper.

25:09 I understand what I’m describing is basically just

25:11 the concept of going to school— I get it.

25:14 But in Mara’s drive to learn and understand,

25:18 her close readings and her skepticism of foundational texts,

25:22 I see my own passion…and I see a Jewish way of understanding the world.

25:27 An eagerness to support yourself with tradition

25:30 while simultaneously questioning those same principals.

25:34 I don’t know if Mara is able to see it this way.

25:37 At the end of the game,

25:39 she visits her father’s grave in a noticeably Jewish cemetery,

25:42 and she expresses similar frustrations and guilt as the end of the first

25:47 game— that sometimes she doesn’t know if she’s a Jew at all,

25:50 that she doesn’t believe in God and feels

25:53 nothing in common with people who go to synagogue.

25:56 “Sometimes,” she says, “I think the only thing uniting us is the grief.

26:01 The impossible sense of loss… I can’t carry it with me all the time,

26:05 Dad.” But she carries more than that.

26:08 In the most beautiful moment of the game,

26:10 she gazes out into the sunset and wonders,

26:13 “is home nothing more than a place from the past?” No, she concludes.

26:17 “Surely there is a home within you,

26:20 waiting to be known.” Surely there is a way to find

26:24 one’s own spot in this cloud of other people’s beliefs.

26:28 “If you never had another day…Dayenu.” Judaism leaps

26:32 to express what could otherwise only be felt.

26:38 Perfect Tides: Station to Station is one of my favorite memoir games ever,

26:42 and one of the most legitimate-feeling ways I’ve experienced of weaving personal

26:47 struggles with Judaism into much larger

26:49 questions of identity and finding oneself.

26:52 It’s also a minor indie release,

26:55 currently sitting at well under a hundred Steam reviews.

26:58 And sometimes I wonder if this is the only realm for Jewish games— niche,

27:04 personal, probably unprofitable.

27:06 We’ll occasionally get a character like B.J.

27:09 Blazkowicz or Dina, but a whole big game?

27:12 Something AAA, something high-budget,

27:13 something worked on by dozens or hundreds of people?

27:17 Is there anything that could survive this process and emerge

27:21 with a perspective on what it means to be Jewish?

27:25 Well, I can think of one.

27:28 But I can’t quite decide how I feel about it.

27:32 Bioshock, developed by 2K Boston and 2K Australia, is a game about Rapture,

27:39 a dystopian art-deco underwater city crumbling

27:42 under some truly terrible political ideology.

27:45 Since its release in 2007, it has largely been considered one of the best,

27:50 or at least most influential games of the 21st century.

27:54 It is also a game about Jews.

27:57 Pound for pound, Bioshock almost certainly has the most

28:02 Jewish cast out of any AAA game ever made.

28:06 Andrew Ryan, Dr.

28:07 Steinman, Sander Cohen, Brigid Tenenbaum, Samuel,

28:10 Mariska and Masha Lutz are all Jewish.

28:12 I mean, my god— Bioshock is one of the most talked-about games of all time.

28:18 Why hasn’t the Judaism of its characters

28:20 been part of the conversation all along?

28:24 Well, part of the answer is how “official”

28:28 and “canon” the Jewishness of these characters actually is.

28:31 While it’s easy enough to read several of these names– Steinman,

28:36 Cohen— and assume Judaism,

28:38 the “canon” of Bioshock’s Jewish characters has largely been

28:42 confirmed in extratextual interviews with the game’s director, Ken Levine.

28:46 “I don’t think I was conscious of how Jewish it

28:50 was until afterwards,” he said in an interview with Cody Mello-Klein.

28:54 In fact, the words Jew, Jewish, and Judaism,

28:58 aren't even present in the game’s script.

29:00 Tenenbaum is the only character that states

29:03 her personal connection to the religion— and even then, only by implication.

29:08 Rapture, the city, is explicitly an atheist haven,

29:11 a place where science and art won’t be held back by the petty rules of religion.

29:17 So what’s going on here?

29:19 Is Levine just retconning Bioshock into a Jewish game,

29:22 a sort of “Dumbledore was actually gay” to an entire theme?

29:28 No.

29:28 I don’t think he is.

29:30 Though later Bioshock games would struggle

29:33 much more with appropriately addressing identity,

29:36 I am sympathetic to how hard it is to work through your own

29:40 feelings and history about Judaism— let alone present those ideas to the public.

29:46 To state the obvious,

29:47 most of Bioshock’s Jewish characters are more or less insane;

29:53 deranged doctors, unhinged artists, violent and self-deifying oligarchs.

29:56 To add in text directly stating something like “hey,

30:01 that plastic surgeon that grew bored of the human form

30:04 so he started making picassos out of people’s actual faces?

30:07 Yeah, he’s Jewish” would invite exactly the wrong kind of attention.

30:14 I mean, take the main antagonist, Andrew Ryan.

30:17 Ryan shares his pre-Rapture history

30:20 with his obvious ideological model, Ayn Rand.

30:23 Rand, as much as I hate to admit it, was a Jew!

30:28 Both she and Ryan were bourgeois Jews who

30:30 immigrated to America in response to Russian Bolsheviks.

30:33 Rand stayed in America,

30:35 Ryan started an underwater city, both became insufferable writers.

30:40 I think they would enthusiastically agree

30:43 that their politics do not reflect Jewish values.

30:47 And yet, Ryan can’t help but frame his personal narrative religiously,

30:52 saying that his journey to Rapture was his quote

30:56 “second exodus.” His abandonment of his first home,

30:59 his desire to create his own promised land,

31:02 is a recurring motif in the history of Judaism.

31:06 And Ryan isn’t even the prickliest representation of Judaism

31:09 in the game— that honor has to go to Brigid Tenenbaum.

31:14 Tenenbaum is the closest the player gets to an actual friendly face in Rapture—

31:20 she begs you not to kill the “little

31:23 sisters,” girls that host valuable genetic resources.

31:25 She leaves you gifts around the city, helps you defeat the big bad of the game,

31:30 and is one of the only characters that doesn’t ultimately betray you.

31:35 Tenenbaum is also a holocaust survivor.

31:37 BUT, we learn she survived the camps

31:41 because she literally volunteered to help Dr.

31:45 Mengele, took part in administering Nazi medical experiments.

31:49 She lived because of her collaboration, and even afterwards, in Rapture,

31:54 she continued her inhumane experimentation,

31:57 creating the horribly mutated girls she now wants us to save.

32:02 Tenenbaum’s story is not a heroic one of Jewish resistance— it is a much colder,

32:08 much bleaker story of someone who was forced

32:11 to become something less than human in order to survive.

32:14 Her support throughout the narrative of the game does not come

32:18 from the warmth of her spirit but an unshakeable guilt in her own complicity.

32:24 Bioshock, especially viewed through the lens of Tenenbaum,

32:28 is a piece of post-Holocaust fiction

32:30 that refuses to valorize its characters’ suffering.

32:33 Cody Mello-Klein, in his piece on the game, points out that this history deepens

32:39 the game’s central motif of agency and control.

32:42 “If the trauma of the past still controls our present,” he writes,

32:46 “how much control do we really have?” Bioshock

32:49 remains famous for challenging players on their agency

32:52 within a video game narrative— but how

32:55 much more complex is this question for Jews,

32:57 our list of traditions framed by near-misses with annihilation?

33:01 There is no glamor in Bioshock’s Jewish representation,

33:06 no valorization of the religion’s tenacity.

33:09 And this deeply uncomfortable introspection is possible

33:13 because of the game’s near-invisible use of Judaism.

33:17 Because the culture is deployed as an unconscious

33:20 connecting theme rather than an explicit plot point,

33:24 Bioshock is able to create characters that don’t

33:27 have to serve as a beacon of representation.

33:30 They are deeply broken people and their personal

33:34 histories and culture are wrapped around that brokenness.

33:38 What feels most Jewish to me about Bioshock though,

33:41 more than its individual characters or individual creators,

33:44 is the fact that I continue to wrestle with it.

33:48 In asking “what is a Jewish video game,” an equally important question is “what

33:52 is a Jewish way of playing a game?” Judaism is a religion of close-reading,

33:57 a tradition of creating new allegories and connections

34:01 from stories written thousands of years ago.

34:03 When I think about how I approach art,

34:06 how I approach games, it is in this same tradition.

34:09 We tell and retell the Passover story every year

34:12 and still manage to find new things to talk about.

34:16 Just because we’ve been yapping about Bioshock for nearly

34:20 two decades now doesn’t mean there’s nothing left to say.

34:25 Because when I play Bioshock today,

34:27 I find my modern struggles with Judaism reflected right back at me.

34:32 In the wake of the Holocaust, Andrew Ryan builds a purported promised land,

34:37 and yet that promised land only perpetuates the violence

34:40 it was meant to be a shelter from.

34:43 How could our tradition possibly have brought us to this?

34:46 Can I point at the unspeakable violence and cruelty and say “this isn’t

34:51 Judaism?” Or must that inhumanity be understood as a part of us too,

34:57 not so easily excised from our cultural self-image?

35:00 In one sense, a religion and a video game are both about following rules.

35:07 The torah has commandments, a game has objectives and limitations.

35:11 You wanna be good?

35:13 Just follow those rules, they’ll get you where you need to go.

35:17 But this is a dull, incurious way of viewing both those things.

35:21 The Judaism that I connect with is one that is made to be interrogated.

35:25 Nothing should be taken for granted— not those rules,

35:28 not the goals of its institutions, not even a belief in God.

35:33 And this, not coincidentally, is how I connect to games as well,

35:37 not as a strict set of parameters but as a new

35:41 possibility space in which anything could be built.

35:43 The past is there to be learned from, but not blindly followed.

35:47 The future can— the future must— continuously re-examine what we’ve done,

35:52 in order to learn how to be better.

35:55 The “best” Jewish video game is the one not yet made,

36:01 but one we have to believe is possible.

36:11 While this essay took quite a long time to put together,

36:14 it is not– by any means– a complete history of games about Judaism.

36:18 One of the most notable exceptions is a game called Train by Brenda Romero.

36:23 But Train is not a game you play on a PC or console,

36:28 it’s a board game… about the Holocaust.

36:31 And I am not really a board game guy— so I’ve called in an expert.

36:37 Exclusively on Nebula,

36:38 you can watch a companion video to this one where I’ve pulled in Quintin Smith,

36:44 better known as Quinns, of People Make Games and Quinn’s Quest.

36:48 We have a wide-ranging conversation on Train,

36:51 the ability of a board game to communicate ideas about culture,

36:55 other games that do this, the strange controversy

36:58 with the book Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, and more!

37:01 I mean, come on.

37:02 It’s Quinns.

37:03 You know the chat is good.

37:05 [“I think the paragraph you just said, like,

37:08 took minutes off my life.” “This is just where

37:12 the metaphor of playing the game with history gets really complicated,

37:18 really fast” “I’ll just tease it by saying

37:21 it’s a fascinating roleplaying game that has the most

37:24 awkward rule of all time.”] If you like the kind of work I do here on YouTube,

37:29 it’s hard for me to imagine you wouldn’t enjoy Nebula.

37:32 It is a place where I’m free to explore other,

37:35 more flexible types of videos— interviews,

37:38 mini-essays, cooking shows, travelogues,

37:40 without the ads or crushing algorithmic pressure of YouTube.

37:45 Nebula features many of my favorite essayists,

37:48 who consistently release early and/or exclusive stuff there,

37:51 AND it is a fraction of the price of other streaming services:

37:56 just $3 a month with my URL, well under a cup of coffee a month at this point.

38:03 Listen: in the lessons about how to be successful as a video essayist,

38:08 no one really recommends spending months making

38:10 a thing about being Jewish and point-and-click adventure games.

38:14 I am talking about this stuff because I care about it,

38:17 and I can afford to do that because

38:19 of the support Nebula provides me as a creator.

38:22 So if you appreciate this kind of thing, if you want to see more,

38:26 if you just like giving me the time and flexibility

38:29 to pursue topics like this, I really think you should consider Nebula.

38:33 It’s a video platform that doesn’t make me feel guilty when I use it!

38:38 In 2026!

38:39 How about that?

38:40 Use my code for a big discount and see what you’ve been missing.