The Serpent & The Seed: a mobile game with a message

This Network article was written by Andy Geers for the Global Connections website. Find out more about Discipleship Tech.

Could a mobile game help people come to know Jesus? That was the question that I started asking when I heard about the Bible Society’s ambitious “Lumino” research project. They surveyed nearly 20,000 UK adults into attitudes to the Bible, and their rather surprising headline discovery was that 1 in 4 were open to the Bible and finding out more. But they also identified certain impediments which stopped people engaging, such as not seeing how the whole Bible fits together, and not understanding how it was relevant to us today. I started wondering: what if we could create a “Bible overview” mobile game experience that didn’t assume anything about your existing beliefs, but which taught the big story of the Bible and showed how Jesus was the answer to all of our greatest needs?

It wasn’t an entirely new idea for me: twenty years ago, in January 2005, I had published a blog post explaining an idea I’d had about making video games to help people explore the Bible. Growing up I’d always been passionate about both those things: Jesus and computer games. It seemed to me that a game could be a great way of giving people who might not normally read the Bible a “way in”. Games can give you space to explore as much or as little as you like - to go deeper into something if you want to, but without it feeling forced upon you.

Despite my best efforts, in those early years the idea never quite seemed to come together. Eventually I had decided to invest my efforts elsewhere and created the PrayerMate app, which took off rather more quickly, and ultimately led to my going full time and founding the Discipleship Tech charity. However the idea of the game never quite went away - so when I encountered the Bible Society research it was just the spark that was needed to reignite the dream.

And so was born “The Serpent & The Seed”, which launched just before Easter on the App Store and Google Play. Funded largely through charitable grants and a couple of crowdfunding campaigns, we’re able to give it away completely free of charge (just encouraging people to “donate what you think it’s worth”). Over the last four years, it has been a privilege to work with an amazing team of talented collaborators, including having indie folk duo Poor Bishop Hooper involved writing four powerful and emotionally engaging songs and dozens of other background tracks, which really form the backbone of the experience. It has been wonderful to see the response so far, with people calling it “beautiful and deeply meaningful” or “the most beautiful mesmerizing musical puzzle adventure game I have played till now”. For me personally, though, nothing beats the photos of families gathered round with kids playing it with their grandparents or uncles and aunts. We hope and pray that God can use this powerfully to excite people about the gospel story and our saviour Jesus that it points to.