There's a quintessential Christian marketing story that goes something like this:
- Person was desperate
- Person experienced miracle
- Person became a Christian
When I called myself a Christian for many years, and before that growing up in a Christian home, I heard this story with variations over and over. The frequency was maybe never lower than every 3 years, sometimes more often, at least that's how I remember it. My mother LOVED repeating every new variation of this story when it came out.
Every time I heard this story, I had 2 responses internally: the story was always unverifiable, and the story was always believable. At least it was believable when I heard it for the first time. It lost some of that luster after hearing it countless times though.
Then many years ago I left Christianity, and I never heard that story again in other religious practices. There are other parallels to Christianity in other religions (like love your neighbor as yourself, or practice kindness, etc) but from what I've picked up in Buddhism or Hinduism or maybe even Mormonism - at least so far I've never heard this type of story. And possibly that's why at a very deep level Christianity just wasn't for me - at a certain level the story produced more doubt than it produced devotion.
The closest story which also shows up in other religions is something like this:
- Person has good practice
- Person lives good life even with hardships
That story shows up in Christianity and Judaism (i.e. Job, Habakkuk), but also in Buddhist Koans and maybe even something like it is in the Baghavad Gita.
Back to the marketing story. My only explanation is that this story exists on 2 levels. It may actually reflect real events. But it also serves a purpose for countering lost practice. So I think of it as an antidote. If you have really bad theology (namely the whole universe is really tainted with sin and all people are fundamentally bad) and everyone in your religious practice actually believes this bad theology (rather than seeing it for what it is, a metaphor of the not-yet-born-again-enlightened mind), then nobody new would ever come in. So that horror theology needs an antidote story. And you have to keep applying this antidote over and over again.
It is similar to the "end of the world" story that comes out at about the same frequency - every 3 years or so - where the world will end on such and such a date.
Now maybe that's not true. Maybe I'm seeing something that's not really there. Maybe your mileage varies. But the idea of an antidote pattern seems a compelling storytelling mechanism, so I present it here, because storytelling and game design are closely related. There is something very human going on here, and it seems worth mentioning.
