What is Interactive Visual Worship?

Interactive visual worship is a form of worship where people can use videogame technology to worship visually along with a band that’s playing music. It can be hard to understand at first if you’re not very familiar with forms of both Christian worship media and videogame media. I don’t blame you, so I’ll try to elaborate on both!

Christian Worship Media

During a modern Christian church worship service, on the surface level you will see a band playing music on a stage in front of the congregation, and the congregation sings along to the music. These days people know what to sing by looking at white words on black projected onto screens above or to the side of the band. Some churches have also begun using abstract animated backgrounds behind the words (or on different screens altogether), referred to as “motion backs.” Other churches even try to include less abstract animations, such as video clips of nature or people interacting in a meaningful way. In terms of the media that’s going on, it’s similar to live visuals at a rock concert.

So the goal is to express some faith-based message through film/animation during the musical part of worship – this is visual worship, or rather a specific form of visual worship. Since it is about expression, artists are needed to express that message. They choose the clips and fade between them live to the music in order to create meaning, similar to how a DJ works with turntables. Therefore, these people are referred to as worship VJs. So you could say that these worship VJs are worshipping visually by creating meaning from video clips in sync with a worship band playing music. Again, like VJs would at a rock concert/club. And there’s almost always only one worship VJ doing visuals, just like you usually have one DJ playing in a band or at a club.

Videogame Media

Interactive visual worship takes that idea, combines it with videogame technology and media, and allows a group of people to worship visually at the same time. Now when I use the word videogames, you might think of Tetris or Doom or Halo or Peggle, but that’s not quite what I’m talking about. I think of videogames as a mixture of two unique mediums – a specific medium that doesn’t really have a name yet, and games. At the heart of this unnamed medium is a virtual, fictional, interactive system running on a computer.

This system takes input, computes it, and displays an output that changes based on the input given. It’s fictional in the sense that the system represents something artistic; it’s not tax software, but a virtual world created by an artist that you can explore and learn from. It’s a world that speaks to you on a very human level, but because it’s interactive, some videogame designers describe it as a world that you can have a conversation with.

Interactive visual worship uses this unnamed medium. Keep in mind that it’s a unique medium that’s distinct from games, so it does not include winning & losing, game-like challenges, or points. But it still uses interactive systems or environments. These could be made up of a series of scribbles that move around, geometric shapes that appear to be alive, or an earthly world that looks like a painting or photograph.

What is it Like in Practice?

In the real world, where culture exists, this takes the form of using wireless devices like a Wii remote to interact with videogame-like environments during a church service. And the visuals appear on a screen for the congregation to see, just like existing visual worship media.

I can hear it now…”What?!  Playing videogames during church?!” Well, kind of. Though it’s not that different than mixing beats during church or painting during church. It’s a medium, just like other things that are experienced on Sunday morning. For interactive visual worship, it’s designed to be a communal activity for at least 6 people, like adding a visual band to the music one.

I’m working on a demo video that I’ll post soon; hopefully it will be provide some clearer idea of what this is all about. Basically at this point I have a few environments that I can switch between. It’s a polished prototype. More info to come.

This site unfortunately doesn’t have a plant-growing Conway’s Game of Life simulation like the Flash version was going to, but it does have more accessibility and a faster way to get to the content.  I’m scratching the plant-growing itch by making a musical gardening game anyway.  More info on that in the future.

It’s a bit nostalgic/embarassing looking through the wayback machine at my site circa 2002.  I had a “news archive” since there wasn’t really the word blogging in use yet.  Heh.  And I wanted to make it like makeoutclub…oh man.  I’m much more happy with the direction I was going in June 2003. It was going to be a Flash site with little sci-fi/sleek modules that you slid out and stick in the content section to load the content. I was soooo inspired by the Zion “white room” scene in the second Matrix movie with all the switchboard people.

But hey, this site is actually finished and will actually allow people to view my work quickly.  So go check it out if you are so inclined.

I imagine this tool most often being used to help visualize a sermon being delivered to a church congregation. The goal of the tool would be to present an environment that someone on the media team – a “player” if you will – can interact with.  The player would interact with the environment in a way that matched up with the speaker who is delivering the message.  One example would be if that speaker was telling a story.  The player would explore the environment and trigger events to match up with the timing and emphasis of the speaker’s story.  If the speaker was emphasizing a certain part of the story, the player could trigger events to help emphasize that part.  The final result would be an expression of the story experienced simultaneously through the mediums of virtual interactive experience (of which I consider computer games to be a subset) and oral tradition.

Here’s a run-through recording of the prototype.  It’s based on a story given to me by Chris Petrick, Perry Ross, and Richard Webb at Lutheran Church of Hope, with music and sound design by Paul Gratton (one of my partners from the Napkin Sketch collective), and voice acting by Julie Bull.

Here’s a recording from the production room while I, err….performed it during the last of 4 worship services at Lutheran Churh of Hope.  It kind of shows how the whole thing would fit into a traditional Christian church service. In this case, it was between two songs and presented on the screens. I imagine a “final version” being like this, but with a speaker telling the story live up on stage and a more developed interactive environment.