Religion in Videogames...controversial?

Writing about videogames is not generally the stuff of Woodward and Bernstein. Occasionally, a hostile fanboy or critic will make your life difficult. Trying to get a good review while a game is fresh released can be challenging, especially if that game isn't in its official swing yet. But for the most part, this is the entertainment industry: The consumers want to read about it, the producers want to talk about it, and the rest is just details.

So it was with some surprise that I encountered a wall of fear and paranoia when I asked people around, asking about religion in gaming. What I found is a small handful of people who think about the issues a lot, and wanted to be part of the conversation...and a vast, silent majority who didn't want to touch the topic with the proverbial 10-foot pole.

Clearly, God -- the divine as a concept -- plays a huge role in modern gaming. Virtually every fantasy role-playing game, from World of Warcraft to the simplest roguelike, explicitly includes the divine in the form of priests calling down healing prayers or smiting evil foes. How, then, does this square against the subtext of games like Assassin's Creed II, which -- on close reading -- can be parsed as a kind of atheist screed?

How do we reconcile this? Is the divine -- a present and supernatural divine -- only OK when it's a convenient mechanic, but relegated to the corner with a dunce cap, suitable only for mockery, when it comes to the idea of actual faith?