The other week I found myself in Hell, contemplating a giant potbellied frog that shot Day-Glo green lightning bolts into the heights of a blood-red hall.

This is the infernal landscape you meet when you log onto the Christian computer game The War in Heaven and join the forces of darkness. Should you have the smarts to ignore the frog and consult a volume flanked by funereal candles a few yards away, you may be able to pass through a dissolving wall, skulk through a pit-ridden labyrinth, and battle with chunky angels whose aim is to boot you back to the game’s menu page so you can start all over again.

Despite occasional enigmatic landmarks like a faceless chartreuse lashing tentacle, or a cluster of empty teepees, the dark realms of The War in Heaven-at least the ones I had the patience to penetrate-are maddeningly monotonous. The game’s Christian creators, Theodore Beale and Andrew Lunstad, have set their minds on higher things than virtual-reality window dressing. Their aim, in launching War under the aegis of their software design firm, Eternal Warriors, has been to satisfy computer-game mavens while at the same time providing a little spiritual enlightenment.

This mission is set out clearly on one of the CD-ROM’s introductory screens, which announces, "It is our purpose to provide Bible-based entertainment to Christians while at the same time introducing nonbelievers to the eternal truths of the Word of God." To this end, Beale and Lunstad have crafted a software adventure around the idea of "spiritual warfare," a subject whose further complexities they suggest players pursue with the help of a short reading list-the Bible, two books by a Dr. Greg Boyd (evidently the inspiration for the game), and, for intrigued nonbelievers, C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.

Cybersoldiers-that means prospective players-enlisting in The War of Heaven can opt to join either the ranks of the divine (using weapons like the Sword of the Spirit and the Trump of Light) or of the fallen angels (try Corruption Spells and the Claw of Abbada). On each side, players forge through twelve levels of difficulty, each incorporating a spiritual lesson-good guys take in fear of the Lord, obedience, faith, forgiveness, righteousness, and love, while demonic conscripts absorb the progressively more distasteful knowledge, disobedience, treachery, corruption, defilement, and murder. Whichever camp the player chooses, the lessons demonstrate "how the one true path of Jesus Christ leads to eternal life, while the other leads inevitably to the destruction of oneself and others."

Tempted by the promise of such theologically edifying diversion, I set out a few weeks ago to learn what The War of Heaven had to teach. Choosing sides for the first round was a no-brainer. I had never experienced a computer game before, and the creepy music I unleashed by launching the program-a lugubrious drone like an organ played by Bela Lugosi-preyed upon my beginner’s nerves. The prospect of metamorphosing into a satanic foot soldier was more than I could take; I moved the cursor (shaped like a cross) to the gothic letters that spelled "divine" and double clicked. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," observed the text that popped up, reassuring me that I had nothing to fear from the evil spirits I was about to encounter, because the Lord would be with me.

I spent the next twenty minutes or so lurching through a deserted Stonehenge-like meadow, using my mouse to make satisfying whooshing sounds with a sword, before I stumbled on a kind of catacomb. Sallying down a passage, I emerged into a room containing a stone table and, almost instantly, was ambushed by two winged demons wearing what appeared to be green bikinis. In a matter of seconds my numeric health score plummeted to zero and I was ejected back into the Lugosi fugue.

My second attempt ended in a similar bloodbath. "You’ve got to go around those corners slowly," admonished my brother, whose many talents include superior computer-game skills, as he looked over my shoulder. "Peek around them, in case something’s lying in wait." Relying on this advice and the frenzied use of my laptop’s space key, which blocked blows from the bikini-clad devils, I passed intact through the first room, penetrated a mysterious, scroll-filled library, and immediately plummeted off a ledge.

I am sorry to report that it was only by incessant cheating-involving a panacea-like computer code that restored me to full health every minute or so-that I eventually navigated past demon-cluttered staircases, courtyards, and gardens, eventually reaching a cathedral that awarded me a flashing yellow victory icon for the game’s first level. But even cheating could not get me through the second level, damned or divine-I couldn’t type that code fast enough, just for starters. Eventually, exasperatingly wedged into a wall near a Tree of Life as a demonic hawk hovered overhead, I gave up on The War in Heaven.

The Eternal Warriors company, presumably, did not intend that I would emerge from their game with a new appreciation for cheating. And they probably did not mean to give me such an unnerving vision of the computer-game industry, which, it turns out, fits seamlessly into the web of media that is rapidly trussing up the world. On the software company’s Web site (www.eternalwarriors.com) you can order Greg Boyd’s books from amazon.com, read a chatty sermon (by Boyd) about spiritual warfare, and connect directly to the media outlets that have covered The War in Heaven. And for those who are still in the book age, a novel version of the game is being published by Pocket Books this spring.

Computer games may require a mind-boggling investment of time and patience, not to mention specialized knowledge ("Peek around those corners") from participants, but they are thriving, as J. C. Herz demonstrates in her witty, eye-opening book Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds. Herz makes a convincing case that the ethos of computer games is rapidly permeating every aspect of modern life-corporate executives use game-like simulations to evaluate business strategies, for example, and the military feeds off the technological advances of game designers. In fact, Herz’s book argues that "videogames are perfect training for life in fin-de-siècle America, where daily existence demands the ability to parse sixteen kinds of information being fired at you simultaneously."

Perfect training for the secular life, perhaps, but not for the life of the spirit. At least not my spirit.