Gaming, The Gospel, and The Good Life 🎮
Video games are a powerful media form, and I've enjoyed them on and off for many years. But my experiences with them have led me to ask, why hasn't there been a major game release that promotes the good news of Jesus?
Summary:
- My experiences with video games in life and friendship
- An expression of the beauty and awe uniquely found through games
- My struggle to enjoy games responsibly
- What a Gospel focused game would need to succeed
Read time: ~10 min
With a twinge of disappointment, I knew my white handheld console would never reach its country of origin.
And it never did.
My devotion to video gaming powered on at age 6. From that fateful play onwards, my hands were practically soldered onto my LCD screen, a teal Gameboy Color with Pokémon Yellow nestled in its cartridge slot.
It was the first of many battery-pack accessories, adapters, emulators, consoles, bundles of cable, television sets, games, and core memories that my family and I would accumulate over the years. I couldn’t tell you how many hours I spent driving generic PS2 vehicles through outdoor maps in Rockstar Games’ less popular crime-driving series, Smuggler’s Run.
It’s no surprise that some of my earliest friendships revolved around collecting little creatures and stomping baddies in Nintendo games. Some of my earliest regrets were selling used games to GameStop for pennies. Between the sales, I realized I enjoyed the campy titles played with friends more than the best-selling games I played myself. Some experiences you just can’t buy back.
As things in my life changed, Christ called me to pursue him over the idol of digital entertainment. For a season, he prompted me to break up with games. Thankfully, I did.
Pressing the power-off button on gaming opened up space for me to pursue time in prayer and the Word. To this day, one of my favorite things in life is a nighttime prayer walk through the clean and quiet streets of Tokyo.
Months turned into video-game-free years.
During my second year of English teaching, some colleagues were consorting about an upcoming console release. Feeling strangely left out of the conversation, this schoolyard teacher-to-teacher banter was marked in my mind as tangible freedom from the past. A new console was news to me; I knew my heart had changed.
My defenses against the dark gaming arts weren’t always perfect. A few times I borrowed my friends’ consoles to play RPGs and other titles. My most recent gaming binge sounded like Tetris Effect and looked like slaying orcs. My computer, Mac though it was, continually tempted me with Steam sales and a stuffed library of digital games.
Steam was also proof my high school friends made different choices in their adult lives about gaming. The occasionally online Steam badge of a former best friend indicated he played games while simultaneously ignoring my messages to reconnect. We never got back in touch. Gaming apparently wasn't great fuel for a healthy, lifelong friendship.
Eventually, I was bent on burning my burgeoning Steam account. After losing my old recovery cell phone number, I entered a negative feedback loop, cutting off most options for eliminating my long-time Steam library. Not to be defeated by Valve's arcane account policies, I randomized the account's email, entered an unknowable password, and hit save. The confirmation email, deleted in a temporary email account, was never recovered again.
While the old account wasn’t recovered, Steam was. After many months, I repurchased one of my unfinished favorites, Dicey Dungeons, on a new account.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
As often as consoles came into my lair, I eventually fought them back out of the house. Understandably, my wife was disappointed when I sold her Switch Lite and the PS4 she cheerfully bought me for Christmas the previous year.
Christ generously rewarded our decision with quality time and a stronger marriage.
About this time, I started thinking back to my one-time Minecraft buddy, who inadvertently refined the nagging question I had about gaming.
One thing he mentioned, to my horror, was the genesis of a creepy jump-scare franchise. I reluctantly checked into the creator of the infamous series. What became this creator's profitable demon-powered gaming career started with a low-budget Pilgrim’s Progress title. If it’s for profit or recognition, game creation is a slippery slope into dark places.
But then there was the question. “If games can be used for things that celebrate evil, how can they be used for good and the Gospel?”
Of course, there are games that highlight Christian virtues and biblical principles. Takeshi and Hiroshi is a game centered around an older brother who codes his own game to serve his sickly younger brother. Servant leadership and compassion mark the gameplay along with its homey claymation art direction.
Takeshi creates an RPG on the fly that is adjusted to his brother’s skill level. You, as the player, select enemies for Hiroshi to fight. Your goal is to maximize young Hiroshi’s enjoyment of an RPG game by making the enemies strong, but not too strong. Brotherly love despite ongoing illness bolsters the game’s plot, making it wholesome and heartwarming, but also pretty fun to play.
The best video game experiences have metaphors and imagery that can only be presented effectively in an interactive gaming format. Since a player is the arbiter of decisions, players may feel more responsible for story elements and the outcomes they are controlling. When players participate in stories, the burden of choice falls on the maker of those in-game decisions. There are a number of modern games that have incorporated these story elements with excellence. Some plots and storylines are endlessly adaptive to the player’s decisions. Other games excel at building emotional connection to stories and characters through in-game mechanics, highlighting the burden of decisions that have been made or through gameplay actions gone wrong.
Games can be such profound and imaginative experiences that they argue for the goodness of God uniquely mediated through the medium of digital media. In my opinion, The Shadow of the Colossus is one of these experiences, for the gameplay itself (not everyone’s cup of tea) but also the narrative being woven by the clever world built by its designers.
Fun in its purest form is good, and good only comes from God as the source.
As to whether you can use a medium like gaming to share Christ or your testimony, there are creative attempts out there.
First, I’m thinking of a recent testimony video by Ryan Trahan. It was the first time I’d ever seen a testimony shared while simultaneously playing Minecraft. I pray that followers of his channel take the message of Jesus to heart. Ideally, a video game fireside chat helps a specific audience pay attention to the good news of Jesus. Additionally, these attempts could insert Christ into a user’s YouTube algorithm, where otherwise they wouldn’t engage with Gospel content.
There is a gaming app for iPhone and Android called Serpent.Seed that uses both story and game elements to share the Gospel message. It's a bit of a slow burn, but give it some time and you'll get into more of the gaming elements later in the game.
Playing through a section of it, I realized the major limitation of gaming, as a category, to share the Gospel.
Games aren’t required to have stories or narratives. It’s up to the creator of a game how significantly a story plays into the final product. Game mechanics, such as score keeping and progression, are requirements, while stories in video games are purely optional.
However, a Gospel-inspired and/or Christian game requires strong storytelling.
Certain games, by nature, require the player to supply a whole narrative and fictional world to create any narrative meaning out of the game. Abstract games, such as chess, would require the player to imagine for themselves a universe and a story about an endless battle of black and white kingdoms. (I wonder what narrative someone would supply for a puzzle game like Tetris.)
Of course, games are fun; there is value simply in giving thanks to God and properly enjoying the experience.
If one considers Tetris as the best-selling game franchise ever created, it would be hard for me to argue the world isn’t a marginally better place for the game’s catchy soundtrack and (limited) sense of accomplishment. It’s rewarding to play quick-time clean-up with falling tetriminoes for a high score. A faster and faster-paced game about ordering chaos is something many people get behind.
Personally, I’ve been awestruck at how much a game like Minecraft creates an engaging, stylized facsimile of God’s creation. It’s creatively marked by things I might have left out, had I designed the experience. Namely, I'd leave out the creepy Endermen and the unsettling creature sound effects. (Of course, you can just play peaceful mode or creative mode, unlike me.)
Some of the charm of game creation, and God’s creation, is that they include the kinds of creative elements that you might not expect.
Games represent a great deal of human ingenuity and technology. Through clever 3D modeling and software development, designers create a dizzying array of engrossing virtual play-spaces. Games do an excellent job displaying the incredible creativity that people are capable of. There are games about beavers rebuilding a post-apocalyptic world, randomly generated sci-fi adventures of all kinds, and games similar in scope to Dwarf Fortress. The list goes on and on for creativity in presentation and design of video games.
Like other forms of media, games also represent the worldly values in this day and age.
As far as I’m aware, many popular games at best only contain Christian themes and at worst encourage opposing worldviews. Some games act officially or unofficially as odes to all kinds of evil.
It’s telling that Grand Theft Auto is one of the other best-selling franchises of all time. Clearly, millions of people are motivated to play Rockstar Games’ ongoing car theft and mayhem simulator. It’s hard to imagine playing a 3rd-person crime simulation with an “edgy” narrative related to larceny does much to promote virtue.
It’s hard to extract the concept of battle or life/death from many game formats. After all, the medium singlehandedly fixed the concept of “first-person shooters” and “getting an extra life” into our vernacular. There are a whole lot of games that involve shooting of some variety. A host of genres have various flavors of dispatching digital monsters/baddies. Perhaps because these elements are uniquely unambiguous and visceral to score.
Playing games is a form of entertainment, so of course, games focus on entertaining and surprising the player. They do this well. Too well sometimes. Modern video game mechanics that “game” human psychology with gambling elements like loot boxes and gatchas are problematic. It’s similarly difficult to support any game that profits heavily off of “whales” (players who spend an inordinate amount on in-game currency items).
There is a significant amount of pride that undergirds much of gaming. Pride in gamer skills. Pride in one’s ability to manage and overcome virtual challenges. Video games can be a very selfish experience.
It’s difficult to know exactly how gaming promotes what is good, and how much not-good in gaming was already baked into human hearts. Jeremiah prophesied as much.
Building off the cultural and evangelistic success secured by ongoing series such as The Chosen and House of David, I pray this pocket cultural momentum towards Christ translates into a major game franchise as well.
Games. Whatever are we going to do with them?