There is no area in which I flirt with hypocrisy more than in my engagement with video games.
I was five or six when I first picked up an NES1 controller, and I never stopped playing games since. Through elementary and middle school, I would game when my homework was complete and chores were done. Sometimes with my brothers, sometimes alone.
As a teenager, video games became a bonding agent for me and my handful of friends. We were a bunch of dudes in the grand ‘ole days LAN2 parties, Little Caesar’s $5 hot-n-ready, and Mt. Dew Code Red.
As we aged, our diets changed (for some of us, anyway) and we moved from local area networks to Discord servers, but I still play video games with that same group of guys two decades later.
I think our parents—and maybe us, too—thought we would grow out of video games. If the industry had stayed pixelated and simple, I think we would have. But as technology improved, so did the medium. Video games matured rapidly in their ability to tell compelling stories and create engaging worlds—and in their ability to tap into the dopamine cycles that keep us wanting more.
Video games are now a massive part of the modern media landscape, and they do what all art and media do: introduce swaths of blessings, curses, and complications.
For parents, pastors, and those (like me) who are both gamers and followers of Jesus, dozens of questions swarm about us.
Is it okay for a Christian to pick up a controller and do in a video game what, in real life, would be called “sin”?
Where is the line as it relates to hobby and addiction?
Should I play something I wouldn’t want my kid seeing?
Should I put money and time in this hobby, when I could instead donate both to more “worthy” causes?
And a lot more.
I didn’t grow up in a thoughtful Christian community that wrestled with hard things. I was not prepared to engage with art in an intentional way, and so I’ve often felt as though I was groping through the dark to discern what is “right” and “wrong” in the gray spaces of life. This is even more true with video games: an art form that introduces a lot of complexities that other, more passive, arts do not.
For me (and for some of you reading this) the conversation is deeply uncomfortable because we already know its fraught with metaphorical landmines and personal experiences of feeling judged. It may even make you want to stop reading now.
But please, keep going.
What follows is more confessional than definitive instruction. More desperate than self-assured. I want to know how to honor God in every area of my life, which means I can allow no area to go unexplored.
But I also don’t think chucking an entire art form out the window is the way to do that. There is something redeeming and wonderful in (almost) all human arts, but it is also a strange and terrible task to try and mine out and define what is “good” and “bad”.
Honestly, it’s a task wrought with legalism, judgment, assumed motive, and inaccurate assumptions. But it's also a task that—if done well—can form us to be far more like Jesus, and more authentic and loving followers of His.
So, please don’t make me go it alone. I invite you into my years-long exploration, and I pray the Lord chooses to impart wisdom as we wrestle. For perhaps, like Jacob, we will emerge from this wrestling with blessing.
Video Games as Art
I think it is best to identify video games as a form of art.
I have two primary reasons for this:
Because it is art. I mean… c’mon.
And since it is art, we can leverage principles and practices Christians have used when engaging in other art forms and apply them to video games (with some modifications). We don’t have to start from zero, even though video games do bring some unique ideas/problems that we’ll get to.
Merriam-Webster3 defines “art” as “the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects.”4
Modifying this gets us to a decent definition of video games. Maybe it would go something like, “video games are software-based applications created with the conscious use of skill and creative imagination—often by a collective of individuals—for the purpose of aesthetic pleasure and engagement of the intended audience.“
Art.
The thing is, video games enter the world of art in a way that no other mass-produced and scalable medium ever has: video games primarily create space for player agency, meaning that the audience (the player) partakes in shaping the art.5
Other art forms have incorporated this idea before, of course. Consider an audience during a live music performance or a reader of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” novel. Even sitcoms which rely on an audience to come to a particular episode with a knowledge of current events, is working to engage the audience.
Art is always at its best with it’s done in some form of dialogue or collaboration with the audience.
But video games—more than any other art form—push this boundary to its limits. Arguably, video games exist in order to push this boundary. Developers and gamers alike keep coming back to this medium of art to see how far we can go in player agency.
Without player agency—which is defined as the ability for a player to make choices and interact with the world—there are no video games.
It is this player agency that makes video games both so enjoyable and so troublesome.
Watching a movie in which a character kills another character can seem problematic, but the audience is exclusively a viewer—no agency at all. There is distance between the audience and the action on screen. A gap as wide as “well, I wouldn’t have done that, personally…”
So what do you do when you’re holding a controller and you pull the trigger and participate in an act of imagined violence?6 Suddenly, the distance found in every other form of art is erased and now the audience is doing the action and making the choice.
This creates a whole slew of potential problems as it relates to spiritual formation. Are we formed by those choices we make in these virtual worlds? How far can we push the language, “it’s just a game”?
For now, we’ll end with this simple point: Video games are a form of art, carrying all the blessings and curses that art can carry into our society. Just like any other form of art, the Church shouldn’t ignore it, or chuck it out the window, or pretend it has no impact on who we are.
And yet, though video games may be art, they are art with new boundaries. Boundaries that—for many of us—feel under-explored as it intersects with our spiritual formation.
That’s where we’ll pick up next week.
Original Nintendo Entertainment System
Local Area Network.
Because, honestly, is there really another dictionary?
For the record, most of my statements about video games will be generalized and everyone of them can be rebutted with a “but not this video game, Phil!” sort of statement. Of course, there are many games that will push against my generalizations, but those tend to prove the rule rather than invalidating it.
Kinda literally, since on video game controllers the button to fire a weapon is called a “trigger”.
