What life lessons are learned? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
I recently did a research paper on the allegedly link between video games and school shootings. My conclusion is it does not exist. That being said, I was thinking about this recently some more. Right now, I am going through Persona 5 Royal and I am left thinking about relationships a lot. In Persona 5, my character gets special abilities the more he builds relationships with people.
I got the bad ending the first time I went through the game because I had built up level, personas, weapons, etc., but I had not built up relationships like that. Now I know I need to do differently. I find that by choosing what I want to say back and see the reaction I get, I am learning more as a man on the spectrum about what other people would think if I said XYZ. I am also looking more at my relationships and thinking about the benefit of building my relationships that exist in the real world.
I have the view that many times, games of all sorts build us up in ways outside of the games. My parents never had to sit down with me and teach me the value of money, but I think in playing games involving money, I learned what it meant to work hard, save up, and buy something I wanted. I knew what it meant to go and find a deal and I knew what it meant to conserve what I had.
While I have said this is largely the case with video games, we know that this happens in other games as well. How many times do we hear something about sports and hear about life lessons learned for on and off the field? As I pondered that, I considered how differently we treat such ideas. The idea given is that video games will teach you how to shoot people easily. Sports will help you build character. Strangely, no one seems to get the idea that football will teach you to tackle someone if they have something you want, even though that is an integral part of the game.
It’s as if sports are to be celebrated because they teach good things while video games are condemned because they teach wicked things.
In reality, it all depends on the person. By and large, school shootings I find do not come from games instilling a love of violence, but because students are angry and no one is helping them when it comes to bullying at schools. A suicide and a school shooting in response to bullying are highly similar events. The suicide is the student taking the anger and pushing it inward on himself. The school shooting is him pushing it outward on the world.
Yet how many athletes do we see that are actually horrible role models for young people? How many times do we see a city when a major sports title and the people go out and loot and ransack the town? Do I blame sports for these? No. I blame human stupidity. These are problems that need to be dealt with, but banning sports is not the answer.
What is best is to realize that there are good and bad things that can be learned in most any situation. In a perfect world, everything would only teach good, but we do not live in that world. The best solution is to have parents start teaching virtue at home. Also, get rid of the idea of self-esteem. It turns us more into narcissists than anything else. More often than not, good families will produce good kids. There are bad kids that come from good families and good kids that come from bad families, but this is a generality.
When that is there, good lessons can be found anywhere. They can be found in a student learning lessons kicking a ball across a field. They can be found in someone like me exploring mental worlds in Persona 5.
And those lessons work on and off the field and on and off the console.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)
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