Tag: video games

Book Plunge: Playing With God: A Theoludological Framework For Dialogue With Video Games

What do I think of Matthew Millsap’s dissertation? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

“And Matthew Millsap wrote his dissertation on video games and Christianity.”

My ears perk up as I’m in my systematic theology class last semester and hear these words. I immediately look up this man and find him on Facebook and send him a message. Before too long, he’s happy to send me his dissertation. In preparing to write this also, I contacted him and asked where others could go if they want this dissertation as well and he said you can contact him on Twitter.

So theoludological. I had never heard that word before and my spell check doesn’t even recognize it. It is a combination of ludology and theology. Great! That explains it! So what’s ludology? It’s the study of games. Amazing I never even knew that there was a name for what I have been doing through so much of my life.

Millsap and I are quite similar. We’re both gamers and we’re both at this time 42. We have both been playing games for pretty much all our lives.

Fact check true on the above meme.

When you go through the dissertation, it’s clear that he has a great knowledge of games. Something interesting also for me is that the games he plays seem to be more of a different genre for the most part than the ones that I play. He seems to enjoy first person shooter types and other similar games and I am much more into the RPG and JRPG genre.

Still, he has got me curious about the Bioshock series at least. (Available on the Nintendo Eshop if anyone is feeling generous)

This dissertation is divided into seven chapters. The first is about interaction with pop culture and the lack of interaction with video games. The second is about the origin and history of video games. The third is about narrative themes in video games. The fourth is about theology’s dialogue with other forms of narrative material. Chapter five is where the meat of this work is and shows how this interaction takes place and why video games are different from other forms of media. The sixth shows it in practice with a look at the game Journey. The final chapter discusses implications and further areas of research.

One possible researcher being the one writing this blog.

I was definitely pleased reading this to see how much Millsap definitely is familiar with video games. To some extent, probably a little bit jealous too picturing him getting to read so much about games and at the same time consider it theological research. I could easily picture him, seeing as he’s married, sitting on the couch playing a game like Bioshock and his wife saying “Honey! Can you take out the trash?!” “Not now, dear! Doing research for my dissertation!”

One of the rare times that excuse would work.

If you are unfamiliar with the history of video games, Millsap will give you a good crash course on it in this dissertation. He is also right in there is very little interaction with this medium. When I gave my talk at Defend this month, I was pleased to see how many people showed up. Why? Because this is a topic we need to talk about and there were people of all ages and of both sexes in there.

That being said, the narrative aspect is key. Yesterday, I watched a video on Final Fantasy IV and considered just how much a story difference there was. Final Fantasy IV when it was released over here was Final Fantasy II as Japan kept the next two games in the series to themselves. (And why did we just not declare them our political enemies at that point?!) Something I was surprised I hadn’t noticed was the marked difference in story between I and II. I was a bare bones basic account, but II was a dialoguing adventure with personal characters with real names and twists and turns.

Many games today do have stories. Many outsiders don’t realize that, but just as you watch a TV series or a movie or read a book because you want to know what happens next, so also you play a game because you want to know what happens next. Of course, there is the difference of player agency. It doesn’t really take skill to watch a TV show or movie or read a book to find out what happens next. With a game, unless you look it up on YouTube, you have to play the game successfully to know what happens. Some games even make it harder by having different endings and only those who do the game well will get the good ending.

When we look at the fifth chapter, I mainly noticed his interaction with Craig Detweiler. Consider this quote that he has from Detweiler.

Am I equating cinema with Holy Scripture? Heavens no! The Word of God is a special revelation unequaled in human history. I am not baptizing all art as sacred or all inspiration as divine. Yet God has revealed himself in ways beyond the written word. The Bible itself is a litany of unlikely communiques. Christ promised if his people did not praise God, the rocks would cry out (Luke 19:40). Perhaps those
rocks have recently taken on pop cultural forms. It does not denigrate a sacred text to study other texts; I am merely affirming what the Spirit is already doing. God does not discriminate. The Spirit can communicate via inspiring films like The Shawshank Redemption (IMDb #2) or cautionary tales like The Godfather (IMDb
#1). We need role models and warning signs. While the religious community questions prophets’ credentials, divinely inspired artists keep on singing songs, telling stories, making movies.

While I do think the phrasing can be bad here some, I think when Detweiler speaks of God revealing Himself in movies, I don’t think he’s saying the movie is like Scripture. However, I think what He is saying is that one can see in a movie sometimes an idea of who God is. I remember hearing about a Jehovah’s Witness who left the cult after watching the Passion of the Christ and realizing they didn’t have to go through everything the Watchtower said. One can get theological insights watching popular media like movies and certainly God can use a movie, a book, a video game, a TV show, to draw someone to Himself. I also don’t doubt that Millsap would disagree with this.

At the same time, Millsap did think there was a lowering going on when Christianity was explained in gaming terms.

Jesus dropped into the game of our world with both remarkable (even divine) skills and crippling limitations (of humanity). He explored many comers of his Middle Eastern “island.” Among his contemporaries, he made both friends and enemies. A tightly knit, dedicated community arose around him. Jesus and his clan experienced plenty of grief from aggressive and uncooperative rivals. He was eventually fragged during a deathmatch on an unexpected field of battle. He submitted to the rules of engagement, even while resisting them, proposing an alternative way to play. After three days, Jesus respawned, took his place as Administrator, and redefined the way the game is played

I understand Millsap’s concern here in that this can seem like crude language at times to describe Christianity. After all, respawning in a FPS is really normally not a big deal. Everyone does it. However, I also thought, “What if someone wasn’t a Christian and was a gamer and I was trying to explain Christianity to them?” I could use language that is similar to this. We could say that Jesus was the true respawner much like Lewis said Christianity is the true myth. What we can do in a game, Jesus can do and did do in reality.

Despite all of this, Millsap is definitely right in all of this in how we need theological interaction. The stories he gives from Bioshock I found particularly fascinating. I have listened more than once to the introduction from Andrew Ryan in the first game on YouTube. If you want to listen to it, you can do so as well.

Many of us would agree with some of what Ryan says in this. A man should be entitled to the sweat of his brow. Many of us could also say that while God doesn’t claim all of it and lets us have some of it, we should give some of what we receive to Him.

In the third game, he tells us the story is about a “prophet” who has a cultic form of a Christian type of religion and how someone has to go to his floating island to rescue someone. Despite what some people might think, games like this wrestle with moral decisions and questions. There are many games out there that are extremely philosophical. Consider even Final Fantasy X where the game is all about a quest to defeat a mindless, destructive beast known as Sin.

In the sixth chapter, we look at Journey. I had bought this game and I didn’t get much into it, but perhaps some weekend when I have a couple of hours, which is how long Millsap says it takes to finish it, I could do that. Millsap chose this game because it is an easy one to learn and there is no violence done by the character and it tells a story. Another one I would consider would be Stray, because after all, who wouldn’t enjoy getting to play as a cat?

I definitely agree with his conclusion. There are plenty of areas for extra study. Games are becoming one of the main features in our culture, especially with the rise of smartphones. We Christians have too often been behind the times on this interaction. We need to change that.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

The Use Of Entertainment

Why is it that we enjoy what we enjoy? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Last night, in the midst of some gaming and watching some shows on YouTube, I returned to thinking about my life here in New Orleans. I have thought about how our country used to be much more Christian than it is now and yet New Orleans is now known as a hotbed of crime, drugs, and well, we all know what really goes on at Mardi Gras, which should sadly be a Christian celebration. What has happened to this great city and how can we change it?

Then I thought about how it has been said before by G.K. Chesterton that fairy tales don’t exist to tell us that dragons exist. Children already know that. Fairy tales exist to tell children that dragons can be beaten.

Let’s start this with a subject I don’t care for that much. Sports. For the most part, the idea of watching sports should be that someone goes and watches these people on the field and then decides that they want to be like that person and is willing to work out and practice the game too. Now for some, this is impossible and they can remember what they used to do or dream about what they might do in eternity someday. I think of those with severe disabilities or those who due to an older age cannot play like they used to.

Completely antithetical is the picture of someone who sits down on a couch to watch a game and goes through a whole box of Oreos at the same time. This is not to say you have to be a fitness king, but if you do care about sports, you should care about your own physical condition. Sports should get you out of yourself.

With fantasy, it is the same, whether we are talking about old Greek plays, novels like the Lord of the Rings, TV shows and movies, or video games. All of these are meant to give us heroes to emulate and people that we are to look and say “I can overcome what’s in my life as well.” With sports movies, we often have the story of the underdog, such as movies like Rocky or Rudy, where we know that the team or player we want to win will be the hero in the end because they never give up.

In the world of gaming, we have the same going on. A player playing a game can see a boss villain they have to fight that is gargantuan compared to them. In reality, most of us if we saw such a villain would not bother to really try even but start realizing that our time has come. In fantasy, it is the opposite. You are even more certain that you can win and you try again and again and again. The size of the enemy doesn’t make it impossible. It just makes the victory all the greater.

So it is also with every challenge that we face today. The Greeks told their plays I suspect in the hopes of spurring other young Greek men on to greatness. Hebrews tells us a list of heroes of the faith in an effort to say “Be like these people.” Today, we tell stories of people, real and fictional, in an effort to inspire greatness in us.

That should be the purpose of what we do today. If we are captivated by the battle of good and evil on the screen or in literature, we had sure better be fighting it in our own lives. If we believe that the villain can be overcome no matter what, we need to live accordingly as well. It could be tempting to say “That’s fiction, not reality”, but as Chesterton again said, “Truth is stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.” In fiction, the characters normally aren’t aware of a supreme deity watching over the story entirely. In reality, we should be, and that should change everything.

Enjoy the story, but also use it. If you care about sports, care about your own physical condition. If you care about the battle of good and evil, be ready to fight it yourself.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Life Is A Game Walkthrough Part 6

Do we play by the rules? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Continuing our walkthrough of this book, we now come to a section about rules and why they matter. Many of us play games without rules every day. Nowadays, most video games don’t even come with instruction booklets. When I was growing up, those booklets were a treat. If I found my old instruction books today from the games i got, I would probably look through them just to reminisce.

A lot of games we play are simple enough that we don’t see a rule book. Most people have gone to a sporting event and understood what is going on in the field without sitting down and being told the rules of the game. When I was in DivorceCare and we had a get-together, we would sometimes go out in the yard and play Corn Hole. I never once read anything on the rules of corn hole, but they were simple enough to understand.

In our world, we also have rules for how to play the game. If you’re a Christian, you can find some rules in the Bible, but certainly not all. There can even be debate over which rules apply and when. A favorite of internet atheists is to ask “Well why are you allowed to eat shellfish” as if they have just given a devastating blow to any Christian. (And to too many, they sadly have.)

Also, we have to understand what it is that we’re playing the game for. What are the victory conditions. If you’re playing Mario or Zelda, it’s normally to rescue the princess. If an RPG, it’s to defeat the main villain and save the world. If it’s a puzzle game, it’s to get a high score or finish a certain number of levels. Of course, there can be overlap.

What are our victory conditions?

Like the rules of the game, these aren’t written out for us, aside from Scripture. C.S. Lewis once said that if a ship is at sea, it needs to know three things. Those are how to stay afloat, how to avoid hitting other ships, and why it’s out there in the first place. I still remember the first time I heard that.

I heard the first two and those made sense, and yet the last one was the most important one really and I hadn’t thought about that as something to think about. You have a lot of people today who are health enthusiasts and want to live a long and healthy life. There is plenty of information out there about how to do that, but where is the information on why to do that?

What about money issues? Plenty of people will teach you how to save money so that when you are in your senior years, you can have enough to live on. What is not taught is why you should want that in the first place. This is not to say that people don’t have reasons for wanting health and wealth, but how many people think about what those reasons are?

We who are Christians need to think about this also. Is our goal just getting to Heaven? Then you have the question of why not become a Christian and just kill yourself? Why not just do evangelism by converting people and then killing them immediately so they can get there? Internet atheists are rightly answering this kind of theology with questions like this.

After all, the going to Heaven goal gives us something to die for, but really not much to live for. If you think this world is just going to be destroyed, why bother trying to save it and take care of it? Someone like myself looks at the world and sees the darkness and does my best to say “Challenge accepted.” I was talking with someone within the past week about our city of New Orleans and told him that our city does have huge problems with realities like crime, but that just gives us a chance to shine all the brighter.

If we are playing a game and playing it to win, we need to think about these questions. How do we play it right and what are we playing it for? Without these, we will be less than valuable players. We might even lose the game.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Life Is A Game Walkthrough Part 5

What kind of game are we playing? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I’m returning to my look at Edward Castronova’s book Life Is A Game, seeing as it was highly influential on my Defend Talk. At this point, he is asking what kind of game we are playing. We are going to be looking at three main categories, materialist, subjectivist, or objectivist.

For a materialist game, everything in this game is matter in motion. Suppose you see a drowning child and you jump in the water to pull them to safety. Did you do a good act? Not really. You are matter in motion jumping in to save matter in motion and goodness is not a material property inherent in the matter in motion. If there is any goodness, it doesn’t come from the situation itself.

Actually, Hume would agree with this. Good or evil are often ideas that we throw on the events that we see. We read them into the event instead of reading them out of the event. In a materialist universe, it is not real. I do understand that atheists and other materialists do have arguments for why they think moral truths are real and objective. I just find them all so far lacking.

What about a subjectivist game? In this, we make it up as we go along. There is no real game, but we act as if there is. The closest analogy that comes to mind is Calvinball. Calvinball in the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip is supposed to be the game that has no rules.

To be fair, many of us can make up games for us to do on our own when we get bored. Many a family on a long car trip, including my own, did the game of trying to find cars from different states in the country and seeing how many you could find. Children with imaginations make up games quite easily. In essence, most every game we have here to some extent is made up. Chess is not built into the fabric of the universe.

That being said though, once the rules of a game are made, one cannot change them willy-nilly. You cannot sit down to play a game of chess and suddenly decide that your bishops can move horizontally in the middle of the game. Now if you and your opponent want to make up some artificial rules to change the game, you can, but they must be agreed upon.

However, subjectivism doesn’t work because we can’t just make everything up and if we make everything up, we can make up the outcomes to. There is no risk. There is no real way to lose. Besides that, there are aspects of the game we cannot change. No matter how much you protest, 2 + 2 will still equal 4 and no amount of complaining will change that.

This leaves us with an objectivist game. There is something real to what we are doing. There is also something that is real beyond us. This game is not just something material as there is real good and real evil out there.

How do we play this game then and what is the goal? That’s for another time.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Playing To Win

What if this is a game? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I’ve been speaking about my talk at Defend 2023 lately and the research I have done as a result has been fascinating to me. For those who don’t know, we had to bring in chairs for people to sit in during my talk and at the end, an organic discussion broke out among the audience. Something about this topic really hits home and connects people.

Why?

Before the talk, I went to the Unbelievable? facebook group and I asked participants to talk about a time they were emotionally moved by a game. Now in most threads there, you will see a lot of antagonism towards others. It’s Facebook. It happens. Atheists and Christians and everyone in between don’t always get along.

I didn’t see any of that here. If someone didn’t say explicitly and I didn’t know, I wouldn’t have been able to tell who was who since everyone was getting along amicably and sharing together their experiences.

I don’t count that as a bad thing.

But why was it happening?

Then I thought about being at a seminary and how our semesters go. You can remember this from your schooling times even if it was never higher education. You would often learn and study hard for that test, take it and pass, and then you would gradually just forget everything. Why? You never used it. It was never relevant. I love math and I enjoyed my math classes, but that doesn’t mean I can tell you how to do quadratic equations off the top of my head.

However, I do have two experiences from 6th grade I remember. One was instead of Math, I took computer keyboarding and used Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and learned to type in that class. Today, I still maintain that skill and I can type about 80 words per minute.

I also remember free time in my Social Studies class which was also a lot of geography. I remember going to the GeoSafari system and I knew my state capitals already and so I decided to do the game to learn the South American capitals. I still remember a lot of them to this day.

And how did I know my state capitals? We played a game in the class regularly in 5th grade to see how well we knew the state capitals. We had a map of the states on the wall. Two students would see who could identify which state got hit with the teacher’s pointer first and the winner would progress. It was the goal to see who could have the longest streak.

Then I compared this to growing up gaming. You know how many times we failed at a game and yet we got up and tried time and time again? I learned a lot of perseverance with that. I played RPGs where you had to save up money to get the best equipment and I would regularly not progress forward until I had all the money I needed to buy what I wanted. You know what? To this day, I’m still a money saver and I try to get the most out of every penny.

As long as I can remember also, I have had good versus evil built in me. My DivorceCare leader explained it to my parents. I have played games all my life. I want the real adventure. The fantasy adventures I go on are meant to build in me a yearning and a desire to seek the real adventures, and that is the result.

Also when we were growing up, we didn’t have the internet. I didn’t have that until I was in high school. Want to know how to beat a boss or find a secret in a game? You have to go with word of mouth, read it in a magazine, write to Nintendo themselves, buy a strategy guide, etc. Did you hear that rumor about Mew being under that truck in Pokemon? Many people tried many rumors to see what was true and what was not. You couldn’t just go to GameFaqs or you couldn’t just watch a YouTube video.

In other words, we worked at play.

This isn’t just me either. Paul says the same thing in 1 Cor. 9. Every runner trains, but only one gets the prize. People training for the Olympics of their day would work to no extent to be the best. There were great rewards for them after all. They had great honor and sometimes their could be tax exemptions for them and their people as a result.

We still have similar today. People that want to be good at sports work really hard. I have heard that Michael Phelps swam several several hours every day and ate well over 10,000 calories a day to keep up.

Today, fans can be the same way. There are fans that know pretty much every statistic about the sports teams that they watch. I don’t understand this honestly. I think it’s foolish, but they probably think the same about my interest. I still remember Peter Kreeft saying sometimes he fears he’s a bigger Red Sox fan than he is a Jesus fan.

We had a speaker at Defend saying about our faith that what we are doing is not a game. I suspect the implication was “Therefore, take it seriously.” I get what he was saying, but here’s the problem. It’s often the things that we don’t really enjoy that we don’t take seriously.

I shared this on my wall last night and was told there are already people working on this and it’s called Gamifying. This is where we use the principle that game makers have learned on how people want challenges and to succeed and they will take on a big challenge if they think the payoff is worth it. As Thomas Sowell has said, it’s all about tradeoffs.

So what if we treated it this way? What if evangelism became a quest, a quest for the glory of God and He does promise a reward. Why would He promise a reward unless He wanted us to pursue that reward? Jesus regularly points to our own self-interest. What we do brings glory to God, but we benefit as well.

There’s a saying that if you enjoy what you do, you never work a day in your life. Think back to what was likely the best job you ever had, or maybe you have it now. Why is it the best? Is it because the pay is really great or the benefits are really good? How about this? It’s the best job you’ve ever had because you enjoy what you do.

I would honestly prefer a job with less money where I enjoyed my work than a job with more money where I hated my work. I suspect I am not alone. Work is something that we also do for fulfillment. We want to make a difference in what we do and if workers think they’re replaceable cogs in a machine, rightly or wrongly, they will not work as well.

What if we made our education enjoyable? I remember my first semester in Greek in Bible College and I did really well. What do I remember most? We had a computer program that was a game of sorts and I being a perfectionist wanted to get perfect on every single section of that program. I would not move on until I could do perfect three times in a row in every lesson.

Guess what? I did well in that class.

This could be especially so for men who love to compete for the most part. I am also remembering again in 6th grade that in my science class I had the top average for the first 6-week period. That kept happening and then the teacher gave an assignment so that you could increase your class average by 20 points. Did I need that to pass? Nope. Did I take that task on even though I didn’t need to? You bet I did. Why? Because I wanted to keep up my top average all year long, and I did just that.

So ultimately, this is all asking why do we do what we do and what can we do to make us want to do more of what we ought? For myself, if there’s something I enjoy a lot, it is a good debate. I have had gaming sessions when I lived with my parents where I had my laptop right next to me and then someone would respond to me on Facebook in a debate and I would pause immediately and jump in. As much as I enjoy gaming, I enjoy a good intellectual exchange even more.

I contend also that Christianity promises us this great adventure and this adventure extends even into eternity. Eternity is not the end. It is if anything the glorious beginning for us. I don’t know what work we will do in eternity, but we will do it, and we will enjoy it.

So the speaker here said this isn’t a game. I know what he meant, but I want to contend the opposite. This is one. You have to play it, but you better play it well.

When we have that excitement about the game and that this actually has a purpose and there is a great benefit, I think we can actually take it more seriously. I know when I have a big debate coming up, I certainly spend a lot of time reading on the topic and usually much more than for other things because I willingly take on the debate and can see immediately what the serious ramifications are. I know I will be before an audience and I want to do well.

So could this all be a great game the creator has made for us? Perhaps it is, and if so, we had better play it well. He does not allow any do-overs, cheat codes, or anything like that. (Although I hear he left us a great strategy guide.)

We are on the ultimate adventure. The plot is far better than any we could have dreamed up because God Himself is beyond it. There is no greater good in this world worth fighting for and if need be, worth dying for.

Play this game well. It is worth it.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

More on Quests

Do we need quests to survive? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I’m still writing about my presentation at Defend 2023 where I talked about video games and Christianity. Yesterday on my wall I wrote about the need for quests. Quests are goals that we have set for ourselves and seek to go out and accomplish. These could be simple goals that we can call our routine, such as brushing teeth and hair, showering, or other goals, like my going to talk to someone about auto insurance today or how I read X amount of certain books on my Kindle.

When it comes to games, quests can keep us coming back easily and give us incentive to keep going. Games tend to become less enjoyable after the quests have been completed. Sometimes, this happens so much that players make artificial quests.

This is also why some game systems have achievements in their games. A completionist is someone who often tries to complete every achievement in a game, though some of them are just impossible to do. I mean literally impossible. If you had an achievement about pre-ordering a game and it’s already out, sorry. You can’t get that one.

An achievement is a way of being told you accomplished something. You did something that was worthwhile. This is often especially so for men who are usually much more insecure than we come across as and who thrive on praise, especially if we have a lady in our lives.

As I thought about this last night, I remembered one time when I was married my in-laws wanted my then wife and I to come over and clean the windows. I remember I got high praise for how I did since I was extremely thorough, practically using a toothbrush and scrubbing every bit of dust I could find. Looking back, I realized it was a quest. I was given a challenge and I wanted to do the best I could.

So why do I not do that at my own home? Because that’s not a quest of mine and there’s no one I’m here trying to please. If I’m fine with the place, that’s good enough for me.

In our day and age, we don’t have quests anymore. When does a boy become a man? For us, it’s when he turns 18. That’s not really an accomplishment. Congratulations. You lived 18 years. Now to be fair, not everyone does, but it happens so often that we count those who don’t an exception.

Maybe one reason our young boys are often acting out and getting in prison or just getting women pregnant and neglecting fatherhood is because they are trying to demonstrate they are men? Could it be we actually could benefit from something like a rite of passage? Could we use something that a man can look back on and say “Yes. I am a man.” Naturally, there are counterparts for the women as well, but if we look in our prisons, most of the inmates are men.

The black family in America is often worse with this as fatherlessness is even more common. A father is often someone who indicates to the boy that he is a man. Without that, the boys will team up with other boys in an effort to become men. Asian families by contrast are often highly family oriented. Perhaps the Asian communities have better ways of establishing maturity.

Quests are our way to go out and do something and prove something and if we know the quest has a purpose, we are often far more willing and do so with more joy. If your quest is just to go to work and you think, rightly or wrongly, that you’re just being given meaningless busy work to do, you won’t care about your job. If you think you’re just a replaceable cog in a machine, why should you care?

And why do we do the work at our jobs? To earn an income. Why? So we can provide for our families. Why? So our children can grow up. Why? So they can do the exact same thing. If we think our lives are just going through motions and doing the exact same thing again and again, we won’t approach our lives with joy.

What about our Christianity? Do we often know what the point is? We often say the goal is to go to Heaven when you die? For most of us, there’s a good amount of time between when we’re born and when we die. What do we do with that time? We tell other people about Jesus so they…..can go to Heaven when they die….

But what about all that time in-between?!

It’s as if we view the gospel as everyone having a disease and the goal is to get them a treatment so they won’t die and then have nothing else for them to do except give everyone else the treatment. What do we do with all this time? What is the quest of Christianity?

It’s one reason I like to talk about the kingdom of God. That changes reality. It’s saying that we are spreading a kingdom and we are in a battle of good versus evil. Now we’re talking. Reality doesn’t just take place when we die. It’s going on right now.

Evangelism is then part of the battle of good versus evil. It is stopping evil from spreading wherever we can. It is us working together as Christians for a common goal to defeat the intruder’s work that came into that garden so long ago. Does that sound bizarre to you? Paul describes frequently in the New Testament such as Ephesians 6 and 2 Cor. 10 the Christian life as one of battle. What is the book of Revelation describing if not a massive war over the souls of men?

The Christian life should be an exciting one. We are all part of a journey, part of the greatest battle between good and evil that can ever be. If we’re gamers, our quests there should remind us of the importance of the quests that go on outside of the games. We are on a quest for the king, and He will reward those who play the game well.

But should we treat this as a game?

Now that’s another post entirely….

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

Life Is A Game Walkthrough Part 3

What is your quest? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

In our continuing look at Edward Castronova’s Life Is A Game, it is time to talk about quests. Quests are something common to a gamer. When I boot up Final Fantasy XIV in the afternoon, I see a series of quests that I can undertake. Some are simple. Some could just involve talking to someone and reporting back. Some could involve exploring a dungeon. Some could involve defeating a powerful enemy.

Gamers know the rule about quests. We can have the ultimate goal of the game overall, but it’s easy to get caught up in sidequests. These are quests that you take that are not essential to the story, but have their own benefits. Often times, the sidequests can be more enjoyable than the ultimate quest.

Sometimes also, the sidequests you can do in light of the situation can get hysterical. I was playing FF XIV and had a scene once where a baby in a skirmish got tossed in a body of water. Normally, the player jumps in immediately and rescues the child, but I had a pop-up for a requested dungeon raid come up then so the child managed to survive for half an hour while I raided a dungeon. Tough kid. In Final Fantasy VII, the meteor heading towards the planet will wait while you’re busy doing chocobo races. Also, sure, Zelda is in trouble, but hey, Link wants to go fishing!

Quests give us meaning and purpose. We want to have something that we are aiming for. C.S. Lewis once said that a ship on the water needs to know three things. First off, how to stay afloat. Second, how to avoid hitting other ships. Third, why it is out there in the first place.

Quests give us a purpose to be out there in the first place. Some quests we have involve small goals. You might have a quest to do laundry today or to go to the grocery store and pick up some items. You might not think of these as quests, but they are. You have a goal that you need to accomplish and you set out to do what it takes to accomplish that goal.

Some quests are much more long-term. As a student at a seminary, I have a goal of getting my Master’s and eventually a Ph.D. I also have a goal right now of meeting a good Christian girl and getting married. On the way, there can be several other minor quests on the goal of these quests.

You won’t go on a date unless you ask the girl out. On my end, I am also currently speaking to a therapist here at the seminary who is helping me with social relationships for the goal so I can learn to be social and interact with people better. It’s super difficult if you are on the spectrum. That’s a quest to get me to this quest.

To get the degree, I must pass the class. To pass the class, I must do the assignments. That means going to the library and reading the books. (And if anyone is feeling generous….)

Ultimately, something that has to be asked is what is my overall ultimate quest. Link’s is normally to rescue Zelda and defeat Ganon, again. (Though technically, based on the timeline, it is a different Link every time. If you don’t understand, it’s okay. No one really understands the Zelda timeline.) In Final Fantasy VII, it’s to stop the meteor and defeat Sephiroth.

For us, part of the idea of the game of life is we have to figure out our ultimate quest. What are we here for? What do we want to accomplish? Everyone wants to accomplish something. What is our goal? Earn the most money? Have the most fun? Be a good person? Some combination? What drives us?

If we want to play the game well, we need to find out. Otherwise, we could be questing for nothing.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Life Is A Game Walkthrough Part 2

What position will we take in the game? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

We’re continuing our look at Edward Castronova’s book Life Is A Game and looking at how games are lived out. He writes that if he saw a Buddhist who was drunk, he would not criticize his devotion to his teacher, but he would question how seriously he took his teaching. After all, Buddhism does say a lot about self-control.

The same could be said about Christians, naturally, and yet this is something that needs to be kept in mind. When non-Christians want to bash Christianity because they see Christians living inconsistent lives, such as being heavily promiscuous, then that doesn’t say anything about Christianity. It says something about that particular “Christian.” (The person could really be fooling themselves into thinking they are a Christian.) If you see a Buddhist not living out his Buddhism, then that tells you nothing about Buddhism. It tells you a lot about the Buddhist.

When we choose a worldview, we are choosing how we play the game. We are choosing a position that we think best describes the game that has been created. When you play a real video game, you could debate what kind of worldview it exists in. Not all will be screaming something, as it could be hard to tell what worldview Tetris could be in, but what about a series like Final Fantasy? In this world, it is taken as perfectly “natural” that gods, magic, and stupendous beasts exist. Also often in these games, that good and evil exist is a given.

As a gamer also, I never really got bothered by the problem of evil which is brought up. Evil is something that since it is in the game often provides something for us to rise above, for us to conquer. If you’re a fan of mysteries, you understand this also. You read wanting to know who the bad guy is and in the end, how he gets tracked down and stopped.

This is not to say that evil is good, but we do realize it as a challenge for us all and we need a good worldview to conquer evil. Not only that, we need a good worldview to tell us that evil is real and that the fight is winnable. Somehow, many of us do have that idea that it is winnable.

If you read a book and in the end, the bad guys win and that’s it, it seems like there is a problem with the book. Somehow, we anticipate that no matter what is going on, the good guys will win. There can be a hint of anxiety in us at times watching a show or movie or playing a game and wondering “Will this last-ditch effort really work?” It does, and we are relieved, but not always surprised.

So in conclusion at this part, what do we learn? We learn that to defeat evil, we need a worldview that can be lived fairly consistently at least, as humans tend to fail to some degree at everything and that includes our worldview. We also need a worldview that tells us that evil is a reality and explains its place in our world. Finally, we need one that can show us that evil can be defeated and there is hope.

We’ll discuss more next time.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Life Is A Game Walkthrough Part 1

Are we playing a game? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Spoiler warning for the old game Final Fantasy Legend ahead. It’s an old Gameboy game, but if you are planning on playing on an emulator or something, skip this part.

Your party in Final Fantasy Legend has climbed a tower twice that is said to lead to paradise, defeating the fiends of Gen-Bu, Sei-Ryu, Byak-Ko, and Su-Zaku, as well as their leader Ashura. (Fans of mythology should recognize those names.) There was a trap the first time going up so the party had to do it again and fight the first four of those fiends again, until they got to the top again.

This time, they seem to enter a peaceful and serene area where there doesn’t seem to be much of anything, except for one man, standing in front of a door.  They talk to him to find out he is the Creator and they were the first to finish the game. It was a game he made because people didn’t know what courage and determination meant so he created Ashura to see what they would do. He wants to reward the party and grant them a wish.

The party is indignant upon hearing this insisting that he used them. Eventually, it’s clear they’re picking a fight with him and so the party fights the creator. In the end, they win, and rather than go through the door, they choose to return to their world. (How much I wish we could get a story that would show what was beyond that door.)

THOSE WANTING TO AVOID SPOILERS CAN RESUME HERE.

What if our world also was a game? Granted, there are differences, as contrary to Isaiah 45:7 as read by fundy atheists, God did not create evil. However, He did allow it. My thoughts on this come from reading Edward Castronova’s book, Life Is A Game, which I heard about on a podcast on God and Gaming with two hosts, one being a Catholic priest, who both love gaming and they have Catholics on there who are in the game industry and Castronova was one of them.

He looks at game design and says “What if God created the universe like we create a game?” It’s an interesting hypothesis and I am going through it and in that spirit, rather than call this a book plunge, I will call it a walkthrough. This is one of those books that I am highlighting every night something I read that I find relevant. I am not just learning a lot about the world around me, but I also think I’m learning about myself and so many times I read something and I think “I can relate to that! I didn’t know there was a name for that!” By the way, I’m not even 20% through the book.

So let’s start with RPGs. These are my favorite genre of games. In these, one assumes the role of a character and makes decisions as him (or her) and really seeing the world through their eyes. Castronova says that these have shown us that people want to be heroes and have their lives matter and go on quests. (Another area that shows this I think is the rise of the superhero genre) It’s common in the world of RPGs for a player to spend 20-40 hours a week on one game. Consider how many people made plans suddenly when The Legend of Zelda: The Breath of the Wild came out. In Japan, there are laws on when a Dragon Quest game can come out because everyone takes off to play it.

Now we can look at this and say “What is wrong with our society in that people are wanting to spend so many hours playing a game?” or we can say “People are spending so many hours playing a game? Why?” Obviously, it is meeting some desire in the lives of those people, but is it just a desire to have fun?

Probably not just that, because while gaming is fun, there is also the reality of what is known as rage quitting. People get super frustrated because they can’t seem to beat that one level. Many times it’s common to throw one’s controller and just march off in a huff, and yet so many times we come back. Why?

What if we saw this not as a problem, but rather as a clue? Could it be possible that game design could tell us about the human condition? What if we did see the world as a game? Could that give us any insights into the nature of reality? Is this also a novel idea to see it this way?

And what is the purpose of play? Something to consider is play is its own end. People do not play so they can work, but we do work so we can play.

And how does this relate to our everyday theology and life? Is this part of the reason sometimes men hate going to church? Could seeing life as a game make us want to go deeper into understanding God?

I plan on exploring these questions as I go through this book. I don’t know how long it will take, and I also do not plan on blogging next week as I have the Defend conference going on. I hope you’ll be there, but if you can’t, I hope you’ll join me as we explore answering if life could be a game.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

Book Plunge: Grand Theft Childhood

What do I think of Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson’s book published by Simon and Schuster? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I heard about this book while going through The Gaming Mind on Audible. Making a mental note, I went to my library website and ordered it. I’m thankful that I did. This has been an amazing read on the alleged link between video games and violence in children.

This is not a book written from a Christian perspective, at least explicitly. The authors do not state their worldview. However, the authors have interacted with the material they critique and have also included snippets of interviews they have done with children and their parents.

To which, a lot of that information should be encouraging to parents. Older children, for instance, happen to think there are some games that their younger brothers and sisters shouldn’t be playing and they won’t play when those people are around. Surprisingly, something they were often concerned about was swearing. After all, there are a lot of things in a game hard to copy, but swearing isn’t. All you have to do is speak.

Also, something that needs to be said is that many times, children actually do imbibe their parents’ worldviews more than parents realize and learn what to play and not play. Of course, this isn’t across the board, but children are watching and are learning. Quick pro tip here on how parents can better understand what’s going on in the games of their children. Play the games with them and/or talk to them about them. (Yeah. Actual interaction with your children works. Who would have thought?)

The authors also don’t just look at the fact that children play violent games, but often ask why they do. Many times, children say that this actually helps them deal with their anger. In an odd way, that could be saying that rather than cause aggressive behavior in children, video games actually help to alleviate it. Frankly, if there was a strong connection between violent video games and violent children, we would see a lot more violent children.

Also interesting is that if anything, NOT playing video games, especially for boys, could be more of a problematic sign. Remember the Virginia Tech shooter? Something odd his classmates said after about him was, “He never wanted to play video games with us.” Video games are often a tool of social integration and bonding. Kids today get together to talk about games like Pokemon. I started getting more friends in Elementary School and beyond because I had a reputation as being quite good at video games.

The authors also point out that the hysteria over video games has happened over most every new form of media that has come out. Violence and sex in these has never been new. Go back to ancient history? It’s there. Medieval times? Still there. Renaissance and Enlightenment? Yep. What would be an anomaly is a time where such stories did NOT exist.

What about sex in video game? Yep. This is covered. (Odd way of describing it.) Most of us know about Lara Croft and the hope of so many teenage guys to find a nude code to use for her. Now, many games can be even more explicit. Again, this is something that parents need to talk with their children about, but it is not a shock that females are made to be attractive in video games. The Final Fantasy series in X, XII, XIII, and relevant spin-offs from those games all had a protagonist with a very similar look based on what was attractive in Japan at the time.

So when is there a problem? It’s not in the gaming itself. It’s everything around that. If your child is becoming more withdrawn, has a dramatic change in moods, has no or very few friends, and is dropping grades, don’t blame it on the games. The games are often a way of dealing with whatever the real problem is. Find that.

For parents also, the last chapter is all about practical advice for you and it does enforce what I recommend. Play the games with your children, or at least talk about them. Show an interest in them. If the world of the Legend of Zelda means something to your child, find out why. You could get to understand your child better and your child will think they matter when you show interest in what interests them.

If you enjoy gaming and want to deal with criticism, read this book. If you are a parent and you are concerned about your children and video games, read this book. The same applies if you are a teacher or someone in ministry, especially youth ministry.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)