"Video Games aren't sinful, they're just stupid"

Jethiel

Jethiel

Moderator
I know there are differing opinions on this but I love this clip from Pastor Mark. I cannot say that I disagree either...but prefer to think more of the people I play with rather than just the game itself. I am looking for the full sermon to gain the perspective of context as well.

Can't wait to discuss this :)

Mars Hill Church message clip link
 
Mark D has said that a couple of times. The whole sermon is highly recommended too for context. I also can't disagree with him and like you I believe it's about how we play and who we play with. I think we might ruffle Mark's feathers if we said UFC was stupid, but that's another conversation all together. :)
 
I've learned to take a lot of what Driscoll says with a grain of salt. He has some amazing sermons, and there are a few that miss the mark.

Without watching the whole sermon for context, I think he misses an important point - we can use it as a ministry tool to reach out to others. We can use it as a medium to encourage other believers. We can use it to start conversations with the unbelieving masses.

God can use anything He wants to use for His glory. Isn't there a reason that prostitutes, beggars, lepers, shepherds, fishermen and tax collectors are the central people in Jesus' ministry? It wasn't kings. It wasn't the rich. It wasn't military leaders. It wasn't even Jewish religious leaders.

God uses unconventional methods and mediums to get the Word out.
 
[7F]EhUd;415894 said:
I cannot say that I disagree either...
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Oh, I can... but I don't have the time (before going to a wedding in a few hours) to build the necessary post -- a wall of text -- to support my position and prove that video games are not stupid in any way, shape, or form.
 
John you need to watch the whole sermon to see his point it isn't nes that they are stupid but the way people use them is and a waste of God's time.
 
I'm still not convinced. Two of the women in my class at college are former drug addicts. Their backgrounds give them a specific ministry to reach out to. A few weeks ago, I found out that a young adult at church was a WoW player and having trouble dealing with all the stigma, even amongst his friends. He has a pretty weak faith because he was seeing that Christians were judgmental, that they didn't seem to have any fun, etc...

The fact that I dealt with the same issues with my friends and my co-workers gave me an opportunity to draw him in and share my experiences with him. I don't know where it will all go... but I certainly wouldn't have had that opportunity without gaming in my background.
 
The fact that I dealt with the same issues with my friends and my co-workers gave me an opportunity to draw him in and share my experiences with him. I don't know where it will all go... but I certainly wouldn't have had that opportunity without gaming in my background.
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Absolutely agree. I think the point is when gaming takes precedence over God's commands to train our kids in the Lord or work to provide for our family then there is a problem. If we are gaming to shirk our responsibilities as men (or women) .... only God will make it clear to each of us if this is an issue.
 
I would take this to another level and apply it to other giftings and skills as well. God calls us to be His salt and His light in this world. I don't know people's hearts but if they use their talents and God given abilities only for selfish endeavors they fall into this same sort of category. I think the best part about his point actually reinforces how much we need ministry into the gaming world - everyone is seeking a team to join, for a battle to win, for rescuing and being a hero - reminds me so much of John Eldridge's book "Wild at Heart". When we only care about the game then we lose our effectiveness for Christ and we can become the same stereotypical 'time-wasters' that we are hoping to reach out to. If you are like me and are not blessed with an abundance of money then time becomes my most valuable asset to offer God, and I should feel responsible for what I do with that time.

Baseline issue (which has already been mentioned) the human heart is selfish. I want to make sure I am being with and used by Christ in whatever I am doing - be it buying groceries, dealing with customers, playing a video game, etc. My selfish tendency is to do things for myself and not for others or ultimately for Christ.

Obviously I am a gamer and those reading this are as well. Please take this as an encouragement to keep Christ in the center of whatever you do. If you can identify with someone because of the gaming background and/or experiences that is just a stepping stone on the path to show them Christ - so let's use what God has given us and do our best to use it for expanding His kingdom. Likewise if I only let my relationships remain 'game-deep' then I may be just wanting to justify my actions rather than confront them with the Bible.

Here ends my spiritual perspective into my gaming choices. Beyond this there are a great many arguments for why gaming is beneficial (teamwork, problem solving, social interaction, etc) - I'm waiting for John to post towards these points :)
 
Durruck said:
I'm still not convinced. Two of the women in my class at college are former drug addicts. Their backgrounds give them a specific ministry to reach out to. A few weeks ago, I found out that a young adult at church was a WoW player and having trouble dealing with all the stigma, even amongst his friends. He has a pretty weak faith because he was seeing that Christians were judgmental, that they didn't seem to have any fun, etc...

The fact that I dealt with the same issues with my friends and my co-workers gave me an opportunity to draw him in and share my experiences with him. I don't know where it will all go... but I certainly wouldn't have had that opportunity without gaming in my background.
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I also find this extremely helpful and healthy for you to do Randy. I have made some very poor life choices in my past (drugs, alcohol abuse, hiv tests, etc.) and because of how Satan intended to use my choices for ruin, God has allowed me to identify and interact with people as a demonstration of His grace and God's ultimate plan of salvation and how that usually does look in this world (which starts quite messy at times).
 
Alright, alright: take 2.


Preamble notice: I'm not here to argue against Driscoll's sermon. Rather, I'm here to present a case for the value of video games both in the secular arena, as tools for learning and for keeping the mind going, and in the spiritual arena, as the fruit of our God-given heritage. Whether or not you agree with Driscoll when I'm done will be up to you and what you do with my words.

In addition, this post contains original research by me, but you'll have to take my word on it, since I'm too lazy to cite it properly. My sources include J.R.R Tolkien's On Faerie Stories, a few articles from The International Journal of Video Game Studies, and a class taught by Alice Major, Edmonton's former Poet Laureate and "Canada's smartest poet" (she has multiple PhDs in many sciences in addition to being a poet.) I'd recommend looking up any or all of these things, but you'll have a hard time with the last one.


Introduction: Motive and perspective

Okay, so here's where I'm coming from. Driscoll's statement that video games are stupid is actually a statement that video games are unimportant, and so it is tragic that many many Christian men spend their time playing video games instead of changing the world for God.

Under the assumption that video games are unimportant, I agree with Mark's conclusion. What I disagree with is the statement that video games are unimportant. While a video game can be pointless (it's hard to argue that Bejeweled has much of a point,) Video games have the potential -- and often realize this potential -- to be very important and to have great meaning, both on spiritual and on temporal levels.


Road Map

Okay, here's where I'm going on this: I'm going to outline three major areas where video games are important. I'm going to move from the least powerful area to the strongest area of video game value.

I'll start with briefly talking about the practical value of video games as knowledge and intellect tools. Then I will outline a fascinating study of video games in child psychology and video games as poetry, in which I will argue that video games, like other forms of art, are capable of allowing people to "learn the unlearnable." I will move from those "secular" ideas into the idea the Video Games are part of the working out of our spiritual heritage as bearers of the Image of God (!) and how video games both reveal our hunger for God and have the potential to teach spiritual truths. Finally, I will conclude by asking some straight-forward and brash questions about why video games don't do all I say that they can do and how Christians can help -- or hinder -- video games' God-given mission.


This is going to take some time, so I'm posting it in chunks. Try to hold off the heckling till I finish. :)
 
The Practical Value of Video Games

I really don't want to waste a lot of time on this section, but:

Video games have been long known to have several health benefits related to reflexes, and mental dexterity. Video games are now being brought into retirement and nursing homes in order to help aging populations keep their brains active, for example. Joe's posted link on this video sums up a lot of the values of video games. I don't agree with everything she says, but her sections on "what are video gamers learning?" are very good. Video games teach people how to think, how to think quickly, and how to think out of the box. If you believe what this video tells you, then playing video games actually helps to equip men -- including Christian men -- to get off of their butts and change the world.

While video game addiction can be a paralyzing force in a Christian's work in the world, moderate or controlled video game use can actually result in a more effective Christian worker!
 
Video Games are Poetry: Learning the Unlearnable

This is the fun part; this stuff may blow your mind. Unfortunately, it's also hard to source and ground-breaking, so you may just have to take my word on it.

In my last semester of College, I had the opportunity to listen to and talk to Alice Major, Edmonton's former Poet Laureate (2005-2007). A highly intelligent woman, she gave her talk on the incredible value of poetry and other "language arts" -- books, movies, music, and even video games." Here's the short version:

1. A team of researchers at the University of Alberta were studying baby talk. Not how babies talk, but how adults talk to babies. You know, the annoying cutesy-wutesy noises we make when talking to them. "Who's a good boy? You're a good boy." "Do you want num-nums? Yes you do!" The reason these doctors are so interested in baby talk is because it is a world-wide phenomenon. Every known culture group in the world devolves into silly babbling whenever they talk to babies. That is significant because when compared to every other culture in the world, very little of our habits are universal. But baby talk is.

2. Ever thought about how babies learn ideas? Babies routinely conquer and grasp ideas that are "beyond their grasp" and sometimes even beyond the grasp of adults. Their brains forge mental pathways at an astounding rate, creating -- seemingly from nowhere -- synapses for speaking, walking, and even morality. According to the above researchers, baby talk plays a large part in this process.
When Dr. Spock wrote his book saying people should stop speaking to babies in the way that they did, psychologists tracked an alarming learning deficiency in new babies, children, and the resulting adults until his book was debunked.

3. Baby talk has very similar qualities to poetry. Meter, repetition of words and sounds, internal and external rhyming schemes, to name a few. These qualities can cause the messages to become rooted in and easy to be used by the human brain.

4. Poets have been saying for centuries that their poems can change the world and can make it possible for the reader to learn things that are beyond their capability to grasp ideas.

I've had a lot of people give me a blank stare when I say that, so I'll try to unpack it. A determined, healthy individual can do anything they put their mind to, given enough time. But many of us cannot do things because we can't put our minds to them. We don't know the steps required to get to the point of doing them. If you've ever had an unattainable dream to do something you know you can do, but that you can't figure out how to get to the point where you are actually doing it, you know what I mean.

Poets have claimed for centuries that their poems will allow people to actually experience truer love, better lives, more freedom, etc., even when those ideas are impossibly far away and impossible to grasp. If baby talk and poetry both have the ability to help us to forge new, inconceivable ideas, then perhaps the poets are right.

5. Poets, then, have the responsibility to use their craft to try to help people to grasp ideas of how the world could be bettered, how God could truly love us, and how we could truly love each other.

Now, to relate that back to video games. According to the International Journal of Computer Game Research (for those of you who saw my earlier post calling them the International Journal of Video Game Studies, it looks like they changed their name,) a peer-reviewed journal that contains research on video games, in an article called "Video Games have Words, Too", good video games must create specifically different dialogue than people do in the real world. This is because long, drawn out conversations make people bored and destroy the game's immersion.

As a result, good video game dialogues tend to contain qualities such as
meter,
restricted line length,
repetition of words or sounds, and
internal or external rhyming schemes.

In other words, video games contain the ability to allow the player to conceive the inconceivable.

This does open up a huge can of worms, since it brings up the question "what are the games teaching?" I'm not sure how many of you watched Blizzard's 48 minute retrospective, but at one point they do talk about sitting down and getting the values they wanted to convey down pat before creating Starcraft and Diablo. I only hope more companies do this.
 
A Spiritual Heritage: Video Games as product of the Image of God

Here goes! Please don't brand me a heretic until you have read the whole thing :)

In the Beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.

Out of Nothing.

Well, I'm sure it wasn't 100% out of nothing. God must have had an idea worked out first. Creation from Nothing is called ex nihilo. It's supposed to be something more or less unique to God. God speaks into being something that he's dreamed up; it becomes real and is our world.

According to J.R.R. Tolkien, one of Christianity's top 3 fiction authors of the 20th century (says me), humans are also capable of creating ex nihilo.

In his essay On Faerie Stories, Tolkien argues that the imagination allows us to create things out of "nothing."

Now, because we're not God, when we dream something up, we lose it immediately, because we can't create permanent things out of nothing.

What we create are dream worlds. Worlds in which things happen, things are different, characters live out their lives, so on, and so forth.

What is interesting about this theory is that humankind has spent a huge amount of their time since the beginning of the world trying to make their ex nihilo worlds permanent.

We invented stories so we could share our worlds.
We invented pictures so we could show people what they looked like.
We invented books so that our worlds could become portable, more permanent, and independent of the dreamer.
We invented movies so that people could experience them in an immersive way.
We invented video games so that people could interact with them.
We created MMOs so people could live in them.

I'm serious. If I've lost you at this point, let me unpack it a bit.

It shouldn't be surprising that Humans want to emulate their Father. In addition, you shouldn't feel that humans being able to create things from imagination is somehow damaging to God's sovereignty as creator. Actually, the human drive to create our own world gives great glory to God. It shows that humans inherently are drawn to marvel at the glory of creation. In fact, for me, it's one of the greatest evidences of intelligent design and for the existence of a divine creator.


Tolkien also theorized an important use for these worlds. Essentially, when someone reads a book, or sees a movie, or logs onto World of Warcraft, they visit an imaginary "secondary world" (Tolkien's term for our worlds) where they have the capability of learning things from that world. When they get off of the computer, leave the theatre, or close the book, whatever they have experienced or learned stays with them. So, it is possible for these worlds to shape and change us. Actually, it's more or less impossible for these worlds to not shape and change us.

You really can't talk about some weird esoteric theology point without bringing up one of the other "three great Christian fiction writers of the 20th century." So I will. C.S. Lewis said that the value of Art was that it has the ability to get past the "Watchful Dragons" in our minds. What he meant was that people have become accustomed to specifically avoiding thinking about spiritual matters. They watch for spiritual matters and stop listening whenever someone mentions God or Jesus. But, they are defenseless against a charming story about a Lion, a Witch, and a Wardrobe, for example.

Hey, this ties into the above post about teaching the unteachable, right?

Anyway, Tolkien and Lewis both saw the point of human creativity as allowing people to experience (not just "learn) spiritual things. Like that God's grace and mercy exists, or specifically that God's true love, grace, and mercy can actually exist. Video game creators create real worlds where real people can go to experience real experiences.

That's fairly important, although also very scary.
 
And now my brash questions:

1. Do you see video games doing this?

2. If not, why not?

3. Are Christians contributing to video games teaching spiritual truths, or are we supressing them?
 
wait, what? it's over already? I was just getting into it. I have to admit, I especially liked the part about Lewis' idea of getting past the Watchful Dragons. Essentially, he created whole worlds to get past the basic statements and teach.

Quite similar to what Jesus did. When he was asked "who is my neighbor?" he answered with a parable - a short story, if you will - to help the audience decipher the truth on their own (Lk 10:28-37).

But like another parable, we are the wedding guests that have been invited (Mt 22). We have to decide if we will attend or if we will go do something else. I believe, however, that it is actually possible for us to do both at the same time. Jesus has essentially packed us a picnic lunch and sent us out on a journey (Mt 28:10). We get to partake of His communion while we're out doing other things (1 Cor 10:31).

As long as we are not neglecting our responsibilities to God (and subsequently, our family, neighbors, etc), there can be beneficial parts to games, even a way for a dirty Samaritan to reach out to a proud Hebrew in need.
 
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