Completely Unfair
That’s not fair!
If you are a parent, you hear this a lot. As a kid, I said the same thing. Heck, even as a forty-five-year-old adult, I still have that thought even if I don’t verbalize it as often.
As image bearers of God, we have this sense of justice woven into our beings. Our souls yearn for justice and equity because we serve a just God (Isaiah 30:18) who loves justice (Isaiah 61:8) and shows no partiality (Romans 2:11). And yet, we live in a world that echoes, “Life’s not fair, kid.”
It’s true. Life this side of The Fall isn’t fair. That is plain to see. We live in the in-between and do our best to hold the tension while working to bring God’s Kingdom into this present world, which includes the work of justice.
Isaiah 1:17 instructs us, “Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.”
“A just balance and scales are the Lord’s; all the weights in the bag are his work.”
As Christians, we are about the work of justice and equity. As game developers, we do this in our own unique way by crafting pleasurable experiences and spaces grounded in equality and fairness. Games are places of respite from an unfair world. It is one of games’ superpowers. Players know that for a brief time, they can occupy a fair environment, where the injustices of our world are stopped at the door.
It is a sacred, unspoken agreement entered into between players and designers. We (players) will give you (designers) some of our valuable time, attention, and possibly money for the opportunity to spend time in a fair, logical, rule-based, and, hopefully, compelling (fun) experience. And to uphold our end of the bargain as game designers and developers, we incorporate concepts like game balance, progression, and difficulty curves. We spend hours considering things like random number generators (RNG) and iterating on algorithms for things like matchmaking. We undersize colliders from the art to ensure the visual clarity of collisions. All of this (and much more) is in the service of fairness and to prevent the player from ever feeling cheated.
The more I think about it, that last part—feeling cheated—is the heart of it. We don’t actually want fairness; we want to avoid injustice and the feeling of being cheated. Our world tends to use the words “fair” and “just” interchangeably, but there are subtle differences—“fair” means treating everyone equally, while “just” means treating everyone appropriately.
The wild thing is, if you stop and think about it, our God is completely unfair. Oh, He’s undeniably just; there’s no question about that. But fair? No. And it’s the best news in the world!
Pastor Chris Brown said, “You better hope and pray to God he never treats you fairly.” If God treated us fairly and gave us what we deserved, we would be toast! Without the gift of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross and this thing called grace, we would forever be cast as God’s enemies. “God will never be less than fair,” continues Chris, “but he has the right to more than fair.”
As a game designer, I want to adopt God’s approach to fairness: never less than fair, but reserving the right to be more than fair. If you’re interested in exploring just how unfair God can be, then I recommend watching this sermon by Chris Brown. It blessed me, and I promise it’s worth your valuable time.
