Where’s The Love? — The Church and Games

With Valentine's Day almost upon us, I find myself reflecting on relationships. Before marriage, Valentine's was usually a downer for me. For every pleasant memory, there were a hundred frustrating ones. Most years, I found myself pining over a relationship I wished I had and longing for that special someone to look in my direction and smile. In many ways, my adolescent relationships are like the church's relationship with games—lacking.

So what's the problem? Where are the sparks? I think Frank Lantz concisely summarizes the reasons why some people don't "get" games. In the introduction to The Beauty of Games, he writes, "One hope I have for this book is that it might help make the world of games less confusing to those on the outside, people who may be aware that something big and important is going on here but for whom the whole enterprise is a noisy mess, an explosion in a cartoon factory, a childish, bloody domain on pointless obsessions and wasted energy."

Childish Distractions 

Could it be that the church sees games as childish? Frank admits they can be seen that way. I remember many young women citing childishness as the primary reason for not liking particular boys during those awkward teenage years. From personal experience, I've heard multiple preachers point to Paul's description of putting away childish things to admonish young men to put away their video games and become men. It seems like a possibility for some in the church—never mind the bits about becoming like a child to enter the kingdom and having child-like faith.

A Tool of the Devil

Violence, blood, swearing, sex, demons—you can find all that and more in games. Why? Because art reflects life. Are games a tool of the devil? They have been called that by numerous well-meaning believers. For the sake of argument, I'll concede that the devil has used video games as a tool to harm. But I have an honest question: What hasn't he used as a tool? The way I see it, the devil is in a knockdown drag out right with humanity, and he is picking up anything and everything he can get his hands on to whack us with it. And if games are a tool, we know they can also be used for good, just like Mr Rogers used television to reach millions of children with God's love.

I've repeatedly heard those first two reasons through the years, and they are getting pretty stale. Nonetheless, the following reasons are newer arguments, which I've only encountered recently and find quite compelling, so stay with me!

Work > Play

In the thoughtfully constructed video, Why Aren't There Any Good Christian Games?, Moony argues that there is a fundamental conflict between the Protestant Work Ethic and play. "Play is seen as secondary in value to work and service.", writes Brian Edgar in The God Who Plays. Not only is it secondary in value, but at some point, the theology gets so contorted that there becomes no room for play because it's viewed as lousy stewardship.

Brian illuminates how confused this line of thinking is, "This connection between work, rest, and play is something that is often lost in the life of the church, which is a tragedy as the play takes one's relationship with God beyond doing, having, and achieving and takes one into enjoying, appreciating, and sharing. It emphasizes the creative life rather than merely the productive one and the aesthetic life rather simply the ethical one."

Inappropriate Freedom

Moony also touches on this last problem: the presumed conflict between Calvinistic predestination and freedom. If an all-knowing God knows everything about you, including your eternal future, how can we have free will? And if we do have free will, it needs to be constrained.

Brian Edgar writes, “One problem was that it was associated with what was seen as an inappropriate level of human freedom. Play is necessarily open-ended and subject to chance, the whims of participants, and the results of various explorations that take place as the game progresses. Play generally has a high level of freedom and, for some, this seems to run counter to a theology in which everything is predestined.”

Those are four possible reasons the church is indifferent to games; there are probably more. I don't have a definitive answer, but it's an important question. It's important to me for a lot of the same reasons why Frank Lantz wrote his book, which I quoted at the beginning:

One hope I have for this book is that it might help make the world of games less confusing to those on the outside, people who may be aware that something big and important is going on here but for whom the whole enterprise is a noisy mess, an explosion in a cartoon factory, a childish, bloody domain on pointless obsessions and wasted energy. I want this book to give people like that a window into this world and help them understand what's happening here, why some people find games deeply beautiful, and why the particular way in which they are beautiful may be historically and culturally important.