Month: January 2023

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 7

What kind of freedom do we have? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

As an American citizen who was born here and has thus far never left the country, freedom is a big deal over here. It makes sense. The Pilgrims who came over here came in search of freedom. Our country fought a war in order for us to be free. We are called the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Many of us like freedom, but we don’t think about what it is. In Castronova’s book, we’re going to be looking at two different kinds of freedom. The former is freedom-of or freedom-to. In this, you are free to do what you want, within certain parameters of course. You are free to have an affair with your neighbor if both of you agree. You are not free to murder your neighbor, even if for some reason both of you agreed to this. (Perhaps a convoluted plot involving insurance fraud?)

This is a freedom we’re very big on today. A woman will proclaim proudly that she is free to have an abortion if she wants. If someone wants to do something that the world thinks is foolish, well it’s a free country. You want to go and eat donuts for every meal every day? You can do that.

Freedom like this is saying you are free to do what you want. Many of us value that freedom. However, there is a freedom that takes it a step further.

Aquinas spoke of a freedom where you can do something free from guilty, anxiety, and stress. This is not that you are free to do what you want so much as you are free to want what you do. It’s like the saying about a job. If you like what you do, you never have to work a day in your life.

What does this have to do with the book’s thesis? It has a lot to say about how we can try to cheat the system. Some will try to game reality to get as much as they can while everyone else around them loses. They are free to do this.

However, there are still some rules that cannot be broken. You cannot put $2 in your piggy bank and then $2 more and somehow have $5. You are free to jump off of a building if you want to, but gravity might have a word to say to you when you hit the bottom. You are free to commit some crimes, but your society might have something to say and put you in jail.

This also has something to say about suicide. You are free to do this, but once you do this, the game is over. Dead men do not play any games.

In our world, we often want the former freedom, but think somehow we can escape the consequences. If you sleep around continuously, you should be able to avoid pregnancy and STDs. You should be able to eat whatever you want and live a healthy lifestyle. You should be able to avoid studying and still be able to ace all the classes that you have. You should be able to be a deadbeat employee and still be kept on board and get a raise.

Such freedom doesn’t really exist. Every choice has consequences. There are tradeoffs with every decision that we make. Some are minor and inconsequential. Some are huge with major consequences.

This means that we have to choose how we will play the game very carefully. We can play as if we think we are an exception to the rules, but reality is under no requirement to comply to that. If we try to go against reality, and I contend that with transgenderism and the redefinition of marriage our society is very much doing that, reality will eventually come back and hit us hard.

We can say God is loving, and that is true, but even love does not mean freedom from consequences. Most of us have been in a position where being loving to someone seemed to be very unloving at the time, perhaps to both of us. It meant letting them suffer with a bad decision. Parents have to do this regularly.

Not only that, we suffer from the bad decisions of others. None of us is immune to suffering. For we who are Christians, it’s extremely arrogant for us to think the Son of God was not spared the worst suffering when He walked the Earth, but somehow we will get a free pass.

I would that every day I could tell you all that I am not divorced, but every day I have to face that reality and it still stings every day. However, under freedom, I have a choice on how to respond to it and my choice is to do my best to live every day and overcome whatever led to that horrible event and work towards my goal of remarriage. It would be great if I lived in a world where I am understood and I don’t have to learn all these social skills that I don’t get at all and seem pointless, but such is not the world I live in.

If I am to play the game well, I need to understand how it works and so do you. This is where our worldview thinking comes into the picture. If we choose the wrong worldview, then we will suffer for it. If Christianity is true and we live like atheism is true, then there are consequences. If atheism is true and we live like Christianity is, then there are consequences. We all must weigh out those consequences and go beyond more than just a strong feeling or hope that one of those is true.

I still choose the Christian side to this day since I am convinced that is where the evidence of reality points, but I know there are still consequences. I have to live a certain way. There are things I can want to do but I cannot do because of the decisions I make. This is something everyone has to decide. Say what you will about Pascal’s Wager, but every one of us has to make it somehow. We all have to say this is how I’m going to believe reality works and I will live accordingly.

However, we have the added difficulty that we don’t agree how the game is played. A few weeks ago, I had a get together over here that involved playing Super Smash Brothers Ultimate. While we all had varying skill levels, we all knew there were rules to the game and it had to be played a certain way. We could have made some artificial rules, such as my being handicapped somehow, but we would have agreed on those.

Our society can be difficult today because we have many vastly different views on how the world works and how to function in it. There are people today who still live as if the world is in a past era and that if you just say what the Bible says, everyone will agree with it. There are some like myself who agree with Scripture, but knows that not everyone else does and you need to be able to make a case from multiple fronts. There are some who think it’s just a book of fairy tales with perhaps some good bits on living, but nothing to live your life by.

And we all have to live together somehow.

This makes freedom hard, but this is how we are all playing the game. Every day we get up and face reality, we agree that we will play. Our job at the start is to find out how we think the game is to be played and do so to the best of our ability. We are free to do as we please to an extent, but hopefully, we will be free from guilty, worry, and stress, and live our lives enjoying what we do.

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)

 

My Defend Talk

So how did my talk at Defend 2023 go? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I was a last-minute addition to the conference giving a talk on video games and Christianity. I do remember I slept the night before, but I was nervous, which I was assured was normal. A regular speaker at the conference told me he always gets nervous before every talk and if you’re not, then there’s something wrong.

So my talk is scheduled for Thursday at 2. I had told Paul Copan I would be leaving his plenary a little bit early so I could go to the room to get ready and he thanked me for letting him know that. I went to the room and got everything set up, including my powerpoint, and I had three videos I played also during the talk for added effect.

One thought I had had was “Would anyone really show up?” Fortunately, I saw a couple of people come in and so that at least meant some people were interested. However, I soon found out that I had nothing really to be concerned about. People were interested in this topic.

Considering the size of the room, this was a full crowd. What about those people sitting on the sides? That’s because we had to bring in chairs for people to sit in eventually. It wasn’t just college age kids. There were several people in there, even ones who don’t really play video games themselves.

Fortunately, my powerpoint presentation worked well. I had mentally timed out how things would go and they went quite well. Something that surprised me when I was doing this research was that it touched on areas I had not thought that I would touch on. Obviously, this talk would be about topics like violence in video games and sexism and things like that. Right? Nope. Those were just side issues I gave references for at the end.

I ended up quoting John Cassian and Aquinas talking about acedia, known as the noon-day demon. This was a sort of boredom that came from life and how this is one reason we need quests in our lives. This is something I’ve been writing a lot on while reviewing Life Is A Game.

All of this was exciting to go through, but this isn’t even the best part so far. The best part was when Q&A came. Now normally, this is always the best part of any talk. However, something happened in my session that I had not seen happen in any other session. This is not to say it didn’t, but I had been in a breakout session whenever possible and I had not seen this take place.

It started with a guy who had a question saying that he was really good at a game called Apex and he could go professional or he could be a youth minister and should he do the fleshly thing and go with a lot of money or go with a calling. Now I do question the idea of callings like this, but the first thing I said was “Why assume going for a job that pays well to be fleshly?”

Soon, someone else spoke up and talked about what a good influence he could be in the world of Apex if he went that way and that’s when I was able to sit back and oversee a lot of what happened, but I realized what was going on was incredible. Organic discussion. The people in the class were interacting with one another’s questions and sharing their own experiences. For me, that is the best indication that it went well.

I did also stress this is an area that needs more research and I suspect I will do a lot of that. One point I pointed out is that I did an Amazon search for a book discussing if Christianity is fun. How many books are written on that topic? None. At least I didn’t find them.

There are 3.2 billion gamers in the world today. That’s 40% of the population. We need to reach them for Christ. Shouldn’t we understand them?

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