Tag: First-person shooters

A Question on Violence and Gaming

How do I answer an objection like this? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Since I have a YouTube channel dedicated to gaming and theology, a niche I saw very few people addressing, it’s not to be a surprise when someone shoots me a question. A husband and wife I am good friends with wanted to ask me one. It goes as follows and I am quoting:

So I was wondering something based on your work with video games. I have an acquaintance from a Christian group who has a Twitch account streaming video games. (This person prides himself on being a conservative Christian and has been on his wife for being too theologically liberal). He invited some of us to tune in and I checked it out. He was playing a game I’d never heard of called “Resident Evil”. Within 30 seconds, I heard over the top vulgar language and saw a character being tortured to death. Is this the kind of game that’s common among the Christian gaming community?

Good question.

Now at the start, I have never played Resident Evil, though I am trying to get into Bioshock because of the rich philosophical themes, not because I just enjoy first-person shooters. However, I did really enjoy Goldeneye back in the day. Everyone did.

That doesn’t mean I don’t know about Resident Evil and have never seen gameplay about it. However, when I hear at the start that there was torture and vulgar language, I don’t stop immediately. It’s easy to make a hard and fast rule, but two things give me pause.

As I told them, when I was in high school, I remember being in English and the teacher showed us a movie. We had to watch it in more than one class as it was a long movie, but I do remember we saw full nudity in women. You could see a woman in a bed completely topless. I remember there was a lot of violence. People were being killed constantly. There were then scenes with several women totally nude. Keep in mind I didn’t grow up in a liberal area. I grew up in the Bible belt.

However, I bet most children in the class that if they went home and said they had watched this movie, their parents would not be concerned. They would ask what they thought. It would lead to a good discussion. I’ll go further. If I ever get blessed with children, I will want them to watch this movie one time at least when they are old enough.

The movie was Schindler’s List.

If you have a hard and fast rule against anything like what was described in the question above, you will be prone to miss this movie, and yet it is a classic. It points to a great period of evil in our history and something we need to talk about. If you look at the women who are nude and just think about sex, you have a serious problem.

Lately also, I have seen people saying that if we object to Drag Queens and certain books in our schools, then we should object to the statue of David. After all, he is fully nude. The difference here is that the intent of David is not to be sexual, but to show the glory of the human body. It is not to sexualize David. The intent of porn and many of these books is to sexualize.

Another reason this gives me pause is because I think of what skeptics say, especially about the book of Judges. Consider Judges 19 where you have a gang rape take place and then the body of the victim is cut into pieces and sent to the tribes of Israel. Skeptics ask how something this awful can be included in the Bible.

Yet this whole section is also about how wicked Israel was at the time and the consequences of living in an ungodly society when there was no godly king. It is not to celebrate the time. It is to say “Don’t be like this time!”

Thus, when it comes to these games, I make no hard and fast rule for the most part. If it leads you to sin, don’t do it. If it doesn’t, then the only thing to really consider is how other people might see it. That should be kept in mind.

Some people might play Resident Evil (RE) because they enjoy the gameplay and they enjoy the puzzle solving and the skill involved in playing a shooter game. That doesn’t mean that these people will become mass shooters.

Some people will point to school shooters, but many of these actually did not play video games. An example of this is the shooting at Virginia Tech where the student was known for not playing games. It could be this made him an outsider to the culture of people who were gamers and thus could actually be a warning sign.

If first-person shooter games were the cause of these kinds of violent outbreaks, then we would expect that there would be far more outbreaks than there are. There aren’t. The overwhelming majority of people who play these games will never kill anyone with a gun in real life.

I read a book on audio recently that talked about a lady named Daphne Maurer who was doing research on vision and at the university was looking for some guinea pigs for the tests. The only people there were the video gamers in the computer lab because, well, nerds hang out at the university. These people were playing first-person shooters and when given the vision tests, they aced them incredibly.

What Maurer found over time was that people who played these games consistently tend to have better vision. After all, you have to survey a whole area and watch for any movement and know it well and you have to be able to get a shot in quickly if a target shows up and quickly identify if they are a friend or a foe. These people learned how to do that.

Ultimately, and this said in light of the very recent school shooting in Nashville, the problem is actually not the guns. The old saying is true. Guns don’t kill people. People do. They will use any weapon whatsoever. At the start of Bioshock, your main weapon is a wrench. The largest mass killings done in America were done with planes and with trucks with fertilizer.

The problem is us. We are sinful people. The sexual revolution has especially raised the breakdown of the family where those good moral beliefs were supposed to be taught. Many of us who are gamers like myself want to avoid real-life violence. I will break to avoid hitting a squirrel while driving. If anything, a lot of us want to overcome evil. Edward Snowden even said his exposing of government surveillance came from playing video games.

There are plenty of good books on this. I recommend Moral Kombat: Why The War On Violent Video Games is Wrong and Grand Theft Childhood. I ultimately contend that the best solution is to restore the value of human life and to restore the family and undo the sexual revolution.

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

Book Plunge: Getting Gamers

What do I think of James Madigan’s book published by Rowman and Littlefield publishers? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Just so readers know, I did go through this one on Audible. My books on Audible tend to be either about gaming or politics. Since I have started a channel on YouTube now called Gaming Theologian (Please subscribe) this kind of study is all the more important to me.

Each chapter here is a question and explored through not just games, but the works of modern psychology where even experiments done long before there were video games are still used to explain the impact of them today. Each of these could be read on their own if you wanted an answer to a question. Also, Madigan does not tow the party line where he makes sure games always look good no matter what. If the data is not conclusive or even goes the other way, well that’s the way the data goes.

The first section is about the gamers themselves. You get a discussion on why gamers can behave like jerks online and then when they play games, why do so many have a temptation to cheat? Also, why are fans so often ready for a fight? Back in the day, I know how many times I got into lunchroom arguments over if Nintendo or Sega was better.

The final one in this chapter was about why we’re so nostalgic about retro games. Many young gamers today do not understand this, but those of us who are older do. Who are services like Nintendo Switch online that have games for the NES, Super NES, and Gameboy for? Mainly, they’re for the adults. I can go back and play a game not because it was particularly the best one, but because I remember it and it brings back good memories.

The next section is about how games do what they do. Most of us don’t really care for studying for a test, for example, but we will do something we don’t like on a game for a long time and enter the game knowing we have to do that, and that is grinding. Now I will admit I am unusual in this in that I can enjoy grinding because I like being overpowered when I get to later areas.

For those who don’t know, grinding is where you go and fight basic enemies in an area just to gain experience or money. A lot of people don’t, and yet they do it! Why? We have to sit down and really force ourselves to do things we don’t want to do sometimes, like read and study, but we do sit down and make ourselves grind.

As some of you know, I’ve spent some time thinking about the educational system and why it doesn’t seem to work like it should. We’ve all seen people who are “highly educated” but are morons. We’ve also seen people who haven’t gone to college or have jobs many people look down on, such as you could get at a trade school (Note. I am not looking down on them. This is just the way society often portrays them) and yet these people are brilliant.

I took many classes in high school and yet even in subjects I did enjoy, I don’t remember much of it. I am a math guy, but I could not tell you a bit how to do many of the formulas that I studied in Algebra ad Geometry, and yet just recently, I sat down and found I was able to go through the original Legend of Zelda, both quests, and Link to the Past and still find everything again, and I never had to sit down and study those!

What this means is that somehow we do learn games better. I suspect most children have never sat down with a copy of the Pokemon type chart, but they can sure remember what type works well against what for the most part. It’d be a mistake for their parents to think that that’s something simple to learn. Oh no. It is not simple, and yet these same children could struggle with multiplication tables.

Something is wrong with how we’re teaching.

Games also keep us going with items like loot boxes and free draws. One reason this is exciting is not that we care about what’s in the box always, but it’s the anticipation of wondering what we could get. Once we get it, it’s done, but there is that rush when you get a new box. For me, I think of Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. I never spend money, but sometimes you get quests that let you get tickets for new characters and there is always that initial excitement wondering what you will get.

The next section is about questions such as how games are marketed. As Christians, one aspect we could consider is how games keep us immersed in fantasy worlds. However, we could add we find it much easier to tell others about games, movies, etc., than we do about Christianity. Of course, part of this is some of us are naturally introverted, but is there something else here?

Finally, we get to questions about how our games affect us. When we make an avatar and they look like us, does it affect how we play? What about violent video games? We do seem to like them. Why? Does it matter? Finally, do games make us smarter?

One fascinating aspect of this was Daphne Maurer who was doing some studies on peripheral vision and at the university, decided to use as test subjects people who were always in the area, the video game club members. She found that when it came to the tests she gave, all of them aced it easily. This led to her studying first-person shooters and how they can improve someone’s peripheral vision.

After all, if you are someone who does well at a FPS, you have to be able to scan the field before you, identify targets quickly, be able to see them before they see you if they are hostile, and tell if they are on your side or not. Madigan also writes about the skill involved in Starcraft. Chess is seen as a good game for building up your mind, and I don’t doubt that. I agree with it. Yet with Starcraft, you have to know so much with so little and be prepared for a thousand different moves.

Overall, if you have an interest in games, read this book. If you have an interest in psychology, read this book. If you have an interest in psychology and don’t even care about games, read this book. Anyone can get some insights into human nature reading this and I highly recommend it.

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