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The Gospel According To Video Games

The Gospel According To Video Games

Last updated on: October 21, 2024 at 5:23 pm by Nathan Clarkson

The Gospel According To Video Games 2024-10-21T17:23:13-07:00 Nathan Clarkson

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Evangelical Christians have long held video games at arm’s length, largely dismissing them as violent, sexualized, and even demonic time wasters that have no place in a believer’s life. But what if the church has too quickly judged this art form that just might have the power to bring us closer to God?

I can still remember my unadulterated pre-teen joy the day I discovered a used Sega Genesis in a basket underneath a pile of mismatched remote controllers at my local Goodwill. After some lawyering with my mom, we bought the game console and took it home with the deal that I had to read as much as I played it. It came with a few game cartridges that I enthusiastically blew in and slammed into the machine to start up what would be the beginning of a life-long love. Up until then I had only ever played some educational computer games like The Oregon Trail or Carmen Sandiego, or Tetris on a black and white Gameboy. But as the whimsical music and brilliant colors of the 2D 16-bit game appeared on my TV screen, my young mind and heart was immediately captured, as I was suddenly ushered into another world where I was a hero on a quest to defeat evil.

The other great and grand narrative that captured my heart and mind as a young person was that of my faith. My parents gave me an incarnational and holistic view of God that drew me into a religious understanding that both informed my life’s direction and inspired my imagination to see the transcendent woven into reality. Looking back, decades later, I can see the same instinct I had that drew me towards the purposeful narrative of fighting darkness in an enchanted and beautifully designed world of my video games was the very same one that drew me towards my faith. But at the time I found it difficult to reconcile these loves, as all the messages coming from the church about video games were ones of fear. Telling tales of teens becoming swept into the occult, becoming violent, or worse, wasting their time when they could be reading the bible, the church warned parents of the inevitable corruption of their children’s souls and minds if they picked up a controller.

In the decades since I first found that old, aptly named Sega Genesis*,* video games have developed rapidly into larger worlds and narratives, lifelike graphics, and an audience of billions — now being a larger industry than the film, television, and music industry combined, being played regularly by literally almost half of the world’s population. Video games have taken the best of each art form (visual, musical, writing, acting, etc.) and have brilliantly combined them into one interactive, artistic, narrative experience. But unfortunately, even with the influence and artistic merits of video games, the church’s attitudes towards them haven’t moved much beyond what they were decades ago. Blogs, pastors, and modern-day puritans continually warn us that at worst, video games are corrupting souls, and at best, they are idols that will distract us from a godly life. But through many years of both studying my faith and the ins and outs of theology in books, as well as playing countless games and exploring the ins and outs of other worlds on my TV screen, I’ve discovered that to the opposite is true. Video games aren’t idols that distract our gaze from God, but rather have the ability (as you’ll read below) to act as windows we can see Him through.

Creator of Worlds

God has many great and accurate titles and names in scripture, but the first one we see Him embody in Genesis 1 is the role of “Creator.” More specifically, the Creator of the universe and our world. And the world He made for us to inhabit is one of magnificent creativity, color, diversity, and beauty. Having been created in the image of God, there lies within humanity the instinct to be world creators and beauty lovers like Him. We’ve seen this through the amazingly creative worlds found in stories of the likes of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and aesthetically beautiful art like the soaring cathedrals across Europe and religious paintings that still elicit awe. But with the advent of video games, we now have an opportunity to even more fully reflect our Creator by, like Him, creating beautiful worlds of our own.

In the same way the Pevensies walked through a wardrobe and into a magical and beautiful Narnia, when we pick up a controller and explore the worlds of Skyrim, or the Kingdom of Hyrule (from The Legend of Zelda) or gaze at the breathtaking digital scenery of What Remains of Edith Finch, we aren’t just wandering through a graphic engineer’s digitally-created simulations. Rather, we are encountering the result of someone acting in the image of their Creator by using their God-given imagination to create universes for us to marvel at and dwell inside of, even if just for an hour on our TV screens.

Story Oriented Creatures

God loves stories. He began all of scripture with the words “In the beginning.” He could’ve given us a theology textbook, but instead shared His word through a sweeping narrative, taking place over thousands of years, filled with compelling characters and plot twists to rival that of Game of Thrones. Jesus spent His time on earth not just lecturing the crowds with the five points of the Gospel, but telling parables and stories, as He knew being created in the image of a story oriented God, this is how we’d understand and grasp truth most effectively.

In the image of God, humans are story oriented creatures. We think in, learn through, and understand reality within the context of narrative. We’ve been telling stories since before recorded history — first on cave walls, then around fires, then with words on a page, then with movies on a screen, and now through video games. What sets video games apart as an even more effective storytelling medium than the ones that have come before it is that for the first time in history, the audience is given the opportunity to be not just a passive observer of the story, but rather an active participant in it. When playing a compelling narrative in a video game like The Last of Us or Life is Strange, we are completely immersed in a tale where our choices have consequence and weight on the outcome of the story in a meaningful way. This can ultimately have the power to help us take more seriously the decisions we are making in the tales God has written for us to live out in our own lives, in the real world, as we conceptualize ourselves as people that matter in a story that matters.

Right and Wrong

Christianity is inherently interested in questions of morality, good and evil, right and wrong. For thousands of years, we as the church have debated, pondered, and studied to discover the true nature of ethics. This is a worthy pursuit — one that video games are particularly interested in as well, one the medium is apt to explore in meaningful ways. It’s rare you’ll find a narrative video game that isn’t centered around the concepts of good triumphing over evil. Even the early 2D game series like Super Mario Bros or Sonic The Hedgehog revolved around its heroes conquering the villains to save the princess or the world. As technology has developed, video games have been able to explore the ideas of good and evil in more substantive and effective ways.

In what many now consider to be the greatest video game ever released, Red Dead Redemption 2, you play as Arthur Morgan, an outlaw in the turn of the century Wild West who embarks on a fraught and fierce journey to become a good man. In a particularly moving scene that rivals the depth and honesty of the greatest of films, Arthur, while facing his mortality, crosses paths with a nun. In their brief conversation, Arthur comes face-to-face with his many sins, and almost simultaneously face-to-face with the reality of forgiveness and redemption. There, in the middle of a video game, is one of the most probing explorations of morality I’ve ever seen and one of the most beautiful depictions of the Gospel ever displayed in recent art.

Play On

Like any created thing or artistic creation, wisdom and intentionality should be used when interacting with video games. But for Christians to fearfully dismiss or degrade this medium is to dismiss a powerful conduit to understanding and experiencing God, not only in our own lives but in the lives of billions around the world. So go and get swept up in a grand narrative where your choices matter within a beautifully created world, that has the ability to feed your soul truth about good triumphing over evil and the redemption of all things, right there on your TV screen with a controller in your hands.

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