shirt #4: Video games ruined my life

Title: Video games ruined my life. Good thing I have two extra lives.

Design: white slogan and multi-coloured graphic on royal blue

Make: Threadless

Life is short

Recently I discovered a computer game I was playing had a built in stop-clock, which logged the total number of hours I’d spent playing it. I’d passed the 40 hour mark. That doesn’t sound like much, but I only work 37 and a half hours a week.

So I’d spent the equivalent of more than a working week playing that game - and I hadn’t even completed it yet!

Video games are fun, when they aren’t so frustrating you want to smash your controller, and fun is good. Rest is also good for us, although whether video games are very restful is another debate. It depends a lot on what games you choose to play. There’s a controversial study group called ‘Killology’ which has concluded (among other things) that violent ‘first person shooter’ games can act as a training exercise in shooting people.

For example, in one case when a teenager ran amok in a school with a gun, the number of ‘head shots’ among his victims exceeded the skill level expected of a Navy Seal. His ‘simulator training’ was video games, and that is mirrored in similar murderous rampages that have occurred in the USA. [Read more]

But I don’t play those games, so I’m okay. I play benign games like PacMan (I love PacMan). And, so if video games altered behaviour, any of us who grew up playing PacMan would spend our lives in darkened rooms, eating little white pills and listening to tinny repetitive music. (Hang on a minute...)*

But even if video games have no effect on you, despite what the authors of ‘Killology’ would argue, they undeniably drain your time if you let them. On one of my other sites, freelance theology, I was recently asked a question related to ‘leisure time’ and how we use it as Christians. Part of the response I wrote sums up for me the dilemma we face when we consider how we use our time.

The importance of ‘Rest’ and the urgency of ‘Time’
There are two competing Biblical themes relating to how a believer should regard leisure. One is the notion of ‘rest’, as typified in the concept of ‘Sabbath’, which combines rest from labour with worshipping God. The other is the awareness that ‘time’ is a non-renewable resource, which should be used carefully. The ‘Parable of the Talents’ (Matthew chapter 25, verses 14-30) for example, cautions a person against wasting what they are given in an unproductive way. The Jewish ‘Wisdom’ tradition, particularly the book of Proverbs, places a high value on productivity and condemns laziness and idleness.

What seems to be needed is a balance between rest that is needed and using time productively. Rest that enables a person to recharge and take time out to concentrate on what really matters, i.e. worshipping God, is considered valuable by Biblical writers – and is proscribed in the Law of Moses as the ‘fourth commandment’. But there are also warnings that devoting too much time to leisure can mean we never achieve our potential. Nobody knows exactly how much time they have, and so it is
important to use that time wisely.
[Read the rest of the article here]

Moderately addicted?
It may be that with video games, as with so much else, the ‘everything in moderation’ rule applies. Certainly discernment over which games you play is important. The verse “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” comes to mind (Philippians 4: 8-9). Is a game where you steal cars, drive recklessly and kill people any of those things?

And then there’s the ‘getting in the way’ issue. I think we have to be very careful as Christians not to scream ‘idolatry’ at any past-time or concept. It’s as annoying as the way ‘heresy’ is carelessly bandied about in Christian media, and on the web. Playing video games is not idolatrous, unless they become the most important thing in your life. If they become all-consuming, if they occupy the majority of your time, if they in effect control you, then yes, like any addiction, they have usurped the place of God.

But most of us aren’t in a spiral of addiction to video games. Even though when I get a new game I sometimes come close to obsession with it. I’m attracted to the novelty and so it may become my main leisure activity for a while. But then it wears off, usually when I realise that it has consumed a large amount of my ‘non-renewable resource’; my time.

And that’s the irony about this shirt. It would be lovely to think that in life there are two unseen hearts at the top of the screen (or Mario’s head followed by a number). But there aren’t. When I use up this life, I don’t get another go at whatever challenge killed me.

The challenge for me is that when I die, I’ll have more to show for my stint on earth than a few completed computer games. Otherwise, video games will have ruined my life. And I won’t be able to have another go and this time do it right.

*Not my own joke, but funny…