Category: Essays

Things that don’t fit anywhere else.

April 8, 2014 / / Essays

Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.

– G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

One of the primary reason that Christians often don’t like video games, or won’t even entertain buying one, comes down to one simple idea: God designed us to live a real life, not a fake one. An understandable goal, of course; nobody wants to see any Christian sitting in a room all day playing a video game, right? That’s not very Christian in the opinion of many. A relationship with God Himself should take precedence over all else.

I understand this opinion, and confronted it for many years, and in a way I am still haunted by it. No, not THAT question: should I play video games? Rather, this question: are video games just more exciting than real life? Does that mean real life is, gasp, boring? Maybe they just don’t want us to see it when we play video games? Not necessarily! But let’s contrast them both and see what develops.

April 3, 2014 / / Essays
April 2, 2014 / / Essays

So I commended pleasure, for there is nothing good for a man under the sun except to eat and to drink and to be merry, and this will stand by him in his toils throughout the days of his life which God has given him under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 8:15

Do video games need to be “fun”? That the current directors of the Assassin’s Creed franchise ask this question, and then answer in the negative, says a great deal of how we think of “meaning”. Meaning must be serious, must come in a form that is slightly offensive, shocking, or otherwise. I don’t tend to believe that.