Gaming and the World of Fantasy

Finally! My last blog entry on the book, Understanding Evangelical Media. This has been a very interesting, sometimes fascinating, sometimes infuriating, journey. For the first time, I agreed with pretty much everything I read in the last chapter I had to read, “Evangelicals’ Quest to Find God’s Place in Games.” Kevin Schut, the author of this particular chapter, means of course video, computer, and role-playing games, not the Olympics.

Anyway, I often find that writing about something I agree with is one of the most difficult things to do. It’s easy to get angry at someone and rant for a while, but what do you say when you agree? Simply writing, “I agree with this chapter,” is not enough to fulfill this assignment. So my task, I guess, is to find something I agree with and add a profound thought to it that will make all 3 of my readers marvel at my intellect.

Kevin Schut takes a long at games produced by Christian evangelicals, and the evangelical response to some mainstream games. One thing he focuses in on is an evangelical attack on games (especially role-playing games) that they suck the player into the world of fantasy to the point where they lose touch with reality. Some have pointed, and with good reason, to the Columbine high school shooters and how these teenagers were nearly addicted to the first-person shooter game ‘Doom.’ This was a key factor, it is argued, in the massacre they carried out in 1999.

This argument does make sense, but I definitely don’t agree with the extreme version that all people who dive into the gaming world will lose touch with reality. Many people are quite capable of keeping the two lives separate. But for some, it doesn’t look that way. I guess, like anything, it depends on the person. Evangelicals should refrain from making across-the-board judgments, and look closer at the individuals in the situation.