Christianity and Violence in Video Games

You can find the original article at www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3146863.

As avid a gamer as I am, I had never really thought about this before. I find it hard to believe that some people would seriously draw parallels to fragging someone on-line with violating the 6th Commandment, "Thou shalt not murder." This association had never even remotely crossed my mind, and I find the idea rather silly. Still, the question remains whether Christians really should be playing 'violent' video games. Well, to me, most games are about competition, be they video games, board games, cards, or sports. In many video games, that competition is expressed as violence, and because of the medium, needs to be displayed in visual pixels.

An argument can be made that it's because of the visual nature of games that gives them their power. Seeing a visual representation of a human, that bleeds when shot, and stops moving when it 'dies' does seem much less abstract than, say, killing someone in Bang! or Mafia. This could be a factor in younger minds that have yet to draw the distinction between real life and fantasy.

For myself, I view video games like I do any other non-video game, just as a bunch of rules to analyze in order to find advantage. After all, whoever implements the rules the best wins. In sports, direct competition involves scoring in the face of the enemy's defense. In poker, it takes the form of number crunching, bluffing, and baiting your opponents. In chess, it's outmaneuvering, feinting, and trapping. And in many video games, it's hitting your opponent while not getting hit yourself, all while your opponent is trying to do the likewise, not unlike a karate or kendo competition. My view can be pretty much summed up by this quote from the article linked above:

"We view games as just games," says Kedrick Kenerly, founder of +CGO+, Christian Gamers Online. "They all boil down to a few things: They have a goal, they have a reward for the goal, and they have a set of rules that need to be followed to reach the goal. The violence in most games isn't something we get worked up about. It's merely 'presentation,' simply a way to convey an experience to players so they can follow the rules to reach the goal." Abstract games like checkers, chess, and Monopoly operate in the same fashion, Kenerly argues-they merely employ different presentation methods.