Introduction

Video games are the magical invention of an imaginary world. To play the game is to conquer a pretend planet. All power in that world is just one click away. You see what isn’t real and become whatever you want. With a few button pushes—less effort than rubbing Genie’s bottle—you win victories without consequences, display courage without sacrifices, and climb mountains without risks.

Video games are the anti-sacrament. Instead of the earthy circumspection of bread, wine, and water, video games project abstraction. There is blood spilled, footballs thrown, cars raced, and aliens exploded through the medium of special effects. But the imaginary world on the screen is totally blank. It's an inverted sacrament that leaves gamers chuffed with a world that isn’t there. The effect is that video games insinuate nihilism into the heart. This is a five-part process.

Video Games Insinuate Nihilism Into the Heart

First, you lose the ability to recognize relevance

Relevance is making sense of the world. Your body is essential in making sense of the world. Common sense is formed when you learn how your embodiment of human life meshes with the surrounding physical world. Without a commonsense understanding of the world, you will struggle to discern relevance.

Every day you are taking in sense-experiences. What is relevant? What needs to be kept and what needs to be ignored? These questions are answered in an explicitly personal way—how does it impact my life, my body, my interests? To make the proper relevance judgments, you need to learn who you are, what you are, the kind of world you live in, and why you want what you want.

If a person’s imagination is captured by a pretend world, it will be difficult to discern the significance of the real world and its relation to body, desires, interests, and purposes. Put simply, the world God made is organized for embodied human beings to live in, which is why people struggle to make relevance judgments in a virtual world.

Second, you lose self-control

Addiction is the opposite of self-control, which is part of the fruit of the Spirit. Video games today are awesome; they’re addictive in a way far beyond the games of the 1990s. Do you have control over it or does it have control over you? Video games are not independent from other areas of your life. Addictions breed addictions. Lack of self-control in one area leads to a lack of self-control in another. This produces the all-to-common mindset of perpetual entertainment. “Entertain me!” we demand. This requires repentance.

Gaming addiction includes a well-defined neurochemical component. MRIs show gaming addiction to be neurologically similar to other addictions, such as gambling and drugs. Gaming hijacks the dopamine reward pathway. The overproduction of dopamine during gaming sets off a series of neurochemical events, leading to a craving for more. This, in turn, leads to impaired self-control and dysfunction in daily activities, interpersonal relationships, and life purpose—which are factors in every addiction.

Talk of dopamine and the like explains the physical but not the spiritual concern. It doesn’t touch on the deeper question because it doesn’t depend on whether there is anything outside of us. Mere concern about addiction does not prove reality or inevitability. We must know the nature of the thing, and the thing in question is not, ultimately a dopamine pathway, but human nature. If the nature of a person is a creation, then the cause of that nature is a Creator. If a man is a fool for believing in a Creator, then he is a fool for believing that life has a purpose. If true freedom is not the absence of restraint, but the presence of purpose, then video game addiction isn’t just idolatry, it’s the reduction of human nature.

Third, you lose the ability to acquire skills

Skills are the ability to execute an embodied task effectively. Skill acquisition is itself a skill that entails bodily presence in the world. Acquiring skills requires a choice to take the responsibility to perform that skill. It might be mechanical skills, organizational skills, people skills, or aesthetics. Since bodily presence is required for acquiring skills, video games do not deliver on the promise of honing, say, problem-solving skills. Rather, prolonged exposure to video games leads to stunted creativity.

Fourth, you lose a sense of the reality of people and things

How does relating to the world through video games affect your overall sense of reality? What is lost when human beings relate to each other by way of video games? How do video games help you get out of your inner, private, subjective experience? How do video games aid faithfulness in a world of things and people?

Fundamental to human existence is vulnerability. If you don’t pay attention when you drive home, then you could get hurt or killed. Each day, human beings are involved in potentially risky situations. But when the mind is captured by video games, the sense of vulnerability is absent and the experience is interpreted as unreal.

Playing video games interferes with a person’s sense of the context of the world. Life in a virtual world deprives you of bodily involvement in a risky environment. Real life requires you to interpret the situation yourself and learn from your mistakes in a vulnerable environment. That’s why the skills, experiences, and problem-solving performed in video games don’t translate to the real world. Virtual reality cannot reproduce the sense of vulnerability. It can’t reproduce the sense of being in a risky situation. The notion that expertise and skills can be acquired in disembodied space is what might be called metaphysical gibberish.

Fifth, you lose a life of meaning

Nihilism is operating with a disinterested judgment of the world around you. It’s spiritual claustrophobia where, in detached reflection, you conclude that nothing matters, at least not enough to die for. When you build a world without action or risk, then there is no need for decision or initiative in the real world. Nihilism means you lose the ability to distinguish the trivial from the important; the significant from the insignificant.

The gamer will dismiss this possibility as quite remote, because, for example, they still have feeling enough to give their mom a “thank you” and a hug when she does his laundry. But insinuated nihilism is gradual and subtle, meaning, it is too close to be recognized. It is indirectly imparted and becomes part of the mind, morals, and instincts. The body is affected too and nihilism is acted upon long before it can be explained, let alone recognized. This produces the vague and rather unfavorable impression that you are standing on firm ground when you are drowning.

Conclusion

The point isn’t unconstrained condemnation of video games. But there is a need for wisdom and boundaries. There is a need to pay attention to what is being sowed. And there is a need for the enthusiastic cultivation of embodied faithfulness.

The fact that a lot of people spend a lot of hours every week playing video games doesn’t mean that Christians should. So, if you are addicted to video games, what should you do? Commit to a three-month fast from video games. What should you do with your extra time? Consider three things.

First, seek out challenges. If you are a young man, find something difficult to do. Learn a language. Read books. Befriend the friendless. Serve at the Downtown Rescue Mission. Play a sport. Challenge yourself. Second, seek out responsibility. Find something that needs to be done and take ownership of it. Third, love your neighbor. Love means self-sacrifice, which always begins at the cross of Christ.

To move away from video games is a reliable way to extract yourself from the habits of self-indulgence. Such an uncurling is an act of love, centered beyond the self. If Saint Augustine is right that sin is when a person is curved in on himself—incurvatus in se—then the uncurling process means making new plot points for your life; it means entering a new world whose dimensions are larger than deathworks, selfishness, and navel-gazing. It’s the expansion of life that transcends adolescent complacency in favor of holiness. Uncurling will not, by itself, make a person holy. For that, we must begin with the glorious reality of Jesus Christ, who took the challenge, fulfilled his responsibility, and loved sacrificially.

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Jason Cherry is an elder at Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as a teacher and lecturer of literature, history, and economics at Providence Classical School in Huntsville. He graduated from Reformed Theological Seminary with an MA in Religion and is the author of the books The Culture of Conversionism and the History of the Altar Call and The Making of Evangelical Spirituality.