One of my favorite video games as a kid was that 1980s cult classic, Dragon’s Lair. If you somehow missed the 80s, all you need to know is that Dragon’s Lair was a fantasy adventure game, where the player guided a valiant knight named Dirk the Daring on a quest to rescue the fair Princess Daphne from the clutches of an evil dragon named Singe. This was in the days when home consoles were still in their infancy, so Dragon’s Lair was one of those quarter-munching arcade attractions of a by-gone era. It played largely like an elaborate choose-your-own-adventure game, where every level presented you with a series of puzzles or booby-traps, and you had to decide if you would, for instance, turn left or drink the potion, draw your sword or dodge right. There was some careful timing and some sharp reflexes required, for sure, but most of it was trial and error.
What set Dragon’s Lair apart from its contemporaries, however, were the graphics. In the days when most other games were still mucking about with pixelated space invaders or monochrome pac-men, Dragon’s Lair had found a way to harness cutting-edge laserdisc technology to present action scenes on-par with those of an animated Disney feature, the likes of which had never been seen in a video-game format before. As a result, Dragon’s Lair allowed the player to immerse himself in the adventure more fully and more magically than any other game in the arcade. While you didn’t exactly become Dirk the Daring (the advent of the true action adventure RPG was still a few years away), still, Dragon’s Lair invited you into a compellingly-realized, intricately-textured world, where your actions progressed a living, breathing story, and your imagination—because it had to work less-hard to fill in the visual gaps—was free to soar.
Held up against the standard of today’s most popular video game adventures, of course, Dragon’s Lair looks somewhat naif. It’s almost a bit too-cute-for-words, next to the sprawling kingdom of Hyrule in Breath of the Wild, say, or the cinematic (and rather grown-up) cut-scenes of The Witcher 3. A purist would probably argue that it doesn’t even qualify as a true RPG. At the time, however, Dragon’s Lair sparkled as an alluring hint of what a video game could be: not just a fun digital pass-time, but an immersive journey into an alternate world.
“Immersion” is, in fact, the technical the term gamers use to describe all this. The degree to which a video game recreates an experience so vividly that you can allow yourself to believe it’s really happening to you, is its level of “immersion.” Gamers sometimes evaluate games based on how “immersive” it is, and often the more elaborate role playing games will allow independent programmers to develop modifications to the original code (called “Mods”) that increase a game’s “immersion” even more. The immersive nature of video-gaming, I think, is one of the aspects that sets it apart from other human activities. In reading, for instance, you are invited to immerse yourself in a story, but the world of the story—its sights, sounds, movements and sensations—must be supplied entirely by the imagination. Cinema is much more sensory, of course, but the worlds created through film are no-where near so interactive. Only video games bring the human imagination to life so fully, in a genuine, interactive, multi-sensory experience.
“Immersion” is an important concept, not just in gaming, but in thinking about gaming theologically, too. If it’s true that one of the appeals of gaming is the way it allows you to escape the world-as-it-is and immerse yourself in an alternate world, so completely and so compellingly that it imaginatively transfigures the real world as you do, then in this gaming intersects with one of the main themes (and appeals) of theology, too. Like video games, theology also acknowledges and affirms the human desire to experience a world unlike the world as it is, to be taken out, above, or beyond every-day human experience, and immerse ourselves in something transcendent. C. S. Lewis famously put it like this: “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” Interestingly, as a way of illustrating that truth, Lewis invented the magical world of Narnia, a place that imaginatively satisfied a child’s desire for transcendent immersion, by poetically offering them an alternate world to explore. In doing so, of course, he also provided us with one of the 20th Centuries great symbols for the Christian life: becoming a King or Queen of Narnia in the everyday world of modern England.
Great care is needed here. The transcendence that theology offers is not some computer-engineered projection of human desires, sustained by our own ingenuity, any more than it is an imaginary kingdom for children, dreamed up by a creative storyteller. The transcendence that theology offers is, in fact, the world-as-it-is, transfigured by the holy and heavenly presence of the very Spirit of God Himself; and remarkably, as we immerse ourselves in that presence, we find ourselves not taken out of the world but sent into it, to love it and embrace it and supernaturally redeem it with his grace and truth. The immersion that theology offers, you might say, immerses us more fully than we could ever imagine in the ordinary stuff of earth, by immersing us completely in the extra-ordinary stuff of heaven.
So in this theology and video-games are plying different trades. But as an analogy for how theology does its work—and, perhaps, as evidence that this work speaks more intimately to the human heart than we might otherwise have expected—we can look to the immersive worlds of today’s best video games. In them we discover that the human spirit is in fact longing for an experience of the transcendent, that we are wired for something that nothing in this world can satisfy. And by them we are reminded that to satisfy this longing is not just our deepest need, but also a source of sheer delight.
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