There’s a poignant teaching from the Buddhist tradition about something called “The Hungry Ghost.” It’s a way of talking about a certain spiritual condition that people can sometimes find themselves in. A hungry ghost is a spirit with a very narrow throat and a huge distended belly, so that it’s always trying to stuff itself full, but can never get enough in. It’s an image of human emptiness and spiritual despair at it’s worst.
I’m a Christian pastor, of course, not a Buddhist monk, but still I’ve thought about the image of the hungry ghost a lot over the years, ever since I heard about it from a doctor named Gabor Maté. He worked for years among the heroin addicts and homeless people of Vancouver’s downtown east side, serving one of the most severely addicted populations in the country, and he uses the image of the "hungry ghost" to describe what it is like to be an addict—always eating, never full.
In Maté’s view, an addiction is simply a strategy that the brain has latched on to, to salve the psychological pain of the deepest wounds it has experienced. The problem with heroin, as a strategy for self-medication, is that its physiological effect is so powerful, flooding the system with opioids, short-circuiting the brain’s natural ability to produce endorphins, and making the user physically dependent on the chemical just to feel normal, let alone “good.” Some addictions are more destructive than others, in other words; but Maté argues that everyone, really, has some “ghostly hunger” or other in their lives—obsessive work habits, compulsive viewing of pornography, impulsive spending, over-indulgent eating—that we use to avoid or cope with inner pain. He talks sincerely about his own addiction to classical music—which might crack a smile or two—until he explains how his compulsive buying and listening to classical music did for him on a psychological level, the very same thing heroin did for his patients. (Here's a Ted Talk he gave a while ago on this subject; very much worth a listen.)
Turns out we are all hungry ghosts.
I’m thinking about Gabor Maté and the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts this morning because for the last few months we’ve been exploring video games from a theological perspective, trying to develop a “theology of video games,” as I’ve been calling it. And we’ve looked at time and worship, freedom and providence, original sin and problem solving, each in turn. I stand by my work, of course, and do indeed think that each of these themes are ways to think theologically about what’s going on whenever we sit down to game.
There is, however, a shadow side to gaming, one that is quite serious, I think, and one that any serious theology of gaming would be remiss if it didn’t address at some point: simply that gaming can be, and certainly for many people it is, a “ghostly hunger,” something that does for the gamer on a psychological level what heroin does for the drug addict.
To be clear, I am not trying to say anything beyond my particular expertise, about the existence “video game addiction” as a genuine and diagnosable mental disorder, on par with alcoholism, say, or other kinds of substance abuse. There is some controversy around the idea that “video game addiction” should be recognized in this way. The World Health Organization did include “gaming disorder” in the 11th revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases, but the American Psychiatric Association did not include it in the 2013 edition of the DSM-5. The APA held that there was insufficient evidence for its inclusion, though they considered it “worthy of further study.” From a strictly clinical perspective, then, there are none of the standardized definitions or diagnostics that we would need if we were to talk about compulsive gaming as a mental disorder.
That said, it should also be noted that “problematic gaming” is on the rise in our society. A 2016 study of Ontario teens, conducted by Dr. Robert Mann found that 13 percent of participating teens “reported symptoms of a video gaming problem.” This was up by 9 percent from 2007, and included such problematic symptoms as preoccupation with gaming, loss of control, withdrawal, and disregard for consequences. On an anecdotal level this rings true as I consider my last eleven years as a pastor, and I think about the number of times I’ve seen compulsive gaming steal the happiness from young married couples, or spoken to parents who had concerns about their teenager’s obsession with video games.
So: whether or not video game addiction qualifies technically as a clinical condition—and I’m speaking as a gamer myself when I say this—it certainly qualifies as an addiction in the spiritual sense, as an activity people use to avoid, self-medicate, or numb the spiritual fears and pains all of us carry in the deepest part of our selves. Certainly when I am most honest about my own experience of gaming, I would have to say this is true, that often I turn to gaming as a superficial way to salve my emotional distress or soothe my emotional turmoil. An hour or five roaming the mythic land of Skyrim, for instance, where all my problems have straight-forward solutions and every success is rewarded, as I move forward in a compelling story where I am always the hero, can help me to forget, by transcending it, whatever emotional unrest I may have brought with me when I first sat down to play.
This does not mean that gaming is intrinsically bad—anymore than classical music is, even though Gabor Maté used it to feed his ghostly hunger. It simply means that we must handle video games with real care and self-awareness, recognizing that we are all of us hungrier ghosts than we think, and unless we’ve found a real way to fill our spiritual emptiness, we’re just as likely to try feeding it with video games, as we are with booze or drugs or classical music.
For the Christian especially, this understanding of gaming as "ghostly hunger" is especially helpful, I think, because a Christian would say that in Christ we have found the one thing that can truly feed the ghost within. Didn’t the Lord himself say it, that anyone who was thirsty could come to him and he would feed them with the only wine that really satisfies (Isaiah 55:1-3)? And didn’t Jesus say that he himself was the bread of life that would fill our spiritual hunger so full we would never be hungry again (John 6:35)?
The answer to these questions, of course, is yes. And if we have truly satisfied our spiritual hunger in him, Christ then sets us free to approach gaming from any of the theological perspectives we’ve explored so far, appreciating it for what it can do, without depending on it to do that one thing that only He can do: to feed the hungry ghost.
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