Of Games and God (Part X): Gaming and the Image of God

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I grew up in the Radio Shack era, when personal computers were just beginning to come of age and it was mostly children and hobbyists who showed any interest in them. My first computer was a Radio Shack Color Computer III, affectionately known in those days as the Co Co 3. It came complete with a whopping 128k of memory (yes, that’s a “k” there, as in kilobytes), and no built-in data storage system. Any programs you wanted to run on the Co Co 3 you had to load into the memory via cassette tape, or type in manually, line by pains-taking line.

I spent many a happy hour programming my Co Co 3, though. It came installed with Extended Color BASIC as its standard programming language, and between the years 1986 and 1994, I coded whole entire worlds using this simple but versatile machine. Although I did program a working word processor that I actually used to type up high school assignments, my primary interest was in the area of video game design. Most of the games I came up with were poor derivatives of the platformers, the dungeon crawlers, and the text-based adventure games that were popular in those days, though I did have a game of my own design published in the Co Co 3’s monthly magazine, an obscure periodical known as The Rainbow. It was a clunky karate game, where two poorly-rendered stick figures squared off in a digital death-match of speed, agility and strength. 

When I look back on those early days, programming line after tedious line into a machine so that it would blip and blink in ways it never would have otherwise, except that I had applied my imagination to it like that, what stands out most strongly to me is the way the video game medium opened up all kinds of unique opportunities to be creative. As a 12-year-old boy, video game design was an intensely pleasurable artistic activity, one that contained but surpassed any other medium I had explored as a prepubescent artist, from drawing to writing to poetry to play-acting.  Even within the limited scope available to me on a 128k machine, this was so.  Some of the gaming universes being assembled on today’s most powerful computers are truly masterpieces of creativity.

I’m not just sharing this for the sake of the nostalgia, though, rather to illustrate a final aspect of video games that we ought to consider if we want to understand them theologically.  Over the last ten posts we’ve looked at video games from every theological angle I could think of, from the significance of community to the quest for transcendent immersion, from the morality of gaming choices, to the nature of predestination in the gaming world, seeking each time to attach a distinctly theological handle to this popular pastime. One theme that has colored all our discussions throughout this series, though I have yet to mention it specifically, is the fact that video game design is a uniquely creative endeavor.  There is, in fact, no art form quite like a video game.

I use term “art form” hesitantly here, however. My understanding is that there is some debate raging in the gaming world, over whether or not a video game can, in fact, be called a “work of art.” In his book God in the Machine: Video Games as Spiritual Pursuit, Liel Leibovitz suggests that video games are not art, per se; but this is not because they lack the fundamental qualities of artistic works, rather because they actually transcend art, functioning more as “religious rituals” than as “works of art.”  “Video games operate under a different set of epistemological guidelines [than art],” he argues. “They are not here to be contemplated rationally or negotiated as works of art. They do not invite the sort of subjective, distant reading that calls for Nietzsche’s infinite interpretations. Instead, they facilitate the sort of emergence that is common to religious ritual.” 

Liel Leibovitz is probably loading more significance onto video games than the medium can bear, here, but it is true that, rather than being a single work of art, video games assemble a whole range of artistic efforts into one single experience. Music, aesthetic design, visual art, literature, story-telling, drama, cinema—it’s all there together in a well-made video game, with the added dynamic that, unlike any of these art-forms on their own, video games invite their audience to interact creatively with the art itself, to create something original with it, even as they are experiencing it as a self-contained creation in its own right.

The video game, you might say, is a form of  meta-art, art that creates art, and in this it allows us to be uniquely creative: to create a world which in turn allows the gamer to create something that truly did not exist before he or she sat down to play.  Anyone who has logged untold hours on Minecraft, or Roller-Coaster Tycoon 3, or The Sims will get what I’m getting at here, but so will anyone who has slogged away grinding out experience points on Skyrim, for the sake of leveling up their character in the new build they’re working on, for their fourth new play-through of the game. Video games are a form of creative expression that in turn create possibilities for creativity.

This is a theological observation, especially, because the book of Genesis insists—and it is a point that has had more theological ink spilled over it than almost any other idea in the good book—that human beings are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27-28). This concept has a whole matrix of meanings around it, far more than we could unpack in a brief space like this. For now though, suffice it to say that in Genesis, it’s the creator God, in the process of creating the creation, who makes human beings in his image. The implication here is that in some sense human beings have a divine vocation to carry on and extend the creative work that God began in the beginning, when he made us in the world and told us to be fruitful and multiply.

Being made in the image of the creator implies that we are called to be creative, too.  This is only true in a limited sense, of course, one that is appropriate to our mortal human nature, but even so, it is a genuine call to real creativity.  This is why humans have always found music-making, and word-speaking, scene-painting and play-acting such transcendent experiences, I think, and also why our religious experiences have always included these kinds of profoundly human activities.  Because we were created in the image of a creative God.

There is much more to say about it than simply this, to be sure, because Christians would rightly insist that the New Testament consistently connects the “Image of God” language from the Book of Genesis to the revelation of God that we discover in the person of Christ. He is the true Image of the unseen God, and we will only discover what it really means to be made in God’s Image as Christ renews the image of God in us, shaping our lives to reflect his own, glorious life. And obviously, no video game on planet can do that for us. 

With that caveat firmly established, however, we are free to point to all sorts of creative activities as evidence of the fact that human beings are indeed made in the likeness of a creating God, including symphonies well scored, and sunsets well painted, screenplays well filmed and statues well sculpted. To the extent that every artistic endeavor calls into being something that might never have otherwise existed, we can find glimmers of the image of God in any of them. It never would have occurred to me at twelve years old, that this is what I was doing when I was coding entire worlds into existence with my Co Co 3, but in the joy being creative like that I truly was discovering  a little something of what it means to be made in the image of the Creator.

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