Here’s a statement that only Minecraft players will understand: whenever I build an automated chicken roaster in Minecraft, I always feel a little twinge of guilt over all the little pixelated birds I have to capture to do it. If you’re not a Minecraft player, all you need to know is that one of the animated animals in the game is the egg-laying chicken, and if you assemble the 3-D blocks in a specific way, you can trap a whole ton of chickens into a small little space, so that all their eggs are then captured in a little hopper. If you know exactly what you’re doing, you can then set up something called a “redstone dispenser” which will automatically hatch all those eggs for you; and if you’re really worth your salt, you can build it so that once they’re full-grown, those chickens get cooked by an oscillating bucket of lava, dropping their roasted carcasses into a little wood chest. In this way, over the course of a day or two doing something else, you can fill up a whole chest with roasted chicken, creating an instant, renewable supply of food for all your mining and crafting.
I realize this is hard to visualize if you don’t know the game, but here’s why I’m telling you about it: because in order for it to work, you have to trap a bunch of animated chickens—a dozen or so for best results—in a tiny enclosed space—a space so small that if they were real chickens, it would be profoundly inhumane to keep them there, laying egg after egg with no place to go.
They are not real chickens, of course, so there’s nothing necessarily inhumane about building an automated chicken roaster in Minecraft; but even so, I always feel a little bit of guilt squeezing all those chickens into the contraption and sealing them off to their egg-laying fate.
That might sound pathetic to some, especially since I play Skyrim and have few qualms running bandit after bandit through with my sword, and more importantly, because I’ll eat real chicken without batting an eye, but there it is: I feel bad for the chickens in my automated chicken roaster in Minecraft.
I can’t believe that as a 46-year-old man, I'm admitting this.
But the reason I am admitting it is because it raises a very significant point that any honest theology of video gaming needs to deal with eventually, that is, the moral quandaries that video games present to their players. I am not necessarily asking the questions that usually get asked around the morality of video gaming—is it appropriate for children to view the graphic content of modern-day video games?—do first-person shooter games encourage people to become killers?—and so on. Those questions need careful consideration for sure, but my question is a bit more subtle than that: in what ways do the moral decisions we make in the world of a video game reveal something true about our moral character in real life? Does it mean I am a “bad person” if I like doing “bad things” in a video game? If I choose to perform “good actions,” does that mean I am “a good person”?
This question has become more and more worth asking, I think, as games have been approaching greater and greater realism in their content. Time was, when all you could do was run a maze gobbling up blinking dots, the most you had to worry about was possibly promoting gluttony. These days, with their elaborate story-lines and life-like graphics, video games have all kinds of potential to put their players in all kinds of morally questionable situations.
The most controversial of these games, perhaps, is Rockstar Game’s infamous Grand Theft Auto franchise, which officially holds the Guinness World Record as the most controversial game series in history. In the years since the first Grand Theft Auto game was released, back in 1997, this action-adventure game has continually pushed the moral envelope in its story telling and content, allowing players to solicit the services of prostitutes, perform acts of extreme violence, torture their victims, not to mention commit the crime for which the game is named. In the most recent installment of the series, the player is actually required to perform horrific acts of torture in order to progress in the story.
Not every game is as vice-ridden as Grand Theft Auto, to be sure, but even in some of the more tame ones, the moral quandaries abound. In Witcher III you can visit a brothel if you want to. One of the quests in Skyrim leads you into the heart of a cannibalistic cult, which you can chose to join if you wish. And did I mention what you have to do to the poor chickens in Minecraft if you want an automatic chicken roaster?
For its era, the in-game morality of Ultima IV was an ingenious device, because players were not given any instruction as to which actions would advance them in mastering the virtues, and which would set them back. You had to figure this out simply by completing quests and trying to practice the virtues as you went along.
Ultima IV illustrated that gaming has great potential to help us explore our own moral character, to ask hard questions about who we are and who we are becoming as moral beings. Not every game has capitalized on this potential, of course, and some are exploring it without necessarily meaning to. It’s not clear to me, for instance, if the makers of Witcher III included the brothels in their game because they wanted to present the players with a chance to explore their own moral fibre, or if it was simply for the sake of cheap titillation, but in either case, the potential is there, to ask ourselves what kind of people we really are while we play.
To be clear, I am not trying to repeat the straight-forward cause-and-effect argument here, that if I perform an immoral act in a game, I will be more likely to want to do that thing in real life. There is empirical evidence to support this belief, however, evidence that I think every Christian gamer needs to grapple with pretty honestly at some point. The American Psychological Association found such a strong cause-and-effect link between violent video games and anti-social behavior, that in 2015 the APA Council of Representatives adopted a resolution to engage in a public education campaign about the issue.
But that’s not exactly the argument I am trying to make here, however seriously I take this data. My argument is actually cutting the other way. When the Pharisees asked Jesus about eating unclean food, he replied to them that they had got their theology of cleanness backward. It’s not what goes into a person that makes them unclean, he retorted, rather, it’s what comes out of them (Mark 7:15). Jesus was speaking about the kosher food laws in Torah specifically there, but I think there is a principle at work in this saying that we could port over to Christian gaming pretty easily. It is not what goes into us when we game—i.e. it’s not the game that we play—that makes us unclean; rather, it’s what comes out of us while we're playing that makes us unclean.
Of course, if I choose to play a game like Grand Theft Auto V, where I know I will advance through the game only by practicing vice and celebrating "virtual evil," that choice itself is a “thing that’s coming out of me,” and it may need some Spirit-led introspection about what’s really going on inside. Speaking more generally, though, the morally ambiguous storylines of most modern-day video games can serve the Christian as a kind of virtual litmus test for their spiritual formation, a way to explore how deeply our moral character is rooted, by discovering what we will and will not do while we play.
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