Video Games

When children are exposed to violence on TV and in video games, studies show they tend to become more aggressive themselves. But a study reveals that even just exposure to swear words in media may lead children to become more physically aggressive as well.

In a study involving middle-schoolers in Missouri, researchers asked the students about their exposure to profanity in the media — in particular on television and in video games — as well as their attitudes about swear words and their tendencies toward aggressive behavior. The scientists measured both physical aggression (by asking students whether they hit, kicked, or punched others) and relational aggression (by asking them whether they gossiped about others to damage their reputations).

The researchers calculated that exposure to profanity had about the same relationship to aggressive behavior as exposure to violence on TV or in video games. In addition, they found that the more children were exposed to profanity, they more likely they were to use swear words themselves, and those who used profanity were more likely to become aggressive toward others. Study leader Sarah Coyne said:

From using profanity to aggressive behavior, it was a pretty strong correlation. And these are not even the worst [profane] words that kids are exposed to, since there are seven dirty words that you’re not allowed to say on TV. So, we’re seeing that even exposure to lower forms of profanity are having an effect on behavior.

While bullying behavior was not specifically addressed in the study, children who are more aggressive are known to be more likely to bully. So, controlling youngsters’ exposure to profanity may be one way to stem the tide of bullying among teens.

Kamal Bherwani is on a mission to use his tragedy to prevent other parents from suffering. But rather than just making a public service announcement, he’s using an innovative strategy. He’s turning his message into a video game. Bherwani’s game is called “Johanna’s Vision.”

He said in a recent news interview “It’s loosely based on my family’s story. It’s about a girl who finds out her brother died of fentanyl poisoning.”

Bherwani’s 26-year-old son Ethan died from a fentanyl overdose in May of 2021 during a trip to a casino to celebrate his college graduation. Now his father says:

He wanted to be a lawyer. He was going to go on to law school. He had so many other talents – whether it was musical talents or his gift for even being a journalist. He had written articles about sports and sports journalism that were published.

Security footage from the casino showed Ethan at a blackjack table, suddenly slumping over, and falling out of his seat. His father said, “He was on the ground for 11 minutes before help arrives. Took them several more minutes to revive him. They never gave him Narcan.” Officials from the casino say that Narcan, also known as naloxone, was available at the time but that it wasn’t administered because none of the staff knew at the time that he’d ingested fentanyl.

As a result, the video game “Johanna’s Vision” is intended to help its players understand the dangers of fentanyl and to train them how to administer revival aids like naloxone to help save lives.

The Office of Addiction Services and Supports (OASAS) took notice of Bherwani’s innovative videogame and contacted him. The chairman of OASAS said:

This is an emerging area where people are looking at recreational gaming and how that can be harnessed to inform the public. It is through efforts like expanding Naloxone, which can reverse overdose deaths. We are definitely grateful to Kamal and others like him who have taken their personal tragedy and really channeled that into advocacy.

Potential preaching angle:

A powerful message is sent when we harness our tragedies to warn others.

The gaming industry, valued at around 257 billion US dollars as of 2024, is on a winning streak. As the pandemic ceased, the competition among gaming platforms and the abundance of game choices dominated the entertainment market.

• Approximately 3.26 billion people worldwide play video games (40% of world population).
• 89.5% of video game sales happen in the digital world.
• In 2022, there were approximately 90 billion mobile game downloads from app stores.
• People between 18 and 34 comprise 38% of gamers globally.
• By 2025, the mobile games industry will reach 138 billion US dollars.
• Around 85% of all revenue in the digital game industry comes from free-to-play games.
• 8.4% of children and teens have problems with game addiction
• Approximately 69% of US households have at least one member playing video games.
• Approximately 77% of parents play games with their children because it allows them to spend time together and to socialize with their kids.

Editor’s Note: You can read the original article which cites many more statistics from a large number of sources here.

The pandemic has brought many changes to businesses, schools, and churches. Another way the pandemic altered America: It has created what might be called the “Introvert Economy.” Data from studies appears to show that most people’s social lives continue to dwindle.

During the pandemic, a lot of Americans had to stay home—and many discovered that they preferred staying in to going out. And odds are it will stick: It is the youngest adults who are going out less, and when they do go out, it is earlier.

Technology has also speeded changes in social habits. There is evidence that TV schedules once had a big impact on people’s schedules. Now that more content is streamed on demand, people may be thinking about their time differently. More choices of at-home-entertainment also may decrease the desire to go out or stay out. This is another trend accelerated by the pandemic—perhaps because when more people work from home, they save time on commuting and can go out to dinner earlier.

There was a bit of a bump in socializing in 2022, probably in response to years of pandemic isolation. Yet the long-term trend is clear: More time watching TV or playing video games at home.

Possible Preaching Angle:

One small upside to the data. Chances are everyone else is having just as uneventful of a weekend as you are. Your friends aren’t all that busy and would love to hang out with you.

Kaylee and Mike Low have four children. When their oldest son, now aged 14, started asking for a cell phone back in the fourth grade, they both said no.

Mrs. Low said, “He was really noticing his peers getting smartphones. But we weren't naïve to the fact that a cell phone would increase the risk of exposure to pornography, and other risks (such as the effects on mental health and the developing brain). So, we just kind of had this gut feeling that it wasn't the right timing."

It became a hot topic of family conversation. Sixth grade was probably the hardest year for him in this process. There were 34 kids, and he was the only one without a smartphone.

At the times when their son grew frustrated, Mr. and Mrs. Low "got better at teaching him" why they wanted to wait and made space for the teen to express his feelings. Mrs. Low said, "I think we just really tried to listen to him, tried to validate his feelings.” They told him, “We're doing it because we love you, and we want what's best for you,” instead of it coming across as being bossy or being told what to do.

However, in 7th grade, the teen quit asking for a cell phone altogether. He'd noticed that some of his classmates, who were often up gaming all night, were more anxious than they used to be, couldn't regulate their emotions, or seemed disengaged from the world around them. Some of them had lost interest in extracurricular activities and "really seemed unhappy."

When his parents asked him where he felt the benefits were, he said that he “doesn't have to carry the world around in his pocket.” He said that kids at school are stressed out about how many likes they get, or what's going on in some random part of the world. So, he feels a sense of freedom. He finds joy in outdoor activities or extracurriculars. He's driven to succeed in life.

Mindful of his future needs, the Lows now plan to introduce their eldest to a cell phone gradually. They are preparing him for adulthood when he doesn’t live with his family.

Now in 9th grade he is thanking his parents, after five years of freedom from screens and the dangers of untethered access to the internet.

According to Alyssa Mercante at video game site Kotaku, many gamers today lament what they perceive to be woke culture running amok. According to them, the multiethnic casting of central characters must be a result of diversity consultants forcing racial quotas on otherwise uninterested creators. If not for these overly aggressive interlopers, goes the thinking, the characters would hew more closely to their established norm (which just happens to be mostly male and/or white).

This is especially the case with Sweet Baby, Inc., a creative firm that works with game studios like Remedy Entertainment, publisher of titles like Control, Quantum Break, and Alan Wake 2. Mercante says that there’s a group on Steam, the main PC-gaming marketplace, with 100,000 members, dedicated to detecting which games that Sweet Baby has consulted on. Many such gamers think that Sweet Baby’s influence led to Remedy casting a black actress in one of protagonist roles.

“It’s absolutely not true,” said Kyle Rowley, Remedy game director for Alan Wake 2, when asked on X whether Sweet Baby mandated the casting. And when Mercante spoke to people at both Remedy and Sweet Baby, she found the opposite to be true.

Kim Belair, CEO of Sweet Baby, Inc., said, “Sweet Baby is, at its core, a narrative development company. That means anything from script writing to narrative design to narrative direction, to story reviews. One of the things that we do offer is cultural consultations or authenticity consultations … but the perspective is never that we’re coming in and injecting diversity. For the most part, it’s the reverse. It’s that a company has created a character, and they want to make that character more representative and more interesting.”

Sweet Baby co-founder David Bedard insists that the diversity of representation in video games is a byproduct of developers wanting to make the game better for all players. Blair said, “We are not censors. We have no interest in false diversity or in tokenization. We have an interest in making stories better, and making characters more interesting, and in developing a stronger language around narrative design…Those are the things that we are really passionate about.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

You don’t have to be politically liberal or woke or whatever to consider the needs of others as more important than your own. That’s the kind of life that Jesus modeled and that the Apostle Paul wrote about.

In 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially recognized "internet gaming disorder" (IGD). Addicts play pathologically. They can't stop—they play even after their mental health and careers have suffered great harm. The WHO estimates that at least 60 million people worldwide suffer this condition. Fortnite, a combat, survival and violent online video game is the most played of all time, boasting over 500 million registered users.

Today, games are less expensive, more accessible, and more technically advanced than ever before. Psychology professor Jeffrey Derevensky, who advised the WHO panel, said, "Kids are walking around with a mini-console in their pockets. Gaming is a hidden addiction. You can't smell it on their breath and you can't see it in their eyes. And so parents are often totally unaware of what their children are doing."

Maclean's magazine writer and former addict Luc Rinaldi describes how playing, and especially winning, can meet basic needs:

I replayed Resident Evil 4 a dozen times because there's something endlessly satisfying about blowing up a zombie's head. But my favorite games were the ones that offered something my real life lacked. Exploring the fantasy world of Skyrim, I wasn't just some kid in the suburbs of Toronto; I was a noble swordsman on an epic quest to save the realm. In a video game, even a loner can feel like a king … The high was intoxicating.

The obsession runs deep. One North Carolina boy kept playing as a tornado was leveling his town. A study published in Nature showed that gaming can more than double a player's baseline dopamine levels. Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman claims that, for some players, “gaming can increase dopamine levels as much as having sex or snorting cocaine. Our brains are programmed to seek out more of these hits, which is what drives gamers to keep gaming.”

Like all addictions, there comes the inevitable crash. The trouble is that the euphoric feelings don't last. Gamers develop tolerances. They need to play more to achieve the same rush. After overloading their brains with happy signals, an equal and opposite reaction occurs. Their baseline dopamine level drops. They get angry, sad, and apathetic.

Do you realize that 30 percent of all men of working age in this culture are not working? There are many reasons for this. Some workers lack the skills needed for all but the lowest-paid jobs. Some jobs have been eliminated because of technology advances or cheaper overseas labor. Some have discovered government benefits that enable them to avoid working.

A study for the Mercatus Center of George Mason University, reports that “75 percent of inactive prime-age men are in a household that received some form of government transfer payment.” The researcher believes that government disability benefits in particular are one reason for the lack of interest in work.

Another trend toward irresponsibility is the growth of the video-gaming culture in our society. Many young men and women are spending countless hours every day or many hours of the night just gaming away. They may lose sleep, college opportunities, and work advancement with addictions to meaningless competitions that consume time and energy but produce nothing.

Possible Preaching Angle:

What would you call a pastime where a person spends all their time, all their money, all their resources, pursuing things that are not real and that never will benefit them or society? We would call it slavery. And those who are enslaved by such meaningless pursuits ultimately lose all respect for themselves. Work gives us dignity, because work itself is dignified.

Eden Chen was a teenage shoplifter and competitive gamer. Then he found purpose beyond possessions in Christ. He shares his story in CT magazine:

Growing up, I was something of a nomad. I spent the first years of my life in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Then, at age six, I moved to Hong Kong, where I remained until the third grade before moving back to Maryland.

My parents raised my brother and me in the church. By the time we returned from Hong Kong, both of us had stopped going. I was obsessed with four things: video games, sports, material things, and chasing women. But I really excelled with the video game controller in my hand. At one point, I was one of the top 10 Warcraft 3 players in the United States.

Meanwhile, I had begun regularly shoplifting at the mall. On a weekly basis, my friends and I would compete to see who could walk out of the mall with the highest dollar value of stolen goods. Thankfully, God wouldn’t let me drift too far down this dangerous road.

At age 16, I began attending church again. I had always believed that God existed. From my perspective, it seemed likelier that nature and human creativity resulted from creation, rather than random chance. Still, for all my curiosity, I wasn’t eager to hear the answer. I knew well enough that discovering a righteous God could interrupt my preferred lifestyle of pursuing pleasure and doing as I pleased.

Then my youth pastor invited me on a mission trip to a rougher part of Nashville, Tennessee. During that trip, I met missionaries who helped reignite my search for God. They had lived in the inner-city projects and materially speaking they had next to nothing. But they were the most joyful people I had ever met. I had always assumed that more riches and possessions led to greater joy, but these missionaries were debunking that theory.

After returning home, I embarked on an all-encompassing search for God. I studied the major world religions—Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. I figured that if God was real, then he would probably make himself known. I read C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, the most logical expression of faith that I had encountered. All of a sudden, it struck me that running away from Christianity would require more faith than running toward it. I felt that the gospel o­ffered the most compelling answers to life’s most important questions: Where does all of the good in the world come from? Where does all the evil in the world come from? How do I deal with personal guilt over the way I have lived my life?

The gospel presents a fascinating solution. In the instant someone accepts that they are a sinner and that Jesus is Lord, they are made righteous not because of what they have, but because of what Jesus did on the Cross. That was the most simple and complete solution to the problem of how God can punish sin without crippling sinners—that is, all of us—with guilt and condemnation.

Editor’s Note: Today, Chen heads up a creative agency called Fishermen Labs. They make virtual- and augmented-reality experiences, and emerging technology for startups and Fortune 100 companies. They hope to emulate the 12 fishermen that Jesus called to follow him—the most influential band of misfits in the history of the world.

One of the ways that Meredith Holt-Caldwell stays in contact with her 80-year-old mother Denyse Holt is through their newest daily ritual, comparing scores in the popular online word game Wordle. So, when Denyse didn’t send her word grid one morning, and didn’t respond to any of her text messages, Meredith grew concerned.

As it turns out, she was right to be concerned. Authorities say that early that morning, a man presumed to be mentally ill, broke into Denyse’s home and threatened to harm her with a pair of scissors. She told reporters, “I didn’t think I was going to live. I was in shock. I was trying to survive.”

Denyse’s silence prompted Meredith to call police in the area to request a welfare check, which escalated into an hours-long standoff with local law enforcement. Eventually, a SWAT team broke through the door and subdued Davis with a stun gun, taking him into custody. Davis was eventually charged with home invasion, aggravated kidnapping, and aggravated assault against a peace officer.

Despite being held in captivity for over 17 hours, Holt was uninjured upon rescue. “I’m very lucky,” she said.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God can use even trivial things to help engineer our rescue from life-threatening dangers and troubles.

Recent court documents unveiled disciplinary actions against two LAPD officers, actions which resulted in their firing. Former LAPD officers Louis Lozano and Eric Mitchell were supposed to be responding to a call about a robbery in progress. But according to recordings obtained from their squad car and body cameras, they waited 20 minutes before they responded to the call.

What occupied their attention during that 20 minute span? The popular augmented reality game Pokemon Go. The officers spent approximately 20 minutes chasing virtual creatures on their mobile devices. “A Snorlax … just popped up on 46th and Leimert,” one of them was recorded as saying.

After the firing, the officers protested the decision on the basis of their contention that recording their conversations was an invasion of their privacy. However, the city’s board of rights upheld the firing in their decision, affirming its necessity. In its filing, the city responded: “Playing Pokémon Go showed complete disregard for the community, wasted resources, violated public trust and was unprofessional and embarrassing to the Department.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

As the people of God, we are called upon to give our full attention to serving. If we're unwilling to sacrifice our immediate desires for the sake of others, we can't in good conscience call ourselves disciples of Jesus.

Vince Patton couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He was surfing YouTube when he found a video of a Tesla driver playing a video game on the car’s touchscreen dashboard. Tesla officials say the feature was added to help drivers pass the time while their cars are docked in charging stations. But Patton was shocked because the driver was playing the video game while the car was in motion.

Patton is also a Tesla owner. Shocked, and also curious, Patton got in his own Tesla Model 3 and headed over to an empty parking lot in a remote area to test it out for himself. He said, “I was just dumbfounded that, yes, sure enough, this sophisticated video game came up.” Not only was he able to load up games but he even surfed the web on the onboard browser. He said, “Somebody’s going to get killed. It’s absolutely insane.”

Patton took his concerns to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. He wrote in a complaint “NHTSA needs to prohibit all live video in the front seat and all live interactive web browsing while the car is in motion. Creating a dangerous distraction for the driver is recklessly negligent.”

An NHTSA spokesperson made this statement: “We are aware of driver concerns and are discussing the feature with the manufacturer. The Vehicle Safety Act prohibits manufacturers from selling vehicles with design defects posing unreasonable risks to safety.”

When contacted, representatives from Tesla were unavailable for comment.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Part of wisdom is learning how to avoid temptations that can distract us from our primary calling, or worse, put our safety and wellbeing in jeopardy.

In a recent issue of Wired, Zak Jason writes:

In the 2003 Major League Baseball season, Oreo Queefs stood five-foot-zero, weighed 385 pounds, and, impossibly, stole 214 bases, obliterating the century-old single-season record of 138. A walrus with the legs of a cheetah, Queefs also regularly blasted the ball 500 feet to the opposite field. Over just two seasons with the Florida Marlins, he batted .680, hit 203 home runs, and was ejected for charging the mound 46 times. Then, before even reaching his super alien prime, Queefs vanished into thin air.

A few weeks ago, I received a text from the Marlins manager about what happened to the former Golden Glove winner. Queefs has fallen on hard times. The now 43-year-old lives with his uncle in a rented trailer in Nevada, where they run a failing off-off-Strip sausage stand called Queefs’ Kielbasa Kiosk. He is twice divorced, hasn’t seen his 15-year-old son in 12 years, and is on probation for attempted robbery of a bait-and-tackle shop.

In reality, Oreo Queefs exists only on a PlayStation 2 memory card, now likely corroding in a landfill. The manager is my childhood friend Chris, onetime owner of the EA Sports game MVP Baseball 2003. We conceived Queefs one summer night the only way two 13-year-old boys know how: (via) the game’s Create-a-Player screen. We chose his height, weight, speed, and batting hot zones. We watched with pride as he eviscerated the league. I haven’t played any of these games in a decade, but over the years my friends and I have updated one another on the lives of our created characters. They’ve all plummeted from glory.

The media has been overanalyzing why millennials can’t grow up ever since the oldest millennials have been legal grown-ups. Still, I can’t help but take the fact that at 32—an age when Jesus Christ was leading his friends and much of humanity to eternal salvation—my friends and I text one another during the workday about the video game characters we created when we were teenagers.

The writer Sam Anderson recently quipped that “the world of sports media is basically where American men go to avoid therapy.” As kids, we lived our dreams vicariously through video game characters record-shattering successes. As adults, we process our real setbacks and failures through their imagined setbacks and failures.

Layoffs, anxieties, illnesses, divorce, fertility issues—these are a few of the realities of adulthood that men are generally less than forthcoming about. Instead of discussing these directly, they cope through abstraction. When we talk about our created characters becoming has-beens, we’re (childishly) saying we’re not children anymore. When we bring them up, they finally open the door for us to talk intimately about struggles in our own lives. These children of our childhood are now ad hoc therapists of adulthood.

Until the COVID-19 pandemic, Roman Khripunov didn’t realize the missionary potential of video games. Khripunov ran soccer academies for refugees and immigrants in Houston, using the sport as a platform to share Christ with children. When the coronavirus paused in-person outreach, the ministry came up with an alternative: Soccer coaches would begin playing video games on the livestreaming platform Twitch and invite players to watch and ask spiritual questions. On Twitch, participants talk with each other as they play or type back and forth in a chat box.

It was a hit. Teenage soccer players reluctant to spend 15 minutes discussing spiritual matters in person were willing to engage for three to four hours over video games online. Eventually, the ministry opened its Twitch channel to the public and began to establish a presence on other gaming platforms as well, with coaches talking with people online.

Among the success stories, a man from the Netherlands professed faith in Christ while gaming, then brought five friends to hear the gospel too. Khripunov said, “The people that we’re starting to observe on these [gaming] platforms are actually seeking a lot of spiritual things. They’re very hungry for the gospel.”

Some Christians have moral qualms about video games and have shied away from esports. Many video games are of real-world sports, but many others include sexualized and violent content. There are also concerns about other negative effects, such as gamers who show signs of addiction, and video game abuse has been linked to anxiety and depression.

Canadian Stefano DiSalvo, the most prominent professional esports player to share his Christian testimony openly, has experienced the dark side of esports. He said that many teenage gamers are “escaping from their own reality and kind of taking out that anger, taking out that depression on other people online. It creates this toxic environment at times.” That may be a reason to avoid esports. Or it may be a reason to find lost souls there.

Lacking the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, modern society is looking for new, innovative ways to help make people more empathetic. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, whose company sells the Oculus VR headset, said of virtual reality (VR): “One of the most powerful features of VR is empathy. By cultivating empathy, VR can raise awareness and help us see what’s happening in different parts of the world.”

The hope and promise of VR is that one day everyone will call it an “empathy machine”:

By creating an immersive and interactive virtual environment, a VR headset can quite literally put you in someone else’s shoes. Text, image, or video offers only partial views of a person’s life. With VR, you can get inside their head. And this high-fidelity simulation, the argument goes, will make us better people by heightening our sensitivity to the suffering of others. It will make us “more compassionate,” “more connected,” and ultimately “more human,” in the words of the VR artist Chris Milk. ... By lending you the eyes and ears of someone suffering, tech helps you to develop a greater sense of responsibility for them. You feel compelled to act. This is connectivity not merely as a technical concept, but a moral one.

This expectation is partially explored in the movie Ready Player Two, released in November, 2020. More advanced VR--actually placed inside the brains of most of the world’s population--has rid the world of crime, disease, addiction, and all forms of prejudice. As one of the film’s characters says: “For the first time in human history, we have technology that gives us the ability to live in someone else’s skin for a little while.”

When a man went to purchase a PlayStation 5 (PS5) from a reseller, he was unsure about the legitimacy of the listing because of its low price. After speaking to the reseller on the phone, his curiosity increased, as it sounded like the woman on the other line didn’t know much about video games, and didn’t explain why she was selling it for such a low price. Nevertheless, he made arrangements to pick up the unit in person.

After greeting the lady of the home, he eventually met the other occupant--a very remorseful looking man. After confirming that he was the one who originally bought it, the buyer had to ask--why was he selling it? The PS5 had been only recently released, and as such, in great demand. After a bitter sigh, the man confessed: “It turns out that women can tell the difference between a PS5 and an air filter.”

Inspired by several image memes that depicted the unusual chassis of the PS5 as an air filter, this man had apparently tried to deceive his wife into thinking that’s what it was. The jig was presumably up when she most likely asked a series of reasonable questions, like why its fan was so quiet, and why air purifier needed to be plugged into their large screen television.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Christians are called to walk with integrity in all areas of life. When we use deception to get what we want, we shouldn’t be surprised when our plans go awry.

Children are spending more time than ever in front of a screen, and it doesn't necessarily bode well for their futures. In 1997, babies and toddlers age 0-2 got an average of 1.32 hours of screen time each day, Axios reports. By 2014, that number had doubled to three hours per day, and more of that time is spent in front of the TV than ever before.

Using data from a previous child development study, JAMA researchers found that children age 2 and under spent 43 percent of their screen time in front of a TV in 1997. The rest of the time was spent with video games and computers.

According to a 2023, National Library of Medicine study, at six months, children were exposed to an average of 1hr, 16 min of screens per day, increasing to an average of 2 hr, 28 min by 24-months. Some children at six months were exposed to more than 3 hr of screen time per day. Inequalities in exposure were evident as early as six months. Children from higher educated families were exposed to 1hr, 43 min fewer screens per day, compared to lower educated households, with this difference remaining consistent as children age.

"Prolonged screen time can increase risks of obesity in children and can be linked to poorer performance on developmental screening tests," Axios also notes.

Sam Leith is an English author and literary editor of the British newsmagazine The Spectator. He spends most of his time reading great pieces of writing. However, he enthusiastically makes the case for playing video games, which are supposedly mindless and a waste of time.

Leith asks if the time spent playing video games is pointless. “Well, possibly—but it’s … pointless in the same way meditation is pointless … and playing or following sport is pointless. It’s a pointless thing that fulfils a foundational human need. Not being able to bear very much reality, and all that.”

Leith’s main point is that these games offer an escape from the often grim, harsh, and mundane experience of real life. Life can be cruel and often doesn’t give you second chances. “Out here … things fall apart. Time runs only one way. But in the game world, the resurrection of the virtual flesh is not a miracle but a routine occurrence. There’s always another life, another try, the possibility of remaking the world of the game afresh.”

Possible Preaching Angles: It is true that some people spend hours in a virtual world of games. However, the church can recognize the heart need this represents and offer true new life and a fresh start in Christ.

In his book, Jeffrey Froh writes that an American child who watches three hours of children's television programming a day will see 4,380 good acts in a year but 15,330 acts of violence in that same time. Strong evidence from research indicates that abundant exposure to violent programming and video games is linked to aggressive attitudes, values, and behaviors.

In a broad review of more than a hundred studies involving over 130,000 male and female participants from around the world, researchers found that violent video games increase aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, bodily arousal (e.g., heart rate, blood pressure), and aggressive behavior, and that they decrease empathy for others and helping behavior. On the other hand, exposure to prosocial content is linked to good deeds and kindness towards others.

Possible Preaching Angles: What's true for kids is also true for adults. What we set our minds on determines how we will think, feel, and behave.

The numbers for the $101 billion (2024) video game industry are astonishing:

• 190 million Americans play video games.
• 61% of the US population plays a video game at least one hour a week.
• 28% play a minimum of 1-5 hours per week.
• 21% of US adults 18-29 spent 6-10 hours playing per week.
• 8% surpass 20 hours weekly.
• The revenues collected by the industry rivals that of professional sports, motion pictures, and television.

Why the obsession? Cultural critic Frank Guan examines the gaming craze and offers some possibilities for the mania and passion.

First, "games make sense." The rules are clear to all. According to Guan, "The purpose of a game, within it, unlike in society, is directly recognized and never discounted." Second, you are always the protagonist. "Unlike with film and television, where one has to watch the acts of others, in games, one is an agent within it." And, third, they are utterly convenient. The gamer never has "to leave the house to compete, explore, commune, exercise agency, or be happy, and the game possesses the potential to let one do all of these at once." Fourth, the game might be challenging, "but in another sense it is literally designed for a player to succeed."

No wonder Guan concludes by stressing the escapist nature of video games:

"[Video games] solve the question of meaning in a world where transcendent values have vanished … We turn to games when real life fails us—not merely in touristic fashion but closer to the case of emigrants, fleeing a home that has no place for them … . Life is terrifying; why not, then, live through what you already know?"

2024 video game stats can be found here and here