Hello…Perceptions.
Well, today I want to talk about video games. Now, I haven’t talked much about video games over the years. And when I HAVE spoken about video games it hasn’t been very positive. However, one thing that I’ve never doubted is the influence and importance of video games. Games are huge. In fact, games are predicted to produce $284B in worldwide revenue this year. To put that in perspective, Hollywood’s worldwide box office revenues were $33.9B in 2023. The NFL had a total revenue of $18B in 2022. Games are big business. And like all big business, the video games industry is a patchwork of people from genuine nerdy gamers to pencil-pushing numbers-crunchers to savvy marketers to non-nonsense executives. It takes all kinds from creatives to money-men to make an industry like video games go. The games themselves, the actual product that actual people like to actually spend their actual time actually playing after actually paying actual money to get, these games are not just products, they are, in fact, actual works of art. They are products, yes. And they are commercial products, yes. But they are also art. Visual, audio, and narrative art meant to help a person escape from real life into a fantasy world for a while and have fun. This means that video games, at least really good video games, are VERY expensive to create and produce. Games cost millions of dollars to make and sometimes tens and even, rarely, hundreds of millions of dollars!
Now, with an industry this lucrative there are bound to be a variety of personages working in and around it. And I don’t simply mean people with different skillsets. I mean people who have a variety of motivations. Some people just want to make money. And that’s all fine and well. Some people want to just make games that are a blast to play. And that’s all fine and well. Some people, on the other hand, wish to use video games to effect social change. Aye, and there’s the rub.
Because the reality is that video games are, for better or worse, shapers, and very important shapers, of our moral imagination, not only as individuals, but culturally, and even globally. The lead story-writers of major video games will have a much wider reach to influence people’s morality and values than I will ever have. Most preachers not only could never dream of having the kind of influence these people have, but we probably wouldn’t know what to do with it if we had it! If you told a theologian that he could have the undivided attention of millions of people for dozens or hundreds of hours and that he could shape the content howsoever he wanted, as long as it was fun to play, I think that he would jump at the chance and then struggle to know what to do. And that’s because telling a compelling moral story that’s engaging and that also communicates a message, but not ham-fistedly, is a much rarer gift than we’ve given it credit for being. Great story-tellers, even competent storytellers, seem to be growing increasingly rare. And, sadly, preachers don’t always make good poets. And more’s the pity.
However, and here’s where we get to the news of the day, it isn’t just Christian preachers who lack imagination when trying to shape the moral imagination. Preachers of wokeism also lack imagination. Progressive fundamentalists are also people who don’t know the subtle science and exact art of subtlety. And because their politics are so on-the-nose it’s hard to miss. And that’s bad enough because that’s bad art. But it’s all the more worrisome, because the morals and politics they’re pushing are loathsome to wide swathes of the gameplaying audience.
Enter Sweet Baby Inc. and what’s being dubbed, Gamergate 2. And here I’m simply going to offer a brief summary, and not read an article because there is no single article that really captures the whole affair in a concise way. So, here’s what happened.
A company called Sweet Baby Inc. exists. It specializes in “helping” game developers tell their stories in ways that satisfy DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) standards. Their mission, such as it is, “is to tell better, more empathetic stories while diversifying and enriching the video games industry. We aim to make games more engaging, more fun, more meaningful, and more inclusive, for everyone.”
Now, for people who haven’t been paying attention that probably seems rather innocuous and anodyne—they’re helping, don’t you know. But if you HAVE been paying attention some of those words stick out like sore thumbs. And, the thing is, that if they had helped produce games that were more diverse and inclusive and did it in a way that was artistically integrous and didn’t drip with a political bias they probably would have been fine. The problem is that’s not what they did. They engaged heavily in what’s called “race-swapping” or “gender-swapping” which is where you take a character that’s traditionally white and or male and make him black and or female. They also made a lot of narrative decisions that gamers didn’t really care for. And people began to notice.
An article published in January pointed out the small, but growing, discontent with SBI products. And recently a gamer posted on the gaming website Steam a list, just a factual list, of the games that SBI has had a part in. That’s it. And here’s the shocking thing. SBI felt so threatened by people simply being given a convenient list of products that THEY worked on that they tried to get Steam to ban that person from using the website. Now, if you’re not a gamer remember, that people use Steam and they pay actual money to have a Steam account and they use Steam to play actual games for which they’ve paid actual money. SBI decided that they felt so harassed by someone compiling a corporate bibliography that they wanted this person banned from the platform and out his cash.
Which, you know, to me seems odd. I mean, if someone wanted to make a bibliography of every sermon or article I’ve ever published, I’d be flattered. I mean, nobody’s ever gonna do that, but still, flattered. But SBI wasn’t flattered. And one can only guess why they weren’t flattered. But it seems to me, and it seems to many in the gaming world, that SBI doesn’t want you to know what they’ve worked on because they know that they have a reputation that isn’t particularly positive among their costumer base and they’d prefer to keep “helping make games better” in secrecy. You know, as most people running businesses honestly do…wait what?!
However, in response to this, the interest in the page SBI detected created by the user kabrutus went from just a few followers to hundred of thousands! And in response to this everyone lost their minds. Outlets not particularly trusted by many in the hardcore gamer industry put out puff pieces about SBI, but the dam had burst and people who don’t care about video games at all—people like me—began to pay attention. And as we’ve all learned, paying attention is the gravest of sins, the worst crime you can commit is to notice things! That’s why libsoftiktok has been declared an enemy of the state by the antique media. That’s why films like What is a Woman was both so powerful and so derided. You see, let me break down what happens. Far left progressives, call them woke if you want to, they publish all kinds of stuff on the internet about what they actually think and feel. And then when a person notices and says, “ummm, that seems weird, or creepy, or illegal, or immoral” the liberal media and all the wokescolds begin a campaign to defend the precious and attack the person who noticed. The problem isn’t that they say psychotic and evil things, it’s that you had the audacity to notice and disapprove. But that’s a story for another day!
But what’s a story for today is the fact that the more people look into SBI the more it seems like this is a pretty shady company. Despite its cutesy name and the pastel palletes on their website, they are engaged in nothing more nor less than good old-fashioned race-hustling. Their CEO has publicly bragged about using mob-tactics.
But it’s funny how people who brazenly use and encourage mob tactics dislike it when the great unwashed decide to simply stop buying your products! Because you see there are mob-tactics, like things that organized crime uses, you know mafioso, the mob. And then there are mob-tactics, as in using cancel culture to try to get individuals or governments or corporations to knuckle under. And both of these are used by the wokesters in the gaming industry, because these are basic tradecraft of the race-hustler. In fact, these are pretty much the ONLY tactics they have—apart from getting made-up degrees from disreputable programs so they can engage in intimidation via education…or simply put, credentialism. Although the phony-bologna degrees also allow them to secure sinecures so there’s that. And if you’re into legalized, tax-payer-theft, via nuisance lawsuits, then academic race-hustling might be the thing for you!
But these people don’t like it when the mob—as in you, and me, and those of us too stupid to secure jobs at the New York Times—decides that it wants to have a less than favorable opinion of what progressives do, and actually have the audacity to say it out loud and plan a boycott, when we do things like that it must be because we’re racist, misogynist, transphobes who are going to get kids killed. And calling people ists and phobes was really effective for a time. But that pony did its one trick one too many times and the show is played out. People cottoned on to the fact that they’re going to be called ists and phobes nomatter what they do so they might as well not kowtow. Of course, the most cowardly and foolish can still be cowed, but people like that are becoming fewer and fewer. Folks are on to the charade. They’ve seen the Emperor’s nether-regions and they’re tired of being hectored into saying it looks like Versace!
But, alas, the social justice movement came for games, just as it has for Hollywood, education, government, comic books, and everything else. However, gamers had an advantage that other groups didn’t have. And that’s that the gamers have direct and immediate influence on the success or failure of certain projects. That’s because, unlike in government, or education, gamers are buying a product. And unlike Hollywood or Streaming platforms where there are entire networks, and there are serious efforts to hide the successes and failures of certain products, games either sell or don’t and Steam monitors how many people are actively playing any game at any given time. That means that gamers and the industry have really good data on what games people pay for, play, and play over time. Both the profitability and the durability of a product can be known by producer and consumer in real-time ways. There’s no relying on journalists to say what’s good—there’s no need. People can just look at the stats. Everyone can see what games are successful and what games aren’t.
And what many have said is that they just want the politics out of games. Just like people say, “keep the politics out of movies,” or NASCAR or soft drinks or whatever. People say that they want zones that are free of politics. Now, some people mean, they don’t mind if there are political, or social, or theological bents to games, as long as their existence in the game is organic and natural and artistically done and not ham-fisted and obnoxious.
Others however, are suggesting that there should be no politics at all. What they want is a neutral public square in the world of video games. They just want neutral. They want default. And there are many, many people in this world, particularly people who have bought the lie that secular democracies are dedicated to creating ideologically neutral public squares, who think that default exists.
But that’s a lie. It’s always been a lie and it will always be a lie. As my friend Pastor Logan Feller likes to say, “neutrality is a myth.” There is no such thing as a neutral public square. And more importantly for today’s purposes, there is no such thing as a politically neutral video game—at least not the kind of games that most people play. If it portrays human behavior, then it cannot be neutral. There will be values and judgments made. They are impossible to avoid.
Games are political. What people really mean, when they see all the wokery and hate it is NOT, “get politics out of my games!” What they actually mean is, “I want normal things and normal values. I don’t want this. I want the pre-transgressive social values. I want society’s default settings.”
And sadly, many, many people have confused society’s default settings as neutral. They’ve assumed, like a fish in water, that concepts such as heteronormativity, sexual monogamy, meritocracy, doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, lex talionis justice, personal moral accountability, individual identity over group identity, et cetera, are just societal defaults. People think that these are just the normal and natural ways people engage with the world. But that just isn’t so.
The reality is that everything is, in fact, political, and theological. Everything has a bias. Including video games. And that’s OK. But pretending that there’s some sort of objective, God’s-eye-view, view-from-nowhere position where we can see things without bias is silly, stupid, impossible, unhelpful, and positively destructive. When people rebel against the forced inclusion of progressive politics and social messaging in their video games it isn’t because they don’t want games to be political, it’s because they reject the transgressive morality of the progressives—as well as it being bad art. People resent being told that they need to shut up and agree with a thing they find fundamentally disagreeable.
Brothers and sisters, friends, the “default” social settings, the “apolitical” is not default and it isn’t apolitical. It’s the society that resulted from Christianity. When people reject progressivism in any sphere it’s because they like the kind of society Christianity creates—admittedly that is a different thing than the kind of society CHRISTIANS create, but there is overlap.
As Christians we need to take moments like this as opportunities. Not just jump on the bandwagon to dunk on the purple-hairs, but to say, “Hey guys, those values and morals that you see being undermined, they don’t just emerge naturally—they come from somewhere, and they must be promoted and believed and defended—they come from Christ!” If we do that, we may not get as many viral tweets, but we will do an awful lot more for the Kingdom of God. And we may just see some souls saved, too.
So let’s help people see that the values they hate to see undermined come from Jesus, and lead them to Him in humility, love, and faith.