Are "Violent" video games wrong?
Posted: Wed May 13, 2009 3:49 am
Seeing as how my free time is usually spent playing games in which violence is at least a minor part of the gameplay(with some exceptions), I would like to know if anything in the Bible would advise against such a practice.
Personally, I don't even feel like I'm doing anything violent in most of them. It's more like "Oh no! It's the enemy-shaped horde of polygons! I must left-click at them!"- oddly, I feel more violent when playing non-violent games most of the time. In addition, I'm making a first-person game using Game Maker that's coming along decently and has fighting a war as a theme, and I just recently thought "what if this isn't the best thing to do?"
Then some times I think about games like Doom, which I played at a very young age. The whole goal of it is to kill demons and demon-possessed zombies(and it's certainly rather gory), which I guess probably wasn't the best thing for me to play when I was about five years old(It really didn't scare me that much, because I thought they were Nazis or the U.N. or something as opposed to demons-and yes it was Doom; not Wolfenstien 3D). I don't see how killing demons in a videogame could be a particularly offensive theme to God, but I'm not so certain about the senseless violence.
I could certainly say that I had a "violent" stage in my early childhood, but I know for a fact that it had nothing to do with "violent videogames", because that was also when I was more interested in "amateur film making"(Which, having only myself to produce and act everything, starred "Lego People" as actors instead), those films however, were centred around vicious things like "deathmatches" and "weapon testing on living subjects". I also made custom components to simulate the characters having holes blown into them.
But back on the subject, would you say that Violent video games as a whole aren't that great a mode of entertainment for Christians, or am I just obsessing over a stray thought that sprung to mind? I never really even felt like there was much of anything wrong with most of the "violent" games I've played, except for a few- even then, it's not due to violence.
Personally, I don't even feel like I'm doing anything violent in most of them. It's more like "Oh no! It's the enemy-shaped horde of polygons! I must left-click at them!"- oddly, I feel more violent when playing non-violent games most of the time. In addition, I'm making a first-person game using Game Maker that's coming along decently and has fighting a war as a theme, and I just recently thought "what if this isn't the best thing to do?"
Then some times I think about games like Doom, which I played at a very young age. The whole goal of it is to kill demons and demon-possessed zombies(and it's certainly rather gory), which I guess probably wasn't the best thing for me to play when I was about five years old(It really didn't scare me that much, because I thought they were Nazis or the U.N. or something as opposed to demons-and yes it was Doom; not Wolfenstien 3D). I don't see how killing demons in a videogame could be a particularly offensive theme to God, but I'm not so certain about the senseless violence.
I could certainly say that I had a "violent" stage in my early childhood, but I know for a fact that it had nothing to do with "violent videogames", because that was also when I was more interested in "amateur film making"(Which, having only myself to produce and act everything, starred "Lego People" as actors instead), those films however, were centred around vicious things like "deathmatches" and "weapon testing on living subjects". I also made custom components to simulate the characters having holes blown into them.
But back on the subject, would you say that Violent video games as a whole aren't that great a mode of entertainment for Christians, or am I just obsessing over a stray thought that sprung to mind? I never really even felt like there was much of anything wrong with most of the "violent" games I've played, except for a few- even then, it's not due to violence.