21st Century Gaming and 21st Century Godhood
By Francis F. Dec
(Editor’s Note: So I’ve been trying for the past couple months to convince any of my friends, acquaintances, or really anybody passing by if they’d be willing to write something for me within the realm of video games. Finally somebody bit, and my associate Francis wrote this up for me. I’m hoping this becomes a more commonly-occurring theme in the future, so if I know you (hell even if I don’t but you just want to write something tangentially about video games) drop me a line and send me what you got. I’d love to put it up.)
According to a recent study released by a team of mathematicians from Northwestern University and the University of Arizona, religion may be headed towards extinction in the first world.# While some may celebrate this as the dawning of a new age of reason, the rapid secularization of the first world should be approached with caution. Voltaire’s utterance “If God does not exist, it would be necessary to invent him” rings as true today as it did 300 years ago.
The secular gods and religions of the past and present have been as destructive to the soul as any crusade or jihad. The Nazis of Germany were elected on the whimsical notion that race is the new God and purity of Germany is the same as purity of spirit. The North Korean dogma of Juche preaches that God is the national self-reliance with il-Sung, the father, is Jong-il, the son, is Mao the Holy Ghost as trinity. But what type of god could hold the attention of a society with a tragically low attention span and comically misplaced sense of entitlement? The answer, of course, is you.
At least, that is what video games teach us.
In the distant video game past, pale-faced children would use their allowance to buy magazines filled with cheat codes. Perhaps you remember some of the arcane scriptures of yore that would bless you with ability to make something out of nothing (unlimited ammo) , walk on water (noclip) or invulnerability (literally, God Mode).
Certain games would make these button prayers nearly mandatory if one wished to experience the full game.(Contra 3 comes to mind). In the past, you were the Viking praying to Woden for protection against the harsh realities of the game and life.
Then we pussied out. Games became easier as autosaves were introduced and health began to auto-regenerate. A veteran FPS player can likely go through a new full game without dying once. Some video games (Bioshock and Prey) relegated death to the realm of inconvenience instead of frustration.
No longer are we the Viking praying for safe passage, now we are Old Testament God, cleansing Sodom and Gommorah one Nazi demon at a time. This relatively new revolution in gaming is one of thousands of market innovations employed to increase our sense of individual power. Not only can we have a burger our way and have our dumbass initials etched onto our iPods for an extra charge, we can take out our impotent aggressions on virtual terrorists with fake military weaponry. The only difference between God and the consumer is that God is always right even after he maxes out his Visa.
Looking at it this way, it seems pretty obvious why God had to take a break after six days.
