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Questions About Life and God
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By Professor Brad Hickey
Many years ago, I suddenly froze, transfixed. In front of me, several cousins were in front of a small old-style TV, playing Super Mario Bros. on Nintendo’s first U.S. gaming console called the NES.
As my love for fantasy and play grew, I embraced The Lord of the Rings (LotR), tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeon and Dragons (D&D), and other “nerdy” activities such as anime and cosplay.
In this article, I would like to share with you how I believe God not only used gaming to fill my life with beautiful memories, but also how God used these activities to heal my heart and lead me to him.
To explain properly requires me to go back to the beginning of my story.
While the first few years of my life are filled with memories of warmth and love, most of the years following are not.
Divorce, dysfunction, emotional abuse, had all left me with a significant lack of role models along with a profound lack of confidence and emotional maturity.
I faced the danger of facing life as a young adult with very little direction or a good community to hold me steady.
I felt disconnected from traditional institutions such as churches yet still held an unshakeable confidence that there was a God, that he cared about me and wanted me to live an ethical life.
Yet if I was to live a good life, God was going to have to do something drastic – by the age of 12 I was lost, running out of time, and had no idea of how to move forward. My family began to implode as infighting threatened to tear apart any meaningful relationship at any given moment.
I was a lone wolf separated from my pack, often living at my friends’ houses. I presented a tantalizing target for anyone looking to manipulate vulnerable people.
Remarkably, God did show up…in the strangest way possible – through the nerdy things I loved.
Beauty can surprise us and appear in the most unlikely of places.
I most encountered beauty and wonder through video games like Super Mario Bros., or later through shows such as Battlestar Galactica, Critical Role, or Andor.
And not just the games or shows themselves, but gaming music and the culture that sprang up around them – from colorful Nintendo Power magazines sent to my mailbox, action figures, gaming competitions, and gaming lingo as a whole. These all mesmerized me and followed me as I grew older.
Let me provide an example. About twenty years ago, I regularly played alongside a group of people in in the MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game) called World of Warcraft – a video game that contains a massive world with many people who fight monsters, engage in many adventures, and explore fantastic lands in-game.
This group of people called themselves GTH and represented a wide range of ages, personalities, and skillsets from around the world – including air traffic controllers in the Midwest, retired grandmothers in Texas, business salesmen in Canada, college students and scholars living abroad in war town countries, and stay-at-home parents in Australia.
GTH was like many other groups of its kind – we banded together to help each other complete large difficult quests that we could not have possibly achieved on our own.
Some of us were healers (my role), some chose characters who dealt a lot of damage to monsters, while others protected our team from a monster’s attacks.
We trained many hours together, developed bonds with each other, and had a good feel for each other’s capabilities and temperament. Our leaders were very kind and looked after all of us in their own way.
Each player’s character possessed a unique set of skills that were tied to a group of keyboard keys that could be combined in many creative ways.
For example, one key press might activate a healing skill able to be used while running, was less powerful, but quick to take effect.
Another skill might require me to stand still, delivered a great deal of healing but took effect in an excruciating 2.5 seconds, an eternity in combat that left me vulnerable.
Or I might release a large amount of healing over 10 seconds to everyone - a slow but powerful drip that sustained players over time while I was busy with other concerns.
Success depended on mastering somewhere between twenty to thirty unique skills while developing one’s ability to sequence them correctly in a dynamic and ever-changing environment.
Healing as a paladin for GTH represents one of the most wondrous forms of beauty I have ever personally felt.
Once a battle started, I felt connected to others and became aware of them and their characters through constantly monitoring their health and situation – healing, removing diseases and poisons, placing magic shields on someone at the last second to save them from certain death.
As my muscle memory kicked in, my hands became blurs on the keyboard and mouse, a subtle and creative work of art that required weaving skills in intricate patterns that were uniquely my own.
Afterwards, as our foes fell, the shouts and whoops of my comrades felt like a well-earned tonic for my heart.
I believe that World of Warcraft healing at that time represented a form of beauty made possible by an elegant user interface, a thoughtful community-centric and humanizing program design, and talented and soulful teammates, all coalescing into a unique type of collaborative choreography that few people will ever know yet is beautiful and wondrous all the same.
The first time I remember God speaking to me through gaming was while playing a Nintendo game titled Castlevania.
Castlevania invited players to fight their way through an old castle filled with undead of all kinds to earn the right to fight Dracula to end his reign of terror.
I found the music hauntingly beautiful and as I slew zombies and leapt from platform to platform, I decided to put words to the music, to align the words and their tones with the sounds.
But not just any words. It was my way to express my love to God, to share my hurts, or thoughts. It felt very awkward at first, but I also felt more connected to God who I was sure heard my strange gaming songs and accepted and loved them… because he loved me.
Since that time, around the age of 12, I have never stopped singing gaming hymns such as Hollow Knight’s achingly beautiful soundtracks or Final Fantasy XIII’s orchestral brilliance.
This singing would lay down the foundations for a steady connection to God although I little understand how important that connection would become.
Singing gaming “hymns” reminds me of the Bible verse, Ephesians 5:19, in which the writer encourages followers of Jesus to “sing and make music from your heart to the Lord” in my own unique gaming-related language.
As I grew older, I believe that God continued to lead me to games, shows, and fantasy books that held wisdom, that resonated with who God is and how he wants all people to live. I was drawn to certain characters.
I loved the toy robot, the Transformer, Optimus Prime, because he was gentle and courageous, strong and loved others. In the Lord of the Rings, characters like Faramir, a military captain, showed mercy, patience, and wisdom even in the face of great temptation. Video game characters such as Aerith Gainsborough showed me the value of self-sacrifice so that others could flourish.
However, about 10 years ago, I faced a crisis point.
I was let go of a job I loved due to my inability to juggle too many commitments at once. This crisis point left me with some important questions that I needed to answer: who was I and who did I want to be?
At that time, a dear friend invited me to play in a Dungeon and Dragons adventure with a group of Christians. These friends helped me explore my situation through my character, a prickly paladin named Vladimir. Through our adventures, my friend would create characters and situations to help me articulate my thoughts and express my heart.
For example, Vladimir, like me at the time, acted from a complex mixture of brashness, anger, and arrogance. He cared about the world but was cynical and felt very little hope both for himself or the people he sought to save.
Several of my rash decisions early on in our journey produced painful consequences to those I professed to care about.
Similarly, my brazen cynicism became a poison that tainted every encounter with others in my real life.
There came a poignant moment in our adventure when I/Vladimir faced a difficult choice – to move on and choose hope and love, or to continue down the path of bitterness and hopelessness.
I chose hope and I was able to celebrate that moment with friends who in their own way welcomed me back.
Through exploring our shared world, I came to realize that I was also exploring and confronting myself, which would prove important for future moments in my life.
This would not have been possible without this strange mix of fantasy, storytelling, and friendship.
I can see God chose to pursue me through gaming and nerd-related culture and activities. It was my most natural native language, the worlds I most loved and naturally understood.
The Bible teaches that Jesus loved us so much that he was willing to go to any lengths to save us and give us hope. I also believe God pursued me in gaming because he loves the people inside those spaces and has given nerds their unique passions and related gifts to serve God and care for others in this world.
The greatest example of compassion and care for others is Jesus Christ. He willingly sacrificed his life for us, to bring healing and a new life to all who will come to him. He is the One who most completely filled my heart with his love.
If you have yet to know him, please see this article: Beyond Blind Faith.
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