Gaming Alone: Helping the Generation of Young Men Captivated and Isolated by Video Games

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Unknown Speaker
Why are men in such crisis? I mean, the stats are like only 40% go to college and women with degrees don’t marry men who don’t have degrees. But there is something going on. I mean, mass shootings is a uniquely male crime because they’re lonely and lost. Or not useful in society

Unknown Speaker
the most Why are men and boys struggling? And what should we do about it? In the US the 2020 decline in college enrollment was seven times greater for male than for female students. Among men with only a high school education. One in three is out of the labor force, mortality from drug overdose, suicide and alcohol related illnesses are almost three times higher among men than women.

Sarah Zylstra
Have you heard about this? The statistics are genuinely alarming. It sounds like boys are all going to drop out of school quit going to work and spend the rest of their lives watching porn, doing drugs and playing video games in their basements while their moms do their laundry. The Washington Post has been running headlines like the boys are not all right, and why aren’t men going to college anymore? The New York Times called it a quote crisis of men and boys. Most sources now simply refer to it as the boy crisis. I’ve got two boys, so I can’t let this one slide by. I’m Sarah Zylstra. And I work for the gospel coalition you’re listening to recorded.

Unknown Speaker
We have a crisis on young men start to gain young men are twice as likely as Hispanics in high school and beyond attaching yourself to many of the most dangerous person in society.

Sarah Zylstra
In 1982, men and women were attending college in equal numbers. Since then, women have outpaced men not only in college enrollment, but in college completion, and graduate school enrollment. For every four boys in college today, there are six girls in graduate schools. Women are outpacing men, even in traditionally male heavy programs like law school and medical school. Where are all the boys? Here’s what I found out. Young men actually are going to college more than they used to. In 1970, about 20% of young men had a bachelor’s degree by 2021. That was up to 36%. It’s just hard to see the boys, because there are so many more girls. In 1970, about 12% of young women had graduated from college by 2021. That was up to 46%. I know what you’re going to ask next. Why? Across the world, even across history, when girls gain access to the classroom, they tend to be more successful than their male peers. Girls do more homework and get higher grades than boys. They’re less likely to get into trouble, repeat grades, be diagnosed with learning disorders, or be expelled even in preschool. So that’s a problem. But it’s not a new problem. It’s true that in the job market, fewer young men are working even though there are now 5 million more job openings than unemployed people in our country. The percent of men in the workforce has dropped from 97% in 1967 to 88% today. But here’s the thing. That trend has continued steadily for 50 years, regardless of changing market conditions or economic recessions or unemployment rates. The men who aren’t employed are more likely to have dropped out of high school and to have a criminal history. To be young, unmarried and childless, are not living with their children. So what do they do all day. national surveys show they’re spending most of their time eight hours a day on quote, socializing, relaxing and leisure. That means lots of watching television, but it also means lots of video games. In 2017, the National Bureau of Economic Research released a working paper connecting the lower rates of working young men to the improvement in video game technology. I’m not saying all male problems stem back to video games. But it is true that gaming has changed drastically over the past few decades. In 1999, about 50% of teen boys played video games for about 34 minutes a day. Today. 97% of boys play for an average of two hours and 20 minutes a day. What’s going on there

Sarah Zylstra
my first clue to what was going on with boys in video games came from studying girls. A few months ago I did a podcast called scrolling alone. It was about how social media promises to be about connection and friendship. But instead it largely makes Gen Z women feel anxious and alone. Instagram and other platforms tangle young women in a cycle of digital comparison and competition, divorced from the in person laughing and crying and hugging that enriches relationships. Social media isn’t wrong Exactly. But judging from the way it’s affecting young girls, we need to be a lot more careful with it than we have been. Even before we published scrolling alone, I could see parallels with the world of video games. In both you create and maintain an online identity and an online world. In both you can meet and become friends with people across the world that you haven’t met and might never meet in real life. In both you might aspire to be an influencer or a top gamer, which looks easy, like gaining fame and fortune by doing something super fun. But it’s actually a lot harder on you than it looks. In both there are quantifiable markers a score are a number of reshares or double taps for how well you are succeeding in both, you can spend hours in front of a screen without much difficulty. With the advance of technology. Both forms of entertainment have grown really, really popular. Globally, social networking sites made $153 billion in 2021. More than twice as much as Hollywood, Starbucks and the NFL combined. The video game industry is bigger yet raking in $180 billion last year, more than 40% of the 8 billion people on the planet play in America among teen boys 97% play. I’m not willing to write off either social media or video games completely. I’m a reformed Christian, and I believe in God’s sovereignty over every square inch. So how can we think well, for ourselves and for our boys about video games 321.

Unknown Speaker
The first video game I ever played was Minecraft. I was goodness, I was maybe like 11 or 12 at the time. So you know, I remember very vividly getting like my first laptop. You know, buying it with my money that I’d saved up from working over the summer and whatnot.

Sarah Zylstra
That’s Jacob Toole. He’s a junior at Dordt University where I got my undergraduate degree and where I now sit on the board. And yes, this is a school that’s so reformed. It’s named after the Synod of Dort, held by the Dutch Reformed Church in the 1600s. To get there, I fly from Chicago to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and then drive about an hour southeast into the top corner of Iowa. The university sits in a little rural town surrounded by cornfields and big blue skies. It’s the kind of place where kids still walk to school by themselves where grandpa’s gather in the morning for coffee. And we’re 19 churches, 12 of them with reformed in the name serve a population of about 8000. I’m here because while I was sitting in a board meeting last year, I heard about a gaming club that’s doing something no one else is thinking with students about a reformed theology of video games. More on that in a minute. For now I sit across the table from Jacob in a library conference room and ask what motivated him enough to work all summer mowing lawns? To buy a laptop and Minecraft

Unknown Speaker
because I watched YouTube videos about it. Yeah, I knew I knew that’s what I wanted. Yep. From watching YouTube videos, Jacob loved Minecraft is the building the exploring the the experience of having, you know, an entire world at your fingertips to do whatever you wanted with you know, it was basically get up, go to school, you know, and then as soon as I got home as soon as I got time, Minecraft as he got

Sarah Zylstra
older, Jacob built his own desktop PC. He got an account on Steam, which is a site where players can buy games log their scores or post reviews.

Unknown Speaker
I’ve put close to 500 hours and age of wonders three, I’ve put many hours into Hearts of Iron for stolarz You know all these different Grand Strategy type games. I put a lot hundreds of hours into these games.

Sarah Zylstra
I asked what his mom thought about that. Um,

Unknown Speaker
there were many times where she tried to institute something along the lines of you have X amount of hours per day. That’s it go to Oh, no, didn’t go too well.

Sarah Zylstra
Here we are not even 10 minutes in and already at the heart of the problem. I can’t claim video games are the only thing that’s wrong with men in America. But I do know half of American gamers report missing sleep in order to play a third have missed meals and a quarter have skipped showers. More than 10% have missed work because of games. The young men I talked to at door looked clean to me. They played sports, sang in the choir and had girlfriends, they went to class got good grades, and they were leaders on campus. But they could all get lost in digital worlds. And it could be hard to make their way back. Johnny is a senior engineering major, he attended a private Christian high school that wasn’t close to his house. I asked how much time he spent playing when he was younger.

Unknown Speaker
If I’m honest, sometimes too much, it definitely got to a point like it started out with the whole thing of my mom didn’t restrict too much of my time, because that was how I hung out with my friends because I lived away from our friends. Then as it got on that lack of restriction on the time, it wasn’t the greatest thing. Because I I had trouble and I still sometimes have trouble budgeting my time. So yeah, that’s one thing me and my mom kind of both wish that had been done differently.

Sarah Zylstra
And here’s Ethan, who grew up connecting to his dad over video games, it was a great way for them to bond. But it was also hard to turn off, especially when he got to college,

Unknown Speaker
second semester freshman year, you could definitely make an argument that it was it was becoming an addictive problem for me. I didn’t adjust the college life super well. So my first two semesters were tough, particularly first for December reasons video games. But even second semester there was it was a Saturday, so I didn’t have classes. But when I realized that I had been at the computer playing for 15 hours straight. I was like alright, they weren’t enjoyable, 15 hours, probably not healthy. Definitely not healthy, too to to give myself what little credit, I deserve little, a good most of those 15 hours were with other people. I wasn’t just it wasn’t just me alone, but still 15 hours, just too much. That’s too much of anything.

Sarah Zylstra
He’s right, of course, 15 hours of anything is too much. But it’s rare that you can physically do much else for that long. If you tried to play sports for 15 hours straight, you would collapse. If you tried to work for that long, you’d give out if you ate for that long, you’d explode your stomach. The unique thing about video games is that you can play them for a long time, they require very little physical energy, and the blue light from the screen keeps your mind from recognizing that your body is growing tired. This works for video game companies who make money not just on the sale of their games, but also by what’s called in app purchases, or microtransactions. That’s when you can buy something small say fortnight skins or a specific weapon or extra lives to make the game more enjoyable or to help you progress. I cannot emphasize enough how important this is. The average League of Legends player spent $92 on these game upgrades in 2019, the average fortnight player spent $82. In 2020, players spent a combined $93 billion on microtransactions. That is eight times more money than they spent on the games themselves. For comparison, that was more revenue just in microtransactions than target made that year. This is a massive economic incentive to keep players online. Over the years through trial and error video game companies have spent a lot of time and money figuring out ways to engage the human brain. Want us to present someone with an achievable task and a clear path to success. Our brains release dopamine when that happens, we feel competent and happy. And when it fades, we want to feel competent and happy again. Another strategy is to offer someone an uncertain reward in social media. That’s the question of how many likes or reshares a post will get in video games. That’s a loot box that you buy even though you’re not sure what’s in it, or it’s earning an arbitrary reward for completing a task, say a random number between one and 10 coins instead of a stable consistent five coins. There are a bunch of other strategies as well such as leveling up or tracking streaks like playing every day for eight days, or getting daily rewards or being penalized for taking a break. For example your supplies might go bad where you won’t get any upgrades no Wonder Boys are having a hard time logging off.

Unknown Speaker
I’ve kind of rational rationalize it as that’s what guys love to do. We’re girls love to go shopping or we love to go on social media guys love to video game and Haleigh

Sarah Zylstra
is a junior at Dordt. For a while she dated a boy who couldn’t put down the controller. He was

Unknown Speaker
putting off schoolwork to play video games and he NH I would go in there or anytime I would talk to him, it would be because he was playing video games. Or that’s what I felt like at least I rarely saw him doing schoolwork.

Sarah Zylstra
This is important because while about an even number of boys and girls play video games, those who are addicted are overwhelmingly male. It seems like video games tap into something about the way God made men. When males conquered territory in a video game. A Stanford study shows the parts of their brain associated with reward and pleasure light up with dopamine, the female brain lights up to but not nearly as much. Another study showed that males feel better about gaming wins, and not as badly about losses as females, their incentive is to keep reaching for those wins. No surprise, then that a sizable minority, some say up to 20% of males really struggle to put the games down, especially in younger years when their brains are developing. The executive control center which weighs risks and rewards isn’t fully matured until around age 25. Which means kids and teens are more likely to favor the immediate gratification of a game than the delayed gratification of going for a run or finishing a paper. Studies bear this out.

Unknown Speaker
There’s such a sensory smorgasbord of action and color, our children are becoming addicted. They’re playing for days on end to the exclusion of everything else. Even school

Unknown Speaker
no alert from the World Health Organization about video game addiction, the organization is now designating gaming disorder as a mental health condition ABCs

Sarah Zylstra
gaming disorder but some play for up to 20 hours a day. In 2019, the World Health Organization identified gaming disorder in part as the escalation of gaming over negative consequences. In other words, even though you’re failing the class or losing the job, or alienating the friends, you still keep playing. If this continues for at least a year, the who said then you’ve got a gaming disorder.

Unknown Speaker
What makes anything addictive, it’s it’s a stimulus that triggers a dopamine response. And then you you know, because of how our bodies are made, we want more of the stimulus. And because of the dopamine hit, and we’re like, okay, and especially with video games, you know, sometimes that’s a pretty easy dopamine hit to get. So then you can just press the button over and over again, and you get there and all of a sudden, you know that you’re trapped, and you’ve wired your brain in such a way. So that’s like one of the few ways you can actually get the dopamine hits, so you can’t like get it normally anymore, and then you end up with problems.

Sarah Zylstra
Jacobs, right. And when boys choose games over and over, they’re reinforcing neural pathways in their brains. They learn how to respond rapidly to large amounts of incoming information, which is good training for anyone who wants to be an air traffic controller. But it’s not great training for boys who need to practice focusing their attention on a single purpose, like reading a textbook, focusing on a task or listening to a teacher. And it’s not great for learning off screen skills like navigating face to face conversations, finishing a boring job or shooting a ball into a basketball hoop. While video games do Hone digital hand eye coordination, that doesn’t translate off screen. In other words, playing a video game doesn’t help you catch a ball or spot a moving target in real life. Unfortunately, when those neural pathways become too entrenched, they’re almost impossible to reuse this. None of these things are secrets. Well, not everyone has studied the research. Anyone who has experience with a boy and a video game knows there’s potential for trouble. I have yet to meet a mother who is really happy with the way her son interacts with video games. My husband and I were so unimpressed with the effect video games were having on our 12 year old, we banned them altogether. Robert Taylor, the Vice President for Student Success at Dordt felt the same way.

Unknown Speaker
As we were starting to hear from students that they had interest in eSports. And I thought to myself that has the last thing that I even want to explore because I couldn’t see the value in it. And I had watched so many of our students struggle because of addictions to gaming.

Sarah Zylstra
Confession. I talk to students and faculty at Dordt for three days before figuring out that esports has nothing to do with actual sports. It does not actually mean playing Madden or NBA 2k against someone else. It means playing any video game Street Fighter or Super Smash Bros or League of Legends in an organized competition. Over the last four years more than 200 Esports programs have popped up at colleges all over the country. The main selling point for colleges is that they draw male students, which is important since nearly 60% of college students are now female. The selling point for students is that you can earn scholarships for being particularly good. Plus, you get to play video games in school. Robert wasn’t interested in EA Sports at all, really no one in darts administration was but Roberts boss had met a guy named Brad Hickey, who was at Fuller Seminary working on the world’s only PhD in video games and reformed theology, called this guy Roberts boss said, That’s a giant waste of time, Robert thought, but he did. And that phone call changed everything.

Unknown Speaker
I came from an extremely difficult background. Honestly, I went to a school for kids who are like last stop before you’re just out of the system.

Sarah Zylstra
Right hickeys first experience with transcendence with other worldly beauty with longing for something better came through video games,

Unknown Speaker
God uses so many of the different spheres to reach people, right? We think that typically that it’s always the church. It’s always like, you know, this moment of like, I read the Bible. And there was like this Agustin moment, right? That wasn’t the way it was with me. I remember the first time I saw like Super Mario Brothers or other games down the line. It was like a moment for me, it did something inside me like, wow, get this music, this art, I had a massive stutter. I couldn’t even order it at a restaurant or anything else like that. And I know that I had never really like traditional places like church and family and everything didn’t work. And so I found a group online that we did all these amazing things together. And they were people from around the world who had known each other for a while. And it was an embodied friendship. And I felt family and solidarity. They cared about me. But like if people got sick, they would go fly and visit them and people like they would go to each other’s weddings.

Sarah Zylstra
It’s not an exaggeration to say that God used video games to reach Brad even to heal him a little and to connect into healthier human relationships. He’d grown up in an Assemblies of God church, but when he got to Fuller Seminary, and Richard Mao, he started reading theologians like Abraham Kuyper, Herman bavinck, and Joseph Piper,

Unknown Speaker
then I started to push the church a little bit and saying that, you know, for some reason, we say that every square inch right, I keep hearing this ad nauseam. But then for some reason, we break off this one piece of culture as if it’s somehow inherently just evil, when in reality, that God’s active in those spaces, and that God is calling us to redeem those spaces, and that God delights in the fact that when we find Mario Brothers, like, see, look, what you did was pretty cool. Well, that’s used for My glory, right?

Sarah Zylstra
That’s what he told Robert, on the phone, it really

Unknown Speaker
hit me in that phone call that I had not been thinking about it in a very reformed way. And I pride myself in seeing all of creation as being God’s, and that we’re to be stewards of it, and that through the work of His Holy Spirit, we can be vessels of redemption, right here. And so I felt pretty convicted about that

Sarah Zylstra
I felt convicted to especially after reading these sentences from Brad’s dissertation. Our role as God stewards requires us to make a genuine effort to understand what video games are and to speak authoritative ly about them. To do otherwise would be to miss out on an opportunity to influence and enjoy a significant cultural space, as well as to ignore new ways in which God is working in the world. Okay, Brad, you got me. So tell me how can we understand video games in a Christian way? Hang with me here. We’re gonna get theological. Here’s what I learned from Brad’s dissertation. First off, it seems clear we’re meant to play. In creation, God appears to play with color and light and sound. He plays through the creation of planets from the expansion of the universe, we understand he’s playing still. Through the Old Testament, we see him playing in serious ways offering tests to job and Abraham and Jacob and he plays in lighter ways. Through the stories and parables Jesus tells His disciples, even in the hard questions that to them seem like riddles. It’s almost impossible to define play, but we know it when we see it. We know it brings joy. We know it connects people, and we know it takes us out of ourselves. A girl with a dollhouse or a boy in the woods is in another world. A family around a board game friends on a basketball court, or a teen with a book are all transported away. CS Lewis calls play a pointer to something other an outer play can point us to eternity to heaven. But it also teaches us how to live here and now. Play is one of the first things we look for in human development. Children play to practice adult roles to develop physical emotion. and social abilities to develop their own talents and interests. Adults play to connect with family and friends or to relax their brains from the stress of labor. In a testimony to help fun and generous God is those breaks, sometimes spark ideas or connections that help us in our work. Without question, play is woven into the fabric of God’s good creation.

Unknown Speaker
If you think about a good game of chess, what it’s really doing is teaching us how to have character to draw virtue, teach me to like, think about the person across from me. If you think about, you know, the Scottish games, as they were originally were, it was a way of diffusing anger between tribes through the use of play,

Sarah Zylstra
like the Scottish competitions. And like modern sports, video games can give players a safe way to be aggressive, they can bring delight, and they can connect people. I heard that over and over. Here’s Zach, a junior history major.

Unknown Speaker
Every weekend, in middle school, in high school, or every day, really, we’d sit and we’d play, we’d get done with football practice. And then we’d go home and play video games. That was always a lot of fun. Eventually, going into my junior year of high school, I moved to North Carolina, where I met a friend who he played a lot of Destiny two. And so I play that with him, like every night through that I have made friends all across the country. That’s a lot of fun. Lots of stories. And Johnny,

Unknown Speaker
I didn’t live near any of my friends from school, so I couldn’t really like easily go hang out with them. So video games was one of the ways that I would hang out with my friends like playing Minecraft with them online, that was the way that I would get to connect with them and get to hang out with them and keep those friendships.

Sarah Zylstra
And Jacob,

Unknown Speaker
I think it’s a good avenue for like shared interest in community and building relationships. And it’s, you know, that’s, that’s, that’s a very good thing, because it’s a lot easier to make friends with someone if you have some kind of shared interest. So

Sarah Zylstra
that sounds great to me, because I love friendships. And because I know that friendships in America are fewer and thinner than they used to be, especially for men. In 1990, just 3% of men reported they had no close friends. Last year, that jumped to 15%. For men under 30. It was 28%. At first, I blamed this on transients, because a lot of my friends don’t live anywhere near where they grew up. But the numbers don’t bear this out. Before the pandemic Americans were at an all time high of staying put back in the 50s and 60s, about 20% of the population moved each year, in 2019. That was down to less than 10%. Even young people, those from 20 to 30 aren’t moving as much as they used to. So we’ve got a population that’s fairly geographically stable. And we’ve got a huge social platform on which guys can connect and play games together. Why aren’t men overloaded with friends? Why are they instead losing friends? To try to answer this, we have to go back to dirt.

Unknown Speaker
We invited Brad to campus and I just threw out to our men’s underclassmen buildings about 400 men. I said, if any of you have any interest in eSports, we have someone working on a PhD. Who’s here we’d like to do a little presentation and also a little q&a and hear from you. And I sent it the night before and we had about 40 probably 40 to 50 students come. And what shocked me was that I didn’t know those students and I worked pretty hard at knowing students on our campus and a group of 40 I felt like I didn’t know very many of them at all. And as we engaged with them, we began to understand that they didn’t know each other either. So this was truly a group of students that was highly engaged in their activity of gaming, with people all over the world, but they didn’t know the people that were living next to them or in their building. And that’s when I had a deep pit in my heart. I was grieving it realizing we’re not impacting these students in the way that we strive to as a university.

Sarah Zylstra
Oh, that’s not good. It reminds me of social media, which promises to connect you with friends and family but leaves young women feeling more isolated and lonely than they ever have been before. Maybe video games, promise adventures with friends, but in reality, isolate you in your room. But aren’t you literally playing with people? Aren’t they your friends? Sometimes they are guys you know from school or church or baseball, and sometimes they’re online only friends. More than half of boys play video games with people they’ve never met in probably never will meet in real life. I got more insight into this from Ethan,

Unknown Speaker
probably the one that I’ve played with the most that I’ve never met is a guy. I have no idea what his real name is. We all we call them Dirty Dan, because his username was Dirty Dan. And the most I know about him is he’s 16 and lives in Arizona. That is the extent of the information I have about him. Because all the rest I need to know is that he plays destiny with us. And he’s funny, he’s nice. He’s really, really, really good at the game. He carries us through so many things, because we’re terrible. He’s awesome at the game.

Sarah Zylstra
Okay, part of this, I’m going to chalk up to the differences between males and females. When my husband hangs out with his friends, He’s not asking nearly as many personal questions as I would. And when my sons were younger, they could play all day with a friend at the park or preschool and come home not knowing that child’s name. But another part of me knows this can be a problem. If I hadn’t seen Ethan say hi to lots of people on campus. If I hadn’t heard lots of students tell me they know him. If I hadn’t met his wife, I would be really concerned. Because if you don’t know someone’s name, are they really your friend? And if most of your social interaction is anonymous, or online? Is it really social interaction? Or are you really just gaming alone next to other boys who are gaming alone? I honestly do think video games can be a way for boys to enjoy friendships together. But if it’s all you do together, that’s a pretty shallow friendship. If most of your friends all live in other cities, they can’t help you when your car breaks down, or come over for pizza on a Friday night, or join your church small group in 1990 45% of young men said they turned to friends first when wrestling through a personal problem. Today, that’s down to 22%. Studies in video games and loneliness show that the motive for playing matters. If you play to be with friends, video games don’t make you feel lonely. But if you’re playing to escape from a hard real life circumstance, you do feel more isolated, you’re also more likely to become addicted. So it makes sense that boys who are fine in high school can struggle with gaming when they get out on their own or go to college, which are hard and scary things to do. Social Anxiety can push a gamer to spend more time online, which in turn heightens his real life social anxiety. That’s what Robert was worrying about with his 40 students in that meeting.

Unknown Speaker
Probably at about 15 staff after there were tears as they shared their stories and feeling that they like they hadn’t been seen ever in their life. And there was this hope that seemed to generate from this idea that door would even bring this guy here. For that evening,

Sarah Zylstra
Robert and Brad started talking about what it would look like for Brad to come and work at Dordt. At first they were thinking he’d run something like an Esports program. But the main point of esports is to be really good at gaming. And the way you do that is by gaming all the time. And neither Brad nor Robert was up for that. Instead, they wanted a program that would be Christian, that would be reformed. They wanted something that looked different from the way the world did video gaming, it was hard to find a pattern for that. Other Christian colleges have student led gaming clubs, or eSports. And a few Christian professors have taught and written on video games. But Robert and Brad wanted to implement a program that would intentionally connect students to each other and to God that would consider video gaming through a Hyperion worldview. Nobody had done that before. It turns out, they didn’t need to look to other colleges, they just had to walk across campus where they found a model for what they wanted in the gym.

Unknown Speaker
So in 2018, there were a number of us in the athletic department, along with campus leaders who believe that there’s a different and better way to do athletics than what society was telling us was appropriate.

Sarah Zylstra
That’s Ross Dalma, the athletic director at Dordt. Like Robert and Brad, he’s in a field where it can be hard to identify the Christians,

Unknown Speaker
even amongst Christian colleges and universities who administer athletic programs. Athletics has sometimes been a bit of a one off in that, yes, they’re connected to a Christian institution. But what’s transpired in athletics doesn’t always mimic what’s going on with the rest of the campus. We wanted to have an athletic program that internally was really mentoring and witnessing and challenging our student athletes. And then externally, we also wanted to be a department that was stepping into a space that athletics very polluted, very tainted, outside politics and entertainment. Athletics as a whole is a very tainted icon. And so we wanted to step into that space and try to read demon reclaim that, as best we could

Sarah Zylstra
the sin Ross could see in athletics was a cousin to the sin and video games. Basically, idol worship, pursuit of your own glory, winning at any cost chasing accomplishments, an unspoken rule that really, this part of your life doesn’t have to come under the headship of Christ. Because what would that even look like?

Unknown Speaker
The NFL plays on Sunday for a reason. And Saturdays is college football. And so for four months, just using that sport alone, our entire weeks as a society are pretty much centered around if college football is your idol, Saturday, and if the NFL is your idol Sunday, and both of those course creep into the worship of God, it creeps into family time,

Sarah Zylstra
like video games, sports appeal more to boys, and weirdly for some of the exact same reasons. Athletics also offers a chance to compete to conquer to accomplish, it also offers instant validation. And if you didn’t win this time, sports also offers another chance to try again. That’s probably why across cultures males are more likely to play sports as kids are more likely to play as adults and more likely to coach. As a side note, they’re also more likely to skip church to watch sports like video games. Youth sports were made possible by the incredible rise of technology, affluence and leisure time and American society over the past 50 years. like video games organized sports seems safe to modern American parents. Tom Sawyer, Timmy and Lassie, braving Kevin from home alone were rough and tumble and free to roam. But their adventures seem downright dangerous to parents today, who would prefer to have their boys where they can feed them. like video games, sports seasons can become all consuming. There’s a reason we call some wives football widows or golf widows. There’s a reason universities make allowances for the coursework of students who have heavy practice and performance schedules. And there’s a reason pastors point to youth sports as a main cause for families to skip church on Sundays. I know that comparing football to Madden isn’t a perfect analogy, but they share enough commonalities that Brad could learn from what Ross was doing.

Unknown Speaker
Well, Alex is a vehicle to helping you become a better servant of God and a better Lover of Mankind.

Sarah Zylstra
Ross and his team believed that so they wrote the defender way, which are four principles I’ll link to in the show notes. Basically, they want their student athletes to be first committed Christians, then servant leaders in their communities, then excellent students and then winners of championships. It’s not rocket science, just a written down list of priorities, but it’s made a big difference.

Sarah Zylstra
Dork coaches pray and lead devotions, but they also form discipleship groups with their teams. They talk about competition as worship. They’re serious about service and athletes rake leaves and move boxes for community members. They’re also serious about academics, which means some teams meet during the season to plan their time so athletes can schedule in papers and study groups. It means coaches know in real time how their students are doing on assignments. Last year, for the first time, the 3.47 average GPA of Dordt student athletes was higher than the average GPA of the general population. A few years ago, dort hired a football coach with a master’s in theology from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. I was intrigued first, because I love it when coaches go to seminary, but also because Joel Penner is tasked with training young men to be adult men. I asked him if that was harder than it used to be.

Unknown Speaker
So I’m looking over 22 years, I guess even back to when I was, you know, a high school college athlete. I don’t ever remember feeling like my aggression, or my competitiveness was wrong. And I think that’s one of the the biggest shifts now in culture is that I think, I hate to say castrating men, because that sounds fold, but maybe that’s appropriate. I think culture is funneling men into a really confusing predicament. You’re aggressive and your competitive impulses are part of your depravity. I think that’s the message.

Sarah Zylstra
Jewel is all for testosterone and aggressive play as long as it’s self controlled.

Unknown Speaker
One of the things I love about football is the way that it teaches discipline. Okay, let’s self control is a fruit of the Spirit. Imagine the self control it takes to put four to six seconds of absolute passionate, competitive, aggressive energy into a play, block, tackle, run, throw, catch, take somebody down, you get four to six seconds the whistle blows it’s over. I mean, it’s not just slowly over the whistle blows, stop. And then guess what? 60 to 80 times again, you got to go on off on off. I mean, think of a light switch on off on off this full aggression. The training for self control is remarkable.

Sarah Zylstra
It strikes me that this isn’t just true for football. It’s also true for basketball, baseball, soccer, every sport features aggressive play within boundaries. Honestly, sodas war. In general, even when the fighting is fierce. neither side wants to hit hospitals or civilians, when they do the other side. And the watching world cries foul. Those same principles hold true for video games, you can play wild and angry, or you can play with focus and control. You can play for a limited number of minutes, or you can let video games take away your sleep or meals or family time. And then Joel gives me the money quote, which breaks it all open for me.

Unknown Speaker
God gave us two very helpful images when we’re when we’re when we’re to think about Jesus, we have two metaphors, we have a lion, and we have a lamb. And I think for millennia now, Christians have been picking which one better fits the narrative and you don’t get to do that you you have to understand, he’s both, I think that we would be better served if we opened, opened up to this idea that Christians, not just men, but for sure men need to be modeling his behavior, he is a warrior, and he’s a prince of peace.

Sarah Zylstra
I cannot stop thinking about this. Stop being so weak, our culture told men 50 years ago, and now they’re hearing stop being so strong. It’s hard to know what to do how to be. But nobody looks at an athlete and thinks he’s confused or has a split personality for being both aggressive, and submissive. Those two things work together to create something so lovely. We pay to watch him do it. If you’re following Jesus, we should look like that too. And all in full blown fierce rush onto the field God has set before us all our energy bent into the work. And at the same time, complete submission to God’s Will his word, his leadership of us. We are fierce warriors, under a captain, brilliant scholars, under a teacher, faithful and able servants under a king. That’s beautiful. But I’ll tell you what’s even more beautiful to hear that come out of the mouth of a college football player.

Unknown Speaker
The dual nature of Christ, he was the Lion and the Lamb. He was a humble man, but he was also a dominant man. So approaching your life. That’s that stance of reference. But also that determination is not a conflict or a thing. It’s something that goes in line with who you are who you’re called to be.

Sarah Zylstra
Okay, so how can you pull that same idea from the football field to the game room, Brad got to work, experimenting with ways video games could help students better love God, be servant leaders and be good students. He started a class called engaging the world of gaming. in it. He talked about the history of video games, including Christian developers. He talked about God’s sovereignty over every aspect of creation. And he talked about sin. One interesting question Brad asked his students was, can you sin in a video game? He means can your avatar sin when you kill a noncombatant? Or hoard wealth or fight for your own glory? Are you doing that? What is that doing to your soul? Do you need to repent? And anyway? What does it mean to be a Christian avatar? Could someone else by watching you play see something different about you? If they asked, Could you share Christ with them? Brad would love to explore and then offer an organized approach to video game missiology

Unknown Speaker
have gaming ethnographers to be able to go anywhere they like as if we’re going to a different tribe right to watch and observe and compiled data so that we can have online missionaries right.

Sarah Zylstra
That is a huge mission field 3.2 4 billion people so we

Unknown Speaker
want it to be the sort of education thing where now we’re training them preparing them well, to go into these spaces to be able to use this quorum do gaming right

Sarah Zylstra
gaming quorum do before the face of God. Brad decided to start a gaming club to help students live within limits for God’s glory online. To begin, he created an application process convinced that putting up boundaries let students know they’re on a team and that they’re living under authority. Then he limited the game selection darts club has no glorification of any exploitation, no games where it’s hard to find a redeeming quality. The gamers use top of the line equipment in a basement room with lots of space and cool lighting. But it isn’t open all the time.

Unknown Speaker
The hours that it’s available are probably far less than what anyone would ever guess, cutting people off so they get good sleep at night, or at least we’re not in the way of them getting good sleep, making sure that we’re not in the prime study times of the day, distracting students from their studies, having a lot of our big events on weekends, but not filling up both weekend nights, because we’re also hopeful that while they’re engaging in the guild community, we’re hoping that through all of this process that they’re also engaging in the rest of the community to

Sarah Zylstra
Brad builds a leadership structure for the gaming club with a President and Vice Presidents dort added even more accountability. If a member of the club starts skipping class or missing too many assignments, the professors can contact Brad who like an athletic coach has the authority to talk with a student about their behavior. If it continues, or their GPA dips too low, they can lose their club membership. By the time Brad finished, the video game club was so far from an Esports program, he had to change the name. Instead, he called it a gaming guild. That might seem like a lamer version of an esports team. But when they opened the guild last year, 54 students signed up even before the official launch. Soon numbers jumped over 80 and then rose to 96, this year with another 20 on the email list on a campus that houses just over 1300. That’s about 9% of the student population.

Unknown Speaker
It’s been a lot of fun, it’s nice to just be part of something like this getting to build something, most of the effects that I see on like the camps or the whole happen in the events that we do on Fridays, we’ll have a bunch of people playing Smash Bros. We have Smash Bros tournament earlier this semester. We have like tons of board games that people can just get together and play. And then sometimes we’ll just have like, five people on all the computers playing on like a competitive match together on the team. And it’s so much fun.

Unknown Speaker
I think before the guild guys would just video game in their apartment. One of the biggest benefits is that now this is reaching a whole new audience of people, guys and girls alike that didn’t necessarily feel like they had a home or somewhere they could just be themselves. And now they have that outlet and they have that space to be themselves and to do something that they love Kayla

Sarah Zylstra
date’s Gianni now, and she appreciates the way he’s working at setting boundaries to prioritize his schoolwork she plays to for the sheer joy of it. She loves the VR headset that lets her slash beats of music when they fly through the air. To her it feels like directing. She also enjoys the role playing games, which let her pretend to be a character for an hour or two. Carolyn, who is a senior music major loves that too. Here’s her favorite thing about the guild. It’s

Unknown Speaker
a huge community. And there are so many different games that the guild has that you can play. So there’s something for everyone. It’s really casual. You just come and there’s food and there’s games, build friendships. It’s a really great outlet for like people like me who wanted to get into something but didn’t really know how I think there are quite a few people that I don’t think I would have met if I didn’t go to the gaming guild stuff. Or maybe I knew who they were, but I didn’t talk to them.

Unknown Speaker
Perhaps one of the most meaningful developments, for me personally, is to watch students grow and mature. For example, I’ve seen students such as Abigail and Bree and Jacob Toole, who I think were quite hesitant actually to buy in initially. And who would I now see it every event. They’re laughing. They’re part of deepening and maturing friendships. And it’s also wonderful to see or like, even with my guild, President, Ethan, growing, maturing, learning, learning how to lead host events and be there for the members of The Guild. It’s also deeply satisfying as the guild director,

Sarah Zylstra
maybe you’re noticing that Brad and the students aren’t talking about how much they love the equipment, or the internet connection or the cool basement space, though they tell me they like those things, too. What they love the most is being together

Unknown Speaker
as I’ve had a chance to go to their activities. I see beautiful health. And I see so many people that I know, without the guild would be in their rooms at that very moment by themselves on a Friday night and instead, I hear laughter I hear conversation. I hear teasing one another and I see people together. It’s so beautiful. Because you know what the exact opposite of that always was. And that’s what’s so exciting about it. It just feels again, like we can’t take credit for this. A holy spirit’s doing something here. And we get to be a part of it. And that’s so exciting

Sarah Zylstra
don’t want to leave you with the impression that dort is doing things perfectly. While lots of kids come to the gaming events, some are still in their rooms gaming alone. And there are still tons of questions to be asked and answered about a reformed view of video games. But I can feel myself shifting on this. Maybe video games could be a way to relax into delighting into the goodness of God, the creativity he gave a game designer, and the joy of connecting with people who are physically far from us. Maybe they could help boys be aggressive within limits, a way to point to and to practice living under Christ’s headship. That said, I’m wondering if I need my own version of the defender way, rules of life to give perspective and limits to both youth sports and online gaming. More than anything, I want my boys to love God and neighbor, I want them to serve joyfully to work diligently and to submit humbly to authority. To that end, I want to challenge them to be Christ followers at school and at home, on the court and on the screen. But I also want to push a little further to ask to sports or video games cause you to stumble into sin in real life. To be honest, I have a kid who is struggling with video games. When he was playing. He was easily frustrated when he wasn’t playing. He was thinking and talking a lot about when and what he was going to play next. He complained when we told him to turn off the game. And he was never more patient kind or joyful when he was done. So a few months ago, we turned them off altogether. For this kid, that was exactly the right move. Since then, he’s built his own go kart with wood and wheels. We got him a bow and arrow and he shoots cardboard targets in the backyard. He rollerblades and runs and reads and built a website where you can look at pictures of his go kart, he’s more interested in conversation more eager to help empty the dishwasher or set the table. His Spirit seems more joyful, more gentle, more patient. I’m not telling you this. So you’ll throw away all of your or your kids video games. That might not be the right choice for you. But I do want to encourage you to pay attention. Ask yourself, your friends, your spouse, your kids, the hard questions. The video game industry needs Christian thinkers who can figure out how to game quorum Dale

Unknown Speaker
Korn do is that’s why we’ve adopted it because it’s so you know, because those are the three aspects of it is that the joy of it, if you’re not doing it, enjoy and delight and honor, if we’re gonna, then you’re not going to do a good job. If you don’t do we responsibility, it’s just going to be secular. And then it’s also the historic, how do we take into account the voices of the past, right and it’s honoring the past and, and allowing like the voices of the past speak, whether it’s like Hyperion, or whether it’s gaming designers, because there’s a lot of people that have been Christians who have paved the way for gaming

Sarah Zylstra
young men and women. If video games delight you draw your soul to worship God or genuinely connected with others, lean into that. Be the type of player who asks how someone else is doing, who makes choices with noticeable integrity, who plays in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ. model the beautiful paradox of Christianity be the player who conquers new worlds and wins strategic battles, but who can also cheerfully log off to eat dinner with your family or put away laundry or finish your work? And as you look for worlds to conquer and enemies to vanquish remember this, that character you are online is nowhere near as smart or complex or gritty as the real you. The world you enter online can’t come close to the breathtaking, exhilarating world God has created for you to explore in real life. The digital adventures you have are not as exciting. The enemies you face are not as formidable. The opportunities are not as incredible. The twists are not as unexpected. The stakes are not as high. The friendships are not as fun or as tight as those in your real life. Let’s Play video games. Just like we strive to do everything else under the Lordship of Christ and before the face of God.