To readers of a certain generation, it’ll come as no surprise that I used to analyze video games with more focus and intensity than I ever brought to the Catechism. You might not understand such an impulse, if a console never served simultaneously as your best friend, faithful servant, and favorite toy. For people who weren’t raised with them, it’s easy to think of video games as cold and robotic affairs. When I was a kid, it seemed like no adult ever spoke about my gaming habit unless they were disparaging it. I can’t begin to count the times that teachers steered me towards dolls and blocks and yo-yos, warning me that a life spent with electronics would result in a stunted imagination.
Leaving the question of “how-much-is-too-much” aside, I can guarantee that there’s nothing cold about video games. If anything, they’re a little too easy to fall in love with. And the better the game—the richer the world in which you’re immersed, and the more compelling the characters that you’re pretending to be—the more quickly it consumes you.
Like all things that can be described as ‘consumptive,’ there are dangers to this. But one of the most valuable things about my youthful gaming was the amount of time it forced me to spend dwelling upon morality. Back then, virtually every game that I played was a good-and-evil story. And my favorite games of all—virtually every entry in Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda series—were epic sword-and-sorcery sagas about the eternal struggle between darkness and light. As I steered Link, the main character, past a host of villains whose chief sins were trying to remake the world in their images, I couldn’t help but think about what it meant to do good in the world.
This is why the strangest game in the series, Majora’s Mask, is my favorite one of all. It follows on the tail of the game with the most expansive, epic sweep (the nigh-canonical Ocarina of Time, in which you travel through time to restore justice to the world), but feels practically claustrophobic in comparison. There are dungeons to explore, and monsters to defeat—this is a Zelda game, after all. But you spent just as much time (if not more time) with the shop-owners, innkeepers, musicians and farmers who populate the fantasy world. The game asks you to immerse yourself in their problems, and to come up with solutions that have nothing to do with killing dragons. One person might need help writing a song; another, just an ear to listen as they vent their frustrations. And, in the context of the game, completing tasks like these is just as integral to completing it as beating the bad guys. In fact, it’s your willingness to throw yourself in “the chaos of another” and give people what they need that separates you from the bad guys. Far from imposing your will upon the world, you’re approaching it with a spirit of genuine mercy.
Now there is a lesson that you can’t learn from a yo-yo.
Teresa de Mallorca is the pseudonym of a neophyte who just completed the RCIA program at Holy Name
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