My eyes were tired, my mind was tired, and I felt like a loser.
Eventually, I pried my eyes away. I read the clock on the wall: 1 AM. I had played a video game for hours into the night and didn’t have anything worthwhile to show for it. Sure, I made in-game progress, but staying up that late? I lost sleep. I sold my next day for a little fun.
Every video game you win is a loss somewhere else.
Gaming is a bad investment. All my time playing the games is gone; it’s spent. If I could go back and use that time differently, it would be more than enough to master a high-value skill. It’s time I could have spent building, learning, and doing. Instead, I messed around in little digital worlds.
Nothing I won in the video games benefited me. My time investment never returned anything tangible. Any online friends I made were just in-game friends. Any money I earned was just in-game currency. Any reputation I built was dorky in real life. By chasing after digital dross, I was running away from the real stuff.
I was doing something far more pointless than hoarding real possessions.
Jesus taught about this in Matthew chapter six. Where my treasure is, where I put in the work, that’s where my heart is1. I also learned that all the treasures we lay up are temporary and ultimately worthless2.
If the real-life treasure is worthless long term, then what could be more stupid than collecting things that are worthless even now?
Yet, sometimes I still play video games.
Gaming isn't absolutely good or bad. I wish it were simple, but life isn’t black and white.
While games can distract, so can anything else. Instead of gaming into the night, I could have read a book. I could have watched some educating YouTube videos. I could have talked on the phone with a friend. All these examples would have resulted with sleep deprivation. So, while none of these things are “bad,” they definatley require balance.
Decisions have to be made even for unimportant matters. In the end, it all depends on who’s playing. You can probably remember your parents telling you something along the lines of: “You can’t play until you have your work done.” It’s pretty obvious, but isn’t it the root of the issue?
I have a life, school, and work. I can’t sit around gaming all the time, and in fact, I don’t want to. It’s fine to play them after getting things done, but there are other things I would rather do. This is why I play them rarely. Not only is it a better time investment, but it also makes the games more fun when I can actually enjoy playing them.
Matthew 6.21
Mathew 6.19
I played a lot of Civilization V in high school and got pretty good at it. In college I bought Civilization VI and I quickly realized that if I wanted to be as good as that as I was at Civ V (and get comparable enjoyment from it) I’d need to dedicate a lot of time to learning how to get good at it. Upon that realization I decided I had more important things to spend time on and that marked the beginning of the end of my video game career.