Gaming as Parable

So with that, I'm going to turn it over to you for the next hour. Take as much time as you need, you want. If you want to take questions from the chat, you're free to do that. If you want to give the whole presentation and do a Q&A at the end, I'm going to be taking notes, and I'll have questions for you along with everybody else. Sounds great, man. All right. All up to you.

I'm going to leave the stage and let you just get your slide deck up and rolling. All right. Let's do that. Let me share my screen. Tire screen. PowerPoint and Discord do not get along very well. It is one of those very strange things.

You would think they would know how to do it, but they don't. But we got it up there. I'm just going to jump right into it. I may or may not interact with chat a lot while I'm presenting. We'll see. But if everything looks good, sounds good, we're going to get going. I do have the Twitch chat up, so if somebody does share in there, I will do that.

Hey, Andy, how are you doing? All right. Pray. We haven't prayed yet. I think it would be good for us to pray before we get started. Heavenly Father, thank you for this day. Thank you for this awesome group of people that are gathered here, people who love you, love the Lord, and are just a little bit nerdy in various ways.

And God, I ask that you would, your presence would fill my house and the workplaces where all these other peoples are and their houses and wherever they're at in their headphones, in their hearts, in their souls, that your presence would be with them. In your name I pray. Amen. Imagine with me, your hands are hovering over the dialogue wheel. A child stands threatened in a sacred pool. The woman across from her doesn't shout. She doesn't threaten.

She speaks calm and precise, with a viper coiled around her feet, waiting. If you've played the opening parts of Baldur's Gate 3, you know this moment. You feel the tension building. And here's the strange part. There's actually no violence happening here, but it might. It's sitting right there, behind the dialogue wheel. One click or button tap away.

But here's the thing. Yes, it's a dramatic scene in a game, but I think it's a lot more than that. Usually Merker. I think, interestingly enough, if you don't kill her, that it's a leadership moment. So today, we're going to talk about goblins and druids and grace. We're going to talk about a viper voice druid, a homeless man collecting cans, a warlock whose patron is just God, and a galaxy that wants you to believe that you're its only hope. Stick with me.

We're going to move fast. We've got a lot of examples and illustrations we're going to go through here. Yes, she is the worst. I agree. Before we go any further, I want to tell you a little bit about what I actually do for a living, because I think it matters for everything after this. I am a leadership professor. My name is Dr.

Stephen Kelso. I am a professor and the dean of students at Kansas Christian College in Overland Park, Kansas. And I love, live, eat, and breathe leadership and leadership training. And part of that whole entire process has been me trying to figure out how do we apply all of that to video games and nerddom. I am working on a pretty big project that involves taking all the different archetypes like lover, fighter, warrior, all the different things that Carl Jung has written about and try to throw it, or not try to throw it, but look at it through a biblical lens and a biblical worldview. And this is some of that work. My radar never fully shuts off.

I watch how students treat each other in group projects. I watch how staff meetings shift the moment somebody gets defensive. I was in one of those yesterday. And that radar doesn't power down whenever I pick up a controller. It never does. It just finds new test subjects. Outside in the classroom, outside of the classroom, I also run something called The Guiding Lantern.

It's a fantasy-themed, storytelling-driven leadership project where you can see my set right behind me, where I play a tavern keeper simply known as Doc. It's the kind of character who is often the NPC that you're selling things to or buying potions from when you go to the little town. And our line over there is pretty simple. We don't shine the spotlight. We just light the next quest ahead. And everything I'm about to show you comes out of that same instinct that I have been trying to build of gaming as parable. Because I think it's really important that we, as Christians, learn to develop a biblical worldview.

And this biblical worldview, these glasses that we wear, apply to everything that we do. Everything we watch. Everything that we play. And I want to be upfront about something. I love these stories. Movies, games, epics, where you get to be the hero. There's nothing wrong with that hunger.

At all. I don't want you to think that there's anything wrong with it. God put it there. But we were built for a story that's so much bigger than ourselves. And all of the games that we play, I believe, are searching for something real. And I want to plant a flag early here. Because everything I talk about today is through that lens.

As Blackcap was asking me to share about this, I thought the only way to do it is just to show you how I try to view games and gaming and stories and movies. Although we're not going to focus too much on movies today. The problem, I think, is how we consume it. Whenever you watch a hero's journey and you see yourself as the hero, it's normal. It's human. Nothing wrong with that, like I said. But if you're not filtering it through truth, God's truth, you're quietly training yourself and really other people around you to believe something false.

You're training yourself to believe that you're the one who has to save the day. That you're the main character of your own story. And as Christians, we know that that is not true. Jesus is the actual hero of the actual story. Your story. Paul put it this way, about as plainly as anyone ever has. Galatians 2.20 My old self has been crucified with Christ.

It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. Whenever you play a game, watch a show, build a new character for any TTRPG you're playing, I want to challenge you to start doing it through a biblical worldview. Understanding that Jesus is Lord, and you are called to submit to him. And if you do that, something shifts. You don't get less out of the story, though. That's the awesome thing. You get so much more.

You start to see deeper heroism below the surface level one. You start to see what villainy really is. Maybe that's why some people always just, uh, poor Kaga at the beginning of Baldur's Gate 3. But if you begin to see yourself not as the main character, but as someone called to serve the king, who's actually the main character, everything's different. Um, and so I want you to start thinking not, I want you to not start, pause. I want you to stop thinking, well, what's the moral of the story? We do that, and that's okay.

It's a good place to start. I want to push you further than that. Not what is the moral of the story, but what does this look like run through that I am not the hero, but that Jesus is? I don't want to name something else right up front because it's going to come out. None of this works if you are consuming gaming passively. Consuming gaming passively. Christians do not get a pass on passivity.

Not at church, not at work. And again, I don't think we get a pass on passivity with a controller in our hands. Romans 12, 2 says, do not copy the behaviors and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way that you think. Renewing your mind is not some sort of spectator activity, but here's the thing. You can absolutely relax and play a game tonight. I'm not saying, not saying don't relax and don't play a game. I'm not telling you to stop having fun, but I'm telling you the moment you stop thinking while you're having fun is the moment that the story starts forming you instead of you engaging with it.

So as we talk today, I'm going to keep asking you to do one thing, small thing over and over. Notice, stay in the room. Don't let your brain check out because your hands and your eyes and your ears are busy. And just so you know, this is based upon some research. Again, I want to look at everything through a biblical worldview, even non-Christian scholars. Researchers have been studying this exact territory for years now. Daniel Schaefer at Baylor University has spent his entire career studying moral choice in video games.

And his research keeps landing on the same conclusion that mine does, watching a screen as a professor. The choices that we rehearse in a game genuinely shape moral reasoning. It's not just an entertainment preference. Now, I'm not saying that you can't role play the Dark Urge in Baldur's Gate 3, but I'm saying and kill everybody. You can do that. You can do that. That's fine.

But what I am saying is that you don't do it passively. You notice. You see. You look at that entire experience that Larian has built for you through a biblical worldview. Communication scholars Marina Cramar and Drew Signal have shown the same thing from a different angle. Players bring real-world moral frameworks into game decisions. And the game decisions reinforce those frameworks right back.

That's why we say, oh, well, this is an evil playthrough. I'm going to do a renegade playthrough of Mass Effect where Commander Shepard's just being awful to everybody all the time. We recognize these moral frameworks, and I think it's important that we don't forget them when we play games, particularly as the world changes. And some of that nuance between what's really, really good and what's really, really bad, unfortunately, starts to get a little blurry. The Bible does say that at some point, we're going to see good as bad and bad as good. And so it's even more important as Christians that we engage with media with a biblical worldview. Researcher Jay McGonigal, who's one of my favorites, wrote Reality is Broken, says, Gamers always believe that an epic win is possible and that it's always worth trying and trying now.

But I would add one correction to that. From the front of a classroom and the back of a pew, the epic win was never ours to begin with. It belongs to Jesus. That being said, he wants to use us. He wants us to have epic moments in our lives that glorify him. Now, let's go to the Emerald Grove. Let's go to the Emerald Grove.

Here's the scene. If you haven't played it, you're in a druid grove. The arch druid, the head druid named Halson, has gone missing. Goblins are circling outside the gate. The druids inside believe that this powerful ritual, known as the Rite of Thorns, is their only way to seal the grove and survive. And a leader named Kaga is the one who's holding it all together. Then there's this tiefling child named Arabella who is caught stealing their sacred idol to Sylvanus, their god that they worship.

And Kaga's response to that child in that moment actually literally stopped me cold. Not just as a player, but also as a professor. Most people who play this game walk away thinking that Kaga is the villain of the grove. And I understand that. It's like, let's just take her out. Let's kill her. But I actually don't believe that that's the most useful way to read her.

Kaga is not dangerous because she's evil. Kaga is dangerous because she's afraid. And nobody ever taught her that fear and responsibility are not the same job. Watch what fear does to her leadership. It narrows her imagination. It hardens her language. It turns an actual scared kid into a problem to be managed instead of a person, a tiefling, not a human in this case, but a person to be understood.

And here's the part that should unsettle every leader in this room. Fear, when it gets put in charge, doesn't often sound like panic. It sounds calm. It sounds confident. It sounds reasonable. It sounds like policy. And here's the mechanic that proves it.

And this is why my professor radar got going when I was watching this experience. Baldur's Gate 3 is built almost entirely around dialogue checks. Just like Dungeons and Dragons or any other TTRPG. You've got persuasion, insight, deception, intimidation. Almost every conversation is the chance to roll the dice and find another way through. And Kaga fills the most important check in the entire scene before a single die is even rolled. She never asks Arabella why she took the idol.

Never asked her why. And that's the tell. This is where we begin to look at all of these situations through a biblical worldview, including leadership. That's my angle. So that's where I'm going that direction. Fear-driven leadership doesn't ask why. It skips straight to the punishment because punishment feels like certainty.

So here's the first thing. Beginning to look at gaming as parable and let gaming teach us. Here's the first thing I want you to carry out of the room today. It's simple enough to use this week. Before you disciple someone, before you discipline someone, before you enforce policy, before you make a hard call. Ask yourself out loud, if you have to, what do I not understand yet? In the Grove, that one question could have changed everything.

Instead, Kaga treated this terrified child like a contamination risk and everybody in the room knew it. Even the people who were trying to do the right thing but still had to listen because she was the boss at this point. And it gets worse before it gets better. After Arabella, Kaga's logic sharpens. Outsiders become the problem. The Grove must be protected at any cost. And if you dig deeper into her story, you find out that she's not just afraid on her own.

Now maybe you played BG3 and you've never seen or experienced this. Spoiler alert. She has been recruited. Shadow druids have been feeding her exactly what fear wants to hear. Outsiders corrupt. That compassion weakens you. Isolation is what keeps you pure.

It makes Kaga feel righteous. Makes her feel strong. It makes her feel like she's not alone anymore. Fear loves an echo that sounds like wisdom. 1 John 4.18 says, Such love has no fear. Because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment.

And it shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love. Fear of punishment, fear of death from the goblins, is exactly what we watch happen to Kaga. Fear doesn't just make her cautious. It wraps her in judgment until cruelty feels like clarity. And so if you catch yourself saying, I have no choice, stop. That's not a fact. That's a signal that you stop looking for another choice.

And a third, don't just agree with who agrees with you. Ask who is still allowed to challenge you. Solomon had a word for this long before any leadership seminar did. Proverbs 27.17, we all know this one. As iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens a friend. If the only voices in your circle are flattering your instincts, you don't have iron sharpening iron. You have an echo chamber.

And that's it. And here's where it lands. The right of thorns isn't just a spell in a video game. It's what fear looks like once it becomes official policy. A literal wall built out of a leader's need to feel control. And it solves nothing. The goblins are still out there.

The absolute threat has not moved an inch. The only thing that's changed is who's paying the price. And it's always the people with the least power to refuse. And that's the pattern that I watch for as a professor in games, in real conference rooms. Fear-driven leadership rarely solves the actual threat in front of it. It just protects the system by quietly spending the people who can't push back. So maybe, I would challenge you, the next time you decide you're going to do a new playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3, see what happens when you actually try to save Kaka.

Because even once you rescue Halson, he says she's worth redeeming. Now again, role play in a game and play games and make choices how you want. But, let me challenge you to consider, hmm, how am I looking at this? What am I feeling about this? Another way I often look at things. One of the things I've been looking at are classes. Different TTRPG classes that we play.

Even inside of different video games where you have different build-outs and load-outs. Like, what kind of person is a person that, what kind of person are they? How does their different various skills and things, like, approach how we, man, I'm going to pause there and let my brain catch up to my mouth. When we look at all the different classes and sub-classes and different video games, different load-outs that we have, one of the things I think is crucial is to say, okay, so I have this kind of play style. I like to do this kind of thing. What does that say about me? How do I interact with other people?

Dungeons & Dragons gives you the barbarian class. And it's built around Fury, the barbarian. There's ten subclasses for them built around two editions. And you'll find two different leadership styles hiding in each version of the same rage mechanic. There's a rage that gets pointed, channeled, a barbarian who rages to protect through an absolute obstacle that nobody can move, to absorb a hit for someone weaker, that's a controlled fire. A leader who feels heat in the crisis and uses it. And then there's rage that just consumes.

A barbarian who rages because he or she has lots of control of themselves, not because they found control in the moment. And so, again, I'm always looking, why? How, why is this person this way? Why is this mechanic built this way? What can we learn about ourselves and about others through these mechanics? By the way, this is Cobble. He's my path of the giant hedge.

Normally, he's only just a really tiny little guy in the humble wood. But when he gets upset, he turns into ten feet like this. It's pretty scary. Pretty scary. So, think about, even when you're playing D&D. Am I watching as a, am I playing as a fan of the game? Or is I playing as someone who wants to really learn about the characters that other people are bringing to the table?

Why are they the way they are? A lot of you watch, like, Critical Role, for example. It's the role play. People come for the role play, not the dice mechanics in that situation. And they get invested in these characters. What if you started investing in your friends' characters as much as you do at somebody like, you know, Brendan Lee Mulgan or Matt Mercer and all of their friends and their characters? How would it be different if you really begin to engage the way Jesus might engage at a D&D table?

And then, of course, there's the classic Mass Effect. My name is Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite shop on the Citadel. The galaxy, and this is where I believe that it's important for us as Christians to really be careful, ironically. The galaxy treats Shepard like the only person who could save it. It's how the game is designed to make you feel, and that's fine. Every single cutscene confirms it. Every character needs you.

You are, by design, the unquestioned hero of this story. It doesn't matter if you're male Shep or Fem Shep. Whichever one. The game hands you a choice that exposes exactly what that feels like under pressure. You're interrogating someone for some information. The clock is ticking. People could die if you don't get an answer fast enough.

The game gives you what's called a renegade interrupt. It's a button right there that lets you shove the man through the window to get him talking immediately. Quick and effective. No one in the room is going to stop you because you're Commander Shepard. You're the hero. Who's going to say no to the hero? Or there's the slower, costlier, less certain version where you can build trust, ask the harder questions, get the same information without the window.

The renegade path often is not framed as evil in the moment. It's actually framed as efficient. And that's often the temptation. Not do something wicked. Just do the faster thing and trust that the hero, being the hero means you don't have to answer for the method. That's the same temptation every leader who's ever believed they're irreplaceable has believed. If I'm the hero, the rules bend a little for me.

If I'm the hero, the end starts justifying the means just a little bit more easily than they should. And this is where having a biblical worldview while we're playing video games is important. Because remember, if you are not engaging the game with a biblical worldview, the game is absolutely engaging you with a worldly worldview. It doesn't make the game evil or bad, okay? It's just the reality of it. It's how the hero's journey is often portrayed. God spoke straight into this exact temptation to his people in the worst, most unstable circumstances they could ever imagine.

Exile in Babylon. Everything familiar is gone. And God gives the people this really—he doesn't tell them to rebel. He doesn't tell them to fight back. He doesn't tell them to, you know, throw a fit. He doesn't tell them to puff their chest. He says, build homes, plan to stay.

Plant gardens, eat the food that they produce. He doesn't say it's going to be easy, but he says don't take the easy route. And that's where we go to Jeremiah 29, 11, which is often taken out of context, by the way. It's important to understand why Jesus said what he—or why God said what he did to Jeremiah. For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord. They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope. While they're there in exile in Babylon, being told by God, hey, build houses, start businesses, pay taxes, pray for the success of Babylon.

It's hard to do. God doesn't tell his people to seize control. He doesn't tell them to find the fastest way out the window. He tells them to build the plant to live faithfully. That's the Paragon move, for using the Renegade and Paragon example, long before anyone called it that. Paragon isn't actually softer than Renegade. It's not even necessarily nicer.

It's slower, though. It does cost you something. And usually it's your own comfort. It's your own certainty. It's your own need to be the one who fixes it right now. Shepard gets to push the window before the galaxy already decided Shepard's the hero. You and I don't get that deal.

We weren't cast to be the hero of this story, which means every time we feel as Christians that Renegade pull, the fast option, the one where nobody's going to question us, that feeling itself should be a warning light. And this is the exact kind of moment that slides right past us when we're playing games when we're just along for the ride. The interrupt button flashes on the screen for maybe two seconds, and a passive player presses it just because it's there. Again, you can role play. You can do the evil playthrough of Mass Effect if you want to. It's fine. Nothing wrong with that.

But again, realize what you're consuming and why you're consuming it and the way you're playing it. Don't do it passively. And then, one of my favorite games of all time, I love being able to talk about my pal, Ichiban Kasuga from Yakuza, Like a Dragon. One of my favorite characters in video games. Ichiban is a career criminal. He is so loyal to the crime family. It runs all the way through him.

And about 10 hours into the game, after I have been ran through the ringer, I have already cried, I have already fallen in love with this little guy with crazy hair. I am invested in Ichiban and his story. I did not expect, and again, I put on the radar, I have the hat, I'm looking at it through a leadership professor, biblical worldview. I did not expect to find this. This man demonstrates more real leadership principles, almost by accident, than more of half the case studies that I teach. And here's where we find him. He's been betrayed by the crime family that he says he loves and wants to serve.

He's been dumped in an unfamiliar city with nothing but a stained suit, a gunshot wound, and his wit. And he ends up near a homeless camp. He has no money, no standing, no crew. Nothing he used to be able to count on. And here's where the game put in front of him. It wasn't a dramatic dialogue wheel in this case. It's just the next thing to do.

And actually, the game kind of teaches you this. You don't have choices. You're just playing the game. He could sit in that camp and stew over everything that's been taken from him. Or he could start with what's actually in his hands. He gets told that if he collects cans for recycling, he could make some money. So what does he do?

He doesn't stay in the camp. He starts collecting cans. Sit with how small that is. It's not a heist. It's not an epic JRPG protagonist comeback speech. Cans. Recycling them for a few coins so he and his new friend Namba can eat.

It's almost embarrassingly unglamorous. This comes straight from Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Talks about the circle of influence played out one can at a time. When you spend your energy on what you can actually control, your influence tends to grow. When you spend your energy on what you can't control, your influence shrinks, sometimes to nothing. Ichiban could have spent every hour of that chapter being furious about his circumstances. He'd have been justified.

Instead, he just picks up cans. Then he walks with Namba with a new clean suit to an employment office. He found work that no one else would call impressive. And he chooses one tiny act at a time to move inside of a circle that he could actually move. And it's interesting, right? Not a lot of people would have picked up Stephen Covey's Circle of Influence and Circle of Concern from Yakuza Like a Dragon. But when you wear these lenses, when you wear a biblical worldview, when you wear a leadership worldview, when you look at gaming as parable, you begin to see games in a completely different way.

And again, this ties straight into Scripture. Philippians 4, 11 to 13 says, In this particular case, Ichiban was choosing to be happy, choosing to be content, choosing to hang out with his new friend Namba, choosing not to focus on how he was treated. Instead, he shows contentment. And yes, that's the way that the studio wants you to play the game. You don't have any other choice. If you don't pick up cans, you don't progress in the game at all. And you should progress in it.

In fact, if you're looking for a way into the Like a Dragon series, Yakuza Like a Dragon is a fantastic place to start. This game is full of leadership lessons. Crazy, goofy stuff. Weird crime. Tons of Japanese drama. But oh man, full of incredible lessons that we can learn. And this is what I love most about Ichiban is a case study.

He never once thinks that he's the hero of the story. He's not posturing. He's just the guy who shows up to collect cans, and the next day he brings someone along with him. In fact, the hero of the story is the crime boss, the person that he has pledged his life to serve. I know this sounds crazy for those of you who played Yakuza Like a Dragon, but Ichiban Kasuga is a really great example for us as Christians needing to serve the Lord. Not mindlessly, because he doesn't do it mindlessly, but he does serve faithfully till the end. It's kind of interesting.

And what's interesting is that Ichiban is different from Kaga the Druid. She had power and lost her nerve. Ichiban had no power and showed up anyway. And that's the inverse of Shepard's renegade temptation too. Shepard gets to skip the slow way because the story already crowned him as the hero. Ichiban never gets crowned, even after the second game. Still not crowned, even though he's pretty cool and pretty heroic.

He just keeps doing the next small, faithful thing. And literally does that across two games now. And I'm sure he's going to do it in the third. Because that's the kind of guy he is. Yeah, he's a criminal. But if you take the criminal side out of it, it's like, man, how much can I learn from this guy? And it's easy to miss the stuff in stories.

But I think that we shouldn't. I think that we should really begin to engage with games. Engage with stories deeply. I'm really, really passionate about this. Quick plug, because it's worth doing. I encourage you to check out all the different things that the different speakers and presenters are going to be sharing today. I know that Nerd Pastor Nate has a couple of books, and he's probably going to talk about them.

He should talk about them. But I did have the opportunity, if you want to read a little bit more of my writing, I got to partner with my friends at Luxe Digital Church. And we put the very first Dungeons and Dragons-themed devotional out there on the Bible app. So if you look up OneQuest Mini Roles, a D&D devotional in the Bible app, you will find myself and the different pastors from Luxe Digital Church and a few other folks from the church who wrote about Dungeons and Dragons from a biblical worldview. Just more examples of how you can do this. I'm not trying to gamify the gospel. I'm not trying to pivot to Jesus-juke people.

That's not what I'm trying to do here. That's not really my style. But, you know, if you're a streamer, if you're a content creator, and you're playing games and talking about games, and you're a Christian, and you want to espouse those biblical worldviews and those Christian worldviews, learning to see the games that you're playing as parable and talk about it intelligently will add significant value to your streams and to the content that you create or the books that you write or the conversations that you have with other TTRPG players around the table or how you look at everything, begin to look at everything from game mechanics to characters to stories from a biblical worldview. I had an opportunity to try this new thing out. At Luxe, I'm a part of Luxe Digital Church. We have a Dungeons and Dragons ministry. We're regularly playing Dungeons and Dragons together.

And there was a Dungeon Master who said that when I DM, I only have one deity in my game. I don't do all the different deities, but my one deity is God. There's a clear difference between good and evil. And it's, yeah, Lexi, exactly. Absolutely. Absolutely. Simply a question of application of Christian ethics.

Totally. And so what I did, because I'd never played in a campaign quite like this before, I made a warlock. And I really just made a warlock because I wanted to Eldritch Blast everything because it's a fun mechanic. Pew, pew, pew. And warlocks in most Dungeons and Dragons make a deal. It's power for service. Their patron is either like some old god that everyone's forgotten or a trickster fae or something at minimum that's morally compromised.

A devil, a devil, whatever. I built mechanically a celestial fae furbolg warlock named Bramble. And his patron was God. And I wanted to try to play this campaign, it was a series of one shots to save the last owlbear. It's a fun campaign. I wanted to try to play this campaign being as Christian as I possibly could. How do I play this campaign from a biblical worldview?

And you know what? It doesn't work out very well. Very quickly, you run into a pack of goblins and what do you do, right? But it was just kind of interesting that I tried to do this. Oh, no, I did use Eldritch Blast, but my patron was God. So, you know, maybe that made it okay. But it was challenging, right?

And so, yes, like Bramble absolutely shot goblins and we had to kill big monsters and like all of these different things. But I tried with my charisma checks, to be honest, I tried not to deceive anybody. I tried to like play through it as Christian as I could. But just like real life, it was messy. Sometimes there's not a clean option, just a less damaging one. Devotion to God in this particular campaign did not remove the difficulty of the world that we live in. But it changed what Bramble, this character that I was role-playing, was bringing into the difficulty.

Think back to everybody who we've met tonight. Cog is patron, the shadow druids, was fear. It made her certain. And certainty without humility hurts people. Shepard's patron, in this case, is a sense in his own legend. The story of the galaxy and how he's going to save it all. Ichiban's patron was whatever the smallest, truest form of him actually was.

And he grew his circle one can at a time. And this is where I want to bring back the question that we painted at the very beginning. What would it actually look like to begin to play games and engage with games from a biblical worldview? How would, what would Jesus do apply to this impossible game scenario? Now, again, obviously, it's a game. We're going to make game choices. It's meant to be gamified.

We're probably going to kill the guy. Yeah, what would Jesus do in D&D? How would you play that out? I think it would be really fun to try to play a campaign where you never break the Ten Commandments. It'd be kind of fun. It'd be interesting. But here's the thing.

I think a lot of people read what would Jesus do as what's the nicest option available. And that's, again, not what we see in the Gospels. Jesus entered the temple and began to drive out all the people, buying and selling animals for sacrifice. My temple will be called a house of prayer, but you have turned it into a den of thieves. And then the very next breath of his ministry, he is between an angry crowd and a woman that they're about to stone. He tells the truth to both sides without ever picking up a stone himself. He says, all right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone.

And so this is where, like, when we're playing games and we're thinking about games, we're thinking, like, how would Jesus play this game? How can I look at this from a Christian worldview? Don't begin to think to yourself, okay, I need to just do this. I need to be soft. I need to be easy. I got to get along perfectly with everybody. What I want you to think about is, how do I play these games knowing that in the real world, I am not the hero of my own story?

Bramble, my character, still had to roll die. In his world, goblins were real. In our world, the deadlines are real. In our world, the hard calls don't stop going away because we started praying about them all the time. The hard calls are still there. But who we serve is Jesus. As I wrap up, I want to reemphasize something that, again, is incredibly important to me.

That we begin to look at the Bible, the games that we play. Not the, well, yes, the Bible, but we begin to use the Bible to look at the different games that we play. Look at the movies that we watch. No matter what kind it is, do a biblical worldview. To really stop letting games and entertainment be passive. I teach and work at a Christian college. This Christian college is incredibly athletics driven.

And we are all the time having folks from the Fellowship of Christian Athletes come and speak to our students in chapel. We are all the time having folks come in who are, you know, the chaplain for the Kansas City Chiefs. I'm from Kansas City. So the chaplain for the Kansas City Chiefs. We had him come and speak once. All these different famous athletes. We use sports analogies constantly.

There's nothing wrong with that. I'm not a big sports guy. I stood up in chapel one day and I started my chapel message by saying, I really like to play games where you kill zombies. That caught people's attention very quickly. And I got to share about gaming is parable. I got to share about gaming ministry. I got to share about what different organizations like XP Church and Lux Digital Church and the Church Digital are doing in these spaces to try to reach people.

And I had a student who I had really been struggling to connect with come up to me afterwards. And he said to me, Wow, I got more out of that message than I've ever gotten out of any other message in chapel. And I don't remember what the final chapel message was. I can't remember. But he certainly did. He recounted the entire thing that I talked about. And he said, If I didn't know that you like to play games and that you could learn from games, I probably wouldn't have listened to you very much today.

And so I think it's time as a church to, yeah, doing all of the different, doing all the different illustrations, it's fine. Doing all of the different, you know, like this story and that story is fine. But if you're a gamer today, talk about games. Talk about the moral in video games. If you are teaching about love over fear sometime in church, I dare you to share the entire story of the shadow druids in the Emerald Grove. It's time for us as people who love games and love the Lord to start using gaming as parable and talking about it. But the only way to do that is that if we stop engaging with games passively.