[This sermon contains spoilers for the video game Red Dead Redemption 2]
One of the ways I know that I am finally getting old is that I have never played two of the most popular video games. Minecraft has been around since 2011 and has sold 122 million copies, inspired t-shirts and toys and even books.
Fortnite is just over a year old, has over 125 million players, and earns hundreds of millions of dollars every month. It has proven so addictive that some describe it in terms usually reserved for heroin, and the National Hockey League’s Vancouver Canucks have banned it during road trips, as the young players would rather sit in their hotel rooms playing the game than bonding with teammates. Some parents have lost all control and all hope, sending their Fortnite-addicted kids into video game rehab as originally reported by Bloomberg and picked up by dozens of other news outlets.
Fortnite is, to me at least, the more problematic of these two games, and not just because it has proven so addictive. While Minecraft has some combat, it is primarily a game of creativity and crafting suitable for young players. You build and you problem-solve. Fortnite, and particularly its most popular version, while still attracting many children, is primarily a game of violence, though to be fair, not as graphic as some. There is a far less popular creative module to the game, and it is possible to form teams in Fortnite, but neither of these creative and cooperative elements is the focus of the game.
A typical round is a “battle royale,†a fight-to-the-death that starts with 100 players and ends with a single survivor, sort of a mega-Thunderdome for those familiar with the film Mad Max 2. The term “battle royale,†now widely used for this format, originated with a controversial and dystopian Japanese film centered on a death match between junior high students. The Hunger Games in American Suzanne Collins’ series of novels for young adults is a “battle royale,†though the novels themselves do not embrace this every-person-for-themselves mentality. Altruism, sacrifice, and love are the virtues celebrated, not survival and individualism.
I grew up at that moment when arcades and pizza parlors were switching from pinball machines to video games, like Asteroids, Space Invaders, and Joust. Too late for the Baby Boom and too early for Gen X, I was a young adult as we started playing games on early personal computers. I remember how cool it was when a friend in the barracks got a Commodore 64. Like most folks, I have a certain nostalgia for that period in my life, the reason I love the award-winning novel “Ready Player One†by Ernest Cline, an online techno-future in a virtual world filled with nostalgia for ’80’s pop culture, though the movie was sort of meh, to use a term from the internet.
Today’s young parents all grew up with video games. Many played them. Many still do.
I still play video games as my time allows, especially during the winter or when something new and cool comes out. Lacking in hand-eye coordination, my preference is for what are called RPGs, or role-playing games, the modern version of old paper and dice social games like Dungeons and Dragons. The other common format, the first-person shooter, is not for me.
Many modern games are a sort of interactive literature or film, with rich scripts, driving narratives, skilled acting. They include open worlds, where you are free to explore, to interact with other characters in a way that feels almost organic. Sure there is code behind it all, but with so many millions of possible outcomes that it feels like an immersive and alternative reality. The games are morally complex, like real life, but there is a sense that you achieve something, for like D&D, video role-playing games reward your hard work with increasing skill and increasing wealth. But different from real life, when you fail to meet a challenge, you can reload and start again. If only, right?
The structure of these open-world RPGs tends to be that there is a central narrative that drives the game forward, and that is not optional. There are dozens, sometimes hundreds of optional side quests. And in some games there is that element of creativity and construction. When you finish the main narrative, you are free to continue playing as the character you have developed, exploring, building, interacting…
My interest was piqued during the summer by the buzz around Red Dead Redemption 2, or RDR2, a game that was supposed to push all the boundaries of immersion and interactivity. I’d never played a game by this particular company, Rockstar, producers of the Grand Theft Auto series. I’m okay with moral complexity, even ambiguity, but I just can’t make myself play bad guys. Murder and car theft aren’t really things I think of as entertaining. I can’t imagine reading a book where these sorts of activities were the focus, nor would I go see it in a movie. Why would I play it in a game?
RDR2 has the same moral obstacle, for you play an outlaw named Arthur Morgan, part of a criminal gang that is spinning out of control. Think of the James Gang or the Dalton Gang, because the game is a Western of sorts, set in 1899. But I like the work of our latter day Louis L’Amour, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy, so given the buzz, I had to give it a try. It feels like being immersed in the new Coen Brothers film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, cut from the same cloth.
The game is as technically amazing as predicted, incredibly immersive. You have to clean your revolver and brush your horse. You have to get haircuts and bathe. If you forget to eat, you lose weight and get run down. It matters whether you have good outerwear, for getting caught in a storm or in the cold is going to damage your health. In fact, it feels almost a little too real.
There is an honor system in RDR2, and still plenty of opportunity to take the moral high road, to stand up against the Klan, for example, so while I was still an outlaw gunslinger, I’d achieved high honor by the final chapter of the main narrative. But early in the game, I had an encounter with a sick farmer who owed the gang a debt. At the start of the sixth and final chapter in the main narrative, the doctor informed my character that he had tuberculosis. I’ve spent hours hunting and crafting and developing this character and even making an outlaw somewhat honorable. The character broke a wild horse and rode her faithfully through all of his adventures. Then I watched her die. And then I watched my character die.
This is not one of those optional branches or random events that happens in games where you re-load and re-play and encounter until you succeed. This is a scripted part of the main narrative. Every single player, and that’s a lot of players, for the game has more than $17 million in sales since it was released on October 26th, every single one of those players is going to watch the character they have created die.
I realize that it is a game, but it is also interactive literature, and you only get to throw stones if you have never cried at the end of a movie or novel.
I have never played a game like this. I’m not sure I ever will again. I play these games because they are lived stories, but I’m not a nihilist. I like happy endings. This doesn’t feel very happy. I am not sure I found much joy in this game. But maybe, just maybe, there was some redemption for Arthur Morgan. He was honorable, in the end, and made the right decisions, stood for love and against senseless violence.
The game itself asks, in the narrative, hard questions, and it doesn’t give easy answers, the mark of great literature and great film. The act of playing the game, especially once you know how it is going to end, forces you to consider questions about fun, happiness, joy, and those don’t have easy answers either, never mind questions about whether I’ll put down the controller and sweep the kitchen floor, about whether I might do something better with my time.
Joy is the theme for this third week in Advent, and once again, we experience a mismatch between the theme and the assigned gospel text, John the Baptizer’s stern message of repentance and selflessness. John’s “brood of vipers†doesn’t feel particularly joyous, yet is critical in our understanding of the Christ event. Other possible texts assigned for this day, from Zephaniah and Philippians, do at least contain the word rejoice, and the passage we read from first Isaiah refers to joy twice.
The theme of the week also calls to mind the Magnificat, or Song of Mary, the words Luke tells us she spoke when visiting her relative Elizabeth, one pregnant with Jesus, the other with the Baptizer.
Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.â€
The passage goes on the describe the divine reversal at the heart of the gospel, human systems of power turned on their head so that the hungry are fed, the powerful reduced.
We are meant to believe, from this passage and from tradition, that Mary rejoices in getting knocked up by some mysterious spirit. I must admit that I am not completely on board with this tradition. She was unmarried, and her fiance was not the father. That was enough to get you stoned in the street in those days. Joseph gets word from the angel in Matthew, but in Luke, Mary is on her own. Whether or not people believe her is a matter of life and death.
Why was it so important to later authors, to developing Christianity, that Mary find joy in her pregnancy?
A quick look in the thesaurus makes pretty clear that we do not all define the good that we call joy the same way. One fork in the definition focuses on things like glee and hilarity. A middle branch looks at words like delight and cheer. Yet there is this other end of the joy continuum where we get words like comfort and satisfaction. Joy, then, can be amped up, joy screaming down the high speed twists and turns of a rollercoaster, it can be contentment, cocoa and a fire in the fireplace and Sibelius on the stereo. It can be satisfaction and pride, things that might come closer to Mary’s rejoicing.
Is joy the purpose of life? Joy as a series of blissed out moments that quickly pass, or joy as in a life with contentment, with purpose, with love?
What is a life that is judged as good, by us, by history, by the divine? We don’t get an honor rating like a video game.
Many will know that one of my favorite quotes about life comes from the British sculptor Henry Moore, who claimed that “The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.â€
Which is great as a way of living, but doesn’t really provide criteria for judging a quality of a life. It is forward thrust, and I’m all about forward thrust, but sometimes joy is in what has been done.
We could use evolutionary criteria to judge a life, a good life being a life that leaves behind many offspring to reproduce. But by that measure fewer and fewer Americans are living a good life as, like the Germans and Japanese before us, we have fewer and fewer children. Besides, by that criteria, the lives of Michelangelo and Tchaikovsky would not be judged as good.
But we’ve always been more than biology, fancied ourselves as having souls, something transcendent, as being creatures with a bigger purpose. The wonder and joy we find in the work of the great artist and the great composer must result in a judgment rendered that these were good lives, even if Tchaikovsky’s ended tragically.
That I ask these questions, that I seek more than temporary pleasure, that I see us as more than rutting animals, should not surprise you. I am, after all, a pastor and teacher, and religion is nothing more than humans trying to make meaning out of our existence, as we try to hook human consciousness to something bigger, something less finite than these bodies, whether it is a character written to life and sometimes to death in a novel or video game, or our own lives, real lives, connected in love and creativity to a web of people and communities, to art and even to institutions.
Like my character in Red Dead Redemption 2, I am going to die, eventually, and so are you, at least our bodies will die. Almost all will eventually be forgotten, even if we manage to turn this thing around and save the planet from destruction at the hands of the greedy and selfish, and if we don’t, well everything will be forgotten. But the plus sign in the equation of our lives is that we feel like we are more than just this here, and most of us aspire to being sources of joy.
In traditional Marian theology, the mother of Jesus has joy because she is of use in the divine plan, because her child will save humankind. That’s a pretty high benchmark, and we might aspire to something a little less absolute. We’re not all going to paint the Sistine Chapel nor will orchestras likely perform our work for centuries to come. But our lives can have purpose, can have meaning, can be a source of joy. And maybe this is the true measure of joy, that joy cannot be one’s own, but that joy is measured in the sharing, can never be claimed, only given. It might not look like Ed Wynn floating up to the ceiling with laughter as Uncle Albert in the original Mary Poppins. Sometime joy is just going to be safety and security, a comfortable bed, food in the belly. And sometime egg nog, with a bit of liquid joy thrown in, if you are into that sort of thing.
Maybe, just maybe, joy, real joy, is more than the temporal, the temporary, is spiritual and communal, is the gift of a loving God that surrounded us with an amazing creation, that surrounds us with other humans with spirits bigger than their bodies, that God’s-self was present to humankind, experiencing what we experience and offering healing and hope, in the form of a brown-skinned border-crossing laborer from Nazareth, born in a stable, and sleeping in a manger, a birth we prepare for again as if for the first time. Joy to the World.
Amen.