My whole life, I've been a gamer. I started early, I think the earliest game I ever played seriously was Everquest I. I was a 10-year-old, and fascinated by having a world at my fingertips that I could dive into and be whoever I wanted to be. I played with my dad and my older brother Jake, and my character was Kintarth, an agnostic Barbarian. I had no idea what the word agnostic meant, in the game, agnostics merely had a less detrimental reputation in cities around the world of Everquest.
As an aside, I'm going to try to make this as untechnical as possible, given that the majority of my readers would get lost in the jargon.
The game taught me lots of things. It taught that perserverence equaled reward, and that people, or at least gamers, are inherently selfish and motivated by their own ambitions and their own pursuit of reward. It may be a cynic's approach, but in a gamer's world, believing that someone could truthfully be selfless and have your best interests at heart was foolish, and would lead to being scammed or betrayed in your pixelated interpretation of the World.
I always joke that online games took the place of books in expanding my vocabulary, but I read pretty diligently as a child. Still, learning the word "catacomb" at 10 years old and knowing what it means, among countless other words, was something I could say I took away from my time. The games nurtured me, and the people I played with became my friends and family, some of them still being facebook friends and people I love to keep in touch with. I learned to try and look at people honestly, to learn their true intentions, and above all, guard myself from those intentions.
I've played almost every game you can imagine, to some degree of addiction or another, and to some degree of professionalism and notoriety. Everquest I and II, Diablo I, II, and eventually III. Star Wars Galaxies, an incredible game that died because Sony bought it from LucasArts, immediately changed the entire concept, and lost half their playerbase over night, all to make Everquest, their first game, more popular. Eventually I started playing World of Warcraft, off and on throughout my years of high school and into college.
For whatever reason, World of Warcraft had the recipie that sucked me in. That's what the developers want to do with their games, is make them more appealing than real life, and I was hooked. I'm not going to derail this blog by talking about addiction too much, only to say that online games were pretty much the only addiction I've suffered. And like any addiction, nothing my parents could do or say could keep me from playing, to the extent of going behind their backs and collaborating with friends to play on their account, or whatever it may be. It mirrored the habits of drug addicts.
In the end, the only one who could break my addiction was myself. It took my early 20's interpretation of the destruction of my life to achieve it, but it happened. I had lost friends, my girlfriend, broken relationships with my family, obliterated my grades and ostracized myself from anyone who wasn't a gamer. One day I went to escape, and it provided no satisfaction, no solace, and it just didn't matter anymore.
Back to the point: Faith. I never noticed the correlation between how my faith operated and my history of online games until halfway through the Race. I played, and still do, a roleplaying game called Underlight. It's a 1996 chat-based, first person game in which you can "do and be whatever you can imagine." To be upfront, my character was renowned for having his hand in nearly every plot and being able to navigate any would-be reprecussion and emerge unscathed. I became very good at being manipulative. I learned what people wanted to hear, I learned what people wanted me to say, and I said it, and I learned what I was supposed to do, and did it, or did not to incur the desired reaction.
These tenets bled over into my personal life, particularly my relationship with women and friends. I was often a father's worst nightmare, not only taking advantage of trust, but doing so while appearing like an exceptional person. To allay any fears, I am no longer like that, and have received healing and to some extent forgiveness for that. No need for intervention, my days of thinking I was a horrible person are long gone, mainly due to the incredible relationships I've formed with teammates Channele Givargis and Jordan Fath and former teammate Kelly DeCaster, among others, who have been incredible sisters to me.
Arriving upon the point, GMs (Gamemasters) existed inside the game that often created and perpetuated major plots. They did this by either encouraging the players in their own plots, or creating their own unique plots and inviting players into them. Either way, there was a dependency on these unseen and often unrelatable characters to drive the story, and validate characters and the players who played them.
Often, hours in the game yielded no tangible progress because the players were complacent without these gamemasters. You would have a great idea and run with it, but if you didn't get that unseen encouragement to continue, you'd let it die. You would only be spurred from your complacency if you noticed the presence of activity that was driven by gamemasters, because so much emphasis was placed in what they thought and did.
I began to view God as a gamemaster. If he wasn't working in a tangible way, I didn't care to try. And history had taught me that if I did try and act in faith, I often felt foolish because God did not "show up" in a tangible way. I, of course, knew that God works in intangible ways, and on a smaller scale, but gamers know that anything worthwhile is big, and if it's not big it's trivial and easily ignored.
For a long time, this absence of tangibles led to the assumption of the religious view that I attached to my very first character: agnosticism. I knew that the probability of a creator was high, but I couldn't prove it, and no one else seemed to be able to, so choosing to merely exist had less tangible detriment than acting in faith.
I'm not going to sully this post with dishonesty now, so I'll merely say that I'm still in process. Sometimes, it's easy to believe in the Clockmaker Theory, instead of in an active God. But, then you walk into places like Honduras, Nicaraga, Thailand, Cambodia, and Kenya, and you see something that reinvigorates you and offers the validity that what you're doing is not purposeless, and the months you've spent, often suffering, are not in vain.
Love you all, and I love what an encouragement you have been to me through these eight months, and presumably for the final three.
