No Sympathy for Devils: What Christian Video Games Can Teach Us About Violence in Family-Friendly Entertainment

Abstract

Public debates around video games and violence tend to be overwhelmingly focused on realistic attacks on bleeding, screaming, undeniable humans in a small number of blockbuster games. This essay seeks to open new possibilities for ethical reflection on video games by considering, instead, why games full of destroyable enemies of a somewhat less human sort are often engaged as uncontroversial family-friendly entertainment. This study opens with a brief historical analysis of enemies and gamers as conceptual pillars of video game culture. The strange entity I identify as the gamer/enemy dyad is then refracted through George Bataille and Giorgio Agamben to consider how some of its tendencies could become exempt from moral critique. This frame is then used to examine 50 games created for Christian players, a market well identified by a collective desire to enjoy family-friendly games, to discover what sorts of enemies these games include and what can be done to them. The result, finally, is neither a sense that more games should be kept from children, nor that more games should be given to them, but a clarified attention to the dramatic prioritization of the explicitly human over the nearly human and what this says about contemporary popular culture