Me and games: Confessions of a non-gamer
I have a confession to make… I don’t really play many games online. This fact may make it somewhat ironic that I now find myself in this exciting world of game development helping to make 2ndcity come to life and start connecting kids with God’s story in an exciting new way.
One of my roles here with 2ndcity is to present the vision of 2ndcity to churches and key stakeholders and as part of that presentation I talk a bit about my experiences of games back in the 1990s (and no, an online game was NOT playing with a piece of computer paper with PTO written on both sides)…
Back in 1996 my flatmate was the proud recipient of a hot new Nintendo 64 game console. It was super exciting to have this addition to our flat and if you are able to score someone from the Music and Entertainment section of K-mart as a flatmate, your VHS collection will suddenly become second to none with nearly every Bond film made up till that time… He did suffer however, from an excessively large inclincation to the crazy world of Star-Trek videos!
This Nintendo 64 console launched with a little title called Super Mario 64…
I was totally hooked on this little character and I spent about 10 weeks of my life learning every move, locating every secret star, and defeating every evil Bowser character… That was a mind-blowing 10 weeks. Fast forward 10 years and my wife and I were living in the UK. Owing to the fact that we had two family weddings back in the Kiwi neck of the woods, my wife came back to New Zealand for 10 weeks… this obviously lead to the need to replace her with some form of game console. As it happened, one of my students at the school I was a chaplain at happened to have a Nintendo 64 and it happened to have Super Mario World to go with it… I was in “alone-in-London-without-one’s-wife” dreamland!!!
Getting from the start to the finish of Super Mario 64 second time around, took me just one and a half days. I was able to remember that world as if I was just playing yesterday. The story, locations of stars and all the funky moves you needed to do were embedded very strongly in my memory and there was something about immersing myself in that world that enabled me to retain the facts and information I needed to know to be successful within that context.
As we sit here and build 2ndcity… we completely believe that the way that young people retain information about God and let that interact with their life will make a long-term, enduring connection. There is something about memory and games and we are more than excited about harnessing that for the Gospel.
The memory of so many mindless and pointless games currently sits in the brains of our young people, but little do they know… that with the launch of 2ndcity… they are about to be hurled into a world of meaning, of purpose and intentionally following a Saviour with a plan for their life… how exciting is that?
