A couple of years ago, Grand Theft Auto V appeared as a giveaway, so I added it to the collection and left it there thinking I would probably get around to it at some point. I had played some of the earlier GTA games, particularly Vice City, which I remember as being much more cartoon-like. GTA V felt rather different, and some of the controversy around particular missions meant I had never been especially keen to play it. Then I had to write a paper on Christian ethics, and that eventually led to the slightly odd experience of playing GTA V as part of my theological studies.

Christian conversations about gaming, especially violent games, often begin with the question of whether Christians should be playing them at all. I can understand why. There are games, and parts of games, that make me uncomfortable. But I think there is more to ask than whether a particular game is something I should play.

In 1 Corinthians 10: Paul writes that “All things are lawful, but not all things are beneficial.” For me this opens up a much wider and more interesting set of questions. What am I noticing? What am I overlooking? What is the game rewarding me for? And what happens when I choose not to play in ways the designers and developers may not have anticipated.

For the paper I decided to try what I called a minimum-gratuitous-harm play-through of GTA V. Although the name makes it sound somewhat more virtuous than it actually is.

GTA V cannot really be played without violence or crime. They are built into the story, and some missions simply cannot be completed without them. So, where the game gave me some freedom, I tried to avoid causing additional harm. I avoided deliberately attacking civilians, tried not to steal cars unless a mission required it, drove with at least some regard for everyone else on the road and avoided escalating violence where I had a choice.

Some of those rules developed as I went along.

Early in the game I damaged Franklin’s car during a street race. The obvious GTA solution would have been to take somebody else’s. Instead I decided I wasn’t going to do that, so Franklin walked or took a taxi. Playing this way made the game noticeably slower, and that changed my experience of Los Santos. Walking, sitting in taxis or driving without constantly trying to get to the next destination as quickly as possible meant that I heard more of the radio programmes and noticed more of the advertising and billboards scattered around the city. As such I became much more aware of just how much satire there is in the game.

GTA V spends a lot of time mocking consumerism, celebrity culture, technology, politics, masculinity and the pursuit of wealth. Los Santos is full of people chasing money, status and success, while many of them seem thoroughly miserable.

It is easy to miss this because the game is also very good at giving you other things to concentrate on. If I am driving at speed, being shot at or trying to complete a mission, I am thinking about staying alive and getting where I need to go. Whatever is playing on the radio becomes background noise. This began to raise questions about the difference between what a game says and what it rewards.

GTA V can make fun of greed while encouraging the player to accumulate money. It can satirise violence while making violence an effective way of progressing. Speed and efficiency are frequently rewarded, while my attempts to drive carefully or avoid unnecessary harm sometimes worked against the game’s own measures of success. I completed one mission successfully but received a poorer score because I had taken too long.

Franklin’s attempts at legitimate employment were even more revealing. At one point I bought a towing business and spent some time collecting broken-down vehicles. The work was repetitive, often time-pressured and didn’t pay particularly well. Meanwhile, carrying out assassinations for Lester could make Franklin considerably richer. The attraction of crime is built into the way the game works. In terms of story Franklin wants to escape poverty and make something of his life, and the game does provide legitimate ways of earning money. However, It also makes criminal activity far more rewarding.

Playing GTA does not make somebody violent or more likely to commit crime. I have played Doom without developing any particular desire to fight demons, and I would hesitate to ascribe my opposition to Nazis to the far too many hours I spend playing Wolfenstein 3D. And sadly the many hours of Sid Meier’s Pirates! have so far, failed to produce a career in piracy. But I also can’t say that what happens while we are playing is completely separate from the rest of our lives.

If we are shaped by the things we repeatedly do, then the games we play must have some impact, although that process is rarely as simple as copying a behaviour from one part of life into another. Our habits may involve the things that catch our attention, the things we enjoy, the things that irritate us and the things that gradually become so ordinary that we simply don’t notice them any more.

In Romans 12 Paul talks about being transformed through the renewing of our minds rather than simply being conformed to the patterns around us. We usually hear that discussed in relation to fairly obviously serious parts of life, such as money, relationships or politics. But what happens when we apply the same sort of attention to entertainment. Now I’m not going to turn every gaming session into an ethics seminar. I play games because I enjoy them. But, occasionally paying attention to how I am playing can reveal things I might otherwise miss. Although I doubt I’ll give quite the same level of attention I have paid to GTA V to other games.

During my GTA play-through I found that character of Trevor to be the most uncomfortable to inhabit. His violence often feels more personal and unpredictable than that of the other characters, and there were moments when I found myself just wanting to get through a section of the story rather than enjoying it. When I started to pay attention to that discomfort rather than treating it as something to get past I began to question why one scene bothered me when another didn’t? Why could I laugh at something in one part of the game and find something similar unpleasant elsewhere? Why was I more willing to make excuses for one character than another? Those questions became part of the experience of playing and that the same sort of attention can be applied to very different games.

With GTA, I found myself thinking about violence, money, ambition and what the game rewards. With Minecraft and Valheim, I often find myself thinking about land, resources and my impact on the game world. With Skyrim and Fallout, I find myself thinking about choices and whether a game really treats all of those choices equally. The possibility of talking my way through a situation might be there, but if shooting everyone is easier and brings better rewards, that says something about the world the game designer has created. Although this doesn’t remove my freedom as a player. I can still choose differently. Sometimes choosing differently is precisely what makes the game interesting. But it does make me pay attention to what the game is nudging me towards.

In other games the questions might be about competition, cooperation, power, relationships or what counts as success. Multiplayer games add another layer because the way we treat the other people we are playing with becomes part of the experience as well. And this is where I think churches could have some much more interesting conversations about gaming.

We often seem to start by asking what somebody is playing and whether we approve of it. I would rather begin with curiosity. What do you enjoy about this game? What does it encourage you to do? What does success look like? Is there anything in it that makes you uncomfortable? What sort of world are you helping to create while you play? How do you treat the other people who share that world with you?

Those questions leave room for criticism, but they also leave room for recognising that games can provide creativity, friendship, relaxation, competition, shared experiences and opportunities to think about the world in ways we might not have expected.

Gaming has been part of my life since cassette tapes, BASIC and taking turns at racing games. The technology has changed considerably, as has the way I play, but games are still one of the places where I relax, explore, compete, create and occasionally find myself thinking about questions I wasn’t expecting to ask.

I’m not ready to dismiss gaming as a waste of time or energy, or as something that needs to be justified against more worthwhile activities. There is plenty we can learn from the games we play, about ourselves, our relationships with others and the choices we make. As I’ve started exploring the relationship between gaming and faith, I’ve become increasingly interested in what happens while we are playing, and how those experiences might shape the way we understand ourselves and the world around us.

At the same time, I don’t want to pretend that every moment spent gaming needs to serve some greater purpose. Sometimes we play simply because it’s fun. We don’t need to turn every enjoyable experience into an opportunity for personal growth or theological reflection. But when games do raise questions, whether about morality, community, creativity or the consequences of our choices, I think they’re worth exploring. Perhaps the question isn’t simply whether Christians should play a particular game, but what we might discover about ourselves, our faith and the world through playing it.

Some Further Reading

1. John Wills, “‘Ain’t the American Dream Grand’: Satirical Play in Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V” (2021). Particularly important for the GTA discussion. Wills explores the game’s satire of wealth, consumerism and the American Dream, alongside the tension created when the gameplay itself rewards many of the things being criticised.
   Read the article — University of Kent repository
2. Christopher Bartel, Video Games, Violence, and the Ethics of Fantasy: Killing Time (2020). Looks more closely at fictional violence, motivation and enjoyment. Useful for taking violence in games seriously without assuming that virtual actions simply translate into real-world behaviour.
   Book details — Bloomsbury
3. Milena Droumeva, ed., Playthrough Poetics: Gameplay as Research Method (2024). Takes playing itself seriously as a way of understanding games. The discussion of slowing down, listening and paying attention to game environments was particularly relevant to my experience of playing GTA differently and noticing parts of Los Santos I would normally have driven straight past.
   Read Playthrough Poetics free on JSTOR