Time Spent With Gaming

The increased prominence of technology in daily life has altered everything from the workplace to transportation, including the very nature and availability of entertainment.  As a result, the relatively young medium of video games has become especially common in recent years.  A question that many Christians sincerely ask themselves relates to whether or not there is some line past which a person plays too many video games (or watches too many movies, and so on).  While there is a line of sorts, it has nothing to do with spending a fixed number of hours scouring virtual worlds or investing all of one's free time in gaming.

There is no objective Biblical or logical line distinguishing a permissible amount of time spent playing video games from an illegitimate amount in the sense that playing for some arbitrary number of hours is not irresponsible.  Anyone who posits that spending two hours a day playing games is heinous, for instance, can never prove that their selected number of hours is correct.  If playing for some particular amount like three hours or five hours a day is not inherently negative, then, at what point does playing video games (or consuming some other form of entertainment) take up too much of one's time?

The line is drawn where playing beyond a certain amount would hinder relationship, workplace, and spiritual obligations.  This means that the line might be ever-shifting for some people, while the line might be set at a point so high for others that it would actually be difficult for them to approach it.  It is worth noting that many people never truly even approach the line at all.  Staying up into the morning to play video games and playing at any opportunity during the day do not signify addiction or moral failure unless a person neglects his or her outside obligations in the process.

Paranoia about the mere presence of video games as an art form has convinced fallacious critics of entertainment media that video games are a generally negative thing despite there being nothing irresponsible about playing them on their own.  Just as there are double standards about many other things in Western culture, there is an obvious double standard when it comes to general perceptions of leisure.  A person who reads books is often thought of as intelligent and balanced, even though there is nothing about reading that means one is intelligent.  Contrarily, a person who plays video games, no matter how intellectually and thematically stimulating the games might be, is often thought of as lazy, selfish, and unintelligent.

The inconsistency of social norms surrounding entertainment does nothing to make playing video games the destructive pastime some people seem to want it to be, of course.  There is simply nothing wrong with spending one's free time in whatever amoral pursuits one is inclined to enjoy; as long as one has upheld all other obligations and is not sinning, there is no objective number of hours one must limit an activity to.  It does not matter if the activity in question is socially discouraged or condemned in arbitrary ways.  There is no reason to hinder one's personal pleasure after one has fulfilled one's obligations, after all, and those who make fallacious objections can be safely ignored or mocked.