I’m playing the 2018 city-building game Frostpunk, and I have a decision to make. Frostpunk casts the player as the leader of an isolated city in an alternate-history 19th century in which the world has entered a new Ice Age. The city is organized around a giant generator, which needs to be constantly fed with coal. I’m short on citizens who can go mine for that coal, which puts my whole city at risk.
One way I can find more workers is by passing a law to allow child labor. Children will start in “safe” jobs, but inevitably they’ll work the dangerous mines and forests with the adults. My populace won’t like child labor, and they especially won’t like it when kids get hurt or killed, but they won’t like freezing to death either.
Frostpunk is designed to put you in this position by giving you grim choices that ask you to explore your values and beliefs. It confronts me with a choice not just about how to play a video game but about who I am—do I want to be the kind of player, or the kind of person, who roleplays child labor in a video game? What does it mean that I can see other people, even virtual ones, as expendable?
This is not just a gaming question, or an ethical question, but a spiritual one as well. If we look to the Jesuit maxim of “finding God in all things,” God is present in my in-game situation just as in my (less dramatic, but also more consequential) real-life ethical dilemmas.
Several scholars of games and religion, following Paul Tillich’s Theology of Culture (Oxford University Press), argue that video games, as cultural objects, can be places to encounter God and to grow in our faith. Games can have religious dimensions in that they tell stories about redemption, sacrifice, or forgiveness. They can be, as Catholic scholar Frank G. Bosman writes in his book Gaming and the Divine (Routledge), “new and surprising ways to witness the hidden God of our postmodern world” and “sources of God’s self-revelation.”
Scholar Benjamin J. Chicka writes that God is manifest in games in the way they highlight our responsibility to others and require us to respond to them, whether virtual characters or other players. And Rob Rhea and John Auxier argue that games can be sites for spiritual and ethical formation through the nature of acting within them.
These scholars, alongside game developers, feel that what sets games apart, and what makes them potent opportunities to learn about ourselves and God, is that they are a medium concerned with agency. The player has to do something for a game to exist: make a choice, respond to an in-game character’s pleas for help, or actively decide to deny them. And by being placed in the role of both actor and audience, by being in situations where we cannot be bystanders, games can activate our capacity for action in real life and show us more about how to live our values both alone and with others. By reflecting on what games show us, and by taking those lessons into our communities, games function less as diversions and more as places to grow.
The magic circle
While video games still struggle to shed their reputation as a niche hobby, they’re one of the most popular, and most lucrative, forms of entertainment. The Entertainment Software Association says that 64 percent of Americans played video games in 2024, spending $59.3 billion on games, accessories, and hardware. Globally, games generated $184.3 billion that year, according to business website gamesindustry.biz. Games can be anything from sweeping narratives you play by yourself, such as the sci-fi Final Fantasy or hyper-realistic Western Red Dead Redemption 2; games you play against others, such as team-based shooter Overwatch or sports game Rocket League; shared creative worlds such as Minecraft and Roblox; or casual mobile time-passers like Candy Crush and Wordle.
The essential quality they all have in common—what makes a game a game—has been something designers and scholars have long attempted to define. In his 1938 book Homo Ludens, Dutch theorist Johan Huizinga coined the term magic circle to describe the space games create, writing that games are “temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.” Within the magic circle, play “creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection.”
Naomi Clark, chair of the Game Center, New York University’s department of game design, connects the magic circle to religious practice. “I find it more useful to think about [Huizinga’s] ‘magic circle’ as a space of permission,” she says. “Much as being inside a church might invite or give you permission for quiet contemplation or religious observance, or entering onto the mat of a dojo might give you permission to yell a kiai or spar forcefully, a game gives people permission to play.” The play in that permissive space, Clark says, concerns “our own agency. . . . Games are the art form which works in the medium of agency, and what a game designer does is shape agency in various ways.”
The definition of agency is contested among game scholars, but, broadly speaking, it refers to the requirement that the player is an active participant in a game, interacting with what it offers. Acting makes a game a game, and, for Bosman, it’s also what can make a game religious.
If God reveals God’s self in games as in other cultural expressions, it’s this “necessary active role of the gamer within the game” that merges “the player’s own in-game actions within the divine economy of salvation, contributing to God’s self-revelation,” Bosman writes. “[The player] ‘brings forth’ God in [their] in-game actions in a human–divine cooperation.” If gaming can be viewed as what he calls a religious act, or a “repeatable symbolic action involving God,” then the “quality of gaming, seen as a religious act, lies in this element of interactivity.”
In his book Playing as Others: Theology and Ethical Responsibility in Video Games (Baylor University Press), Chicka argues that this interactivity, or agency, “is a gateway into the lives of other people,” both real and virtual. Just as Bosman sees God manifest through games, Chicka sees “responsibility to others [as] the crucial aspect of how the divine is so manifest through this mode of pop culture.”
He writes that the “ethical call of the other is always present” in games: It shows up when we play as other people, experiencing the world through their eyes; when we engage with others, both teammates and opponents, in multiplayer games; when single-player games present us with characters asking us for help. Some games might require you to take up a character’s quest to continue playing, while in others, declining to help is also an active choice, one that reflects our agency and shapes the game’s world.
“The aspect of you having a choice is something games can do almost uniquely,” says Shane Liesegang, who worked on popular game series such as Fallout and Skyrim before joining the Jesuits in 2015. And through this truth in games, we can also see it in real life. “This is something I’ve tried to instill in the undergrads I’ve worked with since becoming a Jesuit—you always have a choice,” Liesegang says. “Thinking you don’t is usually lack of imagination.”
Moral choices
But video games, by necessity, have to limit what those choices can look like; our agency in games is ultimately limited to what developers can simulate. When it comes to explicitly ethical actions, many games place them on a binary of good or bad. This is very different from what we frequently encounter in real life; we might not be making choices that affect the fate of a civilization, but we face situations far more murky and uncertain than what a game can model. Some games simplify things further by expressing their moral worldview via a scale or meter, recording and tallying up the choices you make over their playtime to ultimately label your character a good or bad person.
While we are, in some ways, the sum total of our actions, in real life we’re much more complicated than that. But these simplifications still have benefits for understanding ourselves as moral actors. Simplified choices clear out the noise and complications of real life; they make it easy to identify and do the right thing or make it obvious when we’re doing wrong.
In her 2014 study of players’ choices in games with morality meters, Amanda Lange found that this simplification sees players tend toward good, that “most players want to make ‘the right choice’ when it’s easy, marked, and clearly labeled.” Contrary to a stereotype of games as places where people indulge in bad behavior, she found that players preferred the “intrinsic reward of feeling good about their behavior” over whatever in-game benefits the “bad” options might provide.
Lange’s study suggests that it’s easy to do good when, well, it’s easy to do good. But of course this isn’t how real life often works. “In some ways, I think games can be very poor training for real world ethics [because they] can train you to believe there’s always a discrete, obvious, ‘press A to do the thing’ choice available when the real world is much squishier than that,” Liesegang says.
Some games try to present less black-and-white options. In roleplaying epic The Witcher 3, it’s often not clear what the right thing is, and the ramifications of your choices and how they shape your character might only become evident hours later. David Pittman, cofounder of studio Minor Key Games, says that he prefers to write “morally gray characters, not only because they are more interesting, but because I believe that is an honest reflection of human nature. Everyone is a sinner, and everyone has the potential for goodness and redemption.”
But these less clear-cut situations can be hard to model in games, based as they are on binary code. Players might struggle to square a character’s desires with their own desires as a player, and it’s often hard to simulate complexity within a game’s choices. And stories without clear right and wrong can also work against some of the benefits games have for helping us understand ourselves and our ability to act. Researchers at University of California, Davis studied the effect playing the game Papers, Please—a 2013 game that casts the player as a border guard in an oppressive regime—had on participants’ sense of themselves in relation to immigration. They found that after playing the game, with its limited options to follow their conscience, players felt less effective as actors, less able to help immigrants than they had before they played.
Here’s where things return to the requirement of agency. Whether an in-game ethical choice is obvious or complex, whether we feel effective in our actions or not, we still have to act for the game to go on. And acting despite the odds, when it feels useless or we don’t know what will happen, can be formative.
In their article “Gaming the System: Christian Leisure, the Imago Dei, and the Formational Influence of Video Games,” Rob Rhea and John Auxier argue that the actions we take in games can shape us by “engag[ing] the will in varying degrees. For the Christian, the will and its formation are central to the objective of living a life ‘conformed to the image of Christ’ (Rom. 8:29).” When we stretch the “moral muscle” of our will in games, we grow our capacity to use it. They write that these repeated expressions of will can, in turn, affect us internally. The act of acting shapes us, regardless of what we’re choosing.
Of course, we can’t entirely put aside the question of whether those actions are “right” or “wrong.” While the connection between in-game and real-world violence has been largely disproven, Rhea and Auxier worry that games that let players behave in negative ways can lead them to “delight in what is evil” as much as positive actions can lead them to “rejoice in what is true.”
Clark doesn’t think that we become “more like the ‘experimental’ self we’re playing around with” in a game through our choices, but she does feel that “trying those feelings on can show us something about our own capacities, state of mind, and the way we might think or act when we’re in a certain situation, or role, or emotional state.”
Even if we’re playing the “bad guy,” the magic circle of games, largely insulated from the consequences of real life, can help us gain insight into what motivates our bad actions, how we feel about it, and what the consequences are. If we approach this with thoughtfulness and intention, and with the belief that God is present in our gaming experiences, we can still see even our negative in-game actions as a learning experience.
Acting with others
Our in-game actions don’t inherently correlate to our real-world ones, but that doesn’t mean they don’t affect our real lives at all. And gamers seldom truly play games alone; they talk with other fans of games they love or play multiplayer games with others. Several people with whom I spoke felt that playing games in community is where players can express what they’ve learned in-game and gain a more complex understanding of themselves as moral actors.
Freya Dutta is creative director of Antidote, a studio that helps organizations and nonprofits create games focused on social and political issues. Antidote’s work focuses specifically on translating in-game lessons from multiplayer games into out-of-game behavior. Dutta says that “games are a perfect metaphor for community: the good, the bad, and the ugly.”
She asks: “Does a game encourage players to think of collectively solving a problem together? Then it will most likely create a sense of shared ownership over the solution, which in turn will encourage players to talk to one another after the game is over. What about a game played by coworkers that encourages players to undercut each other and be their worst selves? (After all, it isn’t how the players are in ‘real life’; they are just playing by the rules of the game.) Perhaps the winner might see some parallels to behaviors present at their work, [like] something a coworker brought up a few weeks ago that they had trouble believing.”
Dutta says that “games as a medium give us all the tools we need to think of our fellow players as community members—community, however, is what you make of it.” There are many examples of gaming communities expressing the agency games foster in positive and negative ways.
Gamers often come together for social action and charitable causes. They stage political protests in games like Roblox. Game developers frequently release charity bundles of games to raise money for natural disaster relief, to help civilians in Palestine, or to support LGBTQ+ rights. A biannual speedrunning marathon—playing games as fast as possible—called Games Done Quick has raised over $50 million for charities like Doctors Without Borders and the Prevent Cancer Foundation.
But gaming communities can also come together for more harmful reasons, most notably in the 2014 harassment movement Gamergate, which saw a vocal minority of players band together around the idea that video games and the studios that make them had become overly concerned with diversity, alienating the traditional image of a “gamer” as a cisgender, white male. Gamergate drove many people from gaming and associated communities; Liesegang lists it as one of the reasons he left the games industry to pursue a religious vocation.
Looking through a religious lens, Chicka sees Gamergate and its consequences in a different light. By viewing games as a space where God calls to us through our responsibility to others, he draws inspiration from the pushback to the movement, where gamers came together to defend marginalized players and the diverse in-game themes Gamergate’s adherents raged against.
Players heeded the “ethical call of the other” that they encountered in games to stand up for themselves, their friends, and even “others they do not directly know and love,” Chicka writes. Inspired by gaming stories, and heeding games’ call to act, “video games and supportive communities surrounding those games provide real reasons to believe in and push for justice, cooperation, and care for others. . . . Shifts in the video game industry since Gamergate have galvanized video game communities to actively realize some of the moral potential that exists within video games and the communities around them.”
Liesegang believes that “gaming communities are more given to dynamism than some other interest groups,” given the constant release of new games and the ways their content and subjects affect players or cause new gaming communities to form. “We see, in an accelerated microcosm, what it is like for a community to move and change and stay true to what it is,” he says.
He also draws parallels to and sees “some ecclesiological lessons to be learned” for the Catholic Church. “The church (in its broadest sense) [is] always moving, always changing; even as it is grounded in tradition and revelation, there is something constitutively dynamic about it. The exact makeup of the church is always changing, and we have to move in response to this.”
You don’t have to look far to see Gamergate-like conflicts in the church, with the growing presence of Christian nationalism and conflicting views on issues around diversity and inclusion that feel ever more urgent in today’s political landscape. It can be easy to feel helpless in the face of them, but Chicka believes that, in the example gamers set by resisting Gamergate, we can see a “way forward out of culture wars and polarized conflicts. Nontraditional games and their communities show a path to something more collective, collaborative, and inclusive.”
Rather than just accepting the negative movement in their midst, Gamergate’s opponents harnessed the agency they’d practiced in games and the lessons games’ stories had taught them to create a more inclusive community. Today, though exclusionary elements and harassment still exist in games, there are far more people committed to acting against it.
From the virtual to the real
How was that in-game agency translated into real life, and how can we harness it in an explicitly religious context? Many people with whom I spoke stressed that, for the experiences we have in games to have value in our lives outside of them, we need to make space for reflection. Some games bake this in; choice-heavy games series such as The Walking Dead or Life Is Strange often show how many players made a particular choice at the end of a game, or their developers share this information online, encouraging discussion among players.
Developers of less binary games strive to do this too. “A player who at least makes an effort to engage with a game will necessarily take something away from it,” Pittman says. “As a developer, I feel responsible for ensuring that the games I make provide something of value to take away.”
Sam Greszes designed a card game called Die On This Hill, which encourages players to passionately make bad-faith arguments as a way of exploring the dynamics of social media. He built a reflective moment into the game by adding a rule that the winner has to email him a picture of themselves literally touching grass, a phrase often used on social media sites to encourage people to step away from their screens. He says this moment of forced reflection is “meant to help people put their relationship with sites like Twitter into perspective, to remind them that, actually, hanging out with friends and going outside is better than the dystopian Skinner box dopamine cycle of algorithmic engagement.”
And when games don’t offer these moments, we can make them for ourselves. Bosman argues that games can be seen as semi-sacramental, especially—but not exclusively—in the hands of a player who brings their religious consciousness to bear on how God can be encountered within them.
Likewise, Liesegang recommends doing a “kind of Ignatian examen about the play session—what did I do? What was I thinking when I did it? How did I feel in the moment? How do I feel now? If a single-player narrative game, what do I think of the characters? Are there any I would want to befriend in my day-to-day life? Would I go to any of them for advice on my real life? What about the character I was controlling? If a multiplayer game, how do I feel about my opponents? Does this have the feel of a schoolyard pickup where tomorrow we might be on the same team, or are they purely Other? Do I feel closer to my teammates? Do we have camaraderie or is it all business?”
In this way, games can start moving from the virtual to the real. “It’s very easy (I am guilty of this myself) to just forget a game once I switch it off, other than the residual cortisol in my bloodstream,” Liesegang says. “But if I reflect on it, as I should with any experience, I can start considering whether it’s building up my soul or letting it atrophy.”
This article also appears in the March 2026 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 91, No. 3, pages 10-15). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
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