A couple months ago a question showed up in my Inbox (paraphrased):

“What is the game, World of Warcraft? I am in contact with a parent who has a son who is “addicted” to it (4 to 5 hours daily). How can I understand and place this game in a Christian context?”

World of Warcraft (known in the gaming community as “WoW”) and other Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) can be a source of confusion for those who are unfamiliar with the gaming genre, especially for Christians who are sensitive about the spiritual overtones of hexes, spells and enchantments. Over the next several days I’ll attempt to answer some common questions concerning World of Warcraft and MMOs in general, including:

• What are MMO games?
• What is World of Warcraft?
• Why are MMOs addictive?
• Are there any positive aspects of MMOs?
• What are the negative aspects of MMOs?
• What is an appropriate amount of time to spend playing WoW?
• What about the curses and hexes involved? Is this demonic warfare and does it desensitize players to true evil in the world?
• Is this whole place an area that demonic strongholds can affect a person’s life in reality?
• Should a Christian play World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs?

If you have other additional questions you’d like to see included in this series, please feel free to contact me.

I should mention that I personally do not play World of Warcraft due to the $15/month subscription fee and the intensive amount of time required to accomplish anything significant, but I do play quite a bit of Guild Wars, a game that falls into the same genre as WoW. The two games are very similar in many ways, but my purpose here is not to compare and contrast the two games. Rather, I’d like to address the MMO genre in a Christian context.

[ Read other "World of Warcraft FAQs for Christians" in this series ]

[tags]World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, MMORPG, MMO, spirituality[/tags]

Yep, my pre-order of Guild Wars: Nightfall is available at noon today, so after lunch I’m going straight to GameStop to pick it up. Since I got married this summer I haven’t played nearly as much of Guild Wars as I used to, which is a good thing, I guess. The guild I was in became pretty inactive and recently decided to split up, so for a PvPer (player vs. player) like me, that contributed a lot to less time in-game. Plus, my wife is just so much more fun! I’ll start looking for a new guild sometime soon. It’s just hard to find a guild of people who are decent players yet still relaxed and play to have fun. Usually when I play with people around my skill level they’re serious about nothing but winning and if anything doesn’t go right during the battle, they place the blame on everyone else and then rage quit. Ugh, such immaturity and drama.

In case any guilds read this who are recruiting, here are my stats:
– Rank 8 (no IWAY fame)
– 600,000+ Balz faction
– Prophecies campaign fully unlocked
– Factions campaign mostly unlocked
– I enjoy support rolls the most (Monk, Mesmer, Necromancer) but I can play anything.

So anyway, [tag]Nightfall[/tag], the third chapter and campaign of Guild Wars, becomes available to play at midnight tonight pacific time, or 2:00 AM my time. Anyone else planning to pick up the game?

[youtube]3gI8K8S37JM[/youtube]

Other trailers are HERE and HERE.

[tags]MMORPG, ArenaNet, Anet, NCSoft, video game[/tags]

Guild Wars “Factions” beta weekend event started today. I’m looking forward to exploring new areas, unlocking new items and skills, but especially the new player vs. player arenas. Since everything is gonna be reset after the weekend anyway, I probably won’t do much of the player vs. environment. I enjoy PvP much more anyway.

Looking forward to playing it with Phillip, my Jr. High guys youth leader, and two Sr. High guys, Randy and Chris. A great time of bonding, I’m sure.

For years now I’ve been integrating two things I love: ministry and video games. As movie sales decrease and video game sales increase, this looks more and more like a field of interest for youth ministry and evangelism.

Back during the Halo and Halo 2 craze my youth group often brought all our Xboxes and TVs together for good ol’ times of system link mayhem. It was a great way for us all to bond (both guys and girls) and create a lot of evangelistic opportunities for connecting with students who wouldn’t normally come to church. Although we still occasionally have Halo LAN parties at my current church, the Halo craze has kinda worn off now. However, I’m still going strong in ministry and video games.

Last February I started playing in the beta events of Guild Wars and started a guild that I’ve been committed to ever since. Little did I know that this would yield excellent outreach opportunities for me, opportunities significant enough to prompt me to recently turn down a try-out invitation from the guild ranked #4 in the world right now.

Since I’ve been playing with some of the same guys for almost a year, we’ve obviously had some time to get to know each other. Of course, my job as a youth pastor sparks many questions and is a great conversation starter on issues relating to God and society. What excites me most about this, though, is that I have earned their respect enough for them to come to me with issues relating to real life. Many nights I have stayed on our voice chat server talking with guild-mates (both teenagers and parents) about conflicts at home, job pressures, how to deal with divorce in the family, marriage problems, school and dating stress, and other real life issues. They usually are the ones initiating the conversation now with something like, “Hey, can you pray for me? I have something going on…” As a result of these discussions, one guild-mate is now actively looking for a good church to start attending! I’m doing everything I can to help him get settled.

It’s such a great feeling to be able to do two things I love most at the same time: making irrelevant pixels change on a monitor of fake characters while ministering to real people with issues that are very relevant to their lives. Life can’t get much better than that.

I don’t expect anyone else to care about this besides me, but oh well. The Christmas update for Guild Wars came out last night and I must say that a lot of the towns and arenas look pretty cool. The sad thing is, this has probably done more to put me in the Christmas mood than anything else. lol I’m pathetic. Now if I could just find one of those Santa hats in-game, I’d be set! Here are some screenshots for anyone who might be interested. Continue Reading

I know most of you just couldn’t wait to see my Guild Wars characters, huh? Here they are.

Click on the image to view it full size.