** Playing God (in "Virtual Reality") **

We used to "pretend" at "Playing God". Now it's real, or at least "virtually real". - I'm talking about video games. The "new" ones. You know, the places where so many of our children do their clicking like crazy. .......

Let's begin with "Black and White 2" . Here your child plays the god of a Greek tribe. As god, he is to win a nation's affection (and their worship) with good city management, careful military planning, and raising an impressive creature servant to do his bidding.

Then there's the video game "Spore" . ...
It won't be out for at least another year, however, experts say it has the potential to be the most amazing ... "god-game" ever made. How would you like to design your own life-form, guiding it from lowly beginnings through sentience, civilization ...
and finally space exploration? ... One of the industry's best, Will Wright, is responsible for this, and such popular games like Sim City and The Sims. ........ Also in these are virtual worlds the video game player governs like a god over his own universe.

In our review, let us go further with "God Of War 2" . This is not so much a god game as it is a game "about" gods. ... Steeped in Greek mythology, the "God of War" series combines breathtaking visuals with addictive, button-mashing combat and more than what the advertisers call a "touch of grown-up type content". You play Kratos, who starts the game as the God of War, and you drop in on numerous notable figures from classic stories: Icarus, Perseus, Theseus, Athena...and kill them.

"Viva Pinata" , is referred to by distributors as "kid-friendly". With a saccharine-sweet presentation. Under its Saturday morning cartoon facade (Not shown here), lurks a devastatingly addictive combination of building, management and economics: the "three pillars of all great god games."

In the ever popular "The Sims 2" video game, you get to "play god" for a small group of people. You control their surroundings, their activities, and their lives (Or just wall the people into a kitchen and set the place on fire.). ...... As you see from aspects of the video game's cover, the player is involved in many dimensions of his virtual reality world. ... His creation.
"Darwinia" is another video that makes your kid a "god"in his "own mind". The game, by simply clicking, casts the user into a "disembodied leader of a race of blobby, pixilated Space Invaders". These beings ramble over wire-frame landscapes populated by enemy beasts that blow people away without remorse.

"Evil Genius" (Sounds innocent enough!) constructs the perfect super-villain lair. Then the virtual reality game player packs the lair with traps to snare unwary spies, and sets about distributing minions cunningly to enslave an unsuspecting world.

Do you still feel you want to be "God"? (Or I mean your child ...) Here is another one for you. It's ..... "Mega Lo Mania" .......... This marvel of technological superiority affords the video player the opportunity to pilot a civilization from stone huts and sticks all the way to nukes, jet fighters and flying saucers. All with a pleasantly whimsy (guilt free) presentation!

All this "God Making" began with "Populous: The Beginning". Developed by Peter Molyneux's celebrated Bullfrog studio. Widely credited with giving birth to the "god game" genre way back in 1989.

I know it looks like I'm selling this stuff, but I'm not. Actually, I look around and see how entertainment devices like these are negatively impacting our youth. In my field of psychology, I know for a fact that the teen and young-adult male, where the frontal lobe (decision-making location of the brain) does not fully develop until about the age of 24; and the usual "linear-thinking tendency" of the normal male, video games especially become addicting to our male youth.

And when it comes to matters of God. ... Is it not already sad how we, His children, ignore the true God on so many levels through the course of each day? Shall we now further "invent" virtual realities of worlds in our minds we lord over with fingers as deities in His place? Do we not realize how much this must hurt true Deity, when He loved us so much that He sent His Son, very God, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross in our place?

Let us please pray for ourselves and others. ... For often we fail to realize the deeper meaning of what we do.