Taming gaming: A faith-based approach to video games at home

Games are a helpful way to entertain children between the more important parts of family life, school or church life, but we need to be careful they don’t take over. Such advice was ringing in my ears when I started writing my book, Taming Gaming. I wanted to get to the bottom of what advice parents, carers and youth workers really needed about video games. 

What I discovered was a lot of confusion, misreporting and scary headlines. There wasn’t a lot of actual guidance about what we should do to keep these things healthy. Worse than that, there were a lot of stories that confused correlation and causation. 

Anxious young people might play more video games but this is as likely a symptom as a cause. Teenagers prone to angry outbursts may be drawn to older rated games, but there is little evidence to show that the games make their behaviour worse.  

Reading this may seem to go against our common sense when a child made to stop playing gets angry, or we watch children playing games where they shoot each other. I didn’t want to sidestep these issues in the book, but I did want to be careful about what was actually happening here.