This fall I began playing my first role-playing game (RPG) on XBOX, a sprawling epic called Starfield that took well over seven years and more than $200 million in R&D for a staff of 500 to bring to fruition. If you’re unfamiliar with RPGs, it’s sorta like Stranger Things but in space. A lot of space.
Starfield takes the player through an epic journey spanning several galaxies and hundreds of planets. You start in a dead-end mining job on a remote moon; after discovering an artifact with mysterious powers, the player is initiated into a top-secret cabal of interstellar explorers. The overall plot is to seek out more artifacts and investigate their origin, unlocking the central mystery of the game.
Players can take a variety of paths to reach that destination, taking on identities, joining alliances, pursuing side quests, and fighting battles. They interact with a wide range of memorable characters with various personalities and motivations. In this way, Starfield, like its predecessors Fallout and Skyrim, adapts to the styles and choices of the player. You can play it stealthily, sneaking, bluffing, and tricking your way through, or you can play it aggressively, guns blazing at every opportunity. You can play it honorably, joining forces with local militias and operating within a strict code of conduct, or you can play as a mercenary, betraying any person or principle at your convenience to get the job done.
What surprised me about this game was how much its structure reminded me of the challenge of living a Christian life. As a disciple of Christ, I seek to love God with all my heart, soul, and strength; love my neighbor as myself; and pursue what I discern to be God’s call on my life, actively working alongside God to foster a sense of shalom, the restoration and flourishing of all people and all things.
But as individuals given free will and born in different cultural, national, and ethnic contexts and embodying a wide array of gifts, experiences, and talents, each of us is granted by God a wide latitude to pursue a call that is tailored for our unique blend of humanity. Paul expressed this in Ephesians 2:10, calling us God’s handiwork, created for good works that God prepared ahead of time.
As such, while we as Christians are encouraged to identify godly principles and beliefs that are consistent across time and history, we all apply them in uniquely different ways. Like Starfield, sometimes life throws challenges at us where we can’t discern clear right-and-wrong scenarios, where we must use our best judgment and trust God to work out the details in the process.
But Starfield reminds me of the Christian life in another way too, and that’s in how its setting evokes a sense of wonder. Astronaut John Glenn once said, “We are more fulfilled when we are involved in something bigger than ourselves.” In Starfield, the tasks of space exploration and scientific discovery can often be overwhelming, but in its quiet moments, the poignant music and beautiful vistas evoke a sense of serenity, reminding the player just how small we are in the vast scope of the universe.
In this way, I’m reminded of the difference between confidence and arrogance. Even though Starfield is just a video game, it mimics many of the actual mechanics and principles of real space travel. In space, any astronaut can have confidence if they’ve been properly prepared for the rigors of life in space. But no astronaut can ever afford to be arrogant. There are just too many ways for things to go wrong in the cold, unforgiving vastness. The natural confidence that every competent astronaut should have must be tempered by a sense of humility and curiosity, if only for self-preservation.
I think a lot of Christians, myself included, struggle with attaining that kind of balance. If we’re not careful, our sense of missional ambition can lead us to unhealthy goals and practices. Without conscious discernment, games like Starfield can whet our thirst for exploration at any cost, which historically leads to principles like the Doctrine of Discovery, which put a Christian veneer on centuries of unjust colonialism, subjugation, and exploitation.
But the good news is that we can be more careful. As the Evangelical Covenant Church, we were right to repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery in 2021. But each of us can do our part to reject that kind of thinking by creating more space in our lives for wonder and humility.
And you don’t need a video game system to do that. If you live in the city, check out your closest planetarium. If you live in the country, take some time to watch the stars at night. Or organize a trip to see something else that evokes wonder, like the ocean, a nearby mountain, or the Grand Canyon.
But if playing XBOX is your thing, then you know where to find me—enjoying the beauty of creation, shooting my way through the stars.
