"Rage-quitting" your treasures on earth

I recently spent (or rather, wasted) two hours of my life on a computer game. Granted it was with my cousin over in Montreal, and I do this to commune with him. It is one of my favourites and it is called Elite Dangerous. The premise of the game is flying a space ship around a full-sized galaxy. The developers weren't kidding about the full-sized galaxy part. The game world contains billions upon billions of stars, waiting to be explored by players around the world. There are suns of different classes, planets of all make and sizes, black holes, quasars, white dwarfs, you name it. There are hundreds to thousands of space stations and colonies sprawled through human space (there are no aliens) in a bubble around earth. You can even visit our own solar system. It is pretty remarkable. Considering that there is faster-than-light travel, where your ship can go at several thousand times the speed of light, it takes about one month of dedicated flying to travel from earth to the center of the galaxy. Wow.

There is an assortment of "careers" that one can take, whether it be mining, trading, bounty-hunting, exploring or even pirating and smuggling (drugs and slaves). The legitimate jobs are as tedious as real-life jobs, but the sinful jobs are exhilarating. As you accumulate money in your career, you gain the ability to afford bigger, better ships with assorted bells and whistles. But pray you have enough money to pay for ship insurance to cover the expense of your ship when you explode. And explode you will, when are unexpectedly mugged by space pirates, crash into asteroids, or get blasted to pieces by the fuzz because you can't park. It is unwise to spend all of your money on one ship. There is much thrill and reward in the visceral risk. But the mundane repetition and unforgiving learning curve can be unfulfilling to many. Gamers call this, "grinding".

Today I chose to play as a bounty hunter. I had made around a million in-game dollars worth of "kills". The cost of replacing my ship was also one million. Before I could cash in my earnings, my ship unceremoniously exploded. I was sentenced to death by cop. Naturally I was outraged. It was not because I had lost, since I knew I was no ace, but because I had spent two hours of my life incurring but a net loss. So I quit the game for a while. Gamers refer to this as, "rage-quitting,"

This is amusing because in retrospect, had I survived to cash cash in my pay-cheque, I would gain nothing but temporary gratification. I could never bring my achievement or money back into the real world. My time was lost for good. Had I won, I would never have noticed this. Such is the spoils of the modern-age matrix of instant gratification. In the case of Elite Dangerous, it may be more sadomasochism.

I am reminded of a fellow who told me that video games were a waste of time and amounted to no good, after I had tried to convince him to join my phone app game company. He is a gifted programmer. He told me how he had wasted countless hours on Diablo as a youth, on what he described as, "numbing his mind to mindless killing".

I am also reminded of my friend who buys digital items on this virtual marketplace called Steam in order to sell them at exorbitant prices to mainland Chinese and South Koreans. He buys them at about twenty dollars a pop and then sells them for hundreds when demand gets high. We are talking fashion accessories for video game characters. Come to think of it, the entire phone game industry is very much dependent on in-app purchases for profitability. I often express to him my distress at the inanity of the way his customers spend their fortunes. Naturally I receive much rationalization. Video games were compared to music, books, movies, TV sports, and other forms of entertainment. The logical conclusion is that all things are meaningless (Ecclesiastes 1:1, hah!). But you know what? He is correct. Many things are meaningless.

We often scoff at the idea of people wasting real money on games and things within games. They appear to be trapped in a dream. The game itself will become outdated, and the next game will come, with better graphics and requiring better hardware. Your old game will be forgotten, and your last Nintendo box will be crushed and recycled for its precious metals. Yet we cling so tightly to our worldly possessions and to our very lives, which are in the scheme of things no longer in duration and no greater in durability. We cannot bring our wealth with us into Heaven. Perhaps we have grown so accustomed to wealth and success that we have forgotten the futility of it all, just like when we succeed in playing a fun video game.

Jesus admonishes us in Matthew 6:19-21, "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do no break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also," Will we see the futility in our worldly treasure in the same way we see the futility of digital achievements? Or will we try to rationalize away our worldliness?