Video Game Addiction A Powerful Testimony

Hey guys, um, I have to lay this out because there's a lot of different tangents that I can end up going into this. And I didn't want my testimony to bring any presuppositions into your mind before hearing Carl speak tomorrow.

Now for time's sake I'm skipping a lot. So feels like there are there's any holes and anything I'm saying. It's because there are and if you want to know more, please talk to me or find me on Facebook.

Early Video Game Exposure and the Rise of an Obsession

I'm very open when it comes to my past. Video games in general is a very gray area in the world society. And of course our Christian walk. This is a brief summary of my life and how they radically affected me over this course of the last 25 years.

In the late 80s early 90s. My father worked for an electronic supply company when one day he brought home our first video game system. Most wouldn't even recognize it even if I named it. But it was a starting point for me until he was fired a few months later due to the store going out of business.

He would bring a game home every week. They were simple back then help the penguin get their eggs to the nest or help Popeye save olive oil. No big deal, but for me it was a start. And then came 1993 in the system called Super Nintendo.

For time's sake I skipped Nintendo everyone was that frankly was my grandfather's and he was smart to keep me away from it. Anyway boasting bigger games with a larger-than-life stories and fake 3d graphics and a processor that no one Has seen before it was hook line and sinker for any child and I still wasn't even in my double digits.

Truly nothing hooked me too much though Mario was still Mario even though he looked cooler and no one questioned Why a fox was leading a team of star fighters against the forces of an outer space villain.

That is until one Christmas my father bought me the game that started my obsession series called Final Fantasy. Sorry Final Fantasy is this series that was known for leveling out video game systems even to this day.

The company that produces the game was known for putting systems to their limits and once they could not squeeze anything out of them They would move the next big thing. The series was known for always having the best stories music graphics you name it up until 2010.

It was the pinnacle of all gaming standards and they got me with their first major installment in the United States. For a ten-year-old. I was a sitting duck. The story the graphics and most of all for me being a musician the music to this day I can still recall and I still have pleasant memories about it, but having an addicting personalities I do it was just a gateway drug.

Final Fantasy is known as an RPG or a role-playing game. Basically take you Dungeons and Dragons books put them into a video game and you have RPGs. You control one or more people throughout their stories making them stronger building them up as well as watching or potentially Controlling for as much as the game engineer allowed you to the outcome of their story.

MMORPGs, Shared Worlds, and Losing Time

With this game and other games that I played throughout high school and into my adult life. They were all pretty much the same with the random zombie shooter game thrown in whenever they made a new one.

But I got far worse when I started dating my wife. We both had a pass with the Final Fantasy series. So when their 11th installment of the game came out, it's actually over 15 now. It was a no-brainer.

We can play together as well as with thousands of other people across the entire world. This is known as the MMORPG or massively multiplayer online role-playing game if you don't know what that means I don't blame you.

But if you've ever heard the names EverQuest Warhammer World Warcraft Guild Wars Ultima online. You've actually come across an MMORPG. In short, it's a site. It's a society based on the internet in fantasy form.

That's how I like to explain it mixed with the massive and engaging stories of the Final Fantasy creators. Some stories even taking three years to develop as well as music written by one of the greatest composers of all time.

We never wanted to leave the world. We made friends all over the globe through this game some lasting some never leaving cyberspace. But when you could accomplish something with a group of friends, it was amazing even our wedding day.

We came home and played 15 hours straight until God called me and I was never a husband to my wife. Even when she cried out for attention my answer. My answer was to buy her a dog because in reality that dog was a more more of a partner to her than I was.

She had a spine condition that almost crippled her. She had a spine condition that almost crippled her and I usually ignored her because I was too busy playing to be bothered. With any emotions I'd look to her for satisfaction and nothing more because that's what I learned from the game control.

Now I breezed over the last 15 hours with the wedding with the wedding situation. But let me explain 15 hours in that game was nothing. We would spend the minimum of six hours every day Monday through Thursday on a Friday.

It wasn't uncommon that we would go to sleep until sometime on Saturday morning. Just to get up in the afternoon and play until Sunday night. I Would take vacations from work just to have a week of constant no showering or sleeping playtime.

I would call out sick to play as well and then lie more to cover it up at work. Video games overall also fueled my addiction to photography. It was as it was bad then but worse when the majority of all female characters in these games really leave nothing up to the imagination and As games started to look more realistic the addiction grew.

Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Consequences

To scare to scary proportions, which is really part of a different testimony and I don't have that much time to get into that. It was a chore to cook. So we ordered out every night and morning. Even getting the door was a chore.

Obviously our health totally suffered we both ended up over 300 pounds. My wife ended up getting weight loss surgery due to her weight almost breaking her spine. While I had gallbladder surgery due to a spike in cholesterol because I ate an entire John entire Papa John's pizza.

That was just the tip of the truth and the game was designed that way. You needed all that time to get anything done. There was no save or stop feature. There were no levels you just kept going and you set the goal of your own personal avatar.

The name mine was Seidel and to this day I can still for a lack of better terms feel him alive in my head. When you sit in front of a 24-inch monitor for that many hours about this big about this far from your face.

You can't see anything else in the room. I Can actually still hear and feel the video game at times? But after my surgery things start to change and it finally hit me as to how much time I was investing in this fantasy and How many other things were missing a new world a single-player video games?

It's that soon on my arm. I can show you later if you want that I can never remove pains me of that every time. This is zombie looking things what's called a little sister in the game called Bioshock.

I'm not gonna get into the details of it because quite frankly, it's one of the most disturbing games I've ever played and now I leave I need to live with that reminder and tell my two-year-old daughter when she points out It's not her.

God’s Deliverance and a New Love for Theology

Anyway, it's shorts. It was God that got me out of this mess. He turned my taste towards him and eternal things. I Say that because soon after we stopped playing while fantasy. Life turned into a downward spiral spiral that led to the Lord saving both me on my wife.

I'm not gonna sit here and say that video games are the devil. I Still enjoy them if I can. But God has given me a love for theology and the things of him. As well as showing me the worth the worth of my family.

And given me the hunger to spend every waking moment. Engaging with them that I can't see wasting the time on something made to waste time. So in short, thank you for listening. I hope I was able to get you excited as I am for Carl's talk.

And now here's Andrew. But I do have to embarrass him because he always embarrasses me. I'm just gonna say this one thing. When I was saved I was I was in a charismatic Church And it was all about the Holy Spirit and you know movement of the Spirit.

So I I see him preaching on the street one day, and I'm you know, I'm getting all excited. It's like wow, somebody's preaching the word in the street. I've never seen this before and He comes up to us.

He sees me after a while. He sees us watching intently and I'm like, yeah, my spirit felt my spirit jumped when I heard you preaching. What Andrew said next is the linchpin for our entire relationship from that point on.

Sorry, I think it was just indigestion. Here's Andrew.