Video Game Addiction - A Powerful Testimony

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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

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Carl speak tomorrow. Now for time's sake I'm skipping a lot so if it feels like there are any holes in anything

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I'm saying it's because there are. And if you want to know more please talk to me or find me on Facebook, I'm very open when it comes to my past.

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Video games in general is a very gray area in the world, society, and of course our

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Christian walk. This is a brief summary of my life and how they radically affected me over this course of the last 25 years.

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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.

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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.

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They were simple back then, help the penguin get their eggs to the nest, or help Popeye save olive oil.

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No big deal, but for me it was a start. And then came 1993 and the system called

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Super Nintendo. For time's sake I skipped Nintendo, everyone remembers that, frankly it was my grandfather's and he was smart to keep me away from it.

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Anyway, boasting bigger games with 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.

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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.

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That is until one Christmas my father bought me the game that started my obsession, a series called

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Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy is a series that was known for leveling out video game systems even to this day.

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The company that produced the game was known for putting systems to their limits and once they could not squeeze anything out of them, they would move to the next big thing.

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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 that first major installment in the

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United States. For a 10 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

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I can still recall, and I still have pleasant memories about it, but having an addicting personality as I do, it was just a gateway drug.

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Final Fantasy is known as an RPG or a role playing game, basically take your

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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.

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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

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I started dating my wife. We both had a past 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.

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We can play together, as well as with thousands of other people across the entire world.

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This is known as the MMORPG, or Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.

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If you don't know what that means, I don't blame you, but if you've ever heard the names Everquest, Warhammer, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, Ultima Online, you've actually come across an

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MMORPG. In short, it's a society based on the internet in fantasy form, that's how

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I like to explain it. Mixed with the massive and engaging stories of the Final Fantasy creators, some stories even taking 3 years to develop, as well as music written by one of the greatest composers of all time, we never wanted to leave the world.

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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.

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Even our wedding day, we came home and played 15 hours straight.

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Until God called me, I was never a husband to my wife. Even when she cried out for attention, my answer was to buy her a dog, cause in reality, that dog was more of a partner to her than I was.

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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.

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I'd look to her for satisfaction and nothing more, because that's what I learned from the game, control.

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Now I breezed over the last 15 hours with the wedding situation, but let me explain, 15 hours in that game was nothing.

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We would spend a minimum of 6 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.

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I would take vacations from work just to have a week of constant, no showering or sleeping playtime.

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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.

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It was bad then, but worse when the majority of all female characters in these games really leave nothing up to the imagination.

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And as games started to look more realistic, the addiction grew to scary proportions, which is really part of a different testimony, and I don't have that much time to get into that.

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It was a chore to cook, so we ordered out every night and morning. Even getting the door was a chore.

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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

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Papa John's pizza. That was just the tip of the truth, and the game was designed that way.

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You needed all that time to get anything done. There was no save or stop feature.

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There were no levels. You just kept going, and you set the goal of your own personal avatar. The name in mind was

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Seidel, and to this day, I can still, for lack of better terms, feel him alive in my head.

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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.

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I can actually still hear and feel the video game at times, but after my surgery, things started to change, and it finally hit me as to how much time

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I was investing in this fantasy and how many other things were missing. A new world of single -player video games.

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This tattoo on my arm, I can show you later if you want, that I can never remove pains me of that every time.

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This zombie -looking thing is what's called the little sister in the game, called Bioshock. I'm not going to get into the details of it, because quite frankly, it's one of the most disturbing games

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I've ever played, and now I need to live with that reminder and tell my two -year -old daughter when she points at it that it's not her.

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Anyway, it's short. It was God that got me out of this mess.

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He turned my taste towards Him and eternal things. I say that because soon after we stopped playing

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Final Fantasy, life turned into a downward spiral that led to the

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Lord saving both me and my wife. I'm not going to sit here and say that video games are the devil.

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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 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.

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So in short, thank you for listening. I hope I was able to get you excited as I am for Carl's talk.

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And now, here's Andrew. But I do have to embarrass him, because he always embarrasses me. I'm just going to say this one thing.

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When I was saved, I was in a charismatic church, and it was all about the

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Holy Spirit and, you know, movement of the Spirit. So I see him preaching on the street one day, and I'm, you know,

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I'm getting all excited. It's like, wow, somebody's preaching the Word on the street. I've never seen this before. And he comes up to us.

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After a while, he sees us watching intently. And I'm like, yeah, my spirit felt, my spirit jumped when

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I heard you preaching. What Andrew said next is the linchpin for our entire relationship from that point on.

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