The word “programming” gets tossed around often when talking about TV — and it carries two meanings. One is obvious. The other is more insidious.
What you and your kids watch is programming. Not just what’s on the screen, but what’s being impressed upon them.
To some people, especially tech giants like Google, the message of the Bible runs counter to much of what they are pushing onto kids today.
The same can be said about the video games children play. And in many cases, it’s worse. Far too many video games marketed to children numb them to violence or undermine traditional values. This isn’t just a game. Kids inured to violence grow into adults inured to violence. Children taught to regard other people as objects — whether as targets in a first-person shooter game or as targets of lascivious attention — tend to grow into morally calloused adults.
These kinds of games, like the smartphones and tablets they’re played on, are everywhere. It seems every kid has either one or both devices, making it difficult for parents to protect them or prevent access to violent, unwholesome material, including interactive online games.
Some of these platforms offer more than just harmful ideas. Predators have been known to use online games to reach unsuspecting children by disguising themselves as other players.
A new solution
But what can parents do?
Parental controls only go so far, and today’s tech-savvy kids often know more about computers and the internet by the time they’re 13 than their parents ever will. Taking away devices is a clumsy — and worse, ineffective — tool. Your kids’ friends almost certainly have devices, and access to them can circumvent any boundaries you try to set at home.
One thing parents can do is provide their kids with an alternative.
Enter TruPlay, a new gaming platform created by Brent Dusing to bring “high-quality, fun, and biblically sound” entertainment to kids.
Dusing, a Harvard graduate and pioneer in Christian gaming through his previous venture, Lightside Games (which reached over 7 million players worldwide), also serves on the board of Promise Keepers — the organization dedicated to “Making Dads Great Again.”
The TruPlay suite of apps includes Bible-based games, such as “King David’s Battles,” which allows kids to role-play biblical characters. The Comics and Videos app illustrates scriptural themes in a graphic novel, similar in theme to “The Dark Knight Rises” but without the darkness. Other games resemble classic hits like the iconic block-building game Tetris — but using stained glass pieces instead.
Counterprogramming vs. censorship
This, too, isn’t a game. It’s counterprogramming.
Dusing says “there’s a lot of awful content” out there and “almost nothing … delivers God’s truth or hope or joy or Jesus Christ to children at all in the gaming space.” In fact, anything that dares to mention Jesus or the Bible, whether in gaming or any other space, without mocking it, is itself mocked. Compare that to the media frenzy around the release of a new first-person shooter. Coverage is wall-to-wall, as if it were the second coming.
But wholesome, family-friendly platforms like TruPlay get crickets — and sometimes worse than crickets.
According to Dusing, Big Tech platforms like Google have blocked or limited the visibility of TruPlay ads, claiming “sensitive interest” as the justification — as if promoting Jesus and biblical values were somehow dangerous.
To some, it is.
To some people, especially tech giants like Google, the message of the Bible runs counter to much of what they are pushing onto kids today — including, in some cases, the explicitly demonic, as opposed to an action game about King David or an adventure game about a little girl who believes in Jesus.
Dusing says TruPlay is being suppressed by Google because “the algorithms themselves view the content we make, encouraging biblically inspired games for children, as a threat.”
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Of course it is — and that’s precisely the point.
“There has been this sea change generationally in America — and really throughout the world — of people playing games as a common part of entertainment and cultural understanding,” Dusing says.
Indeed.
We went from innocent, fun games like “Space Invaders” and “Pac-Man” to hyper-realistic first-person shooter games like “Call of Duty,” designed to realistically convey what it’s like to shoot another human being. Games like “Grand Theft Auto” make sport out of stealing, and games like “Doom” and “Quake” present satanic material as “fun.”
It’s a cultural rip current — pulling kids along while they don’t even realize they’re in the water. And here we are.
“What world do we live in where fun, inspirational games with Christian principles are offensive but sexual content for small children, including sex trafficking, is permitted with no problems on Google?” Dusing asks.
It’s a question that demands answers.
TruPlay’s response is “to transform generations of children in such a profound way that it will shape culture” in a different direction.
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