Mindless Action?

I've been playing quite a fair bit of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas; IMHO the greatest open-ended gaming experience available now on consoles. The game world itself is huge and mirrors 3 cities in the US of A. I've spent hours wandering around the first city of Las Santos and have yet to explore every single location. You've gotta see it to believe.

Of course that's not that the point of today's BLOG. After hours of playing San Andreas and hearing the characters mouth 4-letter expletives, I realise that it's affecting me tremendously. I'm not one to use expletives that much (although I do realise that I am pretty casual with words like s**t, damn & crap at times) but after hours of immersion in the game I realise that expletives seem to come readily to my mind and I'm not talking about the good-natured kind. This goes to show that games (and other forms of media) do have a huge impact on the mind and I wonder if parents really know that kids are exposed to stuff like that in something like a video game. If it can affect an adult like me (yeah, yeah I'm still childish in some ways but I am still a thinking adult nevertheless) then imagine the effect it'll have on a kid playing the exact same thing?

The Bible says this in Proverbs 4:23 which says this "Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life". How so very true. What goes in has to go somewhere right? And guarding my heart does not just mean guarding what I love but also what goes into my mind. Being human is mind, body & soul so I take guarding my heart to also mean guarding my mind. The concept isn't hard to grasp, it's just hard to do. I enjoy all kinds of stuff that potentially may have an effect on me and truthfully I wouldn't really want to let of these things. It's a struggle really because I don't know how much of all these things make me ME and how much of it is worldly influence. I don't believe in separatism between so called "sprituality" and "worldliness" cos' whether we like it or not we ARE living in the world; not disembodied souls wandering the Earth. I dunno ... perhaps over time I'll change but I doubt God really wants to make me not ME; it's just that which parts are the real me and which are not? Puzzling isn't it?

Just my 2 cents worth after not making any posts for almost 2 weeks. Hey! I managed to write about my faith & video games in the same post. Ha ha ha ha ha! I'm a GENIUS! NOT!!!

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