The Gamer’s Gods Cannot Save Him

Herbert Schlossberg took his title from Hosea: “They made idols for their own destruction” (Holy Bible, Hos. 8.4). Idols for Destruction is not a book about literal carved images. Rather, the book is an account of what a culture worships when it still uses religious language for worldly objects that, ultimately, cannot save it. This essay applies that claim to the present-day video game industry and to the online congregations that feed on it.

Isaiah walks through a craftsman who grows hungry and weary, shaping a god from the same wood he uses for a fire, then bows to the leftover and says, “Deliver me, for you are my god!” (Isa. 44.17). Psalm 115 adds the rule that follows: “Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them” (Ps. 115.8). Identity follows worship. Romans 1 traces the same exchange: the glory of God traded for images, until thinking itself becomes futile and God “gave them up” to what they already wanted (Rom. 1.21-28). Colossians names greed as idolatry because what you treat as ultimate begins to name you (Col. 3.5). Jeremiah’s charge is still the simplest: a fountain of living water abandoned for broken cisterns that can hold no water (Jer. 2.13). Jonah says those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs (Jon. 2.8).

The point is that people are destroyed by the things they treat as gods. This is because the things we love absorb our time, money, identity, community, hope, and meaning. In response, the one true God, who also describes Himself as jealous, judges not by throwing a bolt of lightning at idolaters but by handing them over to what they have already chosen.

What Scripture Means by an Idol

Jesus does not need the word “idol” on every page to describe the capture. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matt. 6.21). “You cannot serve God and money” (Matt. 6.24). “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” (Mark 8.36). The rich fool organizes a life around stored goods and tells his soul to relax; God calls him a fool that night (Luke 12.16-21). The pattern is labor, expense, assembled bodies, shared speech, and transferred hope. Acts 19 is the civic version. Demetrius does not open a seminar. He opens a payroll argument. The theater in Ephesus shouts “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” for two hours. That is a convention hall with better acoustics: procession, slogan, identity, and revenue fused.

Apply the list without piety theater to the video game industry and the cultures surrounding it: Time: weeks structured around patch notes, leak drops, and countdown timers.

Money: $80 and $100 editions of games, plus more spent on DLC.

Community: Discord vigils, showcase auditoriums, merch as vestments, influencers as a priesthood that interprets the industry’s secrets for you.

Hope: a release date, a trailer, any story that “this will fix the industry.”

Identity might fill its own essay. Console wars trained a generation to say “I am PlayStation” or “I am Xbox” or “I am Nintendo” the way an older world said a people or a parish. The hardware is a relic for people like these, and the launch-night line might as well be a pilgrimage. Include also “PC master race,” handheld versus living room, physical versus digital, “I don’t do live service,” “I only buy first-party,” and the rest. These are all ways of naming oneself.

The public calendar is a church year. Games Done Quick is a vigil that lasts days: bodies in a room, a game on an altar-screen, donations as offerings, commentary as midrash, chat as the congregation answering back. It is charity, and it is also a people rehearsing who they are. The Game Awards is the other feast: sermons about how great the industry is, trailers dropped like revelations, and an auditorium taught to gasp on cue. We even have entire musical segments now. E3 used to be the high mass until the building closed and the rite moved to streams. The worship service continues with Nintendo Direct, State of Play, Xbox showcase, Summer Game Fest, and more.

There are other altars people pretend are hobbies. Studio loyalty is one: Rockstar as a name you defend before you have played the game; Nintendo as your childhood, and therefore it can do no wrong. Genre loyalty is another: the boomer-shooter enthusiast or the soulslike badge. “Gamer” itself was an identity word long after it stopped being a description of someone who just played games.

The Political Grammar

A people learns who they are by what they assemble to receive. Once the self is PlayStation-shaped or Nintendo-shaped, the next question is not “Do you like games?” It is “Which story is allowed to live inside the assembly?” For a long stretch the stories that sold still ran on leftover weather: a world with a right side, a common moral thread. Nobody had to announce that weather, because the good was already assumed by a society that was mostly Christian. Even when the assumption thinned, the assemblies kept meeting anyway.

Games from that earlier weather are now remembered as “not political.” But that idea only works if “political” means a current talking point. A knight in armor killing a dragon and bringing a princess home is political in the older sense. That is the kind of language still inherent in Super Mario Bros. The language is political because it presumes there is a natural order to things: courage worth risking, a good worth taking the risk, a monster that must be defeated, and a world that must be set right. People did not call Super Mario political because the natural grammar of Christianity was still in the air: the warrior, the serpent, and the bride. That pattern is older than Nintendo.

Progressively, video games and popular culture in general started to treat Christian goodness itself as a joke. Essentially, Christianity, or Christ Himself, became a prop you kick to prove you are an adult. South Park made Jesus a call-in host who cannot run the room. A statue became a gag about bodily fluids. Family Guy, The Simpsons, and a long strip of late-night and Adult Swim comedy ran the same loop: God is incompetent and Christians are knuckle-dragging idiots who have yet to catch up with the rest of the world.

That ridiculing of Christianity, and the departure from it, did not leave a clean hole. While the church stepped back from popular culture, something else took the pulpit: a new priesthood ready to recatechize the last folk tales still standing. Feminism and other postmodern lines of critique did not invent politics in games. Instead, they treated the old Christian grammar as the offense in need of correction. In this retelling, Mario was a tyrannical patriarch, Princess Peach was only a prop, and Bowser was a misunderstood outsider. Gamers had no way to answer this, because they were already so well practiced at irreverence toward Christian things. And so, en masse, they submitted to their idols. They thought they could keep shipping what they liked forever, giving their weeks to studios and expecting a household god. But studios are people, and people have agendas. Why should they owe you your childhood when you have abandoned the God who made that childhood worth anything in the first place? Why should their moral vision bow to yours if you will not bow to theirs? You know you will not become their convert, but they know they will not restore the things you love out of kindness.

And so there stand two unconvertible religions sharing one industry. Without a mediator, a Christ who can tell both parties they are not God, there is only capture: who holds the studio and the hype press surrounding it?

“But wait!” you say. “Didn’t we get all our best games during the Satanic Panic?”

That is an admission, not a defense. Those games were made by studios and people who then hired, sold, and staffed the next twenty years of the industry. They sold video games to a public still living on leftover Christian grammar. The “panic” did not make the games good. The older moral atmosphere did. When the atmosphere changed, the same gatekeepers did not keep making the same products. If Christian irreverence were the fertile principle, the present would look like a bountiful harvest. Instead we have consultants who leverage moral messaging, hundred-dollar editions and thousand-dollar consoles, and industry professionals constantly talking down to consumers about how the world actually works. The older games the current consumer wants back were made under an umbrella they did not build, and they treated that umbrella as a joke.

Mammon Without Surplus

Schlossberg’s chapter on mammon is about what we ask money to do for us. Sometimes a dollar buys lunch, but other times it is how you prove you still belong. Fear of missing out is that second use with a marketing department. It does not say “you need this.” It says “everyone who still counts already has it.” Sit out and you are not just poorer culturally. You are late, and somehow made to feel like less of a person. Right now that trick is uglier, because even the lunch money hurts. The FOMO does not care.

Around 2012 a Chipotle steak burrito ran about $7.50 to $8.50, depending on the city. You paid it, sat down, and did not do math. In 2026 the same steak burrito averages about $12.25 before tax (higher in the expensive zip codes). Guacamole is another three dollars. Chips and a drink put the tray near $17 to $19.

The box under your television followed the same path. A PlayStation 2 launched at $300 and was the machine that sold Grand Theft Auto III, Vice City, and San Andreas as $50 games. GTA IV arrived on a PlayStation 3 that had launched at $500 and an Xbox 360 that most people bought nearer to $400. GTA V launched at $60 on a PlayStation 4 that launched at $400. The tithe back then was one console you bought once and kept for years, and one game that did not ask you to skip groceries.

In 2026 a PlayStation 5 is $500 ($450 if you take the disc-less model), and GTA VI is $80 on top of that, or $100 for the edition they want you to want. The household that bought San Andreas on a high-school wage is not the household staring at a $20 steak burrito and a $500 brick. But your favorite influencers on social media are still performing the old scripts: drop day, Ultimate Edition, setup tour, and a brand-new console as if it were your entire personality.

So is the surplus part of the identity now?

Mammon’s trick is to keep the liturgy at the old volume while the offering doubles. A $50 vice you could hide in last week’s a paycheck 20 years ago is not the same as an $80 game on a $500 altar. The idol still wants your tithe and you will tasked to continue worship as if you still have a surplus somewhere. This is proletarianization without the scenery of a manifesto: a life spent as a buyer of other people’s products and a culture that treats your continuous moral wounding as normal, no matter how much you hurt.

Grift

Yet, the congregation will not leave the sanctuary. Telling people they have an addiction is the easy part, and you see it on social media all day long. It has even become its own market. That is how grift works. An addict can nod along and still need the next hit. Your favorite anti-woke YouTuber names the problem and then sells another video about the same wound. But there is never any exodus. Instead you are tasked with waiting for the next video, and the next one, and so on. The machine that sells you your game-idols has also created its own anti-idols. Spend the week in righteous outrage as the algorithm delivers some new flavor of commentator who pretends to oppose whatever it is you oppose.

This is self-medication. These videos are cope pills people swallow so they can feel as if they have resisted something. Worse, the ritual often feeds the thing it claims to starve. Studios hear the outrage and receive a gift: a visible enemy. Now they have a reason to push their ideology harder. They can tell themselves they are brave when all they are doing is the opposite of what the commentariat is doing. One side swallows videos and calls it resistance, while the other ships its sermons and calls it courage. Each congregation keeps the other in work, continually naming the foe so tomorrow’s disease has a new face. And if the only prescription is to come back tomorrow, again and again, you have not left the sanctuary. You have only changed the vestments.

Judgment as Being Handed Over

Schlossberg’s thesis is that much of what a late culture calls crisis is better read as judgment on its idolatries. Romans 1 is the mechanism in one sentence, three times: God gave them over.

Israel trusted Egypt, then Egypt became the whip. Hosea’s lovers and wages become thorns. The golden calf was turned into powder and the people drank it. Judgment is the thing you already chose. God did not have to do anything other than give you exactly what your heart desired.

The games industry demanded devotion while catechizing irreverence toward Christ. What inevitably followed was a hatred for all good things. The machinery eats itself dry as it matures. That is what idols do.

Christians were supposed to be the people who still remembered the old language. But now the consumer who laughed and ridiculed Christ watches the thing he loved in exchange fail to love him back. The things he used to love have stopped loving him. His future is $100 games and $1,000 consoles, all woke, and all ridiculing him for being a man in a woman’s world.

So here is the question, dear “gamer.” You already know the product cannot love you back. You already know the outrage channel will still need you sick tomorrow. You already know the other side is using your anger as fuel.

What are you still doing on your knees?

If the answer is habit, say so. If the answer is that you have no other god, say that too. Hosea does not end on the smashed idol. It ends on a door. After the lovers, the empty cisterns, the calf, and “they made idols for their own destruction,” the last chapter is a call to come back.

“O Israel, return to the Lord your God, For you have stumbled because of your iniquity.” (Hos. 14.1, NKJV)

God says He will heal their apostasy and love them freely. And then: “Ephraim shall say, ‘What have I to do anymore with idols?’ I have heard and observed him. I am like a green cypress tree; Your fruit is found in Me.” (Hos. 14.8, NKJV)

The new leaks will keep coming, and the newest showcase will keep you hyped for what is in the next box. And of course your favorite YouTube channels will keep describing the same disease when the next product inevitably disappoints. The cycle does not love you. It always ends in the same place: a thinner wallet, a heavier sorrow, and a life spent kneeling to things that cannot keep you alive.

The verse still stands. Ephraim shall say, “What have I to do anymore with idols?” You can take that sentence into your mouth. You can also pretend you never heard it and remain sick.

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