I cried when I read it: Gaming, Grace, and God

I cried when I read it. You see, my  mom had cancer too.

I am a gamer.

Board games, card games, dice games, video games, and more. If it's a game I've probably tried it. I spend more hours than I care to admit playing games or thinking about games. We even had to raise the amount of insurance we have on our house to cover the value of the game collection I've been building since I was thirteen.

When I was updating my LinkedIn profile recently I asked for feedback from a number of people I respect. One of them said, "the hobbies or interest section of your linked-in profile mentioned about computer games a few times--you might consider cutting that back to 1 mention of that--especially if older people are looking at it.  They may view that a little negatively.  "

There's a negative view of gaming out there. Mind you, if you watch this video made from recordings of people playing games, you might understand why. I certainly find it a little disturbing. 

It's also certainly true that games can be a waste of time or a distraction. I know I've certainly spent enough time and money on them.

And yet there's an entire conversation happening around the gamification of education. You can find it on Twitter by searching for "#gamification #edchat". You can find it on blogs. There's even a website dedicated to it. I'm experimenting with it in my minecraft project that I've been reporting about here.

There's a lot of value in games. You  might even want to read the book that Kevin Schut, an old friend of mine, wrote entitled, Of Games and God. 

But what made me write this post is the story of a game being worked on now. I found it in a blog post on Facebook.

I cried when I read it.

This post.

The game is here.