What is an appropriate amount of time spent playing World of Warcraft?
I won’t try to suggest an hourly amount of what is acceptable gaming time for a Christian because I believe balance applies to all areas of life and may be different for each individual. How we invest our time isn’t just a gaming issue — balance in all areas of life is the issue. This applies to how much TV we watch, how much food we eat, and how much shopping we do. All these things can be addictive and must be balanced with the rest of our life. In the context of World of Warcraft and other video games, boundaries need to be set to decide what’s an appropriate amount of time for gaming.
For Teenagers:
Over at OpenSwitch.org, Ben Gray posted an excellent list of tips for Raising Technology Teens that may help guide parents specifically in this area. Here’s my summary that might apply here:
- Be crystal clear regarding what is off limits to your teen. Then discuss the consequences of breaking the rules.
- Consequences for breaking the contract should hurt. Each teen is different in this area. Consequences in the adult world can be brutal, so don’t mislead your teen by making their consequences laughable.
- Take the time to learn about the digital devices your teen uses.
- Use technology to help monitor your teen. Technology isn’t evil. Find ways to make it work FOR you.
- If your teen has slipped up and made unwise choices regarding the Internet then you should feel justified in keeping a VERY close watch on everything they do online.
- Talk to other parents of teens about what they do to keep tabs on their kids. You might get some new ideas and who knows, you might give them some ideas too.
Help you teenager make wise choices in how they spend their time. Don’t belittle their interests just because you may not understand it or have a personal interest in it yourself. Rather, come alongside them and even genuinely participate in their areas of interest. Get a World of Warcraft account yourself and join your teen’s server. Play together and give your teen an opportunity to teach you something for a change. After a little while, discuss it together. Teach them to make decisions concerning areas like WoW rather than making a habit of pulling rank and defending your answer with, “Because I said so.”
For Adults:
Real-life is more important than how well you can move pixels around on a computer monitor that looks in to a non-existent fake world.
Remember to keep your priorities straight. Roughly speaking, that includes:
- God
- Family
- Work
- Miscellaneous responsibilities
- Entertainment and gaming
When all other areas are met satisfactorily first, entertainment is totally legitimate. Time spent with God, with the wife and kids, working diligently for your employer, and taking care of other responsibilities around the house and church always come first. With the leftover time, WoW it up!
[ Read other “World of Warcraft FAQs for Christians” in this series ]
[tags]World of Warcraft, MMORPG, MMO, Guild Wars, spirituality[/tags]
Posted on January 24, 2007
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I had a problem with balancing the game.
Usually when your playing the game for a long time, you get very competitive, its kinda like college, you want to get your degree faster than the next guy.
Same with WoW, you want to reach the maximum level as soon as possible. And for me and thousands of others, the maximum level was very anticlimatic and was only the beginning to the actual content of the game
I basically spent every single night, from 7 pm to midnight (and even the entire night, stopping when the sun came up) doing the ‘end-game’ content.
(End game is the content of the game only accessible by people who are at the maximum level, this type of work takes a large amount of time and dedication)
This interfered with my house chores and even my studies, after some comtemplating, i finally got the willpower to stop the game and uninstalled it from my computer.
When i was leveling my character, i would play 2 or 3 hours at night after i had finished my chores, cooked dinner, and read my bible and write down some textbook notes. But when i reached the maximum level and started doing ‘raids’ and joining guilds, it became too much, and i had to stop.
Your right, there has to be a balance, one single thing cannot take up most of your time. God must be at the top, not WoW.
I agree with the last post. God should be first. I beleive God enjoys us having a good time….but I think in many ways we have abused our “everything is permissable, but not all things are profitable” verse in the Bible. Paul understood that there are things that we “can” do that do not take away from our salvation…but some of these things do harm other areas…..mostly our love walk!
And from my amature opinion, in many of the blogs about this game (WoW) the love walk has been thrown out of the window. There are taints of “I will play this game because I want to” and not so much of “I will play this game because God has specifically spoken to my heart and has said, for me, it is ok.”
god came to me last night and said he was angry because i had been ganking his lvl 80 mage…