Gamers can help us see and shape the future

Synod School convocation speaker: Four tools employed by gamers can be helpful for faith communities, too

September 26, 2024

Photo by Samsung Memory via Unsplash

A longstanding practice at Synod School is to offer a talk-back session with the convocation speaker each evening. At the start of his talk, Dr. Corey Schlosser-Hall, this year’s convocation speaker, shared some of what he learned during the previous evening’s talk-back.

One participant said we might consider attaching our FOMO — the fear of missing out — to what God’s doing right now.

Another noted that much of discipleship formation is built around conserving and preserving. “I wonder if more can be built around what Jesus said in John 20: “Peace be with you. Now go,” said Schlosser-Hall, the deputy executive director of Vision, Innovation and Rebuilding in the Presbyterian Mission Agency. “Then [Jesus] breathes the Holy Spirit on them.”

He said he also heard from people who want faith communities to grow better and more attuned to “memorializing and sacramentalizing when something has completed its lifecycle,” he said. “Could we do better with honoring, blessing and letting go?”

“It was a good, robust conversation,” Schlosser-Hall said.

Turning to the day’s material, Schlosser-Hall showed a couple of TV ads to help spur discussion. The first examines the calamities that can occur when one’s cable goes out. “It’s catastrophizing,” Schlosser-Hall said. “How do you see that lived out in your life?”

“It’s a slippery slope,” said one Synod School-goer. “If we let them in, who else will come?”

“People assume your ideas are bad even before you try them on,” said another.

Then the 540 or so people gathered at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa, viewed a second ad, one for a handheld computer that celebrates people who are filled with passion. “What kind of future is this depicting? Schlosser-Hall asked.

“A sense of possibility, hope and anticipation,” said one.

Jane McGonigal, who wrote “Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything, Even Things that Seem Impossible Today,” develops social games about relating to the future. One of McGonigal’s concepts, Schlosser-Hall pointed out, is time spaciousness, which encourages people, faith communities and organizations to plan and dream in 10-year windows, rather than next month or next year or even five years from now.

Dr. Corey Schlosser-Hall (Contributed photo)

Schlosser-Hall asked Synod Schoolers to take a brief McGonigal quiz using a rating scale of 1 to 10:

• Over the next 10 years, do you think things will mostly stay the same or that most of us will dramatically rethink and reinvent how we do things?
• Are you mostly optimistic or mostly worried?
• How much influence do you feel you have in determining how the world and your life will change over the next 10 years?

“We live in a VUCA world,” Schlosser-Hall said, an acronym for volatile, uncertain, chaotic and ambiguous. But so did the people who lived in gospel times, he said.

“Hope is not a feeling you hope lands on you one day,” he said. “It’s a choice we seek to live into. It’s less something that happens to us and more about what we might choose.”

McGonigal says gamers are good at seeing and shaping the future. They employ four tools to help them do that.

• Urgent optimism, the desire to tackle an object combined with the belief there’s a reasonable chance of success. “It’s worth trying, and trying now,” is their approach.
• Social fabric. “They are virtuosos at weaving a tight social fabric,” Schlosser-Hall said.
• Blissful productivity. “When they’re engaged, they lose themselves,” he said of gamers. “They’re happier working hard at the game than relaxing and just hanging out. It can be a deeper kind of energizing. We need to relax and renew, but we also need to be engaged in blissful productivity,” he said.
• Epic meaning. Schlosser-Hall held up The Legend of Zeldaand World of Warcraft as examples. As for The Legend of Zelda, “the depth of meaning this invites people into is almost a spiritual experience. It’s pretty profound,” he said.

“What better place for these qualities to show up than in our congregations, our presbyteries and our communities? It’s about finding our identity in something way bigger than ourselves and doing it better,” Schlosser-Hall said. “Maybe we can get really darn good at the future. Amen?”

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service

Today’s Focus: Gamers can help us see and shape the future shares Dr. Corey Schlosser-Hall at Synod School

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Effie Shipp, Associate for Lending Services, Presbyterian Investment & Loan Program 
Elaine Shilstut, Cataloging & Metadata Librarian, Presbyterian Historical Society 

Let us pray

God, thank you that you are a God of peace and love. We pray for those who need healing from confusion, pain and despair. We ask your blessing that we might bear rich fruits. Amen.