About the Series

The following is the first post of a series I’m calling, “What I Read in Seminary”. I have had to read pages upon pages of theological material; so much that it feels like I forget a fair amount of what I read. While I do maintain a general synopsis of a book, I want to better internalize and remember what I am chewing and digesting as I read. This series seeks to remedy this by providing brief reviews of the books I read.

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I began researching the subject of gaming disorder, game addiction, or online game acculturation. As I looked for works by the biblical counseling community the only one I could find was by Mark Shaw, Hope and Help for Video Game, TV and Internet “Addiction” (USA: Focus Publishing, Inc., 2008). The booklet is short and succinct, but it was written just before the explosion of video games into the mainstream through the widespread adoption of smartphones. I felt most of the advice was solid but that there was a lack of understanding of the gamer community and proceeded to write two papers for my classes on the subject and which later led me into research seeking a working definition of leisure from the Christian worldview. All that to say, the advice is solid but a decade’s worth of time shows how much video games have changed.

• review
• book
• theology
• pastoral-theology
• practical-theology
• counseling
• wisdom
• biblical-counseling
• video-games
• game-disorder