Men everywhere are asking not just ‘What is a metrosexual?’ but ‘Do I need to be one? And what type of moisturiser really does get rid of crow’s feet?’ Women are regularly assaulted by D-list celebrities pushing their brand of Feng Shui exercise: ‘Find the perfect place for your coffee table and keep fit at the same time.’
And then we can all ‘brain train’. We can learn a language, listen to classical music, play Sudoku, all in an effort to keep those neurons nourished. There is just no end to self-improvement.
This, I feel, is the growing appeal of virtual reality. Second Life, an online 3D world ‘built and owned by its residents’, has a population bigger than Manchester’s. World of Warcraft, a fantasy realm that anyone can access online, has 7.5 million players. Both of them offer us the chance to forsake the painstaking work of real-life improvement in favour of creating a truly spectacular avatar.
(For those of you who haven’t dabbled yet, an avatar is a digitally-rendered version of yourself - or whoever you fancy yourself to be - that inhabits a computer-generated world.)
And what keeps players hooked, it turns out, is an ever-growing obsession with improving their avatars and the advantages that come with it. As it is in real life, so it is in virtual reality: we’re conditioned to expect that completing certain tasks will win certain rewards. Get that pay rise? You’ll gain status and acceptance. Get that six-pack? You’ll get the girl. Get that double-edged elf-made long sword? Now you’ll be able to defeat that orc overlord.
All this is further evidence of just how upside-down God’s kingdom is. We needn’t achieve any self-improvement to be offered the greatest trophy the universe has ever known:
‘Behold,’ God says to Abraham in Genesis 15, ‘I am your shield, your very great reward.’
Progress in God’s kingdom doesn’t depend on making improvements in our lives, real or virtual. Rather, it is simply a matter of spending a lifetime discovering how wide, how deep, how long, how high the love of Christ is.
Jason Gardner
Reproduced with permission: © The London Institute for Contemporary Christianity
