“‘What’s the prize for someone if they gain this whole world but destroy and lose themselves'” (Luke 9.25)?
Shall we play a game?
That’s the question that sets things into motion in the June 1983 film WarGames, which starred Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy. The film tells the story of a young hacker who manages to gain access to a government computer known as WOPR, which was designed as an automated nuclear missile launch system (after it was discovered that humans, for some reason, were reluctant to turn the key and loose nuclear destruction on the world). Broderick’s character doesn’t know that the computer he’s tapped into is a military device; so, he has no idea that playing a round of Global Thermonuclear War would be anything but…well, a game. And our young hacker inadvertently puts the world on course for a third world war.
While not what’s typically thought of as a science fiction film, WarGames presents an artificial intelligence created to win an all-out nuclear war—a technology well beyond the abilities of computers in the early nineteen-eighties. Of course, sometimes science fiction can seem a little too real when viewed years or decades later.
Unlike SkyNet from the Terminator films, WOPR isn’t evil, it’s just curious. In the climactic finish, the computer plays round upon round of Tic Tac Toe alongside running scenario after scenario of an all-out nuclear strike between the two superpowers of the time as a way of trying to understand how either game can be won.
Funny that a computer comes to the same conclusion Jesus did.
Jesus’ words are about not playing the game. Not the high-stakes game of Global Thermal Nuclear War that WOPR was running, but the rules, the mechanics that underlies it and so many of the destructive games we play. It’s the deceptive concept that winning might or even should come at any cost. That in the devastation—of lands, environment, or lives—there is ever a winner.
Again and again, WOPR discovers that the scenarios it’s running lead to an outcome where no one wins. In stark detail, it sees what Jesus warned us about: that the ways of the world tempt us with victory but lead us only to loss. That the delusion that any means which cause destruction or pain are a path to winning is as destructive as the nuclear arsenals the governments of our world cling to.
But Jesus is offering not just a warning but an invitation. It’s an offer to play by a new set of rules with an entirely new objective, one that looks like losing, like surrendering to greater forces but, ironically, is the most effective means to victory: one where enemies and opponents are loved, and where the objective, instead of destruction, is life.
So, do you want to play that game?
Peace Giver, may our world know the grace of playing by a new set of rules.