Of Lesser Import

David Sirlin, in regards to the ability to save only at certain points in video games, writes:

“Here’s my proposal for rule #2 of game design: the player should be able to save the game anywhere! There is nothing so important in a game that it should decide it gets to supersede the player’s real life needs to go do something else or play another game, or whatever.”

“It is, in my opinion, the highest arrogance of a game designer to think that the precious needs of his game outrank the real-life needs of the player to turn off the game and have some reasonable way to save (most of) his progress immediately.”

Sometimes it seems to me that churches – as organizational entities – imagine that their artificial needs are more important than the lives of their congregants.  Whenever an American church refuses to cancel its Sunday evening service on Super Bowl Sunday, it feels to me like the church understands its own definition of “biblical community” (Acts 2:42-47) or “meeting together” (Heb. 10:25) – i.e., Christians sitting in a room together singing praise songs and listening to a sermon – to be more important than the personal desires or culture of its congregants.

I realize that “some people don’t like football,” but I don’t think that’s the real reason some churches refuse to cancel their Sunday evening service.  I think that, at bottom, they imagine that the Church is the dispenser of Christianity.