Revenge of the Nerds

The Arbiter is a weekly column dedicated to revisiting canonical works of art, high and low alike, to reevaluate their merit. All media are considered; none are pitied. As an homage to the greatest Jewish guardian of memory, Marcel Proust, each is rated on a scale of one to five madeleines, with one pastry meaning the work should be forgotten posthaste and five arguing for a spirited recollection.

“Every complaint,” Nietzsche is reported to have said, “already contains revenge.”

He could have said the same about video games.

I learned the connection between gaming and vengeance when I was 17, from a classic called Wolfenstein 3D. That, at least, is the name the game’s developer, id Software, gave it; in Israel, it was known simply as the Nazi Castle. Credited with having catapulted the first-person-shooter genre to ubiquity, the game took place in a maze-like chateau occupied by various swastika-toting baddies, chief among them Adolf Hitler, outfitted with robotic armor and several machine guns. All you did was walk around and shoot Nazis.

Killing Nazis is an appealing proposition, which made the game a hit the world over. But nowhere was its appeal greater than in the Jewish state, where many of the teenage boys who fervently pounded on their keyboards in an effort to nail Nazi scum were the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. When we played, we played in silence and in darkened rooms. We weren’t exactly sure why. To us, after all, it shouldn’t have made any difference if the pixilated enemy was a spiked-shelled beastie like Bowser, the arch-villain of the Super Mario game series, or Hitler, the very real executioner of so many of our relatives. The play experience was the same: move fast, press buttons furiously, kill, kill, kill.

Somehow, we knew better. We knew that Hitler, even robot-Hitler, was real, and it made us want to play more fervently. Curiously, we didn’t care much about completing the game’s tasks, the way we did with every other video game. All we cared about was killing as many Nazis as possible. All we cared about was revenge.

One of the game’s creators, John Romero, felt the same way. “You know what we should have in here?” Romero asked his fellow programmers in an account recalled in David Kushner’s 2003 book Masters of Doom. “Pissing! We should have it so you can fucking stop and piss on the Nazi after you mow him down!”

If only. But even without urination, Wolfenstein 3D satisfied our adolescent urges. Each level featured a powerful boss, and once each boss was defeated a so-called Death Cam was activated, playing back the moment of the kill in gorgeous slow motion and with humorous sound effects.

Before each playback, a title card flashed on the screen, reading “Let’s See That Again!” It was misleading. In reality, we were really seeing the moment of death for the first time, as the previous time we had seen it we were too busy running and shooting, too busy being to observe.

Herein lay the genius of Wolfenstein, a brilliance that hasn’t dulled with the years. It realized, instinctively and early on, that video gamers take leave of their subjectivity as soon as they grab their controllers and start playing. Once they’re in the game, they become part-avatar, seeing the game both through their own eyes and through their character’s. They lack critical distance and haven’t the ability to gaze or reflect. All they can do is move.

Which is why revenge is such a perfect theme for video games. Like very few other human emotions, revenge is the urge that can never be truly fulfilled. Try taking vengeance, and the pit you had in your stomach before the act will only give way to emptiness after it. This is because the only way to get real satisfaction would be to turn back time and undo the offending moment, which is impossible in life but is the whole point of video games, a medium that lets you play and replay a certain scenario until you master it and advance to the next level. In hanging Eichmann, our grandparents discovered how futile it had been to seek catharsis in acts of retribution. In shooting robot-Hitler, we discovered how sweet life could be if all it took to rewrite history was a personal computer and a modicum of hand-eye coordination.

Of course, none of it was real. Only our dead families were real. But for a few afternoons a week, we could step into what Johan Huizinga—the Dutch historian who died in a Nazi concentration camp a few weeks before liberation—called the magic circle. We play games, Huizinga observed, because only in games may we expect clear rules and definite results, only in games may we overcome ambiguity and regulate chance. So helpless in real life, we enter into the magic circle because it is the only place where we can, if only for a moment, order the world. This, Huizinga argued, is why games preceded culture; man, before he could do anything else, had to feel there was one realm of life in which he alone, and not some unseen and unknowable higher force, was dominant.

This is why games are so popular with children, whose sense of helplessness is acute and whose need for control, even pretend-control, is great. And this is why Wolfenstein was so popular with us offspring of survivors: In a nation built on the idea of never again, a nation whose national Holocaust commemoration museum concludes its exhibit with a recording of David Ben-Gurion reading the Declaration of Independence, there was no better way to assert control than to grab a big gun and kill Hitler.

A year or two after the game came out, my friends and I no longer had much time to play. We were now all in the army. Killing became a real-world activity with irreversible consequences, nowhere near as free and strange and magical as it had been with Hitler’s virtual goons. But we were well prepared for life as soldiers. We’d left our revenge fantasies behind, in the dungeons of the Nazi castle.

Reading this week’s parasha, we come across an odd formulation. As the story begins, Moses is in a revelatory mood, telling the Israelites about to enter Canaan a scary story with a happy ending: God’s chosen people, he prophesies, will soon abandon their covenant with the creator, suffer punishment and exile, and, finally, return home to the Promised Land. It’s just the sort of speech you’d expect from a dimming leader; like Eisenhower’s grim prognostications about the military-industrial complex in his farewell address, Moses’ last hurrah warns of hubris and sinfulness and downfall. Nothing new there.

But then, Moses takes an odd step: “I have set before you life and goodness, and death and evil: in that I command you this day to love God, to walk in His ways and to keep His commandments,” he says. “Life and death I have set before you, blessing and curse. And you shall choose life.”

You needn’t be a particularly astute theologian to note the inconsistency between the two parts of Moses’ speech. If the fate of the Israelites is foretold, if it is indeed a tale of betrayal, repentance, and redemption, then all that stuff about choosing life is irrelevant; and if the bit about choosing life, namely the free will to chart one’s course through the choppy seas of morality, is true, then nothing can be predetermined and everything must be predicated on the choices we make. Put simply, one of Moses’ statements seems to contradict the other.

It’s a tough knot to untie, but, luckily, we video gamers are the right folks for the job. Just as earlier this week a group of gamers managed to decode an enzyme structure that had eluded scientists for a decade, so may we offer commentary on the nuanced and profound essence that Judaism shares with video games, namely the existence of choice in the absence of choice.

If this is confusing, just consider tic-tac-toe. This classic game has no narrative; all it has is a grid and a simple set of rules, from which 255,168 distinct possibilities of play arise. In other words, jotting down circles and exes on nine slots drawn on paper offers us a quarter of a million individual scenarios, a cornucopia of choice.

Video games, on the other hand, are far more limited. At their core, they are algorithms, a series of if/then propositions. Even recent, advanced games are bound by being pieces of software, lines of code designed with particular, unchangeable ends in mind. Take, for example, Nintendo’s celebrated The Legend of Zelda: To rescue Hyrule, the game’s fictitious kingdom, the player must solve a series of puzzles and defeat a series of enemies, all of which are specific activities that must be performed in a certain way. True, the premise played out in Zelda is much more complex than that of tic-tac-toe, and one that demands some thought and analysis. But anyone wishing to play the game successfully has no choice but to closely follow a script.

Which, at first glance, sounds like no fun at all: Video games wouldn’t be a multibillion dollar industry if all they offered players is the pleasure of pushing the right buttons in the right order. Of course, they offer much more. This is where intention comes in. The term was coined by videogame designer Doug Church and is defined as an abstract design tool used for “making an implementable plan of one’s own creation in response to the current situation in the game world and one’s understanding of the game play options.”

Serious gamers, like serious believers, know that they live in a world that they did not design, playing a game whose rules they did not make up and do not entirely understand. And yet they know that their success—their survival—depends on coming up with some sort of implementable plan and doing their best to overcome the challenges they face at every turn. This is the source of the immense joy we feel when we crack one of Zelda’s puzzles, say, or figure something out in a video game: We know well that the problem we just solved had only one solution, a solution written into the game by some unseen and omniscient designer, but that doesn’t make us any less proud of our achievement. As far as we’re concerned, the solution was entirely of our own creation. For a moment, we forget all about our cosmic helplessness; for a moment, we believe that we can impose order on an inherently chaotic world.

Even without having ever held a video game joystick in his hand, Moses understood this idea well. His prophecy, of course, is both valid and accurate. But it, the game’s script, takes little away from the tremendous burden placed on each and every Israelite to choose life and reject evil and go with God. To paraphrase Rabbi Akiva, all is foreseen, but permission is still given to play the game as we see fit. Mankind has wrestled with this elemental theological conundrum for millennia, but a generation reared on video games should have a much easier time resolving it.

But among the “boomshakalakas” and other fist-pumping excitements, one thing seemed odd: While the other teams—Montepaschi Sienna, Real Madrid, and Panathinaikos—were identified by name, my home town team was presented as Maccabi Electra. Why would the game’s makers stress Maccabi’s corporate affiliation—Electra is a large Israeli construction conglomerate—but suppress its ties to Tel Aviv? Why do the dudes from Sienna and Madrid get to fly their local colors (Athens-based Panathinaikos is always referred to just by that one name) while the Israelis are relegated to national anonymity (minus, admittedly, the Star of David that adorns Maccabi’s logo)? Could EA Sports, the world’s premiere maker of sports video games, be run by notorious Israel-haters?

Hardly. “I think you are probably better off directing your question to the Euroleague,” wrote a helpful EA Sports spokeswoman, “as we take our direction from them.”

The European super-league, where the continent’s champions play each other for the ultimate bragging rights, depressingly presents the Israeli team merely as Maccabi Electra. No Tel Aviv in site. My soul further darkened when I saw the banner on the top of the Website; the Final Four’s sponsor, I learned (as you can also see in the trailer), is Turkish Airlines.

An email to the Euroleague went unanswered. Conspiracy? Coincidence? I report, you decide.

NBA Jam: On Fire Edition [YouTube]

Their task was to master Wolfenstein 3D, the 1993 computer game that confronted its players with a heavily pixilated, mech-suited Fuhrer strapping large guns, and proved to game developers that a “first-person shooter”—a game in which players navigate three-dimensional worlds, in first- and third-person perspectives, mowing down foes with machine guns, chainsaws, and plasma cannons—could be a massive hit. In the years since, the genre has become one of the most popular and highly grossing entertainment formats of all time, with yearly sales in the billions of dollars. With such success has come, inevitably, controversy: The Columbine killers played a follow-up to Wolfenstein 3D before their rampage, increasing concerns about the effects of video games on children and teenagers.

When the Supreme Court published its decision in the case of Brown v. EMA at the end of last month, the Justices ruled against a California statute prohibiting the sale or rental of violent video games to people under the age of 18. Once again, a sturdy American paradox was reaffirmed, one that was articulated perspicaciously 62 years ago by an iconoclastic cultural critic named Gershon Legman. “Sex,” he noted, “which is legal in fact, is a crime on paper, while murder—a crime in fact—is, on paper, the best seller of all time.”

If Legman is remembered at all today, it is usually as the foremost modern collector and theorist of dirty jokes. But his strange, varied career also included a great deal of advocacy on behalf of origami and a stint collecting erotic publications for Alfred Kinsey. Love & Death: A Study in Censorship, published in 1949, was his most influential book, despite being self-published and suppressed by the U.S. Post Office. It was taken seriously enough that two chapters were translated in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes in Paris, while the poet William Carlos Williams included it in his list of that year’s 10 best books in the New York Times.

It’s of little wonder: In 1949, censorship was rampant, enabled by the 1873 Comstock laws, which made it illegal to send any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material through the mail. So vigorously were the laws enforced that in 1948 a book of short stories by Edmund Wilson—at that point, the nation’s most highly respected literary critic—was suppressed because of its mildly erotic content. But whereas sex made censors jumpy, violence never had. Laws advocated vigilance on both fronts—New York, for example, passed legislation in 1884 that prohibited the distribution of “accounts of criminal deeds … or deeds of bloodshed”—but though both comic books and pulp novels included detailed depictions of gruesome murders, the laws were never enforced.

And that infuriated Legman. To illustrate his point, he quoted a sample from an early story by Edgar Allan Poe that features an old lady’s corpse that has been “fearfully mutilated,” “with her throat so entirely cut that, upon an attempt to raise her, the head fell off.”

“This is legal,” Legman fulminated. “This is printable. This is classic.”

Legman’s objection to murder mysteries turns out to have been uncanny in its anticipation of the first-person-shooter genre as it would develop decades later. Legman warned that mysteries inculcate the same habit of mind that is required for genocide: the strategic dehumanization of a particular person or group of people, whose torture and murder can then be executed without the slightest pang of guilt. The target of such animus, he argued, is not the victim whose death initiates the mystery’s plot, but the murderer him or herself, whom the detective—and, vicariously, the reader—hunts down and destroys.

“By casting one living individual into the character of a murderer,” Legman wrote, “he is thrown automatically outside the pale of humanity, and neither justice nor mercy need be shown him.”

The creators of Wolfenstein 3D intuited this point beautifully: By populating a castle with history’s most despicable murderers, Nazis, they gave their game’s players permission not just to read or to watch revenge killings passively but to mete out death themselves, energetically, glorying in every victim’s dying shriek, convulsion, and squirt of blood. John Romero, one of the game’s creators—in a conversation recalled in David Kushner’s 2003 book Masters of Doom—demonstrated this very spirit. “Hey,” Romero yelled out to a roomful of fellow programmers, “you know what we should have in here? Pissing! We should have it so you can fucking stop and piss on the Nazi after you mow him down!”

Many shooters have since dehumanized their enemies by presenting them as humanoid aliens, robots, or monsters, but the main idea has remained consistent with Legman’s vision: shunting a whole class of human-shaped targets “outside the pale of humanity,” as he wrote, so that “neither justice nor mercy need be shown” them. Legman noted, sardonically, that the reader of murder mysteries “kills three hundred times a year—daily except Sunday—generally just before going to bed.” He would have been astonished to learn that the typical gamer can perform those same 300 executions in a half-hour of play in horde mode.

As the son of an immigrant shokhet, or kosher butcher—the majority of whose Hungarian relatives had recently been slaughtered by Nazis who had first systematically dehumanized them—Legman could not take lightly the representations of violence he found on sale in drug stores and supermarkets. “In the same way,” he wrote, “Germans were given to understand that Jews are not human and, as such, can properly be gassed, electrocuted, and incinerated wholesale.” Comic books—which he called the “kiddies’ korner in this new national welter of blood”—do not, he argued, lack “any of the trappings of the Naziism”: They give “every American child a complete course in paranoid megalomania such as no German child ever had, a total conviction of the morality of force such as no Nazi could even aspire to.”

If all this sounds a trifle hyperbolic, that’s part of the charm of Legman’s prose. But it’s also worth pointing out that he wasn’t alone in his reactions to the grisly, and still fresh, facts of World War II. Several German-Jewish intellectuals in America felt similarly: Most famously, the psychologist Frederic Wertham led an infamous and rather successful crusade against the horrors of comic books, while the Frankfurt School philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and even a future prophet of the sexual revolution, Wilhelm Reich, also remarked upon the fascistic tendencies of American popular culture.

One can only imagine Legman’s apoplectic reaction had he sat down to play Wolfenstein 3D before his death in 1999. When I asked my students, some of whom are grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, how they felt about playing the game, several admitted how gratifying it was to pop around a corner, sight a Nazi, fire, and watch him crumple to the ground in a bloody heap. One, who never quite got the hang of the controls, said that it had been torturous to watch the brownshirts murder her, again and again, just as real life Nazis had slaughtered so many of her relatives. The students quickly grasped the game’s central Legmanian irony: It forces the player, busily slaughtering Nazis, to commit a virtual mass murder that is genocidal in its character. No human (or animal, or demon) ever appears in Wolfenstein 3D whom the player is not expected to murder as quickly and violently as possible.

With his canny perception of the violence of pop culture, Legman anticipated the central argument made by the advocates of the California law. If we have agreed that it is necessary to protect children from sexual images, they argue, why, then, should it be illegal to protect children from exposure to realistic images of beheadings, stabbings, and gleeful dismemberings? California’s brief referred repeatedly to Ginsberg v. New York, the 1968 case of a Long Island luncheonette owner bamboozled into selling a few girlie magazines to a 16-year-old, in which the Supreme Court had declared that its recent decisions invalidating the obscenity laws—which had previously kept Ulysses, Tropic of Cancer, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Fanny Hill off bookstore shelves—did not mean that shopkeepers could now sell pornography to kids. The court made clear, in Ginsberg, that different standards could be used to decide what material minors had a right to see, and later decisions—FCC v. Pacifica (1978), Bethel v. Fraser (1986), and most recently Fox v. FCC (2009)—reaffirmed the need to shield children from what the law has called obscenity and indecency: graphic sexual representations and four-letter words.

Relying on these decisions, the State of California argued in its brief to the Supreme Court that because we agree that the culture children consume influences their behavior, then dangerous or antisocial representations must be censored and that “it should make no constitutional difference whether the material depicts sex or violence.” Justice Stephen Breyer, dissenting, agreed, remarking that he finds “no difference—historical or otherwise,” relevant to the arguments in Brown v. EMA, between “descriptions of physical love” and “descriptions of violence.” Legman already considered this, six decades ago, in Love & Death: “If he & she who read of sex will try it out when no one is watching,” he wrote, “why will not they who read of murder try that too when they have the chance?”

Still, Legman’s opposition to the violence of popular culture notwithstanding, it’s no surprise he wasn’t cited as an authority in the lengthy bibliography Breyer appended to his dissent, or, for that matter, anywhere else in Brown v. EMA. Unlike Wertham—and, surprisingly, even Reich—Legman never advocated censorship. Instead, he predicted that in a society with less pervasive sexual repression, people would be less frustrated and would have less need to turn to violence for satisfaction in their popular culture.

Legman did not believe, as most opponents of censorship do not believe, that the culture we consume has no effect upon us; if that were true, there would be no incentive to defend freedom of expression. But he refused to accept the premise of cultural consumption as what psychologists call an “ideomotor,” as an unstoppable force compelling media consumers to reenact the actions they witness in novels, movies, or comic books. Much of the current debate boils down to this issue, and, all the contributions of social scientists notwithstanding, the debate splits predictably: Those with a dim view of human nature call for censorship, while those with faith in individual will and the possibilities of art agitate against it.

While Legman’s book can’t help to settle this perennial question—a crank and weirdo, Legman had disturbing ideas about latent homosexuals, and it’s difficult to imagine anyone finding in his work the answers to dilemmas that remain unresolved by philosophy and social science—he does help to clarify that the pressing problem raised by Brown v. EMA has nothing to do with censorship but with our preferences and desires. Other examples proliferate in which American children are exposed to intense violence but protected from images of sex, whether it’s a librarian recommending Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns to pre-teen boys but excluding Will Eisner’s A Contract With God because of its sexual images, or the MPAA rating a grisly film PG-13 while branding another NC-17 due to a chaste homosexual kiss.

The real question, then, is why we love violence and hate sex so much, and so consistently, in the United States. Why do we feed the former to our young children in heaping doses while we labor intently, and with almost total unanimity, to shield them from the latter? We continue to send 18-year-olds by the thousands to fight wars that, on the ground, increasingly resemble violent video games, and we continue to arrest teenagers for engaging in consensual sex. Legman’s paradox is alive and well, ratified as law by the highest court in the land, in 2011.

The game’s dark, dystopian tenor and its plethora of stars—Lost’s Harold Perrineau plays the terrorist, comedian Margaret Cho and former 24 president Cherry Jones also play supporting parts—aren’t the only things setting America 2049 apart. Created by the human rights group Breakthrough, the game was designed to raise awareness for an array of social-justice issues, from immigration to racism. Clicking on a grid representing realistic maps of major American cities, the player uncovers videos, encrypted notes, newspaper clippings, and other information relevant to the mystery at hand. As is the case with every worthwhile game, the clock ticks here, too, urging the player not only to find the alleged terrorist but also to decide whether it is the fugitive or the federal government he should fear.

More than 20,000 players have played the game since its release, according to a Breakthrough spokeswoman, a small number compared to the hordes who flock to a megahit like Farmville but an immense one considering America 2049’s demanding gameplay and thought-provoking themes. In addition, Breakthrough produced a series of events, held in institutions such as the Tenement Museum on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Mich., allowing players to explore in person some of the real-life issues raised by the game.

For America 2049 to be both entertaining and educational, however, Breakthrough needed a scholar who could help to weave a rich historical fabric into the game’s fast-paced action. Enter Hasia Diner, a professor of history and the director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History at New York University. Diner is best known for her most recent book, We Remember With Reverence and Love, which puts to rest the myth that American Jews were silent in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. She has rarely played video games, she said, but when Breakthrough approached her two years ago with the idea for America 2049, she was intrigued. Together with three of her graduate students, she put together a treasure trove of historical artifacts—from the New York Times’ coverage of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 to a poster for the 1928 movie Abie’s Irish Rose, about an interfaith relationship between a Catholic woman and a Jewish man—that are strewn throughout the game. These historical objects both help make the game world feel more realistic, and allow players the opportunity to examine these rarely seen gems firsthand.

The game, Diner said, was an elegant way to bring to the fore a host of historical facts crucial to our contemporary political debates yet often drowned out by the din of popular culture. On immigration, for example, “so much of the discussion that goes on now is disconnected from history,” she said. “From the right, it is as though this is the first time the society has faced this issue, and we’re standing on the verge of the apocalypse. Many on the left are also wrong, saying that because most immigrants are non-white, their patterns of integration are going to be different.” Neither position is correct, she argued, and the game, by introducing such historical figures as the thinker and immigration activist Jane Addams, might help disabuse players of some of their misconceptions.

That, of course, is a tall order, particularly for a bit of software that resides amid status updates, pokes, and other distractions. Although games are increasingly being viewed as tools for raising awareness for some of the world’s thorniest issues—next week, a conference for Games for Change, the leading organization promoting the development of high-minded interactive software, attracted hundreds of programmers, activists, and keynote speaker Al Gore—the majority of games that achieve mass popularity are like Angry Birds: fun, fast, and free of any larger meaning. Still, by allowing players to experience decision-making, even of a simulated sort, firsthand, games continue to attract social entrepreneurs who seek to capitalize on the medium’s multimedia capabilities and mass appeal.

“It’s important to us to move beyond conventions, to really look at the fabric of values that underlines human rights, and engage a community of people across issues and across identities,” said Mallika Dutt, Breakthrough’s founder and president. It was a hard-learned lesson: In 2008, the organization produced another game, ICED, or I Can End Deportation. It was popular, but it received divisive reactions, depending on where players stood on the issue of undocumented immigrants. The idea behind America 2049, Dutt said, was to create a more inclusive and comprehensive game.

“We see human rights not as an us-and-them proposition, but as an we’re-all-in-this-together proposition,” she said. “The game grew out of this philosophy. Gaming allows folks to be in the shoes of someone else, and experience a set of issues differently than just listening to a talk or reading an article.”

This, Diner believes, is a good approach to ensuring that the game’s message will eventually trickle down and inspire its young players to learn more about the subject matters under discussion. “Somebody playing the game may see a course in immigration history in college and take it,” Diner said. “They might be listening to Fox News and say, ‘Wait a minute, that’s what they were saying about the Irish.’ Hopefully something will click.”

And even though the work on America 2049 was far removed from Diner’s usual scholarship on American Jewish history, she said she had found much in the process of digging up documents about disease outbreaks, immigration woes, and prejudice that correlates with her traditional expertise. “A lot of what Jewish studies looks at is not unique to Jews,” she said, “and needs to be put side by side with like content. Much of what was posited as a specifically Jewish story is not.” Unlike England or Argentina, Diner added, “where Jewish immigrants were the stand-outs, Jewish immigrants to America were protected by having all of those other folks come in at the same time.” To truly understand Jewish American history, she said, “we have to understand the larger picture.”

Enter Dani Lischinski of Hebrew University: Together with Microsoft’s Johannes Kopf, he developed (Hebrew-only) an algorithm that de-pixelizes and upscales low-resolution pixel art. Or, in plain English: He created a bit of computer code that takes all those sad-looking 8-bit video game characters of old and turns them into well-rounded, full-bodied beauties.

Roughly speaking, the algorithm places two diagonal lines in each pixel, tracking its movement in order to ascertain continuity of colors and shapes, and uses splines—curves that can approximate and simplify complex shapes—to create a modern-looking and smooth piece of animation. As you can see from the photo above, the algorithm is far superior to anything else currently available on the market.

So on behalf of all of us who have spent much of 1989 through 1997 wishing that our Marios, Yoshis, and Links looked better, Kopf and Lischinski—we salute you.

The old-timey tone isn’t mine, and it isn’t ironic: The games’ homepage contains a letter from a fictitious figure called Grandpa Abraham. “I know you love computer games,” coos the made-up paterfamilias, “so I made a special Bar/Bat Mitzvah gift for you: A series of three-dimensional computer games.” The three-dimensional feature isn’t quite as revolutionary as Nintendo’s new gaming console, which is, um, actually 3D. These games rely on graphics and game engines that were all the rage in, say, 1992, the sort of long-since-forgotten stuff that could have just as well been designed by an actual elderly man named Grandpa Abraham. And the games’ narratives—their raisons d’etre, since the council is an ideological body and the games clearly educational and political tools—are just as stilted.

The first game has the player sneak around a Greek military encampment circa 166 B.C.E. trying to obtain keys in order to steal a sword for Judah the Maccabee. Armed with no weapon, the player is left to gawk at the vectors on-screen and guess whether they were meant to represent Greek soldiers, Greek army tents, or the game designer’s considerable hubris. If you enjoy, you know, walking around, this is just the game for you. Not so the second game in the series: This one, set in 870 B.C.E., involves standing on a rooftop and releasing arrows onto far-away enemies of good ol’ King Ahab. This mightn’t have been so bad if it weren’t for the fact that said enemies move with all the grace and agility of partially decomposed corpses, and most of the game is spent waiting for the stick figures in the distance to approach one’s line of fire: It’s less a first-person-shooter and more a first-person-lingerer.

Both games, however, pale in comparison to the third, a Doom-wannabe that purports to take the player into one of the bloodiest battles of the Six Day War. This particular game represents, I believe, a breakthrough in design: Never before has a video game so acutely captured the sheer sensation of crushing boredom. Having now experienced both, I can honestly say that a gunshot wound isn’t as painful as prolonged stretches of time spent in front of this truly awful travesty.

There’s much more to be said about this latest attempt at political entertainment, from the awkward, rhyming introductions that come with each game to the ghastly sound design, but the games truly need to be seen to be believed. Meanwhile, if the folks over at the settlements really want to get into the political video game market, the geeks over at Hezbollah actually have much to teach on how to make a compelling, emotional, and ideological game.

Related: Shoot ‘Em Up, Biblical Style [Fast Company]

Reading the Torah this week, we get little but the rules of ritual. God commands Moses to install Aaron and his sons as priests, and he then embarks on a long and exacting speech concerning the various sorts of offerings, the veins of fat and the feeding times, all the other strictures of sacrifice. We, a millennium removed from ritualistic slaughter, are left to wonder what might be relevant about this cornucopia of commandments and prohibitions; the closest most of us come to animal sacrifice, after all, is playing Angry Birds.

The idea of ritual, however, has never disappeared. Instead of governing the sanctified destruction of beasts, it now subtly, sometimes invisibly, regulates various other aspects of our modern lives. Nowhere is this prevalence of prescribed motions more evident than in video games: Although we seldom associate video games with the sacred, I suspect Aaron and his sons would have known just what to do had God graced them with a Playstation 3 to pass away those long days spent secluded in the Sanctuary.

This bond between video games and ritual first occurred to me while completing my doctoral studies in communications. As a video games scholar, I had spent many tedious evenings defending my beloved medium against accusations of devilry and rejecting the popular misconception that picking up a joystick makes one that much more likely to someday pick up a semi-automatic, put on a trench coat, and shoot up a school. These allegations seemed absurd to me, not only because I’ve read enough scientific papers refuting any correlation between video games and violence, but also because I realized what the pundits gasping about the lurid storylines often depicted in games—all those dead prostitutes and massacred civilians!—did not, namely that video games are played not so much with the mind as with the thumbs. In other words, they are a ritual.

To prove my point, I set up a little experiment. With the help of several research assistants, I spent long stretches of time playing a favorite game. The assistants were instructed to interrupt me at various intervals, sometimes when gameplay was at a peak—in the middle of a critical battle, say, or halfway through a complex and demanding puzzle—and others at moments when my avatar was doing little but wandering around the game’s world aimlessly. Then, applying a simple set of metrics, the assistants would evaluate how long it took me to immerse myself anew in the game. The results were overwhelming: Time after time, the only factor that had any influence on my ability to effortlessly resume playing had nothing to do with the game’s narrative and everything to do with how long I’d been playing before having been interrupted. If, say, I was disturbed 20 minutes into my gaming session, at the peak of an adrenaline-flushed battle against some pixilated baddie, I was able to resume my concentration and immersion in the game almost immediately. But if I was interrupted after three hours of gaming and in the midst of nothing important at all, regaining my focus was infinitely harder. I repeated the same experiment with other players and received the same results. While far from conclusive, the experiment suggested that the key factor determining a player’s connection to the game wasn’t the engagement with a particular storyline but the immersion that comes only with a lengthy duration of play.

Which, of course, is the very nature of ritual. This is why God, at the closing of this week’s parasha, orders Aaron and his sons to “stay day and night for seven days at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting.” However pure the priests’ hearts, the sensation of sacredness cannot come unless practiced, mindlessly, repeatedly, for long periods of time. Whirl like a dervish, chant like the Hindus, self-flagellate like a Shia on Ashura, do any one thing for long enough and with intense concentration and the critical faculties will eventually give way to a higher order of knowing, that of wild faith. That’s the idea behind this week’s parasha, and that’s the idea behind video games.

It is not an easy idea for us to process. We are raised to see the Enlightenment as our worthy inheritance. We are taught that facts are the keys that open the doors of knowledge. And we value our media for allowing us access to new and vast valleys of information. The logic of ritual abhors all that. For the priest alone in his sanctuary or the gamer alone on her couch, for anyone whose life consists largely of mechanized movements repeated ad infinitum, subjectivity eventually dissolves. Instead of looking at the world from the outside in, instead of being analytical and detached, the person in the throes of ritual quite literally loses him- or herself and becomes one with the practice. This is how secrets are unlocked, and how seemingly ungraspable actions, like communing with God, are delivered to earth and into the hands of human beings.

And this is why video games are, arguably, the defining medium of our generation. Elsewhere in the domain of digital media, we find new technologies making new demands that defy the boundaries of our consciousness. Facebook, for example, demands that we befriend scores of strangers when most of us can barely keep track of the four or five loved ones we hold dearest. Twitter seeks to reduce human speech, that mighty flow of thoughts and words, to 140-character bursts. The web allows us to neglect our memory and rely instead on its endless silos of data and bunk. But video games ask us to continue and do what men and women have done since the dawn of history, namely let our hands take over and succumb to ritual. Think of that the next time you want to spend the afternoon with your Nintendo.

What follows is the stuff of legend: God appears, promising Jacob that the land on which he lies shall belong to his seed, and Jacob wakes up the next morning in a grateful mood. “How awesome is this place!” he declares. “This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” With the thought in mind, he takes the stone on which he had placed his head the night before and erects a monument to God, renaming the hill Bet El, or the House of the Lord.

It’s a curious moment. If God, as we are brought up to believe, is everywhere, why is Jacob smitten with the particular location where he had just happened to lie down for a quick nap? And why does the Bible refer to that location so casually, identifying it merely as “the place”?

The second question is easier to answer. “The place” is the same spot where Jacob’s grandfather, Abraham, once prepared to sacrifice his father, Isaac. It’s the same spot where Noah built his altar when he emerged from the ark. It’s the same spot where the Holy of the Holies would stand for nearly a thousand years during the times of the first and the second temples. It’s the place where heaven and earth meet, and more than half of the mitzvot make reference to it in one way or another.

Jacob realizes the holiness of the place instinctively, but to those of us who hadn’t had the pleasure of divine revelation the idea is a bit more difficult to swallow. How are we—we who had never seen the temple, we who move an average of 11.7 times in our lives, we who have come to think of space as primarily a virtual construct, as in “MySpace” or Space Wars—to understand just how holy and awesome space can be?

The answer: by playing Minecraft. Released last year, this computer game now has more than 1.6 million registered users, most of whom speak of it in religious terms and are perfectly willing to sacrifice careers, relationships, and personal hygiene to meet the game’s increasingly intricate demands.

The premise is simple: As the game begins, you, a poorly animated wretch—think early Doom—find yourself stranded alone on an island, the sun beating overhead. By the time it sets, you better have built a shelter; otherwise, Creepers—imagine green-tinted Peeps melted in the fires of hell—skeletons, and an assortment of other pixillated meanies are bound to nosh on your flesh. Herein lies the game’s genius—Minecraft’s world is an enormous virtual sandbox, and it allows you to manipulate its trees, rocks, and other natural resources. You can start by knocking down a few trees, improvising a few tools, and building yourself a humble hut; a few hours (days? weeks?) later, you might have graduated to a castle, a roller-coaster, or the U.S.S Enterprise, depending on your predilections. Then you begin mining the earth for goods. I’ll stop there—like sex, whiskey, or Twitter, Minecraft is one of those things that makes little sense until you try it out yourself.

The game’s appeal is more theological than technological. We’ve seen other “open-world” games before—Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption come to mind—games that allow the player to freely explore a vast digital universe at his or her own pace, interacting with objects and characters and setting one’s own course. And we’ve seen so-called sandbox games, like Sid Meier’s megapopular Civilization series, which allow players to build their own worlds from scratch. But Minecraft outdoes its predecessors in at least one important way: It provides both the sensation that the world is wide and infinite and the ability to seize one of its corners and build a room of one’s own. Play an open-world game and you’re just roaming about. Play a sandbox game and you’re just busy building edifices and fretting about infrastructure. Play Minecraft and you get a sense, uncommon in video games, that space is real, that it matters, that it’s yours. If you’re anything like me, no matter how far you advance in the game, you’d always look back fondly at that first hut you managed to build that first night on the island. It’s your shelter, the geographical point from which you could safely look up and imagine God.

In real life, of course, most of us have no such place. Home, much as we may love it, can never be solely sacred. It’s the place where we feel safest, but it’s also where we eat and clean and work and collapse on the couch in front of the television after a hard day. A synagogue is a holy place, but it is a holy place for us and a community of other people, a place for which we dress up and in which we act reverentially. Minecraft allows us the rare pleasure of having a private sanctuary, one we build ourselves and on which our survival depends. There’s no ladder to heaven—you could probably build one if you put your mind to it—but there’s no need for one, either. The place—or shall I say “the place”?—has already been built.

As this week’s parasha draws to an end, Jacob pulls off a Minecraft move of his own. Having begun by laying down a single stone to mark the spot of his weird, transcendental dream, he heads to the holy land—two wives and many years later—but stops at Mount Gal-Ed on the way and makes a pact with his father-in-law, Laban. This time, he lays down a whole pile of stones. Like us nerds clicking away furiously at our keyboards as we play the game, Jacob knows the temptation of building bigger and better things. He knows better than most the vagaries of wandering, and he knows the joys of settling down. That, after all, is why “the place” ended up being God’s own house; even he needed a permanent residence. We can no longer experience this kind of devotional purity in real life. But Minecraft awaits.

No need to thank me, however. I was just doing my bit. Or rather, Kratos was: He is the protagonist of the God of War video game franchise, the third installment of which, to be released next week, is easily the most eagerly anticipated game of the year.

The premise is simple: As the first game begins, Kratos, a Spartan warrior with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s midriff and Naomi Campbell’s temper, is on a mission to subdue Ares, the God of War. Through a series of frightening flashbacks, we learn that Kratos had once served Ares, an association that led to an abundance of mutilated old ladies as well as to the gruesome deaths of Kratos’s own family members. Haunted by his bloodied past, Kratos seeks revenge on his former boss; eventually, he becomes a god, to the chagrin of many on Mount Olympus who find his scarred face not pretty enough for the pantheon. Deserted and betrayed, poor Kratos must fight the entirety of Greek mythology to clear his conscience and calm his soul.

Both the original title and its sequel have been deservedly celebrated for their elegant gameplay, and guiding Kratos through a bacchanalia of hacking, slashing, severing, and stabbing provides gamers with hours of glorious fun. But the series’ success, I believe, owes more to morality than it does to mayhem.

Consider this: At the end of the first game, Kratos, having finally defeated the evil Ares, begs Athena to honor her word and free him of his nightmares. No can do, says the goddess. Your past sins, she tells Kratos, may be forgiven but they will never be forgotten. Distraught, he leaps off the highest cliff, preferring a crushing death to a life spent in the company of the ghosts of his past. Athena saves Kratos from his fall and crowns him the new God of War. Even as a deity, his demons taunt him still.

It’s a stunning spell of complexity for a medium commonly believed to be all about mindless fun. As we blistered-thumbed devotees know all too well, video games present perhaps the most fascinating arena in current popular culture for the serious contemplation of weighty moral questions.

I realize this is an audacious claim, but a few hours with a controller at hand will convince even the most stony skeptic that there’s real thinking inside the video game box. Sometimes, players get their morality fix indirectly; playing as Kratos, we’re led to believe that if only we kill enough people we’ll forever be rid of our burdens, a belief shattered with each pixilated prowler we slay. Other games demand that we make direct choices that influence the outcome of the game and reveal more than a little about our own dispositions. In Fallout 3, for example, a dystopic action game released in 2008, one particularly brilliant sequence introduces the player to a laboratory controlled by a mad scientist, in which people sleeping securely in special pods dream up virtual scenarios they perceive as real. The scientist in charge, a distorted sadist, demands that the player commit a series of increasingly evil deeds, from breaking up a happy marriage to killing an innocent woman, acts perpetrated in the virtual environment alone that have no real consequences. The player may obey, or he may trigger a certain sequence and bring about the real death of everybody in the laboratory. In the context of the game, the latter option is presented as a mercy killing; no fate is worse than a dormant life of false consciousness dictated by a deranged doctor. And yet people will die. Which is nobler? Which more moral? How we choose makes a world of a difference.

With my knuckles numb from exhaustive play, I turned off the Playstation and picked up the Bible to read this week’s haftorah. In it, the prophet Ezekiel delivers God’s speech to the errant Israelites, promising the Chosen People that even though they had sinned, the Lord will nonetheless redeem them.

“And I will sprinkle clean water upon you,” God promises, “and you will be clean; from all your impurities and from all your abominations will I cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit will I put within you, and I will take away the heart of stone out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh.”

I have no idea if God is much of a gamer, but if He is, He’s certainly familiar with the natural progression of video games: You play, you die, you try again. Game over? Press continue, and play until you win.

In a sense, this is the biggest difference between video games and real life, that unhappy parade of days that never allows us the opportunity to relive our grimmest moments until we manage to set everything straight. But video games and life are more similar than we imagine. Ezekiel knows it: This week’s haftorah is meant as an accompaniment to the story of the Golden Calf, and the prophet is reassuring his people that no matter how badly they mess up their covenant with God, the Almighty will always give them another chance at the game, another shot at getting it right.

It must be so: Unless we’re allowed to play and play some more, we could never reach perfection, and in life, just like in video games, the only way to get it right is to keep on trying. Just ask Kratos.

Although largely secular, my family took the Day of Atonement seriously. We would spend the last moments before the holiday’s descent tearing apart squares of toilet paper, as even this most mundane of acts was deemed disrespectful of Judaism’s most awesome day. Riding a bicycle, a Yom Kippur tradition among young and unobservant Israelis, was similarly judged in my family as excessively profane, and so, as soon as we would return home from synagogue after reciting Kol Nidre, I would run up the stairs and onto the balcony and look around.

The neighborhood, a small and modest enclave in the heart of a small and modest town bordering on Tel Aviv, was shrouded by the thick, ink-blue sky. The glow of television sets, the flickering of refrigerator lights, and all the other ghosts of electricity that haunt our daily lives were nowhere to be seen. The neighborhood was dark, dark and quiet, with mumbles and prayers drowned by the shattering silence. And I, a kid who spent most of his days with his Atari and VCR and various battery-operated trinkets, would just sit there and stare and listen and give myself over to this immense stillness and feel something that wasn’t precisely religious but intensely personal, a feeling I suppose was peace.

It faded fast.

By the early 1990s, as I stumbled into pubescence, Israel was rapidly connecting to cable TV. I still spent Yom Kippur with my grandmother, and I still sat on the same balcony, but it wasn’t the same. Peeking, out of the corner of my eye, at the television, I knew that it now concealed glorious secrets. Even if the Israeli channels darkened their screens for a day on Yom Kippur, MTV in Hong Kong, or the soccer channel out of Milan, or any of the other stations included in our subscription plan went about their business as usual. And they were just there, within reach, hiding behind the reflective screen. All I had to do was turn on the set.

Finally, one year, I did. I was 16, and angry at the world as only a 16-year-old can be. God, it seemed to me back in those days, days soaked in rage and alcohol and self-pity, should ask for my forgiveness, not the other way around. Instead of observing his holiest day, I decided to entertain myself. I abandoned the balcony for the basement. I spent the day watching stale British comedies from the 1970s. It was the most miserable Yom Kippur I’ve ever had.

As I grew older, youth’s rebellious streak mercifully fatigued, I resolved to return to the tranquility I’d known in my childhood. But it was gone, slain, in part, by technology. On Yom Kippur of 1995, for example, now 19 and a soldier, I returned to my perch on the balcony. I surveyed the neighborhood. It was no longer dark. Some neighbors were watching television, however discreetly, and others, I could tell by their open windows, were engaging with a new presence: the Internet.

Despite all my promises to remain disconnected, I was burning with curiosity. It was the day of O.J. Simpson’s verdict. I just had to know how it ended. I slipped into the study and logged on.

And so, with each new year, a new technology joined the parade marching on my peace of mind. Video games got better, phones smarter, the Web more intricate. I finished the army and moved to New York, where the temptation to engage with gadgets became even stronger, especially as the internet now connected me to social networks populated by my friends. As one of Twitter’s earliest users, I felt compelled to spend parts of Yom Kippur 2007, sharing my reflections, in 140 characters or less, with a few dozens of my closest friends. The notion of taking a day off from what media critic Todd Gitlin elegantly dubbed the Torrent seemed ludicrous to me. The whole point of a torrent is that there are no days off, not even for atonement, not even to God.

Or, at least, not for me. Some people, I know, have no problem stepping out not only yearly but weekly, observing Shabbat away from media and machines. I’m incapable of such mastery, partially because I know that no matter how unplugged I manage to become, or for how long, I will never again have that serenity of Yom Kippur on the balcony in Ramat Gan, with the whole world sheltered in soft shadows and everyone sitting wordlessly in the dark. I can be as still as I want, but television, the Internet, the cellular phone, they’ll always be there, emissaries from a bright world of circuitry and screens, a world I’ve come to inhabit and love, a world that Ramat Gan, circa 1985, knew nothing about.

If the aforementioned references mean little to you, rejoice. Call your friends and plan to meet them out this weekend. Take a stroll by the river. Your life is unencumbered, free of the urge to save the virtual world or seek imaginary treasures, blissfully grounded and real. But if you’re like me, there’s a very good chance that you’ll be spending the coming days playing games. One game, to be exact: The Beatles: Rock Band.

You’ve heard about it, I presume? Read about it in every imaginable newspaper and magazine? Seen the barrage of commercials on television? If not, here’s a short summary: it’s a game that allows you to grab plastic instruments and—singing, drumming, and strumming along with the music on the screen—pretend to be a part of the greatest rock band in history.

The Internet, as is its solemn duty, has produced a slew of grumblers, grouches who claim the new game falls far short of the actual experience of real-life rock n’ roll. “Playing the Beatles Rock Band will deliver some joy,” wrote influential music blogger Bob Lefsetz, “but it has none of the visceral excitement you got the first time you heard ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand.’” Gamers, claim the naysayers, would spend a few hours amusing themselves with the Beatles’ video game, then move on to the next computer-generated thrill. They’re not really in it for the music.

But reports suggest that something much more meaningful is at play. Since its introduction in late 2007, Rock Band—the video game series of which the Beatles edition is the latest installment—has sold briskly, driving the downloads of more than 50 million songs. Put simply, this means that a swarm of young people, strangers to antiquated technologies such as CDs and unfamiliar with the roster of artists featured on the Rock Band titles—Bob Dylan, Steely Dan, The Who—used their gaming systems to familiarize themselves with music, a discovery that would have been improbable without the help of the brave, new technology. Video may have killed the radio star, but video games are rushing to the rescue.

Which is, perhaps, the way it has always been. To hear this week’s parasha tell it, we’ve always counted on great songs rolling down from one generation to the next, finding different platforms and different means of expression, providing inspiration when it’s needed most.

As the portion draws to an end, God summons Moses and Joshua to the Tent of Meeting. The aged leader, He says, is nearing the end of his days, and his chosen successor is in need of a sentimental education. When both men stand before Him, God delivers a short and sad speech. The children of Israel, He says, will abandon their divine covenant and worship other idols, and God in turn will hide His face and turn away from his chosen people.

But God is never one for hopelessness. Having delivered this grim account, here’s what the Almighty tells his servants: “And now,” He says, “write for yourselves this song, and teach it to the Children of Israel. Place it into their mouths, in order that this song will be for Me as a witness for the children of Israel.”

And what a song it is! Here goes, in full:

“When I bring them to the land which I have sworn to their forefathers [to give them], a land flowing with milk and honey, they will eat and be satisfied, and live on the fat [of the land]. Then, they will turn to other deities and serve them, provoking Me and violating My covenant.

And it will be, when they will encounter many evils and troubles, this song will bear witness against them, for it will not be forgotten from the mouth of their offspring. For I know their inclination what they [are planning] to do today, [even] before I bring them in to the land which I have sworn [to give them].”

Moses, we are told, “wrote this song on that day, and taught it to the children of Israel.”

This heavenly authored song, of course, is not exactly the kind of stuff one would find on Rock Band. The beat, one suspects, wasn’t all that catchy, and the subject matter, to put it mildly, may cause paroxysms of existential doubt. But the point it makes couldn’t be more relevant to our own lives: no matter how malicious and mindless the era, the sweet music of redemption always plays on, waiting patiently for fresh ears and young mouths to discover it and sing its praises. The fathers may sin, but the sons and the daughters needn’t follow—all they have to do is turn to that good ol’ righteous rock n’ roll and discover for themselves the path to grace.

Which, I suspect, is precisely what’s going on at the moment. In groups or alone, on stage and online, young Jews are discovering Judaism’s ancient song and learning how to make it their own. Like the gamers who lined up this week for The Beatles: Rock Band, they, too, find the old way of doing things out of tune with their lives and sensibilities. To them, the synagogue is like that store that still sells CDs, a venue rich in nostalgia but lacking any real relevance in an age when music, freed of its corporeal forms by digital technology, could be downloaded onto one’s personal music player with the click of a button.

We should, of course, ask ourselves what these changes mean, and what effects they may have on both the personal and the communal levels. We should concern ourselves with the differences between listening to the Beatles and playing the Beatles in a video game, just as we should ask ourselves what young Jews are getting out of their more porous forms of connecting with their religion and heritage that they can’t find in Judaism’s traditional institutions. But we should never lose track of the fact that no matter the form, the content, the song itself, always remains the same, always playing on.

I’m surprised this hadn’t happened before. Writing a weekly Torah column, one gradually learns how to suspend all the machinations of modernity and indulge in the stark rules of simpler times. Smiting seems like a perfectly normal reaction, the plague like a plausible occurrence, and God is everywhere present and involved. In a world burdened by economic uncertainty, geopolitical unrest, and celebrity memorial services, this ancient mindset is not without its charms.

Usually, it is the humans that capture my attention: what, I occasionally found myself thinking, would I have done in Moses’ place? How would I have suffered Joseph’s tribulations? Abraham’s trials? But this week, it was the Supreme Being that was foremost on my mind.

It began with the parasha. In it, the five daughters of the deceased—and deliciously named—Zelophehad petition Moses, arguing that as Jewish tradition allows only males to inherit their fathers’ property, a clan such as their own, consisting only of women, is doomed. Why, they plea, must the name of Zelophehad perish? Why couldn’t his daughters enjoy his fortune and continue his lineage?

Moses brings this before God, and the Almighty doesn’t skip a beat: “Zelophehad’s daughters speak justly,” he says. “You shall certainly give them a portion of inheritance along with their father’s brothers, and you shall transfer their father’s inheritance to them.”

A lesser deity might have scoffed, resenting the insolent humans questioning His commands. A more apathetic creator might have shrugged His heavenly shoulders, leaving the matter for His wretched creatures on earth to resolve. But not our God; He is never beyond hearing the pleas of his people, never averse to conversing with commoners. He listened, and He acted accordingly.

This, I thought, was a particularly moving moment, and after dwelling on it for a long while I felt some mindless distraction was well-deserved. I whisked out my iPhone, and turned to one of the new applications I had recently downloaded, a game called “Pocket God.”

The premise is simple: the player is the invisible Lord of a small Pacific island, on which pudgy pygmies live happily. That is, if one lets them: the game’s greatest pleasure, which helped propel it to great heights on Apple’s iTunes sales chart, is inflicting all manner of otherworldly calamities on the unsuspecting creatures. Tilt the phone, and they slide off the island into shark-infested waters. Twirl your thumbs, and a storm gathers, complete with deadly lighting bolts. Each tap or flip brings with it endless possibilities for sadistic fun. Soon, I was deeply immersed in dispensing biblical doses of random retribution.

As satisfying as this digital slaughtering had been, however, guilt soon took over. Why, I asked myself, was I so ready to resort to violence? The game, after all, offered another path altogether, allowing players to supply their pygmies with fishing rods, for example, and watch with satisfaction as the little guys learn how to find their own food and fend for themselves. Why, then, was I waiting for my creations to fall asleep before punishing them with a menacing vampire bat? Why the lava, the fire, the sharks? Why couldn’t I be a merciful God? If Moses had asked for my opinion, I thought, ashamed, I would have probably advised him to pelt Zelophehad’s daughters with coconuts; it’s what you do with pesky subjects in the handheld, animated universe of which I am the scrupulous sovereign.

Sighing, I had to concede that I was not fit to be a deity, not even for pixelated pygmies, not even for a few minutes each day. In my playful mind, omnipotence left no room for hesitance and had little regard for consequence. Having power meant using it, each and every time, joyously and incuriously. Even if the game’s programmers had allowed it, I can’t imagine listening to my virtual subjects argue against a flaw in my design, let alone conceding the point.

I put down the iPhone and resumed reading the Book of Numbers, which recounted God’s announcement to Moses that the Israelites’ fearless leader will never enter the Promised Land, as he had to be punished for disobeying God in the desert. Sometimes merciful, sometimes stern, intermittently reasonable and erratic, and eternally unknowable: it was impossible to understand God’s motives, let alone replicate them. As if I needed another reminder.

My hands quivered as I inserted the disc into my gaming console. I revere Ghost Busters, the 1984 Ivan Reitman comedy, the way some men worship sports teams, rock bands, or organized religions. I quote it often. I think about it frequently. I sometimes pass by 14 N. Moore Street in Manhattan just to look at the firehouse that served as Ghostbusters HQ in the film. A chance to play as a new Ghostbusters’ recruit, to slap on a proton pack and blast some ghouls, felt less like a game and more like a childhood dream come true.

After completing a short training session, I found myself joining Dr. Peter Venkman (voiced in the game, as in the original film, by the peerless Bill Murray) in the lobby of the Sedgwick Hotel. Slimer, the green and gluttonous ghost, had escaped from captivity, and found his way back to his old haunt, seeking refreshments in the hotel’s luxurious ballroom. But the hotel’s manager, a pixelated persnickety dude, told Venkman and me that the ballroom was off limits. The Rodriguez bar mitzvah was about to begin, and, ghost or no ghost, the hotel couldn’t risk alienating its customers.

As Venkman snuck us in through the kitchen, blasting everything in sight with his proton beam, my mind wandered. The Rodriguez bar mitzvah? Sure, I thought, there were probably Jews named Rodriguez, but why choose such an atypical name in a medium not usually given to nuance? Finally finding my way into the hall, I realized that their last name wasn’t the only thing that made the Rodriguez’s simcha unusual: there on the buffet table, right next to the wine bottles and the silver candlesticks, were a few huge chunks of honey-glazed ham.

I froze in my tracks. It was time, I realized, to make a major decision about my identity. Was I a Jew first and a Ghostbuster second? Or was it the other way around? Do I catch the ghost? Or do I take care of the treyf? My heart beat fast. Then, suddenly, I knew just what I needed to do.

Ignoring Venkman’s repeated pleas to help him with the manic Slimer, I walked decisively over to the buffet. I took my time, making sure my aim was just right. Then, I pressed the button, and blasted the offensive ham into smithereens. I stopped and smiled. But what happened next left me astonished: a bright-colored tag popped up on the upper left-hand corner of the screen. I had accomplished, the game informed me, one of its many hidden mini-missions, little puzzles meant to keep gamers on their toes and help them score more points. “Achievement unlocked,” read the tag, followed by one more unexpected word: “Kosher!”

So the mission, I thought with amazement, wasn’t just about capturing the fugitive apparition. It was also about making sure the Rodriguezs enjoy a halachically proper party.

I refocused my beam on Slimer with renewed zeal. My heart was at ease. In this strange and wonderful game, I realized, busting ghosts and blasting pork were just two sides of the same coin. I was a Jew and a Ghostbuster, just like I always wanted to be.

Imagine, then, my surprise when, playing a video game earlier this year, I found myself having to make a difficult moral choice, the sort of conundrum often contemplated by characters played by Meryl Streep.

There I was, atop a building in Liberty City, the thinly veiled version of New York in the hit game “Grand Theft Auto IV,” with a gun in hand”or rather in the hand of Niko Bellic, the game’s surly Slavic protagonist. Niko and I had just out-chased another character, a petty gangster we were sent to assassinate. But the man did not behave like most video game villains do: instead of perishing wordlessly, he begged for his life. Spare me, he told Niko, and you won’t regret it.

For all the game’s endearing qualities, this bit of human drama”there are several like them sprinkled throughout the game’s narrative”was a revelation. Working in a medium as deeply enamored with mindless violence as video games, the designers of “Grand Theft Auto IV” have nonetheless arrived at that most profound of human realizations: power is never without its limits.

If he attended Sunday school in his war-torn, imaginary Balkan homeland, Niko Bellic might have learned that very lesson from this week’s parasha. After all, it’s all about Sodom, a town even more wicked than the gray and grimy Liberty City, and features the kind of wanton sex and mayhem the players of the “Grand Theft Auto” series have come to know and love.

But hovering above the portion’s carnival of carnality”featuring, for example, Lot pleading with an angry mob to violate his virgin daughters rather than, well, sodomize the two angels who had taken shelter in his home”is God.

Now, for video game players, “God” is a loaded word. Cheaters all, we very often punch some buttons in a certain sequence and observe giddily as our characters are allowed into so-called God Mode, in which we’re endowed with unfailing health and unlimited ammunition. And it was in such a state of digital divinity that I guided Niko, armed to the teeth and virtually invincible, to the rooftop encounter with his pleading foe. As the man groveled, my mind wandered far away from Liberty City and toward the Cities of the Plain.

In Sodom, we find God in an ambivalent mood. Even as he prepares for the town’s total annihilation, God takes the time to listen to Abraham make the case for pardoning the city were 50 righteous Sodomites to be found. Convinced, God agrees that 50 men is reason enough to suspend his smiting, and Abraham, well aware that 50 virtuous dudes were much more than anyone could expect to find in the Bible’s most notorious town, begins his bargaining. Perhaps, he asks the Lord, you would still spare the city if only 45 were found? God consents, and Abraham, like an American tourist in a Mediterranean bazaar, haggles on: Thirty? Twenty? Ten?

This, I realized, is what God Mode truly means. It is not, as in video games, a state of omnipotence, but quite its opposite: true godliness calls not on absolute power but on the capacity for mercy, not on unfettered access to bigger and better weapons but on the willingness to grant absolution to the multitudes on account of the purity of the few. It depends, in other words, on realizing that power would get you only so far.

So great is his grace, that God thinks nothing of discussing his agenda with a mere mortal. Rather than interpreting his role as the great decider in the sky, he is tolerant and temperate, realizing that prior to wiping an entire city off the face of the earth, even he must think carefully of the consequences and must, whenever possible, favor forgiveness over fiery justice.

And if thus does God, so must man. I pressed the button that instructed Niko to withdraw his weapon. The blandishing bandit had to be spared. As Niko got back in his souped-up sports car”another of God Mode’s perks”and as power rock ballads blasted on the car’s stereo, I felt an eerie peace descend on me. Like Lot, Sodom’s one righteous man, I drove away and never looked back.
Liel Leibovitz is the author, most recently, of Lili Marlene: The Soliders’ Song of World War II. To put it mildly, he lacks the temperament for the rabbinate.