I love everything that has been written in this thread, and would like to talk a little about my own experiences with video gaming.
In many ways, I have been a gamer all my life. As a child, I played with board games a fair bit. But I also discovered video games quite early on after getting my first computer at the age of 11 or 12, during my two-year stint living in the United States. It was an Atari, and games I remember playing on that include Pac-Man, Frogger, Popeye and Atari Baseball, along with one or two others. A few years later when the Atari wore out, I got an Amstrad and remember playing an assortment of games on that, including Digger and several card games. The next computer introduced a novel new operating system called Windows (95 to be exact), and around this time games started getting quite sophisticated. Two games that I particularly idled away a lot of time on were EA Sports Cricket 96 and EA Sports Triple Play 2001. And I do mean IDLED.
Around the mid-2000s, I became enamoured with an assortment of online sports management games. In fact, I developed quite the addiction to those, playing a variety of management games involving cricket, baseball, soccer, American football, basketball and ice hockey. These games are quite cerebral. You log in, review your results, play around with your team lineup, scout your next opponent, choose your tactics and then wait for the server to simulate games (which would usually take 10-15 minutes). So there's a lot of thinking and not much action, but that worked for me. These management games also had forums that I used to participate in fairly regularly. It was extremely time-consuming though, especially playing so many games at once. And the forums involved much idle talk. Eventually, one by one, I gave them all up. I think I quit the last such game in about 2012 or 2013. After I found Facebook, I wasted yet more time playing several different Facebook games, but have given all those up too. I remember one Facebook game I played for a while was Mafia Wars. Not very edifying.
But the worst was yet to come. In 2015, EA, whose cricket and baseball games I had so loved a couple of decades earlier, introduced their famous Madden franchise of American football games to the mobile market. And so I started playing Madden Mobile. However, I didn't get serious about Madden Mobile until about a year later. Also, between 2014 and 2016, I played the mobile versions of FIFA 14, FIFA 15 and FIFA 16, before EA changed their mobile format and introduced FIFA Mobile, now modelled along very similar lines to Madden Mobile. So I started playing that. Between them, those two games took up an enormous amount of my time. The thing about them is that they are designed to be played a lot. After all, the more you play, the more money EA makes. This is why many other mobile games are designed along similar lines. It's all about the money to these gaming companies. That's the bottom line. And I became heavily addicted. I spent hours every day working through daily tasks, special promos (which weren't on all the time, but still, pretty often) and matches against other leagues. Some of that time was spent organising those matches, talking tactics with other league members or just shooting the breeze. Idle talk, in other words. There's that word IDLE again. By late 2019, I had reached a point where I was doing virtually nothing else, I was so utterly consumed by those two games.
I don't blame EA for my addiction though, despite the fact that they are very cunning in the way they design their games. They are set up in such a way that you get FOMO (fear of missing out) if you don't play every day. If you don't do those daily tasks and participate in those special promos, you'll fall behind everyone else. Or at least, you feel like you will. I'm sure many of the fantasy games that others have mentioned in this thread are designed along very similar lines. Ultimately though, I blame myself. Nobody held a gun to my head and forced me to play those games. I made the choice, day in and day out, to play them. Moreover, what is behind FOMO? Pride. The desire to keep up with everyone else is completely rooted in pride. Then of course, such games are also designed to appeal to covetousness, and that was another big factor: the desire to get that great new player to improve my team. A player that would be useless within two or three weeks. And a team that would be wiped at the annual season reset. I wasn't prideful enough to think that I would be the best player in the world (the elite players all spent ridiculous sums of money to stay ahead of the pack, and I wasn't quite that crazy), but I did want to be the best I could be. Still a lot of pride going on with that though.
It was really more worldly sorrow than godly sorrow that made me quit those games in the end. (I quit them last year, and only really had a big repentance towards God in January this year.) My mindset when I finally decided to quit FIFA Mobile was, "The amount of time I am spending on these games has got beyond a joke. I'm not even enjoying FIFA anymore. Time to make some changes with the new decade". So as you can see, it was a self-centred worldly sorrow. Had my sorrow been of a more godly sort, I would have been thinking more about what sin it was against God to be wasting my time on these games, and how wickedly I was acting.
Also during the past decade, I have played around with assorted vehicle simulation games, and developed a particular liking for flight simulators. These types of games are not quite as bad, because they are easy to pick up and put down. They are not designed to force you to play them every day. So it's a lot easier to practise moderation with them. However, there are still dangers with even these, because there is frequently a lot of add-on stuff (such as new aircraft or scenery) that you can buy, and I spent way too much money on some of that a few years ago. However, simulation games can still be played quite well without any of that. Another irritating thing about them (although this is true of all electronic games) is that they need constant updating. You can end up spending as much time updating as actually playing! Having said all that, the flight simulation games that I've played with have had one or two benefits, whereas the others have had virtually none. For one thing, because they are based on the real world (at least, the ones I play), you can learn a lot of geography. You can also learn a lot about flying itself. So there is a real educational aspect to them. The time that I spent in flight simulators led me to do a trial flight in a real-life aircraft in November 2019. I have read of pilots who started out playing with home flight simulators. Also, it is possible to multi-task. You can do other things like you might do on a real flight (read, listen to music, listen to a sermon and suchlike) while in a long cruising phase on auto-pilot. So some productivity is still possible, which is not usually the case with most games. However, just at the moment, I am not doing much virtual flying.
Because I am trying to get back into driving at the moment, I have been playing a little bit with my two favourite driving games, American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator 2. Of all the games that I have played over the years, these are about the most benign. As with the flight simulators, you lose nothing if you don't play them for a while. There are no competitions against other players. (Well, there can be "community challenges" with some rewards, but they're more about completing a set number of jobs in a specific region, and you really don't miss out on anything much if you don't participate, other than some meaningless trinket for your truck.) No leaderboards. Definitely no witchcraft or anything like that. You just drive around highways and byways hauling freight. That's all there is to it. Well, you can hire virtual staff and manage them, but that doesn't take up too much time. There's very little pride involved, apart from the satisfaction of finishing a "job" (although that's not necessarily pride). I have no desire to become a truck driver, although some people have taken up a career in that after playing these games. And there is a genuine educational element once again, especially in terms of geography or discovering notable landmarks. I usually have a drive in one or other of these games late at night to unwind. But I'm not doing it quite so much just at the moment. Very occasionally, I dabble in a quiz game or puzzle game, but while these are good for the brain in a way, even they can become addictive if you're not careful. And there is definitely a pride element with those sometimes. Knowledge puffeth up, after all.
So while fantasy games are unquestionably very dangerous things, they are not the only type of game that can do great spiritual harm. As you can see, my main vice in gaming has been sports games rather than fantasy games, yet I have been just as captivated by them and wasted appalling amounts of time on them. They may have a lot less overt witchcraft than fantasy games (although Madden Mobile and FIFA Mobile both have Halloween promos), but they are still very dangerous in terms of the way they are designed to make you play them on a daily basis, and the way they appeal to various sins such as pride and covetousness, not to mention slothfulness. Then too, most of these games have leagues, and chatrooms, and forums etc. that are full of idle talk and vain jangling. There is absolutely no spiritual profit to be had by hanging out in such environments.
The overwhelming majority of video games are quite frankly a device of Satan. In fact, this applies to other types of games like board games too. They are a distraction from things we should be concentrating on such as Bible study, prayer, evangelism, fellowship, and not to mention normal everyday activities like going for a walk or doing household chores. They can rob you of so much if you let them. In nearly every case, they are vanity and vexation of spirit. And as Joshua JZB pointed out, they become idols in the heart. For me, they have been idols of idleness since childhood. About the only valid reason for playing a video game that I can see is for educational purposes. That is why I still play those simulation games a little bit, although I am getting weary of the time it takes to keep them updated. But maybe I'm being like some of the kings of Israel and Judah who destroyed a great many idols but still left a few in high places. Certainly though, I don't want to touch sports games anymore, because there is absolutely no redeeming value in those, any more than there is in fantasy games. And even where some games may have a little benefit, a lot of caution should still be exercised with them.
I'll finish with this: what we do with games is PLAY them. The word play in the Bible often refers to playing instruments, but it can also be associated with fornication (playing the harlot). And there is a specific association with idolatry, mentioned in Exodus 32:6 and referenced in 1 Corinthians 10:7. I'll quote the latter: Neither be ye idolaters, as were some of them; as it is written, The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play. I don't think they were playing games so much, although that might have been part of their revelry. But certainly, their playing was spiritually destructive and tied to idolatry, just like most (or even all, but definitely most) video gaming is today.
