Empty Deceit: The Gamification of Everything

Paul speaks of “empty deceit” in Colossians 2:8, and there is an entire lifestyle of empty deceit marketed and available right now. It’s especially targeted at young men, though women fall for it too. People of all ages can be taken captive. We might call it gamification.

Gamification is the direction the world is trending. Amp up everything. Join the app and keep the streak going. Put action on everything, prop bets on everything.

Why is all this enticing? Because life itself has become insufficient. People are dulled to thinking the world doesn’t offer an interesting enough story. So they desperately engineer artificial stakes to make existence feel like something worth paying attention to.

The sunrise with its prolific, staggering radiance isn’t enough anymore. Let’s bet on what time it crests the horizon. The game itself isn’t compelling enough. We need a parlay on every possession just to sustain interest through the fourth quarter. A bag of chips won’t do. It needs to be flaming, loaded, extreme, McDonald’s-flavored chips to overwhelm every taste receptor you have.

And underneath so much of it runs a seductive current: the promise of free money and no sacrifice. Pick the right game, pull the right lever, tap the right screen, and unlimited crypto appears. No knowledge required. No discipline. No years of study, no mastered craft, no professional competence. Just reactions, reflexes, and luck dressed up as skill.

Everything is impacted. The way to get people into politics is to make it WWE. Let’s pave over the White House lawn to set up the octagon for UFC fights to win crypto.

The vision of this empty deceit looks something like this: a young man sunken into a couch, vape pen in hand, Reese’s Cup flavored energy drink within reach, two screens running simultaneously, live betting on one, something pornographic on the other, while somewhere in the background a refrigerator the size of a small room slowly fills with food that will be forgotten and thrown away untouched.

This entire ecosystem of gamification exists because a marketplace discovered it could commodify idle hours, especially the idle hours of the young, and extract wealth from them. The whole experience is deliberately, scientifically engineered to be addictive. Hooks everywhere. Rewards timed to maximize dependency. It is not accidental. It is predatory.

This is the modern version of Paul’s warning against “empty deceit” wearing a modern costume. It promises fullness and delivers vacancy. It promises freedom and delivers addiction. It promises meaning through stimulation while systematically destroying the capacity to find meaning in anything real.

Meanwhile, you were made to be filled with Christ (Col. 2:10). The gamified life is a slow substitution of that fullness with enough noise, enough dopamine, and enough artificial energy to make it so that you won’t even notice you’ve been sold a bill of goods.

_{Jason Cherry is an elder at Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as a teacher and lecturer of literature, history, and economics at Providence Classical School in Huntsville. He graduated from Reformed Theological Seminary with an MA in Religion and is the author of the books The Culture of Conversionism and the History of the Altar Call and The Making of Evangelical Spirituality.}