The Pixels Gains an EIC: ProfNoctis

The Pixels welcomes its new Editor-in-Chief, Wade Langer (aka ProfNoctis)! Get to know Wade in his statement below.

Hey everyone!

I am thrilled to be the new Editor-in-Chief at The Pixels. Because this is my first position in games journalism, I want to take some time to introduce myself.

I am a faculty member at the University of Alabama, teaching courses that combine religion and video games, and I work in the Religious Life department to help students connect with meaningful expressions of faith. As an extension of these two jobs, I also stream on Twitch (a practice which, believe it or not, actually began as a homework option for my classes). However, before joining the faculty at a university, or earning degrees in Religious Studies, I was just a gamer.

In fact, I was a gamer before I was much anything else. Like so many people, I was still very young when my dad gave me a gift that would change my life: a Nintendo Entertainment System. I was hooked from the very first mushroom found in an item block.

The worlds I encountered on the NES, SNES, and Sega Genesis dominated my attention, even when I wasn’t playing. At school, I would doodle comics starring video game characters or practice my cartography with Zelda maps. On multiple occasions, I even mailed elaborate game suggestions to Nintendo Power, and spent hours drawing on the postal envelope. (Sadly, not one of my letters or envelopes was ever featured.) 

Eventually I graduated from the Mushroom Kingdom to more narrative-driven games. These games told stories of adventure, romance, mystery, horror, comedy, and tragedy. While many non-gamers scoff at such notions—a video game that tells a story??—these kinds of games have provided me with memories that I never would have had otherwise. I don’t mean simply hours staring at a TV playing games, either. No, whenever I grabbed that controller, as any gamer can attest, I embarked on an adventure, traveling to new worlds that I fondly remember today. I explored dark forests to discover legendary swords and braved caverns to save villages from terrifying monsters. And even to this day, like every 13-year-old boy with a PlayStation in 1997, I still tear up when I remember that one girl I couldn’t save.

To me, video games have always been different than any other form of entertainment. The science reveals why: games imprint first-person memories into a person’s brain. You can watch heroes in movies, but in video games, you become one, and it’s all because of the agency and autonomy offered through the controller. By controlling digital avatars, a character becomes an extension of yourself, and their experiences are imprinted into your brain as actual first-person memories.

This became most apparent to me in 2015 when the latest entry in my favorite video game franchise was released: Final Fantasy XV. An avid fan, I preordered and picked up the game day 1. While I played as Noctis, the crown prince of a kingdom called Lucis, I noticed numerous similarities between his story and those of another tradition, one I was particularly familiar with due to my studies—the stories of King David and the entirety of the Judeo-Christian kingship tradition.

So, recognizing these similarities, I played Final Fantasy XV with a controller in one hand and a Bible in the other. Consequently, I began to understand these beloved biblical narratives in a whole new light. The stories of kingship in the Bible no longer seemed distant and disconnected, but they became wildly relevant to who I was as a person.

I wanted to know why, and whether I was just a special case. At the time, I had just begun working as a part-time adjunct faculty member at the University of Alabama, and I figured I could use the opportunity to do some personal academic research. So, I created a curriculum, ran test groups, and even ultimately wrote a dissertation to answer a simple question: What are the psychosocial effects of using a video game (Final Fantasy XV) to teach Judeo-Christian kingship? Is there a benefit over traditional methods?