The Games People Play

Do you remember the rise of EverQuest? It was one of the first big online multiplayer games, what folks now call an MMORPG. It was billed as a way to work together, build guilds, share quests, and form community and relationships across time zones.

But here’s the truth: EverQuest didn’t show the best in people. It showed many of us something else entirely.

People I knew in real life, good folks, kind folks, suddenly became selfish jerks when they were behind a keyboard. They’d mine every resource, slaughter every creature, and sabotage other players just to get ahead. There was no care for shared space, no respect for balance, no community ethic, just the push to dominate.

It was, in retrospect, community shaped by sociopaths. Pull all the plants. Mine all the ore. Burn all the villages. Sound familiar?

EverQuest and its followers like World of Warcraft, Second Life, Runescape, foreshadowed a culture of extraction and domination, of rewarding those who take, take, take, no matter who they might harm. The mechanics were rooted in colonialism, and so were the behaviors.

And once the veil was lifted, once people got comfortable showing their meanest selves online, there was no going back. That quick shift where people started advocating not out of care for others but for clout and personal gain should’ve been a warning. It was a digital dress rehearsal for what we now live every day: a return to the Wild West persona of colonialism, where swagger, conquest, and personal reward are valued over community, compassion, and care. A new frontier, same old trauma script, this time played out behind keyboards instead of on horseback.

When MySpace showed up, it became about who was cool. When Facebook arrived, it became about who had maxed out their popularity with 5000 stranger-friends (I mean who really needs to be in constant contact with the kid who bullied you in second grade). When Twitter took off, it became about who could destroy fastest or decimate others in the wittiest way. But even that wasn’t enough. We needed a new class of cultural gatekeepers, so we built up “influencers,” people whose social currency is built on visibility, not accountability.

Most influencers aren’t celebrities, leaders, artists, or entertainers. They’re people, sometimes formerly anonymous, sometimes already adjacent to power, who gain massive followings by crafting a persona and feeding the algorithm. But most don't rise in power (influence) by lifting up hope or calling folks back into covenant. They cannot build power by cultivating care or deepening relationship.

Instead most rise through mal-directed outrage at targets through rhetoric that is often fake, exaggerated, or deliberately misleading. They learned that if you can stir people’s anger, you can hold their attention. And attention, in this system, is power. And in an instant, they overwrote the power of journalists to report using unbiased sources and multiple confirmations of facts. Journalism was a professionally trained occupation that was instantly replaced by elevated opinions taken as researched truth, when most is just the product of artifice.

This model bleeds directly into our politics. Take someone like Candace Owens. She didn’t build her platform by telling the truth or fostering community healing. She built it by flipping allegiances, leaning into inflammatory rhetoric, and becoming a mouthpiece for the very systems she once claimed to oppose. Her power grows not from consistent values, but from her ability to generate spectacle. And we see this pattern across the board: people shift narratives, abandon former communities, and weaponize identities of strangers all to elevate themselves.

This culture has trained us to reward controversy over clarity. And now, we live in a world where community has eroded so deeply that we no longer know how to trust, how to listen, or how to relate outside the logic of performance. We mistake viral content for conviction. And somewhere along the way, we forgot that real relationship isn’t built on how loud someone shouts, ridicules, or points fingers at others, it’s built on whether they show up when it’s hard, stay through the discomfort, and pick up the tools needed to repair, not destroy.

On Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, pick your preferred platform, the rise of fake profiles, baiting questions, “gotcha” screenshots, and drama accounts has become a sickness. These accounts don’t exist to build trust, they exist to test it and then erode it. They don’t want connection, they want control, and the end goal isn’t relationship or curiosity, it’s destruction of compassion, empathy, and community.

What do you call a world where people ask questions not to understand, but to provoke?Where curiosity is twisted into manipulation? Where every interaction is a setup?

You call it an extraction culture.

And it's a way of being that mimics colonial conquest: taking what you want, weaponizing what you learn, and discarding the rest. It’s surveillance masquerading as conversation. It’s gotcha disguised as dialogue.

This isn’t accountability. It’s performance and it feels like entrapment. People aren’t asking about you and your beliefs to know you, they’re asking to bait you. They do not want to build trust between people, but to erode it. And like the colonizers of the past, they do not do this to grow roots or build community, but to win.

It’s the same logic that showed up in early online games, where the goal was to mine, conquer, kill, harvest and dominate every environment, treating even the most collaborative spaces as battlegrounds over the prizes. Conditioned by whiteness and white supremacy culture, the love of conquest and the human animistic instincts to dominate, extract, and control, felt normal. When it showed up in online games, it didn’t feel like corruption. It felt familiar. That colonial drive embedded itself into our platforms like a fungus. And it grew.

Now it shows up everywhere.In our timelines. In our inboxes. In our spiritual communities. A creeping rot of performative outrage, perfectionism, and punishment.

And the cost is high.

When we center trickery instead of trust, we erode the very foundations of community. We lose the practice of compassionate listening. The real tragedy is that when we abandon truth and compassion, we also abandon the possibility of healing. We stop believing people can change, which means we stop believing we have the potential to change and grow. We stop allowing ourselves to learn. And we lose the sacred, messy, necessary work of becoming more (better?) human together.

Once people learn to be cruel behind a screen, it does not take long for them to get bold enough to be cruel in person. What started as digital toxicity became social policy, spiritual violence, and community collapse in our lives. We’re seeing it in school board meetings, in congregational life, in LGBTQ+ spaces that claim to be “inclusive” but practice distrust and extraction.

But here’s the hope. We learned this, and we can unlearn these habits. We can reclaim something better. We can remember that community is not a product, because it’s a practice. You cannot buy community, you must build it.

One of the tools that helps us rebuild that practice is education. Not education as power or a debate, but education as it was intended, a tool of growth and transformation.

I’ve seen the power of storytelling and education. I’ve lived it. I’ve sat in church basements where someone said, “I didn’t know that,” and someone else replied, “That’s okay. Let’s learn it together.” I’ve watched communities shift when folks realize that showing up means more than having the right words, it means being willing to admit to being wrong, and becoming willing to change.

When we educate with humility, we stop seeking control and start cultivating relationship. When we center curiosity over certainty, we make room for healing. And when we are willing to embrace nuance, we stop demanding perfection and start allowing truth.

So here’s my invitation - Let’s stop playing the games of extraction, ego, and control and let’s stop asking questions we don’t want answered.

Instead, let's ask real questions. Not the kind that trap or test, but the kind that open doors and say, “I want to understand, not interrogate.” Those are the questions that lead to bridge building, not sabotage.

And we can have space for real answers even if they are honest and imperfect, and even when they are not the truth we hoped to hear as an answer. Because honest answers are shaped by our lived experiences, not filtered. And we as a world desperately need answers that invite connection, not more conflict. Truth, even when it’s tender and hard is still valuable.

And this takes education not just of the mind, but of the heart. It takes sacred listening, slowing down, softening our defenses, and listening to hear things we might rather ignore. It takes humility, practice, and a constant willingness to be changed by what we learn from others and the world around us to learn this practice. In seminary, I learned that true leadership wasn’t about how loudly I could speak, but how deeply I could listen. As a debater and public speaker trained to do the opposite, these are skills I am still personally working on developing, and here is how I started.

In pastoral care and leadership classes, we were taught the practice of sacred hearing, the kind of listening that isn’t just waiting for your turn to talk, but being fully present to another person’s truth without rushing to fix, defend, or judge. This is what compassionate listening really means.

Here are some of the commitments of active listening:

• Making eye contact.

• Pausing before you respond.

• Reflecting back what you’ve heard: “What I’m hearing you say is…”

• Asking, not assuming.

• Staying curious, even when it’s uncomfortable.

• Truth-telling, even when it is hard.

• Use questions that require more than a yes/no response.

• Speaking honestly, vulnerably, and clearly, but with care.

• Honoring both your own story and the dignity of the person receiving it.

• Letting other peoples stories stand without having to echo them.

In spiritual leadership, we were taught that listening like this is a sacred act, a way of honoring the divine in one another. In a world so noisy, listening is ministry.

A Simple Ritual for Sacred Hearing Skill Development

If you want to reclaim sacred hearing in your community, try this ritual practice:

The Practice of Three Breaths

1. Sit across from a partner, this can be a friend, family member, or community member.

2. Begin with three slow, shared breaths. Inhale and exhale together. Let the room settle.

3. One person speaks for two uninterrupted minutes, a story, a feeling, a truth they’re holding.

4. The other listens without interrupting, correcting, or preparing a response. Just listens.

5. After the two minutes, the listener reflects back:“What I heard you say is…” and “What stayed with me most was…”

6. Switch roles and repeat.
   

When I am leading my event, I like to close with something like this, read as a group: ""I thank you not for the words you shaped, but for the truth you entrusted. I do not hold your story as mine to retell, but as sacred breath shared between us. May what was spoken be honored, and what was received be held with care. This is not a performance. This is covenant. This is courage. This is love."

Practices like these may feel small, but they are powerful. When we slow down and listen with compassion, we create the conditions for truth to rise and community to heal.

Let’s honor that.

Let’s choose sacred hearing over quick reactions. When we speak truthfully, we can still receive each other with care. Because leadership isn’t just speaking boldly, it’s listening bravely.

The alternative is more of the same: more distrust, more division, and more erosion of our shared humanity.

Scholar Michelle Alexander once said:

“Real change is possible, but not if we focus only on those aspects of ourselves and our history that make us feel good. Truth is required—whole truth, even when it’s hard to hear.”

Real community is possible. But only if we choose to (re)build it together.

#RebuildCommunity kfr, 2025

An image of a group of people at an online gaming tournament.