Culture Doesn’t Just Happen — Someone Creates It

On September 17, 2013, Rockstar Games released Grand Theft Auto V. Within its first 24 hours, it made more than $800 million. By its third day, it had made $1 billion — at the time, the fastest entertainment property in history to reach that number. Not the fastest video game. The fastest entertainment property, period.

Thirteen years later, GTA V has sold approximately 230 million copies. At its original $60 launch price, that many copies would represent $13.8 billion — not GTA V’s actual lifetime revenue, since copies have sold at different prices over thirteen years, but a useful ruler for understanding scale.

GTA isn’t actually the story here, though. It’s the doorway into it.

Look at what happened to gaming. In 1972, the first commercial home video game console arrived. The Magnavox Odyssey could display little more than a few white blocks and a vertical line on a television screen. It sold approximately 350,000 units. That was only 54 years ago. Today, PwC values the global video-game industry at $224 billion. One of the youngest major forms of mass entertainment became one of the largest, in barely half a century.

Music had already filled concert halls. Hollywood had already become one of the most recognizable cultural institutions on Earth. Television had already entered homes around the world. Then gaming arrived — and today, PwC reports that the global video-game market generates more revenue than the movie and music industries combined. Not because movies became small, and not because music stopped mattering. Gaming simply got that big.

As recently as 2012, the global games market was roughly $70 billion. By 2025, it reached $201.6 billion — nearly tripling in thirteen years, in an industry that is itself only about half a century old. It didn’t simply become mainstream. It became one of the dominant entertainment businesses on Earth, and the curve is still moving.

But money only tells half the story. An industry can’t become this large unless people are actually there. Today, approximately 3.6 billion people play video games worldwide — more than 60% of the world’s online population. In the United States alone, more than 212 million people between the ages of 5 and 90 play for at least an hour every week.

This isn’t a kids’ industry, either. Yes, kids play — but the average American video game player today is 37 years old. The generation that grew up with Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox, and PC games didn’t necessarily grow out of gaming. They grew up with it. The medium grew up alongside them.

Then playing became something you watched. For most of entertainment history, the relationship made sense: you watched movies, you listened to music, you played games. Then millions of people started watching other people play. Suddenly, the person holding the controller could become the entertainment too. A player could build an audience large enough to become a creator, and those audiences could become communities that existed far beyond the game itself. Gaming wasn’t simply getting bigger. It was becoming an ecosystem.

This November, TwitchCon will take over the San Diego Convention Center. People who discovered one another through livestreams will travel across the country to meet in person — something that once looked like somebody sitting alone in front of a television has become large enough to produce creators, careers, communities, and physical gatherings around the world. Four days after TwitchCon ends, one of gaming’s biggest franchises returns.

Look at what one of gaming’s biggest franchises built its world around. GTA has never pretended to be children’s entertainment. The games are rated M for Mature. Their worlds are built around crime, violence, and a satirical version of American life where drugs, alcohol, and sexual content are part of the environment. GTA V was made for adults. And yet millions of people who are adults today can tell you they played it as kids. One of the most successful entertainment properties in history wasn’t merely purchased by a generation — for many of them, it was part of growing up.

An M rating can tell a parent what’s inside a game. It cannot guarantee who will encounter it. GTA V arrived in 2013, when today’s 20-somethings and 30-somethings were still growing up. Some played it themselves. Others encountered it at a friend’s house, through an older sibling, or eventually through the internet. The question is no longer simply “did my child buy the game?” A generation grew up while access to entertainment was fundamentally changing.

Now they don’t even have to play it. A child doesn’t need GTA VI, a console, or $80, and they don’t need to convince a parent to buy an M-rated game. They can watch someone else play it. A livestream can put the game in front of them. A clip can find them through an algorithm. A creator can turn gameplay into entertainment for an audience that never touched the controller. The old question was “what games are my kids playing?” The new question has to be bigger: what worlds are forming their imagination?

This is why the size of this industry matters. We’re talking about a medium reaching approximately 3.6 billion players, an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars, an ecosystem where playing has become watching, creators have become celebrities, and fictional worlds can remain culturally alive for more than a decade. So when one of its most successful franchises builds an adult world saturated with crime, violence, sex, drugs, and alcohol, the point isn’t simply to criticize GTA. The point is: someone imagined this world. Someone wrote it. Someone designed what happens inside it. And hundreds of millions of people entered it.

That’s how powerful this medium has become. So what else could be built?

Did you even know you could dream here? Imagine the music you compose becoming part of the moment a 37-year-old man wrestling with suicide decides to stay. Imagine a child entering a world you helped build and encountering something so full of beauty, sacrifice, and hope that it awakens questions about God they’ve never asked before. Imagine someone wrestling with their own life through a story you wrote, because a character on their screen gave language to something they couldn’t explain. Imagine creating something that becomes part of someone’s journey toward Jesus — not because you stopped the game halfway through for an altar call, not because you disguised a sermon as entertainment, but because you entered the space formed, excellent, full of God, and willing to create.

Did you even know you could dream here?

Maybe our imagination has been too small. What if we’ve taught creatives to ask God what worship song they should write, but never what game they should build? What if we’ve prayed over missionaries going across oceans, but never thought to pray over the developer entering a studio whose work could eventually reach 100 million people? What if we recognize the calling on a musician standing on a church platform, but struggle to recognize that same calling when they’re composing the score beneath someone else’s story?

Maybe some Kingdom creatives never rejected these spaces. Maybe they never knew they were allowed to dream about them.

Kingdom doesn’t have to mean a Bible verse on everything. The goal isn’t to make every game explicitly “Christian.” It isn’t to hide evangelism inside entertainment. The Kingdom has something to say about what it means to be human — about beauty and courage, sacrifice and justice, friendship and dignity, good and evil, creation, imagination, reconciliation, and hope. Those truths can shape what a creative makes long before anyone decides what label belongs on the finished work.

Maybe the question isn’t “how do we make gaming Christian?” Maybe it’s: God, what do you want your people to create here?

So ask him. What could you build? What story could you tell? What beauty could you introduce? What experience could you create? What could happen if you stopped assuming your creativity only mattered inside spaces already labeled “Christian”?

Not every interest is an assignment. But you’re allowed to ask God. Dream. Get formed deeply enough to carry what you’re asking him for. Become excellent enough to steward it. And if he sends you — go.

Creation doesn’t sit untouched. Creation has always carried an invitation: take what exists and cultivate it, build with it, develop it, bring something out of it that wasn’t there before. Scripture describes creation as waiting for the sons and daughters of God to be revealed (Romans 8:19). But creation doesn’t sit untouched while we decide whether we’re willing to enter. Someone will subdue it. If the sons and daughters of God don’t cultivate these spaces, that doesn’t mean they remain uncultivated. We are already watching them be cultivated.

Someone will build the worlds we enter. Someone will tell the stories we carry with us. Someone will shape the industries that capture billions of hours of human attention. Gaming is proof of just how powerful human imagination can become when people build, create, develop, and dream at scale. The question isn’t whether culture will be shaped. It’s who will shape it. And maybe an even more important question: did we know we were called to build too?

Fifty-four years ago, a few blocks moved across a television screen. Today, 3.6 billion people play. A medium became an industry. An industry became an ecosystem. And an ecosystem became one of the places culture is being imagined in real time.

The next worlds haven’t been built yet. The next stories haven’t been written yet. The next scores haven’t been composed yet. And creation is still waiting for sons and daughters to be revealed (Genesis 1:28, Romans 8:19).

So ask God what he has given you to cultivate. And have enough imagination to believe his answer may lead somewhere we haven’t gone before.

Sons and daughters, it’s time to dream. Dream. Build. Subdue.

Be part of what comes next.