|PIC1|Video games are here to stay. The challenge now is to make sure they are harnessed for good. That was the message from Christian charity representatives in a panel discussion last week to consider whether video games can work as a force for good within society and particularly among children and young people.

The discussion panel, hosted by the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA), included Joseph Steinberg, director of fundraising and marketing at Church Mission Society, Martin Houghton-Brown, deputy director for new business at The Children's Society, Mike Royal, national director of The Lighthouse Group, and Andy Payne, chair of ELSPA.

In spite of the often negative association of video gaming with youth violence, panel members were unanimous in their support for video games. They pointed not only to their variety beyond the violence-filled genres, to include educational and social gaming, but also to their potential to build relationships across cultures and generations.

To World of Warcraft aficionado Joseph, online gaming is not an opportunity to take on a different persona, but rather an opportunity to be himself and share his faith in a completely different way.

"You get to know people, you get to build up relationships ... You are able to be a living example of your faith in a place where you might not expect that, amongst people who might not have any other contact with people of faith. So I find it a very real place to be who I am," he said.

The Lighthouse Group is a Christian alternative education provider for excluded young people. With the average gamer being 33-years-old, video gaming is clearly as popular with very young children as it is with fully grown adults, and that's why Mike thinks sitting down for a friendly round on the Nintendo Wii is a great way to break down generational barriers.

"I have walked often into one of our centres and maybe a young person is sitting there inside with their hood up and you wonder how am I going to sit down and engage with this young person? And we have found that the Nintendo Wii - which we have in our classrooms - is a great way to engage with young people and actually break into their world.

"One of the things that concern me is the chasm between the world of younger people and the world of older people, and I think that gaming is a great way to bring the two together."

Mike describes the Lighthouse centres as a cross between a classroom and a youth club, where lessons consist of 45 minutes of teaching punctuated by 15 minutes of social activities like video gaming or playing pool.

Nintendos in the classroom might not be conventional, but the success of this teaching model is undeniable: The Lighthouse Group has a 90 per cent success rate at reintegrating excluded young people back into mainstream education.

Says Mike, "It works really well for us and within that setting you can create the boundaries I think our young people need and after a while of working in that context they create the boundaries themselves."

Martin praised The Lighthouse Group, saying that its use of computer consoles in the classroom was a good example of how video gaming can be a force for good, although he added that there were still challenges, particularly for older generations struggling to adjust to the digital era.

"For those of us whose first concept of a mouse is a rodent, we come at this from a very different angle to children and young people. Children and young people come at this from the belief that a mouse is a device which controls a cursor and it's only subsequently they discover they are rodents," he said.

Martin said parents had to get to grips with the world of gaming if they were to make sound judgements about what is safe for their children to play.

"When we introduce a child to a new football team, for example, it's perfectly reasonable that the guardian of that child would want to go and meet their football coach. We use our instincts to make a judgement or an appraisal about how safe it is for our chid to play."

He continued, "There are risks...the issue for us now as parents or guardians and young people in a digital age is that we have to find ways of learning about that environment and interacting with that environment so that we can undertake that same risk assessment process that every responsible parent has always done in every environment."

Playing down concerns over the link between video games and violence, Andy said the positives far outweigh the negatives.

"There are loads of concerns... but the upside is massive and it's connecting the world together," he said. "Internet has made the world smaller in many ways but it's much more connected. Hopefully the national barriers [will] start to fall down, religious barriers, all these barriers that people put up [will] fall down, and you build your communities on what you like, on likeminded people."

Martin encouraged the church to come up to speed with the digital era.

"I don't think St Paul was a gamer but I do think that St Paul advised the church to move from within their boundaries into the marketplace, into the place where society is having its discussion, living its life, doing its work.

"The Bible tells us that there is a responsibility to move outside of those walls of safety, to take the risk that freedom gives us and to say that this is what society is involved with, this is in our contemporary marketplace, there is a digital marketplace, and if Paul were describing his interaction with people in the marketplace today it may well be in an online environment."

The Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA) panel was chaired by Mary Riddell, assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph and chair of CRAE, the Children's Rights Alliance for England.