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Going for a heavenly score

Don’t look now, but a confirmed gamer is leading the Catholic Church

Prevost played Wordle and Words with Friends before leaving for the conclave.

Kyle Orland – | 161
A stock image showing the type of game Robert Prevost enjoyed shortly before being named Pope Leo XIV. Credit: Getty Images
A stock image showing the type of game Robert Prevost enjoyed shortly before being named Pope Leo XIV. Credit: Getty Images
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Yesterday's naming of Chicago native Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV—the first American-born leader of the Catholic church—has already led to plenty of jokes and memes about his potential interactions with various bits of American pop culture. And that cultural exposure apparently extends to some casual video games, making Leo XIV our first confirmed gamer pope.

Speaking to NBC5 Chicago Thursday, papal sibling John Prevost confirmed that the soon-to-be-pope played a couple of games just before flying to the papal conclave earlier this week. "First we do Wordle, because this is a regular thing," Prevost said. "Then we do Words with Friends. It's something to keep his mind off life in the real world..."

OK, so the pope's love of casual word games doesn't exactly put him in the same category of people who are speedrunning Doom slaughter maps. But it's still striking to realize that the 69-year-old pontiff is among the reported 44 percent of American Baby Boomer men who play video games regularly and the 15 percent of Americans aged 55 and over who have played Wordle specifically.

A new generation

In the recent past, papal interest in video games has usually taken the form of official statements decrying their potential for harm. Pope Francis, for instance, warned in a 2016 speech that young people should avoid spending excessive time on "a sofa that promises us hours of comfort so we can escape to the world of video games and spend all kinds of time in front of a computer screen." And in 2007, Pope Benedict XVI specifically called out video games "which in the name of entertainment exalt violence and portray anti-social behavior or the trivialization of human sexuality."

On the other hand, in 2000, Pope John Paul II reportedly went out of his way to praise the Pokémon franchise as "full of inventive imagination" and for its "ties of intense friendship" on a Vatican-run TV station.

As the first pope from the Baby Boomer generation, Leo XIV may be more likely than his predecessors to see video games less as a new technology and more as just another longstanding part of the cultural landscape—he was just 20 years old when the home version of Pong became a sensation across the US, for instance. The new pope is in the same generational bucket as a rising class of (relatively) young US politicians who are also increasingly likely to have encountered video games in their younger days. That includes reported Dreamcast addict and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said she played games like Super Mario 64 at her cousin's house.

While Leo XIV is the first pope who we know played video games, he's not the first one to have owned a video game. In a 2016 moment that became an almost instant meme, streamer MatPat inexplicably gifted Pope Francis a Steam key for quirky indie RPG Undertale during a papal meeting with various popular YouTube stars. The game "represents an evolution for gamers and what they expect from the games that they play," MatPat said at the time, adding that it's "important to let the world know that this community is about more than monster-hunting and level grinding."

Photo of Kyle Orland
Kyle Orland Senior Gaming Editor
Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.
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