YOU CAN JUST HANG OUTSIDE IN THE SUN ALL DAY TOSSIN' A BALL AROUND, OR YOU CAN SIT AT YOUR COMPUTER AND DO SOMETHIN' THAT MATTERS: Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good For You attracted a lot of attention when it first appeared in 2005 -- partly because of its provocative argument, partly because of Johnson's impressive media-critic credentials as a founder of Feed, Plastic.com, and outside.in and the author of several other acclaimed books (a list now joined by a 2007 favorite for several ThingThrowers, The Ghost Map).
Johnson lays out his straightforward thesis on the very first page of Everything Bad: "popular culture has, on average, grown more complex and intellectually challenging over the past thirty years." He amusingly dubs this phenomenon the "Sleeper Curve," after the Woody Allen movie in which scientists of the future are shocked to learn that late-20th-century Earthlings didn't realize the nutritional value of steak, cream pies, and hot fudge. For Johnson, though, the products with hidden brainy goodness aren't foodstuffs but rather pop-culture media: video games, television, the Internet, and film, all of which are increasingly providing their consumers with "a kind of cognitive workout."
Among these media, Johnson devotes the most attention to video games. As seen in the PBS documentary, The Video Game Revolution, games boast a long and complex history, yet they've received relatively little critical attention. Moreover, much of that attention -- as well as the more casual criticisms from political and civic leaders -- has focused on games' violent content and its potential impact on young players. Johnson, however, argues that we need to analyze video games less for their content and more for the cognitive work they demand. Drawing on the work of James Paul Gee, Johnson examines how players explore gameworlds through "probing" (figuring out the game's rules and goals) and "telescoping" (managing a complex, nested collection of objectives). The rewards in such games -- from Zelda and Myst to The Sims and Grand Theft Auto -- lie not in their stories but in the act of gameplay itself. As Johnson puts it, "It's not what you're thinking about when you're playing a game, it's the way you're thinking that matters." And that way of thinking, he argues, provides "mental exercise" with valuable benefits in "attention, memory, following threads, ... perceiving relationships, determining priorities ... [and] participatory thinking and analysis."
It's a compelling argument, to be sure, though it's not without flaws. Johnson basically brackets the "violent games" debate until the last few pages of his book, and while other experts like MIT's Henry Jenkins have persuasively rebutted some of the content-based critiques, Johnson prefers to return to his claim that games' "method" shapes their players more than their content does. In addition, my students felt that Johnson downplayed games' addictiveness and intensity of experience. Particularly in MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and EVE Online, players can become utterly consumed by these virtual worlds, sometimes with serious "real world" consequences.
But here I need to turn the discussion over to you, because I'm not a gamer (though don't tell the kids, but we're getting a Wii for Christmas). For those of you who do play video games, does Johnson's analysis ring true? More generally, why do you enjoy gaming -- the games' content, the gameplay experience, the virtual community of other gamers? For those who don't play games, why don't you?
Johnson lays out his straightforward thesis on the very first page of Everything Bad: "popular culture has, on average, grown more complex and intellectually challenging over the past thirty years." He amusingly dubs this phenomenon the "Sleeper Curve," after the Woody Allen movie in which scientists of the future are shocked to learn that late-20th-century Earthlings didn't realize the nutritional value of steak, cream pies, and hot fudge. For Johnson, though, the products with hidden brainy goodness aren't foodstuffs but rather pop-culture media: video games, television, the Internet, and film, all of which are increasingly providing their consumers with "a kind of cognitive workout."
Among these media, Johnson devotes the most attention to video games. As seen in the PBS documentary, The Video Game Revolution, games boast a long and complex history, yet they've received relatively little critical attention. Moreover, much of that attention -- as well as the more casual criticisms from political and civic leaders -- has focused on games' violent content and its potential impact on young players. Johnson, however, argues that we need to analyze video games less for their content and more for the cognitive work they demand. Drawing on the work of James Paul Gee, Johnson examines how players explore gameworlds through "probing" (figuring out the game's rules and goals) and "telescoping" (managing a complex, nested collection of objectives). The rewards in such games -- from Zelda and Myst to The Sims and Grand Theft Auto -- lie not in their stories but in the act of gameplay itself. As Johnson puts it, "It's not what you're thinking about when you're playing a game, it's the way you're thinking that matters." And that way of thinking, he argues, provides "mental exercise" with valuable benefits in "attention, memory, following threads, ... perceiving relationships, determining priorities ... [and] participatory thinking and analysis."
It's a compelling argument, to be sure, though it's not without flaws. Johnson basically brackets the "violent games" debate until the last few pages of his book, and while other experts like MIT's Henry Jenkins have persuasively rebutted some of the content-based critiques, Johnson prefers to return to his claim that games' "method" shapes their players more than their content does. In addition, my students felt that Johnson downplayed games' addictiveness and intensity of experience. Particularly in MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and EVE Online, players can become utterly consumed by these virtual worlds, sometimes with serious "real world" consequences.
But here I need to turn the discussion over to you, because I'm not a gamer (though don't tell the kids, but we're getting a Wii for Christmas). For those of you who do play video games, does Johnson's analysis ring true? More generally, why do you enjoy gaming -- the games' content, the gameplay experience, the virtual community of other gamers? For those who don't play games, why don't you?
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