Everything Bad Is Good for You (10 page)

Y
OU CAN'T GET
much more conventional than the conventional wisdom that kids today would be better off spending more time reading books, and less time zoning out in front of their video games. The latest edition of
Dr. Spock
—“revised and fully expanded for a new century” as the cover reports—has this to say of video games: “The best that can be said of them is that they may help promote eye-hand coordination in children. The worst that can be said is that they sanction, and even promote aggression and violent responses to conflict. But what can be said with much greater certainty is this: most computer games are a colossal waste of time.” But where reading is concerned, the advice is quite different: “I suggest you begin to foster in your children a love of reading and the printed word from the start…. What is important is that your child be an avid reader.”

In the middle of 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts released a study that showed that reading for pleasure had declined steadily among all major American demographic groups. The writer Andrew Solomon analyzed the consequences of this shift: “People who read for pleasure are many times more likely than those who don't to visit museums and attend musical performances, almost three times as likely to perform volunteer and charity work, and almost twice as likely to attend sporting events. Readers, in other words, are active, while nonreaders—more than half the population—have settled into apathy. There is a basic social divide between those for whom life is an accrual of fresh experience and knowledge, and those for whom maturity is a process of mental atrophy. The shift toward the latter category is frightening.”

The intellectual nourishment of reading books is so deeply ingrained in our assumptions that it's hard to contemplate a different viewpoint. But as McLuhan famously observed, the problem with judging new cultural systems on their own terms is that the presence of the recent past inevitably colors your vision of the emerging form, highlighting the flaws and imperfections. Games have historically suffered from this syndrome, largely because they have been contrasted with the older conventions of reading. To get around these prejudices, try this thought experiment. Imagine an alternate world identical to ours save one techno-historical change: video games were invented and popularized
before
books. In this parallel universe, kids have been playing games for centuries—and then these page-bound texts come along and suddenly they're all the rage. What would the teachers, and the parents, and the cultural authorities have to say about this frenzy of reading? I suspect it would sound something like this:

It should probably go without saying, but it probably goes better with saying, that I don't agree with this argument. But neither is it exactly right to say that its contentions are untrue. The argument relies on a kind of amplified selectivity: it foregrounds certain isolated properties of books, and then projects worst-case scenarios based on these properties and their potential effects on the “younger generation.” But it doesn't bring up any of the clear benefits of reading: the complexity of argument and storytelling offered by the book form; the stretching of the imagination triggered by reading words on a page; the shared experience you get when everyone is reading the same story.

A comparable sleight of hand is at work anytime you hear someone bemoaning today's video game obsessions, and their stupefying effects on tomorrow's generations. Games are not novels, and the ways in which they harbor novelistic aspirations are invariably the least interesting thing about them. You can judge games by the criteria designed to evaluate novels: Are the characters believable? Is the dialogue complex? But inevitably, the games will come up wanting. Games are good at novelistic storytelling the way Michael Jordan was good at playing baseball. Both could probably make a living at it, but their world-class talents lie elsewhere.

Before we get to those talents, let me say a few words about the virtues of reading books. For the record, I think those virtues are immense ones—and not just because I make a living writing books. We should all encourage our kids to read more, to develop a comfort with and an appetite for reading. But even the most avid reader in this culture is invariably going to spend his or her time with other media—with games, television, movies, or the Internet. And these other forms of culture have intellectual or cognitive virtues in their own right—different from, but comparable to, the rewards of reading.

What are the rewards of reading, exactly? Broadly speaking, they fall into two categories: the information conveyed by the book, and the mental work you have to do to process and store that information. Think of this as the difference between acquiring information and exercising the mind. When we encourage kids to read for pleasure, we're generally doing so because of the mental exercise involved. In Andrew Solomon's words: “[Reading] requires effort, concentration, attention. In exchange, it offers the stimulus to and the fruit of thought and feeling.” Spock says: “Unlike most amusements, reading is an activity requiring active participation. We must do the reading ourselves—actively scan the letters, make sense of the words, and follow the thread of the story.” Most tributes to the mental benefits of reading also invoke the power of imagination; reading books forces you to concoct entire worlds in your head, rather than simply ingest a series of prepackaged images. And then there is the slightly circular—though undoubtedly true—argument for the long-term career benefits: being an avid reader is good for you because the educational system and the job market put a high premium on reading skills.

To summarize, the cognitive benefits of reading involve these faculties: effort, concentration, attention, the ability to make sense of words, to follow narrative threads, to sculpt imagined worlds out of mere sentences on the page. Those benefits are themselves amplified by the fact that society places a substantial emphasis on precisely this set of skills.

The very fact that I am presenting this argument to you in the form of a book and not a television drama or a video game should make it clear that I believe the printed word remains the most powerful vehicle for conveying complicated information—though the
electronic
word is starting to give printed books a run for their money. The argument that follows is centered squarely on the side of mental exercise—and not content. I aim to persuade you of two things:

1. By almost all the standards we use to measure reading's cognitive benefits—attention, memory, following threads, and so on—the nonliterary popular culture has been steadily growing more challenging over the past thirty years.
   
2. Increasingly, the nonliterary popular culture is honing
   different
   mental skills that are just as important as the ones exercised by reading books.
   

Despite the warnings of Dr. Spock, the most powerful examples of both these trends are found in the world of video games. Over the past few years, you may have noticed the appearance of a certain type of story about gaming culture in mainstream newspapers and periodicals. The message of that story ultimately reduces down to: Playing video games may not actually be a
complete
waste of time. Invariably these stories point to some new study focused on a minor side effect of gameplaying—often manual dexterity or visual memory—and explain that heavy gamers show improved skills compared to non-gamers. (The other common let's-take-games-seriously story is financial, usually pointing to the fact that the gaming industry now pulls in more money than Hollywood.)

Now, I have no doubt that playing today's games does in fact improve your visual intelligence and your manual dexterity, but the virtues of gaming run far deeper than hand-eye coordination. When I read these ostensibly positive accounts of video games, they strike me as the equivalent of writing a story about the merits of the great novels and focusing on how reading them can improve your spelling. It's true enough, I suppose, but it doesn't do justice to the rich, textured experience of novel reading. There's a comparable blindness at work in the way games have been covered to date. For all the discussion of gaming culture that you see, the actual experience of playing games has been strangely misrepresented. We hear a lot about the content of games: the carnage and drive-by killings and adolescent fantasies. But we rarely hear accurate descriptions about what it actually
feels like
to spend time in these virtual worlds. I worry about the experiential gap between people who have immersed themselves in games, and people who have only heard secondhand reports, because the gap makes it difficult to discuss the meaning of games in a coherent way. It reminds me of the way the social critic Jane Jacobs felt about the thriving urban neighborhoods she documented in the sixties: “People who know well such animated city streets will know how it is. People who do not will always have it a little wrong in their heads—like the old prints of rhinoceroses made from travelers' descriptions of the rhinoceroses.”

So what does the rhinoceros actually look like? The first and last thing that should be said about the experience of playing today's video games, the thing you almost never hear in the mainstream coverage, is that games are fiendishly, sometimes maddeningly,
hard.

 

T
HE DIRTY
little secret of gaming is how much time you spend not having fun. You may be frustrated; you may be confused or disoriented; you may be stuck. When you put the game down and move back into the real world, you may find yourself mentally working through the problem you've been wrestling with, as though you were worrying a loose tooth. If this is mindless escapism, it's a strangely masochistic version. Who wants to escape to a world that irritates you 90 percent of the time?

Consider the story of Troy Stolle, a construction site worker from Indianapolis profiled by the technology critic Julian Dibbell. When he's not performing his day job as a carpenter building wooden molds, Stolle lives in the virtual world of
Ultima Online,
the fantasy-themed game that allows you to create a character—sometimes called an avatar—and interact with thousands of other avatars controlled by other humans, connected to the game over the Net. (Imagine a version of Dungeons & Dragons where you're playing with thousands of strangers from all over the world, and you'll get the idea.)
Ultima
and related games like
EverQuest
have famously developed vibrant simulated economies that have begun to leak out into the real world. You can buy a magic sword or a plot of land—entirely made of digital code, mind you—for hundreds of dollars on eBay. But earning these goods the old-fashioned within-the gameworld way takes time—a lot of time. Dibbell describes the ordeal Stolle had to go through to have his avatar, named Nils Hansen, purchase a new house in the
Ultima
world: