In his book Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter (Riverhead, 2005), Steven Johnson quotes the advice of the 1998 edition of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care on 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” (17).
Johnson proceeds to defend video games against this charge. It’s part of a broader defense of contemporary nonliterary popular culture, including television and film. Johnson’s claim? first, that such culture “has been steadily growing more challenging over the past thirty years”; and, second, that, increasingly, that culture “is honing different mental skills that are just as important as the ones exercised by reading books” (23).
The argument on behalf of video games focuses on two cognitive activities that Johnson believes are at the heart of today’s video game playing. The first is “probing”: the seemingly endless exploration that game players engage in when trying to learn a game. Whereas games like poker, baseball, and chess have clear rules that exist prior to and independent of any particular experience of the game, in video games one literally learns the rules by playing the game: “by trial and error, by stumbling across things, by following hunches” (43). James Paul Gee, author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, has broken this process down into four steps, which he calls the “probe, hypothesis, reprobe, rethink” cycle (qtd. 45) and which, as Johnson notes, sounds a lot like the scientific method.
But there’s another “mode of intellectual labor” that Johnson finds in video games and which he calls “telescoping”: the simultaneous management of multiple objectives, including both immediate problem-solving tasks and long-distance goal-seeking, a nested, hierarchical thinking that is surprisingly complex and manifestly effortful. For example, Johnson’s map of the objectives in the Zelda game The Wind Walker looks like this: “1. Your ultimate goal is to rescue your sister. 2. To do this, you must defeat the villain Ganon. 3. To do this, you need to obtain legendary weapons. 4. To locate the weapons, you need the pearl of Din. 5. To get the pearl of Din, you need to cross the ocean. 6. To cross the ocean, you need to find a sailboat” (50). And so on. The actual map for this activity would need to be much, much more complex. For example, to get the pearl of Din, you have to help the islanders solve their problem: “To do this, you need to cheer up the Prince. To do this, you need to get a letter from the girl. To do this, you need to find the girl in the village. With the letter to the Prince, you must now befriend the Prince. To do this, you need to get to the top of Dragon Roost Mt. To do this, you must get to the other side of the gorge. To do this, you must fill up the gorge with water so you can swim across. To do this, you must use a bomb to blow up the rock blocking the water” (52). And so on. Note that every one of these steps itself takes significant amounts of probing, each individual task embedded in a hierarchy of numerous other tasks, all nested within the main goal of the game itself: in the case of Zelda, to rescue your sister. Johnson admits that the actual content of this particular game – cheering up the Prince, etc. – doesn’t sound very sophisticated when reduced to a written script. But the playing of the game, the hours and hours spent probing and telescoping, is quite sophisticated: “it’s about finding order and meaning in the world, and making decisions that help create that order” (62).
What do you think of this defense of video games? How does Johnson’s description of game playing fit what Wade does in Ready Player One? What does Johnson leave out? What counter-arguments might be used to deflate this defense?
From this point of view, it makes video games seem like the ultimate tool to teach kids divergent thinking and problem-solving skills, but what Johnson leaves out is the culture behind video game playing. I’m currently reading a book called The Demise of Guys, which is all about how hours of video games affects young adult’s social capabilities. Video games are highly addictive, which results in hours of isolation and minimal contact with other human beings. And if we don’t develop proper social skills when we’re young, when we’re older we will isolate ourselves simply because we see no other choice. So even though video games may help us expand our mode of thought, they are also damaging our social savvy.
I agree and this is exactly what happened to Wade. He became addicted to the OASIS program and is not able to accept reality. He adjusts his life to living alone accompanied only by his computerized assistant. He learned to rely on himself and hide behind his computer only until later in the book.