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July 21, 2005
The 'Bad' Guy
I happened to be skimming Steven Johnson's blog this afternoon (after hearing him interviewed yesterday on NPR) and came across a June 21 Washington Post article on his latest book, Everything Bad is Good For You (I was either in the midst of moving hell or broken compter hell at the time, so missed it). I've already discussed my response to Johnson's book, which was clearly written as a polemic, so won't repeat my earlier arguments.
Instead, I want to rethink some aspects of his argument, in part because I may teach some sections from his book in one or both of my media studies courses this fall. Specifically, I'm a little suspicious of the privileging of cognitive development as the primary benefit of engaging with media texts. The Post offers a thumbnail account of Johnson's argument:
To summarize briefly: He's talking trends, not absolutes, and over the past 30 years, the trend in both video games and television shows has been toward forms that are more cognitively demanding. (He doesn't dwell on the Internet, which he thinks needs little defense.)I'm willing to entertain the idea that many (maybe most) TV shows require viewers to sift through multiple narrative threads and to concede the fact that juggling narrative threads can teach some of the problem-solving skills that he is describing (perhaps making playing video games the equivalent of eating vegetables), but I have become more suspicious of the political or social ends of developing these skills, at the expense of other habits of thinking about and interpreting the world (note: an excerpt of Johnson's book is available on the NPR website).Why the upward trends? When it comes to gaming, Johnson invokes some of the neuroscience he studied for his last book. Human brains are drawn to systems, he suggests, in which "rewards are both clearly defined and achieved by exploring an environment." The exploration part is key: Gamers have to figure out the rules as they go along, and "no other pop cultural form directly engages the brain's decision-making apparatus" the way video games do.
With television, Johnson's argument rests more on economics. Complex narratives that "force you to work to make sense of them" have been rewarded by a marketplace where profit now depends heavily on repeat performances, whether on DVD or in syndication. Making shows more challenging to decode makes perfect sense if you're assuming they'll be watched more than once.
Games aren't "Hamlet" or "The Great Gatsby," Johnson writes; they're more like mathematical logic problems. As such, "they are good for the mind on some fundamental level: They teach abstract skills in probability, in pattern recognition, in understanding causal relations that can be applied in countless situations, both personal and professional."
Johnson's examples are invariably "safe" games, such as The Sims, which he mentioned in his NPR interview, and a simulated baseball game, which he discusses in the excerpt cited above, which generally allows him to dodge the question about so-called harmful games, such as Grand Theft Auto, but there seems to be an implicit suggestion that the simulations are somehow more authentic representations of how a system operates. A computer simulation can take into account more variables, such as ballpark conditions, than a complicated baseball-dice game. The brief passage doesn't take into account the fact that both simulations are representations (just as The Sims is a representation of human interaction that programs certain decisions about relationships in advance), competing narratives that might inform our experience of baseball or human relationships. I'd also wonder what it means to value texts that are "rewarded by the marketplace," rather than other criteria (I'm not sure what these criteria would be).
Posted by chuck at July 21, 2005 1:19 PM
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