VIDEO GAMES
VIDEO GAMES
Many people who spend a lot of time playing video games insist that they have helped them in areas
like confidence-building, presentation skills and debating. Yet this way of thinking about video games
can be found almost nowhere within the mainstream media, which still tend to treat games as an odd
mix of the slightly menacing and the alien. This lack of awareness has become increasingly
inappropriate, as video games and the culture that surrounds them have become very big business
indeed.
Recently, the British government released the Byron report into the effects of electronic media on
children. Its conclusions set out a clear, rational basis for exploring the regulation of video games. The
ensuing debate, however, has descended into the same old squabbling between partisan factions: the
preachers of mental and moral decline, and the innovative game designers. In between are the gamers,
Susan Greenfield, a renowned neuroscientist, outlines her concerns in a new book. Every individual’s
mind is the product of a brain that has been personalized by the sum total of their experiences; with an
increasing quantity of our experiences from very early childhood taking place ‘on-screen’ rather than in
the world, there is potentially a profound shift in the way children’s minds work. She suggests that the
fast-paced, second-hand experiences created by video games and the Internet may inculcate a
worldview that is less empathetic, more risk-taking and less contemplative than what we tend to think
of as healthy.
Greenfield’s prose is full of mixed metaphors and self-contradictions and is perhaps the worst enemy
of her attempts to persuade. This is unfortunate, because however many technophiles may snort, she is
articulating widely held fears that have a basis in fact. Unlike even their immediate antecedents, the
latest electronic media are at once domestic and work-related, their mobility blurring the boundaries
between these spaces, and video games are at their forefront. A generational divide has opened that is
in many ways more profound than the equivalent shifts associated with radio or television, more
alienating for those unfamiliar with new’ technologies, more absorbing for those who are. So how do
our lawmakers regulate something that is too fluid to be fully comprehended or controlled?
Adam Martin, a lead programmer for an online games developer, says: ‘Computer games teach and
people don’t even notice they’re being taught.’ But isn’t the kind of learning that goes on in games
rather narrow? ‘A large part of the addictiveness of games does come from the fact that as you play you
are mastering a set of challenges. But humanity’s larger understanding of the world comes primarily
through communication and experimentation, through answering the question “What if?’ Games excel
at teaching this too.’
Steven Johnson’s thesis is not that electronic games constitute a great, popular art, but that the mean
level of mass culture has been demanding steadily more intellectual engagement from consumers.
Games, he points out, generate satisfaction via the complexity of their virtual worlds, not by their
robotic predictability. Testing the nature and limits of the laws of such imaginary worlds has more in
common with scientific methods than with a pointless addiction, while the complexity of the problems
children encounter within games exceeds that of anything they might find at school.
Greenfield argues that there are ways of thinking that playing video games simply cannot teach. She
has a point. We should never forget, for instance, the unique ability of books to engage and expand the
human imagination, and to give us the means of more fully expressing our situations in the world.
Intriguingly, the video games industry is now growing in ways that have more in common with an old-
fashioned world of companionable pastimes than with a cyber future of lonely, isolated obsessives.
Games in which friends and relations gather round a console to compete at activities are growing in
popularity. The agenda is increasingly being set by the concerns of mainstream consumers – what they
consider acceptable for their children, what they want to play at parties and across generations.
These trends embody a familiar but important truth: games are human products and lie within our
control. This doesn’t mean we yet control or understand them fully, but it should remind us that there is
nothing inevitable or incomprehensible about them. No matter how deeply it may be felt, instinctive
fear is an inappropriate response to a technology of any kind. So far, the dire predictions many
traditionalists have made about the ‘death’ of old-fashioned narratives and imaginative thought at the
hands of video games cannot be upheld. Television and cinema may be suffering, economically, at the
hands of interactive media. But literacy standards have failed to decline. Young people still enjoy sport,
going out and listening to music And most research – including a recent $1.5m study funded by the US
government suggests that even pre-teens are not in the habit of blurring game worlds and real worlds.
The sheer pace and scale of the changes we face, however, leave little room for complacency. Richard
Battle, a British writer and game researcher, says Times change: accept it; embrace it.’ Just as, today, we
have no living memories of a time before radio, we will soon live in a world in which no one living
experienced growing up without computers. It is for this reason that we must try to examine what we
stand to lose and gain before it is too late.
Many people who spend a lot of time playing video games insist that they have helped them in areas
like confidence-building, presentation skills and debating. Yet this way of thinking about video games
can be found almost nowhere within the mainstream media, which still tend to treat games as an odd
mix of the slightly menacing and the alien. This lack of awareness has become increasingly
inappropriate, as video games and the culture that surrounds them have become very big business
indeed.
Recently, the British government released the Byron report into the effects of electronic media on
children. Its conclusions set out a clear, rational basis for exploring the regulation of video games. The
ensuing debate, however, has descended into the same old squabbling between partisan factions: the
preachers of mental and moral decline, and the innovative game designers. In between are the gamers,
Susan Greenfield, a renowned neuroscientist, outlines her concerns in a new book. Every individual’s
mind is the product of a brain that has been personalized by the sum total of their experiences; with an
increasing quantity of our experiences from very early childhood taking place ‘on-screen’ rather than in
the world, there is potentially a profound shift in the way children’s minds work. She suggests that the
fast-paced, second-hand experiences created by video games and the Internet may inculcate a
worldview that is less empathetic, more risk-taking and less contemplative than what we tend to think
of as healthy.
Greenfield’s prose is full of mixed metaphors and self-contradictions and is perhaps the worst enemy
of her attempts to persuade. This is unfortunate, because however many technophiles may snort, she is
articulating widely held fears that have a basis in fact. Unlike even their immediate antecedents, the
latest electronic media are at once domestic and work-related, their mobility blurring the boundaries
between these spaces, and video games are at their forefront. A generational divide has opened that is
in many ways more profound than the equivalent shifts associated with radio or television, more
alienating for those unfamiliar with new’ technologies, more absorbing for those who are. So how do
our lawmakers regulate something that is too fluid to be fully comprehended or controlled?
Adam Martin, a lead programmer for an online games developer, says: ‘Computer games teach and
people don’t even notice they’re being taught.’ But isn’t the kind of learning that goes on in games
rather narrow? ‘A large part of the addictiveness of games does come from the fact that as you play you
are mastering a set of challenges. But humanity’s larger understanding of the world comes primarily
through communication and experimentation, through answering the question “What if?’ Games excel
at teaching this too.’
Steven Johnson’s thesis is not that electronic games constitute a great, popular art, but that the mean
level of mass culture has been demanding steadily more intellectual engagement from consumers.
Games, he points out, generate satisfaction via the complexity of their virtual worlds, not by their
robotic predictability. Testing the nature and limits of the laws of such imaginary worlds has more in
common with scientific methods than with a pointless addiction, while the complexity of the problems
children encounter within games exceeds that of anything they might find at school.
Greenfield argues that there are ways of thinking that playing video games simply cannot teach. She
has a point. We should never forget, for instance, the unique ability of books to engage and expand the
human imagination, and to give us the means of more fully expressing our situations in the world.
Intriguingly, the video games industry is now growing in ways that have more in common with an old-
fashioned world of companionable pastimes than with a cyber future of lonely, isolated obsessives.
Games in which friends and relations gather round a console to compete at activities are growing in
popularity. The agenda is increasingly being set by the concerns of mainstream consumers – what they
consider acceptable for their children, what they want to play at parties and across generations.
These trends embody a familiar but important truth: games are human products and lie within our
control. This doesn’t mean we yet control or understand them fully, but it should remind us that there is
nothing inevitable or incomprehensible about them. No matter how deeply it may be felt, instinctive
fear is an inappropriate response to a technology of any kind. So far, the dire predictions many
traditionalists have made about the ‘death’ of old-fashioned narratives and imaginative thought at the
hands of video games cannot be upheld. Television and cinema may be suffering, economically, at the
hands of interactive media. But literacy standards have failed to decline. Young people still enjoy sport,
going out and listening to music And most research – including a recent $1.5m study funded by the US
government suggests that even pre-teens are not in the habit of blurring game worlds and real worlds.
The sheer pace and scale of the changes we face, however, leave little room for complacency. Richard
Battle, a British writer and game researcher, says Times change: accept it; embrace it.’ Just as, today, we
have no living memories of a time before radio, we will soon live in a world in which no one living
experienced growing up without computers. It is for this reason that we must try to examine what we
stand to lose and gain before it is too late.
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