6/09/2005
Go Ahead And Play Video Games If You Know What's Good For You
Author argues that today's video games require complex analytical skills and hone hand-eye coordination.
BY HEATHER NEWMAN Knight Ridder News Service
Video games are good for you.
That's the message in a controversial new book that got more buzz at the recent Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show than most of the games on display: Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (Riverhead Books, 2005).
Everyone -- from developers on the show floor to the president of the Electronic Software Association -- was quoting the book, which asserts that games have become incredibly sophisticated forms of entertainment, requiring complex analytical skills at the same time they hone our hand-eye coordination.
Johnson's arguments are persuasive, and games all over the show floor demonstrated what he was talking about. Sony was showing off EyeToy Kinetic, a new game for its EyeToy camera coming out this fall. It's a workout disguised as a video game. Like earlier EyeToy titles, you move in front of the camera to make things happen on screen. It's always been an active way to play.
But Kinetic takes that to the next level, making a successful gaming session also work out to be the equivalent of a successful kickboxing workout. Sony says it's inspired by aerobics, tai chi, yoga and some styles of dance and kickboxing; regardless of where it comes from, it's guaranteed to make you sweat, and it's a direct contradiction to the idea of gamers as sedentary couch potatoes.
Same goes for Konami's new fall Karaoke Revolution installment, tentatively called Karaoke Revolution Party, which allows you to use a ''Dance Dance Revolution'' pad on the floor to dance and sing at the same time. (As if just singing -- or just dancing -- wasn't challenging enough.) The ''Dance Dance'' series has been called out before as a game that always results in a workout, with reports nationwide of people losing weight while they play.
But Johnson said those superficial benefits aren't the end of the story.
''The virtues of gaming run far deeper than hand-eye coordination,'' he writes. ``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.''
While most reports decry how games' morals have fallen -- despite the fact that the vast majority of best-selling games involve no violence or sex whatsoever -- that's not a good indicator of whether they're good for us, he argues.
''Today's popular culture may not be showing us the righteous path,'' he writes, ``but it is making us smarter.''
Games do that by teaching complex concepts and encouraging us to learn them by tapping into the way the brain senses progress and rewards, he argues, using the example of a 7-year-old relative whom he introduced to Electronic Arts' enormously popular SimCity game.
He showed the boy some of the city he had built in the game and the screens that control everything available to the residents and businesses he'd enticed into his virtual landscape.
At one point, he complained that one of his industrial districts was failing. The boy piped up and immediately suggested that the industrial tax rate was too high, and should be lowered.
Put the child in an urban economics class and he'd fall asleep immediately, Johnson said. But in just a few minutes of playing the game, he'd gotten the idea that high taxes in industrial areas can discourage development.
Video games are good for you.
That's the message in a controversial new book that got more buzz at the recent Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show than most of the games on display: Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (Riverhead Books, 2005).
Everyone -- from developers on the show floor to the president of the Electronic Software Association -- was quoting the book, which asserts that games have become incredibly sophisticated forms of entertainment, requiring complex analytical skills at the same time they hone our hand-eye coordination.
Johnson's arguments are persuasive, and games all over the show floor demonstrated what he was talking about. Sony was showing off EyeToy Kinetic, a new game for its EyeToy camera coming out this fall. It's a workout disguised as a video game. Like earlier EyeToy titles, you move in front of the camera to make things happen on screen. It's always been an active way to play.
But Kinetic takes that to the next level, making a successful gaming session also work out to be the equivalent of a successful kickboxing workout. Sony says it's inspired by aerobics, tai chi, yoga and some styles of dance and kickboxing; regardless of where it comes from, it's guaranteed to make you sweat, and it's a direct contradiction to the idea of gamers as sedentary couch potatoes.
Same goes for Konami's new fall Karaoke Revolution installment, tentatively called Karaoke Revolution Party, which allows you to use a ''Dance Dance Revolution'' pad on the floor to dance and sing at the same time. (As if just singing -- or just dancing -- wasn't challenging enough.) The ''Dance Dance'' series has been called out before as a game that always results in a workout, with reports nationwide of people losing weight while they play.
But Johnson said those superficial benefits aren't the end of the story.
''The virtues of gaming run far deeper than hand-eye coordination,'' he writes. ``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.''
While most reports decry how games' morals have fallen -- despite the fact that the vast majority of best-selling games involve no violence or sex whatsoever -- that's not a good indicator of whether they're good for us, he argues.
''Today's popular culture may not be showing us the righteous path,'' he writes, ``but it is making us smarter.''
Games do that by teaching complex concepts and encouraging us to learn them by tapping into the way the brain senses progress and rewards, he argues, using the example of a 7-year-old relative whom he introduced to Electronic Arts' enormously popular SimCity game.
He showed the boy some of the city he had built in the game and the screens that control everything available to the residents and businesses he'd enticed into his virtual landscape.
At one point, he complained that one of his industrial districts was failing. The boy piped up and immediately suggested that the industrial tax rate was too high, and should be lowered.
Put the child in an urban economics class and he'd fall asleep immediately, Johnson said. But in just a few minutes of playing the game, he'd gotten the idea that high taxes in industrial areas can discourage development.
