BigShinyThing

Unsurprisingly, the article references Steven Johnson’s recent book, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Popular Culture Is Making Us Smarter, which argues that popular culture - mainly due its complexity and accelerated nature- is making us smarter. A number of the anecdotes and stats are worth repeating here.

Gaming is now pretty rampant - in America, for example, half of the population plays computer or video games. If gaming encourages violent behaviour - as so often claimed - why hasn’t there been a higher incidence of it? As Johnson notes, in America violent crime actually fell sharply in the 1990s, just as video and computer gaming as we know it was taking off. Of course, it’s possible that crime would have fallen by even more over the period had America not taken up video games; but video gaming has not turned America into a more violent place.

Tim Rylands, a Bristol primary school teacher, recently won an award from Becta, a government education agency, for using computer games in the classroom. By projecting the fantasy world of ‘Myst’, a role-playing game, on to a large screen and asking his 11 year old pupils to write descriptions and reactions as he navigates through it, he has achieved striking improvements in their English test scores.

The article also suggests that much of the fear of video games comes from a generational gap - one which Rupert Murdoch recently alluded to. Young people these days are ‘digital natives’ - they have grown up surrounded by and embedded in technology. Older people are ‘digital immigrants’ who have been forced to adapt to this new world, and learn how to use technologies such as the internet and mobile phones. Digital natives who have played video games since childhood already consider them just another form of entertainment on a par with films and music. According to Gerhard Florin of games publisher Electronic Arts, “It’s just a generational divide. It’s people not knowing what they’re talking about, because they have never played a game, accusing millions of gamers of being zombies or violent.”

The article also cites Dmitri Williams, who specialises in studying the social impact of media at the University of Illonois. He likens video games to rock n roll which was also initially villified - the shock of the new. He says, “There’s always this pattern. Old stuff is respected, and new stuff is junk. Once a generation has its perception, it is pretty much set. What happens is that they die … Thirty years from now, we’ll be arguing about holograms, or something.”