Everything Bad...

Reading this excerpt is so frustrating that I just want to scream. 

The author attempts to imagine a world where books were developed after videogames, using this historical inversion to draw the contours of an alternative world where all the benefits of videogames are expanded and the pitfalls of books are revealed:

Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children.

You're so right; books are isolating, except for all those book-clubs, online discussion groups, coffee shops, salons, classrooms, reading circles, bookstores, and bedtime stories.  Conversely, videogames are such a naturally social experience that I can't think of a single person that has ever opted to stay in and play Starcraft instead of going out.  Oh wait, yes I can, they're called FUCKING NERDS! 

And what of those early years before multi-player games?  Is Pong intrinsically more social than Harry Potter?  You can start talking about books from book one, page one.  In fact, books are a natural out-growth of the oral tradition, a genuine community experience if ever there was one.  I imagine a world where videogames were developed first and all I see is a single generation of shut-in males dying, one by one, as pale virgins; and then there were none.

Many children enjoy reading books, of course, and no doubt some of the flights of fancy conveyed by reading have their escapist merits. But for a sizable percentage of the population, books are downright discriminatory. The reading craze of recent years cruelly taunts the 10 million Americans who suffer from dyslexia—a condition didn’t even exist as a condition until printed text came along to stigmatize its sufferers.

Perhaps he's never met a person such as myself who can't advance beyond the most basic levels of modern videogames without the aid of a cheat code.  Sure, a lifetime of indoctrination might help me beat Metroid but let's not pretend that videogames are just a pick up and play type of thing while basic reading requires intensive and unresponsive training regimes.  Books on tape anyone?

But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can't control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you.

Four words: Choose. Your. Own. Adventure.  Actually, forget that; has this guy ever read Cortazar's  Hopscotch or any of the hundreds of surrealist fictions that can be rearranged and re-read a multitude of ways with different plots and meaning tumbling out from each consecutive pass?  I doubt it.  These non-linear narratives were developed before videogames and demonstrate that books are not the simple point A to point B affairs he would like to paint them as.  Granted, cropping the whole body of literature down to the most static and structured of its constituents makes the comparison more stark but it isn't exactly fair to pretend that the evolution of videogames started with Splinter Cell while the progress of literature ended at Jane Eyre.

Yes, his imagined world is an interesting one that points out the unintelligent, ill-informed criticism of videogames and other "bad habits" but his analysis strikes me as just as unintelligent and ill-informed as those he's aping.  I'd be interested to hear how these pre-book video games, with their elaborate non-linear structures, would be developed without printed texts (even books or scripts) to guide their plots.  Surely this world can't be all storyboards.

On the whole, this excerpt is ridiculous in the extreme.  Perhaps videogames do get short shrift culturally but for all they're actually worth, so do books.  His doesn't help.

Post-script: I'm actually interested in reading this book when it comes out.

Clarification: the author of the book is making the provocative-contrarian (call it "Dennis Millerish") argument that reading shouldn't just be considered a given in the column of "good habits".  Um, maybe if we could only have eating a balanced diet or reading his would be a useful argument, but if I have to choose between reading and videogame playing it's not even be close.  That's not the same as saying that videogames are a given in the "bad habit" column it is simply saying reading offers greater rewards than videogaming and, as such is less burdened by the strikes against it.

Comments

[Steven Johnson]

You pushed me over the edge -- I actually went back and added text that I didn't think was necessary to the original post, just to avoid this kind of confusion. It now is prefaced by:

WARNING: What follows is Satire. I do not personally believe what is written below. It is an imagined rendition of what some pompous, self-satisfied gamer would say about books had he never actually sat down and read one. It's designed to make you realize how selective and short-sighted most of the criticism about gaming is. So if it seems selective and short-sighted in its description of books, that's precisely the point.

hope that helps,

sbj

[Karl]

Yeah. Also, Pong is two-player.

[Karl]

This is really the problem with the Internet. You can't really criticize anything for fear of having the author whinging at you from the ether.

[ARRON]

I don't think the criticism of gaming, selective and short-sighted as it may be, is necessarily unwarranted. Afterall, the games that get singled out are usually the ones that sell. No one would care about beating up pixilated hookers if GTA weren't moving units.

That the medium's detractors focus too much on the violence and sexuality is a problem videogames actually share with books; fairly or unfairly. For books I would argue it is largely unfair criticism because it is a product of the critics not understanding the deeper meaning of a book, I don't think that is the case for Doom, GTA, et al.

I think your criticism of books on the terms laid out in the excerpt are not only selective and short-sighted but fundamentally false ones.

Besides satire this subtle in the service of bagging on literature in a society where more kids are growing ever more likely to have played Halo than have read a novel is a bit like Jonathan Swift publishing "A Modest Proposal" in an over-populated society of cannibals.

[ARRON]

Karl: Of course Pong is two-player.

::blushes and shuffles papers::

[MATTHEW JOSEF WEBER XVI]

LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH

[Steven Johnson]

Hey, thanks for your clarification. Hopefully, you'll get a chance to read the passage in the context of the book, and you'll see that it's prefaced by a bunch of quotes from George Will, Dr. Spock, etc. all of which are unanimous in their belief that games are a Complete Waste Of Time -- and all of which are pretty clearly clueless when it comes to what games are actually like. So the ultimate point is not so much to undermine the belief that reading is good for you -- I go to great lengths in the book to make it clear that that I love books, and obviously write them for a living. The point is instead to undermine the assumption that games are useless.

It does sound like we disagree about the cognitive virtues of most games -- it's my belief that they are potentially as rich and important as the virtues of reading, but they're *different* virtues. But that's the whole argument of the book...

FWIW, I'm an old Semiotics major, and did five years of graduate work in English lit, studied with Derrida and Spivak, so the postmodern tradition from Hopscotch to Choose Your Own Adventure is something I've spent a lot of time with. But you know as well as I do that 99.99% of books actually read in this culture are purely linear in their structure, and do not ask the reader to make active decisions about the order in which the pages should be read. You are far, far more likely to find a popular videogame that contains zero violence (The Sims is the all-time bestseller after all) than you are to find a book that follows a truly non-linear, reader-driven structure.

Drop a line if you get a chance to read the book -- love to hear what you think.

[Joseph]

My player just started a book club in The Sims. What now?

[ARRON]

Prepare for the rapture.

[thelizabeth]

:::cups hand under chin as blood from bitten tongue oozes over bottom lip:::