goodwriter

Why games are good for you

Steven Johnson writes about science and culture. His book Interface Cul- ture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communi- cate (1997) is considered one of the most important early texts to explain the impact of cybertechnology on human perception and communication, a subject to which he frequently returns. Johnson became more widely known with the publication of his best-selling book Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (2005), in which he defends the value of computer games, among other popular “time-wasting” pastimes. This reading is excerpted from Everything Bad Is Good for You. You will immediately grasp Johnson’s interest in sailing against the current of popular opinion. In response to those who claim the sky is falling, Johnson argues that “the weather has never been better. It just takes a new kind of barometer to tell the difference.”

The pages that follow are Johnson’s barometer. As you read his analy- sis of pop culture pastimes, consider the games you found most absorbing as a child. Do you agree with Johnson about the kinds of skills those games taught you? What about the time you spend today on technological recre- ation—are you wasting time or getting smarter? Because Johnson is writ- ing for a general audience, he does not use scholarly citations, but he does refer explicitly to the ideas of others in his main text and detailed notes. As you read, notice the many kinds of experts he refers to, and how he deploys their ideas to serve his larger purpose.

Leisure studies — which focuses on the ways we spend our free time—is a rich area of research. The question driving Johnson’s analysis here about the purposes games serve is part of this ongoing conversation. What “work” does our play accomplish? Johnson has answers that may surprise you.

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You can’t get much more conventional than the conventional wisdom 1 that kids today would be better off spending more time reading books, and less time zoning out in front of their video games. The latest edition of Dr. Spock — “revised and fully expanded for a new century” as the cover reports — has this to say of video games: “The best that can be said of them
is that they may help promote eye-hand coordination in children. The worst that can be said is that they sanction, and even promote aggression and violent responses to conflict. But what can be said with much greater certainty is this: most computer games are a colossal waste of time.” But where reading is concerned, the advice is quite different: “I suggest you begin to foster in your children a love of reading and the printed word from the start. . . . What is important is that your child be an avid reader.”1 In the middle of 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts released 2 a study that showed that reading for pleasure had declined steadily among all major American demographic groups. The writer Andrew Solomon analyzed the consequences of this shift: “People who read for pleasure are many times more likely than those who don’t to visit museums and attend musical performances, almost three times as likely to perform volunteer and charity work, and almost twice as likely to attend sporting events. Readers, in other words, are active, while nonreaders—more than half the population—have settled into apathy. There is a basic social divide between those for whom life is an accrual of fresh experience and knowl- edge, and those for whom maturity is a process of mental atrophy. The shift toward the latter category is frightening.”2

The intellectual nourishment of reading books is so deeply ingrained 3 in our assumptions that it’s hard to contemplate a different viewpoint. But as [Marshall] McLuhan famously observed, the problem with judging new cultural systems on their own terms is that the presence of the recent past inevitably colors your vision of the emerging form, highlighting the flaws and imperfections. Games have historically suffered from this syndrome, largely because they have been contrasted with the older conventions of reading. To get around these prejudices, try this thought experiment. Imagine an alternate world identical to ours save one techno-historical change: video games were invented and popularized before books. In this parallel universe, kids have been playing games for centuries—and then

1 Benjamin Spock and Steven J. Parker, Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care (New York: Pocket Books, 1998), p. 625.

2 Andrew Solomon, “The Closing of the American Book,” The New York Times, July 10, 2004. Solomon is a thoughtful and eloquent writer, but this essay by him contains a string of bizarre assertions, none of them supported by facts or common sense. Consider this passage: “My last book was about depression, and the question I am most frequently asked is why depression is on the rise. I talk about the loneliness that comes of spending the day with a TV or a computer or video screen. Conversely, literary reading is an entry into dialogue; a book can be a friend, talking not at you, but to you.” Begin with the fact that most video games contain genuine dialogue, where your character must interact with other onscreen characters, in contrast to books, in which the “dialogue” between

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these page-bound texts come along and suddenly they’re all the rage. What would the teachers, and the parents, and the cultural authorities have to say about this frenzy of reading? I suspect it would sound something like this:

Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the long- standing tradition of gameplaying — which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements — books are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of the sensory and motor cortices.

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. These new “libraries” that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers.

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 that didn’t even exist as a condition until printed text came along to stigmatize its sufferers.

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. For those of us raised on interactive narratives, this property may seem astonishing. Why would anyone want to embark on an adventure utterly choreographed by another person? But today’s generation embarks on such adventures millions of times a day. This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to “follow the plot” instead of learning to lead.

It should probably go without saying, but it probably goes better with 4 saying, that I don’t agree with this argument. But neither is it exactly right to say that its contentions are untrue. The argument relies on a kind of amplified selectivity: it foregrounds certain isolated properties of books,

reader and text is purely metaphorical. When you factor in the reality that most games are played in social contexts—together with friends in shared physical space, or over network connections—you get the sense that Solomon hasn’t spent any time with the game form he lambastes. So that by the time he asserts, “Reading is harder than watch- ing television or playing video games,” you have to ask: Which video game, exactly, is he talking about? Certainly, reading Ulysses is harder than playing PacMan, but is reading Stephen King harder than playing Zelda or SimCity? Hardly.

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and then projects worst-case scenarios based on these properties and their potential effects on the “younger generation.” But it doesn’t bring up any of the clear benefits of reading: the complexity of argument and storytell- ing offered by the book form; the stretching of the imagination triggered by reading words on a page; the shared experience you get when everyone is reading the same story.

A comparable sleight of hand is at work anytime you hear someone 5 bemoaning today’s video game obsessions and their stupefying effects on tomorrow’s generations. Games are not novels, and the ways in which they harbor novelistic aspirations are invariably the least interesting thing about them. You can judge games by the criteria designed to evaluate nov- els: Are the characters believable? Is the dialogue complex? But inevitably, the games will come up wanting. Games are good at novelistic storytelling the way Michael Jordan was good at playing baseball. Both could probably make a living at it, but their world-class talents lie elsewhere.

Before we get to those talents, let me say a few words about the vir- 6 tues of reading books. For the record, I think those virtues are immense ones—and not just because I make a living writing books. We should all encourage our kids to read more, to develop a comfort with and an appetite for reading. But even the most avid reader in this culture is invariably going to spend his or her time with other media—with games, television, mov- ies, or the Internet. And these other forms of culture have intellectual or cognitive virtues in their own right—different from, but comparable to, the rewards of reading.

What are the rewards of reading, exactly? Broadly speaking, they 7 fall into two categories: the information conveyed by the book, and the mental work you have to do to process and store that information. Think of this as the difference between acquiring information and exercising the mind. When we encourage kids to read for pleasure, we’re generally doing so because of the mental exercise involved. In Andrew Solomon’s words: “[Reading] requires effort, concentration, attention. In exchange,
it offers the stimulus to and the fruit of thought and feeling.” Spock says: “Unlike most amusements, reading is an activity requiring active partici- pation. We must do the reading ourselves — actively scan the letters, make sense of the words, and follow the thread of the story.” Most tributes to the mental benefits of reading also invoke the power of imagination; reading books forces you to concoct entire worlds in your head, rather than sim- ply ingest a series of prepackaged images. And then there is the slightly circular—though undoubtedly true—argument for the long-term career benefits: being an avid reader is good for you because the educational sys- tem and the job market put a high premium on reading skills.

To summarize, the cognitive benefits of reading involve these facul- 8 ties: effort, concentration, attention, the ability to make sense of words, to follow narrative threads, to sculpt imagined worlds out of mere sentences on the page. Those benefits are themselves amplified by the fact that soci- ety places a substantial emphasis on precisely this set of skills.

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The very fact that I am presenting this argument to you in the form 9 of a book and not a television drama or a video game should make it clear that I believe the printed word remains the most powerful vehicle for con- veying complicated information—though the electronic word is starting to give printed books a run for their money. The argument that follows is centered squarely on the side of mental exercise—and not content. I aim to persuade you of two things:

1. By almost all the standards we use to measure reading’s cognitive benefits — attention, memory, following threads, and so on — the nonlit- erary popular culture has been steadily growing more challenging over the past thirty years.

2. Increasingly, the nonliterary popular culture is honing different mental skills that are just as important as the ones exercised by reading books. 
Despite the warnings of Dr. Spock, the most powerful examples of both 10

these trends are found in the world of video games. Over the past few years, you may have noticed the appearance of a certain type of story about gam- ing culture in mainstream newspapers and periodicals. The message of that story ultimately reduces down to: Playing video games may not actually be

a complete waste of time. Invariably these stories point to some new study focused on a minor side effect of gameplaying—often manual dexterity or visual memory—and explain that heavy gamers show improved skills compared to non-gamers.3 (The other common let’s-take-games-seriously

3I don’t dwell on the manual dexterity question here, but it’s worth noting how the control systems for these games have grown strikingly more complex over the past decade or so. Compare the original Legend of Zelda (July 1987), on the original NES, to the current Zelda, on the GameCube (March 2003). In sixteen years, games have changed as follows:

Then
Controller
4 direction buttons
2 action buttons
Each button has a single function.

Perspective

Static overhead view
You always have complete vision. The game is “flat” (two-dimensional).

Gameplay

Movement is in one of four directions. Fighting: 2 buttons

Objects: Press a single button.

Now
Controller
2 joysticks + 4 direction buttons
7 action buttons
Each combo of buttons has a unique function.
Perspective
Dynamic player-controlled “camera” view Your vision is limited. You must control it. The game is “virtual” (three-dimensional).

Gameplay

Movement is in any direction, including up and down.
Fighting: More than 10 different button combos. Requires accurate timing and coordination.

Objects: Assign a button, learn unique con- trols to use each object. Requires timing, training.

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story is financial, usually pointing to the fact that the gaming industry now pulls in more money than Hollywood.)

Now, I have no doubt that playing today’s games does in fact improve 11 your visual intelligence and your manual dexterity, but the virtues of gaming run far deeper than hand-eye coordination. When I read these ostensi- bly 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. It’s true enough, I suppose, but it doesn’t do justice to the rich, textured experience of novel reading. There’s a comparable blindness at work in the way games have been covered to date. For all the discussion of gaming culture that you see, the actual experience
of playing games has been strangely misrepresented. We hear a lot about the content of games: the carnage and drive-by killings and adolescent fan- tasies. But we rarely hear accurate descriptions about what it actually feels like to spend time in these virtual worlds. I worry about the experiential gap between people who have immersed themselves in games, and people who have only heard secondhand reports, because the gap makes it difficult to discuss the meaning of games in a coherent way. It reminds me of the way the social critic Jane Jacobs felt about the thriving urban neighborhoods she documented in the sixties: “People who know well such animated city streets will know how it is. People who do not will always have it a little wrong in their heads — like the old prints of rhinoceroses made from travel- ers’ descriptions of the rhinoceroses.”

So what does the rhinoceros actually look like?4 The first and last thing 12 that should be said about the experience of playing today’s video games, the thing you almost never hear in the mainstream coverage, is that games are fiendishly, sometimes maddeningly, hard.

The dirty little secret of gaming is how much time you spend not 13 having fun. You may be frustrated; you may be confused or disoriented;

4Henry Jenkins has painted perhaps the most accurate picture of the rhinoceros of pop culture over the past decade: “Often, our response to popular culture is shaped by a hunger for simple answers and quick actions. It is important to take the time to understand the complexity of contemporary culture. We need to learn how to be safe, critical, and creative users of media. We need to evaluate the information and entertain- ment we consume. We need to understand the emotional investments we make in media content. And perhaps most importantly, we need to learn not to treat differences in taste as mental pathologies or social problems. We need to think, talk, and listen. When we tell students that popular culture has no place in classroom discussions, we are signal- ing to them that what they learn in school has little to do with the things that matter to them at home. When we avoid discussing popular culture at the dinner table, we may be suggesting we have no interest in things that are important to our children. When we tell our parents that they wouldn’t understand our music or our fashion choices, we are cutting them off from an important part of who we are and what we value. We do not need to share each other’s passions. But we do need to respect and understand them.” “Encouraging Conversations About Popular Culture and Media Convergence: An Out- reach Program for Parents, Students, and Teachers, March–May 2000.” http://web.mit .edu/21fms/www/faculty/henry3/resourceguide.html.

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you may be stuck. When you put the game down and move back into the real world, you may find yourself mentally working through the problem you’ve been wrestling with, as though you were worrying a loose tooth. If this is mindless escapism, it’s a strangely masochistic version. Who wants to escape to a world that irritates you 90 percent of the time?

Consider the story of Troy Stolle, a construction site worker from Indi- 14 anapolis profiled by the technology critic Julian Dibbell. When he’s not performing his day job as a carpenter building wooden molds, Stolle lives
in the virtual world of Ultima Online, the fantasy-themed game that allows you to create a character—sometimes called an avatar—and interact with thousands of other avatars controlled by other humans, connected to the game over the Net. (Imagine a version of Dungeons & Dragons where you’re playing with thousands of strangers from all over the world, and you’ll get the idea.) Ultima and related games like EverQuest have famously developed vibrant simulated economies that have begun to leak out into the real world. You can buy a magic sword or a plot of land — entirely made

of digital code, mind you—for hundreds of dollars on eBay. But earning these goods the old-fashioned within-the-gameworld way takes time—a lot of time. Dibbell describes the ordeal Stolle had to go through to have his avatar, named Nils Hansen, purchase a new house in the Ultima world:

Stolle had had to come up with the money for the deed. To get the money, he had to sell his old house. To get that house in the first place, he had to spend hours crafting virtual swords and plate mail to sell to a steady clientele of about three dozen fellow players. To attract and keep that clientele, he had
to bring Nils Hansen’s blacksmithing skills up to Grandmaster. To reach that level, Stolle spent six months doing nothing but smithing: He clicked on hill- sides to mine ore, headed to a forge to click the ore into ingots, clicked again to turn the ingots into weapons and armor, and then headed back to the hills to start all over again, each time raising Nils’ skill level some tiny fraction of a percentage point, inching him closer to the distant goal of 100 points and the illustrious title of Grandmaster Blacksmith.

Take a moment now to pause, step back, and consider just what was going on here: Every day, month after month, a man was coming home from a full day of bone-jarringly repetitive work with hammer and nails to put in a full night of finger-numbingly repetitive work with “hammer” and “anvil” — and paying $9.95 per month for the privilege. Ask Stolle to make sense of this, and he has a ready answer: “Well, it’s not work if you enjoy it.” Which, of course, begs the question: Why would anyone enjoy it?5

Why? Anyone who has spent more than a few hours trying to complete 15 a game knows the feeling: You get to a point where there’s a sequence of tasks you know you have to complete to proceed further into the world, but the tasks themselves are more like chores than entertainment, some- thing you have to do, not something you want to do: building roads and laying power lines, retreating through a tunnel sequence to find an object

5 Julian Dibbell, “The Unreal-Estate Boom,” Wired, January 2003.

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you’ve left behind, conversing with characters when you’ve already memo- rized their lines. And yet a large part of the population performing these tasks every day is composed of precisely the demographic group most averse to doing chores. If you practically have to lock kids in their room to get them to do their math homework, and threaten to ground them to get them to take out the trash, then why are they willing to spend six months smithing in Ultima? You’ll often hear video games included on the list of the debased instant gratifications that abound in our culture, right up there with raunchy music videos and fast food. But compared to most forms of popular entertainment, games turn out to be all about delayed gratification — sometimes so long delayed that you wonder if the gratifica- tion is ever going to show.

The clearest measure of the cognitive challenges posed by modern 16 games is the sheer size of the cottage industry devoted to publishing game guides, sometimes called walk-throughs, that give you detailed, step-by-step explanations of how to complete the game that is currently torturing you. During my twenties, I’d wager that I spent somewhere shockingly close to a thousand dollars buying assorted cheat sheets, maps, help books, and phone support to assist my usually futile attempt

to complete a video game. My relationship to these reference texts is inti- mately bound up with my memory of each game, so that the Myst sequel Riven brings to mind those hours on the automated phone support line, listening to a recorded voice explain that the lever has to be rotated 270 degrees before the blue pipe will connect with the transom, while the play- ful Banjo-Kazooie conjures up a cheery atlas of vibrant level maps, like a child’s book where the story has been replaced with linear instruction sets: jump twice on the mushroom, then grab the gold medallion in the moat. Admitting just how much money I spent on these guides sounds like a cry for help, I know, but the great, looming racks of these game guides at most software stores are clear evidence that I am not alone in this habit. The guidebook for the controversial hit game Grand Theft Auto alone has sold more than 1.6 million copies.

Think about the existence of these guides in the context of other forms 17 of popular entertainment. There are plenty of supplementary texts that accompany Hollywood movies or Billboard chart-toppers: celebrity pro- files, lyrics sheets, reviews, fan sites, commentary tracks on DVDs. These texts can widen your understanding of a film or an album, but you’ll almost never find yourself needing one. People don’t walk into theaters with guide- books that they consult via flashlight during the film. But they regularly rely on these guides when playing a game. The closest cultural form to the game guide is the august tradition of CliffsNotes marketed as read- ers’ supplements to the Great Books. There’s nothing puzzling about the existence of CliffsNotes: we accept both the fact that the Great Books are complicated, and the fact that millions of young people are forced more
or less against their will to at least pretend to read them. Ergo: a thriving market for CliffsNotes. Game guides, however, confound our expectations:

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because we’re not used to accepting the complexity of gaming culture, and because nobody’s forcing the kids to master these games.

The need for such guides is a relatively new development: You didn’t 18 need ten pages to explain the PacMan system, but two hundred pages barely does justice to an expanding universe like EverQuest or Ultima. You need them because the complexity of these worlds can be overwhelming: You’re stuck in the middle of a level, with all the various exits locked and no sign of a key. Or the password for the control room you thought you found two hours ago turns out not to work. Or the worst case: You’re wander- ing aimlessly through hallways, like those famous tracking shots from The Shining, and you’ve got no real idea what you’re supposed to be doing next.

This aimlessness, of course, is the price of interactivity. You’re more 19 in control of the narrative now, but your supply of information about the narrative — whom you should talk to next, where that mysterious package has been hidden — is only partial, and so playing one of these games is ulti- mately all about filling in that information gap. When it works, it can be exhilarating, but when it doesn’t—well, that’s when you start shelling out the fifteen bucks for the cheat sheet. And then you find yourself hunched over the computer screen, help guide splayed open on the desk, flipping back and forth between the virtual world and the level maps, trying to find your way. After a certain point—perhaps when the level maps don’t turn out to be all that helpful, or perhaps when you find yourself reading the help guides over dinner—you start saying to yourself: Remind me why this is fun?

So why does anyone bother playing these things? Why do we use the 20 word “play” to describe this torture? I’m always amazed to see what our brains are willing to tolerate to reach the next level in these games. Sev- eral years ago I found myself on a family vacation with my seven-year-old nephew, and on one rainy day I decided to introduce him to the wonders

of SimCity 2000, the legendary city simulator that allows you to play Robert Moses to a growing virtual metropolis. For most of our session, I was con- trolling the game, pointing out landmarks as I scrolled around my little town. I suspect I was a somewhat condescending guide—treating the virtual world as more of a model train layout than a complex system. But he was picking up the game’s inner logic nonetheless. After about an hour of tinkering, I was concentrating on trying to revive one particularly rundown manufactur- ing district. As I contemplated my options, my nephew piped up: “I think we need to lower our industrial tax rates.” He said it as naturally, and as confidently, as he might have said, “I think we need to shoot the bad guy.”

The interesting question here for me is not whether games are, on the 21 whole, more complex than most other cultural experiences targeted at kids today — I think the answer to that is an emphatic yes. The question is why kids are so eager to soak up that much information when it is deliv- ered to them in game form. My nephew would be asleep in five seconds

if you popped him down in an urban studies classroom, but somehow an

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hour of playing SimCity taught him that high tax rates in industrial areas can stifle development. That’s a powerful learning experience, for reasons we’ll explore in the coming pages. But let’s start with the more elemental question of desire. Why does a seven-year-old soak up the intricacies of industrial economics in game form, when the same subject would send him screaming for the exits in a classroom?

The quick explanations of this mystery are not helpful. Some might 22 say it’s the flashy graphics, but games have been ensnaring our attention since the days of Pong, which was—graphically speaking—a huge step backward compared with television or movies, not to mention reality. Oth- ers would say it’s the violence and sex, and yet games like SimCity—and indeed most of the best-selling games of all time — have almost no violence and sex in them. Some might argue that it’s the interactivity that hooks, the engagement of building your own narrative. But if active participa- tion alone functions as a drug that entices the mind, then why isn’t the supremely passive medium of television repellant to kids?

Why do games captivate? I believe the answer involves a deeper prop- 23 erty that most games share—a property that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has spent time in this world, but one that is also strangely absent from most outside descriptions. To appreciate this property you need to look at game culture through the lens of neuroscience. There’s a logical reason to use that lens, of course: If you’re trying to figure out why cocaine is addictive, you need a working model of what cocaine is, and you need a working model of how the brain functions. The same goes for the question of why games are such powerful attractors. Explaining that phenomenon without a working model of the mind tells only half the story.

. . . Cultural critics like to speculate on the cognitive changes induced 24 by new forms of media, but they rarely invoke the insights of brain science and other empirical research in backing up those claims. All too often, this has the effect of reducing their arguments to mere superstition. If you’re trying to make sense of a new cultural form’s effect on the way we view the world, you need to be able to describe the cultural object in some detail, and also demonstrate how that object transforms the mind that is apprehending it. In some instances, you can measure that transformation through traditional modes of intelligence testing; in some cases, you can measure changes by looking at brain activity directly, thanks to modern scanning technology; and in cases where the empirical research hasn’t yet been done, you can make informed speculation based on our understand- ing of how the brain works.

To date, there has been very little direct research into the question of 25 how games manage to get kids to learn without realizing that they’re learn- ing. But a strong case can be made that the power of games to captivate involves their ability to tap into the brain’s natural reward circuitry. Because
of its central role in drug addiction, the reward circuits of the brain have been extensively studied and mapped in recent years. Two insights that have emerged from this study are pertinent to the understanding of games. First, neuroscientists have drawn a crucial distinction between the way the brain

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seeks out reward and the way it delivers pleasure. The body’s natural pain- killers, the opioids, are the brain’s pure pleasure drugs, while the reward system revolves around the neurotransmitter dopamine interacting with specific receptors in a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens.

The dopamine system is a kind of accountant: keeping track of 26 expected rewards, and sending out an alert — in the form of lowered dopa- mine levels—when those rewards don’t arrive as promised. When the pack-a-day smoker deprives himself of his morning cigarette; when the hotshot Wall Street trader doesn’t get the bonus he was planning on; when the late-night snacker opens the freezer to find someone’s pilfered all the Ben & Jerry’s — the disappointment and craving these people experience is triggered by lowered dopamine levels.

The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp calls the dopamine system the 27 brain’s “seeking” circuitry, propelling us to seek out new avenues for reward
in our environment. Where our brain wiring is concerned, the craving instinct triggers a desire to explore. The system says, in effect: “Can’t find the reward you were promised? Perhaps if you just look a little harder you’ll be in luck — it’s got to be around here somewhere.”

How do these findings connect to games? Researchers have long sus- 28 pected that geometric games like Tetris have such a hypnotic hold over
us (longtime Tetris players have vivid dreams about the game) because the game’s elemental shapes activate modules in our visual system that execute low-level forms of pattern recognition—sensing parallel and per- pendicular lines, for instance. These modules are churning away in the background all the time, but the simplified graphics of Tetris bring them front and center in our consciousness. I believe that what Tetris does to our visual circuitry, most video games do to the reward circuitry of the brain.

Real life is full of rewards, which is one reason why there are now so 29 many forms of addiction. You can be rewarded by love and social con- nection, financial success, drug abuse, shopping, chocolate, and watching your favorite team win the Super Bowl. But supermarkets and shopping malls aside, most of life goes by without the potential rewards available

to you being clearly defined. You know you’d like that promotion, but it’s a long way off, and right now you’ve got to deal with getting this memo out the door. Real-life reward usually hovers at the margins of day-to-day existence — except for the more primal rewards of eating and making love, both of which exceed video games in their addictiveness.

In the gameworld, reward is everywhere. The universe is literally teem- 30 ing with objects that deliver very clearly articulated rewards: more life, access to new levels, new equipment, new spells. Game rewards are fractal; each scale contains its own reward network, whether you’re just learning
to use the controller, or simply trying to solve a puzzle to raise some extra cash, or attempting to complete the game’s ultimate mission. Most of the crucial work in game interface design revolves around keeping players noti- fied of potential rewards available to them, and how much those rewards are currently needed. Just as Tetris streamlines the fuzzy world of visual

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reality to a core set of interacting shapes, most games offer a fictional world where rewards are larger, and more vivid, more clearly defined, than life.

This is true even of games that have been rightly celebrated for their 31 open-endedness. SimCity is famous for not forcing the player along a pre- ordained narrative line; you can build any kind of community you want: small farming villages, vast industrial Coketowns, high-centric edge cities

or pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods. But the game has a subtle reward architecture that plays a major role in the game’s addictiveness: the soft- ware withholds a trove of objects and activities until you’ve reached cer- tain predefined levels, either of population, money, or popularity. You can build pretty much any kind of environment you want playing SimCity, but you can’t build a baseball stadium until you have fifty thousand residents. Similarly, Grand Theft Auto allows players to drive aimlessly through a vast urban environment, creating their own narratives as they explore the space. But for all that open-endedness, the game still forces you to complete a series of pre-defined missions before you are allowed to enter new areas of the city. The very games that are supposed to be emblems of unstructured user control turn out to dangle rewards at every corner.

“Seeking” is the perfect word for the drive these designs instill in their 32 players. You want to win the game, of course, and perhaps you want to see the game’s narrative completed. In the initial stages of play, you may just be dazzled by the game’s graphics. But most of the time, when you’re hooked on a game, what draws you in is an elemental form of desire: the desire to see the next thing. You want to cross that bridge to see what the east side of the city looks like, or try out that teleportation module, or build an aquarium on the harbor. To someone who has never felt that sort
of compulsion, the underlying motivation can seem a little strange: You want to build the aquarium not, in the old mountaineering expression, because it’s there, but rather because it’s not there, or not there yet. It’s not there, but you know — because you’ve read the manual or the game guide,
or because the interface is flashing it in front of your eyes — you know that
if you just apply yourself, if you spend a little more time cultivating new residents and watching the annual budget, the aquarium will eventually be yours to savor.

In a sense, neuroscience has offered up a prediction here, one that 33 games obligingly confirm. If you create a system where rewards are both clearly defined and achieved by exploring an environment, you’ll find human brains drawn to those systems, even if they’re made up of virtual characters and simulated sidewalks. It’s not the subject mat- ter of these games that attracts—if that were the case, you’d never see twenty-somethings following absurd rescue-the-princess storylines like the best-selling Zelda series on the Nintendo platform. It’s the reward sys- tem that draws those players in, and keeps their famously short attention spans locked on the screen. No other form of entertainment offers that cocktail of reward and exploration: We don’t “explore” movies or television

or music in anything but the most figurative sense of the word. And while there are rewards to those other forms — music in fact has been shown to

JoHnSon WHy gAMES ARE good foR you 493

trigger opioid release in the brain—they don’t come in the exaggerated, tantalizing packaging that video games wrap around them.

You might reasonably object at this point that I have merely dem- 34 onstrated that video games are the digital equivalent of crack cocaine. Crack also has a powerful hold over the human brain, thanks in part to its manipulations of the dopamine system. But that doesn’t make it a good thing. If games have been unwittingly designed to lock into our brain’s reward architecture, then what positive value are we getting out of that intoxication? . . .

Here again, you have to shed your expectations about older cultural 35 forms to make sense of the new. Game players are not soaking up moral counsel, life lessons, or rich psychological portraits. They are not having emotional experiences with their Xbox, other than the occasional adrena- line rush. The narratives they help create now rival pulp Hollywood fare, which is an accomplishment when measured against the narratives of Pac- Man and Pong, but it’s still setting the bar pretty low. With the occasional exception, the actual content of the game is often childish or gratuitously menacing—though, again, not any more so than your average summer blockbuster. Complex social and historical simulations like Age of Empires

or Civilization do dominate the game charts, and no doubt these games do impart some useful information about ancient Rome or the design of mass transit systems. But much of the roleplay inside the gaming world alter- nates between drive-by shooting and princess rescuing.

De-emphasizing the content of game culture shouldn’t be seen as a 36 cop-out. We ignore the content of many activities that are widely consid- ered to be good for the brain or the body. No one complains about the simplistic, militaristic plot of chess games. (“It always ends the same way!”) We teach algebra to children knowing full well that the day they leave the classroom, ninety-nine percent of those kids will never again directly employ their algebraic skills. Learning algebra isn’t about acquir- ing a specific tool; it’s about building up a mental muscle that will come

in handy elsewhere. You don’t go to the gym because you’re interested in learning how to operate a StairMaster; you go to the gym because operat- ing a StairMaster does something laudable to your body, the benefits of which you enjoy during the many hours of the week when you’re not on a StairMaster.

So it is with games. It’s not what you’re thinking about when you’re 37 playing a game, it’s the way you’re thinking that matters. The distinction is not exclusive to games, of course. Here’s John Dewey, in his book Experi- ence and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only that particular thing he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes,
of likes and dislikes, may be and often is much more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history that is learned. For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.”6

6John Dewey, Experience and Education (London: Collier, 1963), p. 48.

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This is precisely where we need to make our portrait of the rhinoceros 38 as accurate as possible: defining the collateral learning that goes beyond the explicit content of the experience. Start with the basics: Far more than books or movies or music, games force you to make decisions. Novels may activate our imagination, and music may conjure up powerful emotions, but games force you to decide, to choose, to prioritize. All the intellectual benefits of gaming derive from this fundamental virtue, because learn- ing how to think is ultimately about learning to make the right decisions: weighing evidence, analyzing situations, consulting your long-term goals, and then deciding. No other pop cultural form directly engages the brain’s decision-making apparatus in the same way. From the outside, the primary activity of a gamer looks like a fury of clicking and shooting, which is why
so much of the conventional wisdom about games focuses on hand-eye coordination. But if you peer inside the gamer’s mind, the primary activ-
ity turns out to be another creature altogether: making decisions, some of them snap judgments, some long-term strategies.

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Reading as a Writer: analyzing Rhetorical Choices

1. Why do you think Johnson opens with the debate that pits the playing of video games against the practice of reading? Where exactly does he dive in with his own perspective on debate? What is the “sleight of hand” he refers to in para- graph 5? How do his examples in the following paragraphs complicate this sim- plistic debate about the relative virtues of video games and reading? What are your thoughts on this debate?

2. Johnson has a very distinctive voice on the page, and often addresses the reader as “you”—practice that is unconventional in researched writing. Locate at least three sentences in which you think Johnson’s voice is particularly distinctive, and discuss what happens in those sentences that captures your attention. What insights (about tone, word choice, rhetorical strategy) might you apply to your own writing?

Writing as a Reader: entering the Conversation of ideas

1. Johnson and S. Craig Watkins share an interest in paying close attention to activities widely thought of as “time-wasters.” They draw different con- clusions about what we can learn from the ways people (especially young people) use online time and video games. Compose an essay in which you use insights from both authors to make a point about the positive and negative aspects of online time and video games, using specific examples to illustrate your points, as these authors do. What is the significance of your findings?

2. Johnson argues that “everything bad is good for you”; Eric Schlosser, on the other hand, argues almost the opposite in his attack on advertising to “Kid Kustomers.” Using the strategies these authors employ, write an essay in which you argue against the prevailing opinion that some aspect of