Steven Johnson’s much-discussed book excerpt in the NY Times Magazine challenges the conventional wisdom that television rots the brain, arguing that TV today offers an incredibly rigorous cognitive workout. Multi-threaded narrative, a form first developed on television in soap operas, first found its way into more “serious” programming in the early 80s with Hill Street Blues, and has matured all the way up to the Sopranos, the West Wing and 24. Junk too, Johnson argues, has become more sophisticated. Reality shows like Survivor or the Apprentice explore well-worn territory like sex, money and ambition within a more complex, and at times intentionally confusing matrix, and raise the society of the spectacle to new heights. Much of this, it can be argued, is also influenced by video games, and a large part of Johnson’s book is apparently devoted to this.
On his blog, he brings attention to the question of gaming, and delivers a very funny satire on what would happen if it were actually books that were the new invention that had parents and educators in a frenzy, encroaching on the centuries-old civilization of the video game.
“Reading books chronically under-stimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding 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.”
It goes on…
Also worth reading is a nice post on Cognitive Daily about the uses of video games in education. And this piece – “Much Fun, For Credit” – from the Sunday Times about the recently instated “Game Arts & Sciences” program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.