Responding to Bob’s “games provide much more than a cognitive workout”…
Growing up in the 80s, video games were much less sophisticated and probably less effective as a matrix for training consumption. TV performed that role. I remember watching on Nickelodeon competitions between children in a toy store in which each contestant had 60, or 120 seconds to fill a shopping cart with as many toys as they possibly could. The winner — whoever had managed to grab the most — got to keep the contents of their cart. The physical challenge of the game was obvious. You could even argue that it presented a cognitive challenge insofar as you had to strategize the most effective pattern through the aisles, balancing the desirability of toys with their geometric propensity to fly off the shelves quickly. But did that excuse the game ethically?
I’ve played a bit of Katamari lately and have enjoyed it. It’s a world charged with static electricity, everything sticks. Each object has been lovingly rendered in its peculiarity and stubbornness. If your katamari picks up something long and narrow, say, a #2 pencil, and attaches to it in such a way that it sticks out far from the clump, it will impede your movement. Each time the pencil hits the ground, you have to kind of pole vault the entire ball. It’s not hard to see how the game trains visual puzzle-solving skills, sensitivity to shape, spatial relationships (at least virtual ones), etc.
That being said, I agree with Bob and Rylish that there is an internal economy at work here that teaches children to be consumers. A deep acquisition anxiety runs through the game, bringing to mind another Japanese pop phenom: Pokémon. Pokémon (called “Pocket Monsters” in Japan) always struck me as particularly insidious, far more predatory than anything I grew up with, because its whole narrative universe is based on consumption. “Collect ’em all” is not just the marketing slogan for spinoff products, but the very essence of the game itself. The advertising is totally integrated with the story. Here’s Wikipedia (not a bad source for things like this) on how it works:
“The Pokémon games are role-playing games with a strategy element which allow players to catch, collect, and train pets with various abilities, and battle them against each other to build their strength and evolve them into more powerful Pokémon. Pokémon battles are based on the non-lethal Eastern sport of fighting insects, but the Pokémon never bleed or die, only faint. The game’s catchphrase used to be “Gotta catch ’em all!”, although now it is no longer officially used.”
Similarly, the Katamari backstory involves the lord of the universe getting drunk one night and shattering the solar system. Each level of the game is the reassembly of a star or planet. If you succeed, a heavenly body is restored to the firmament.
After an hour playing Katamari, having traversed a number of wildly imaginative landscapes (and having absorbed a soundtrack that can only be described as Japanese chipmunks on nitrous) I re-enter the actual world in a mildly fevered state. The cardinal rule in the game is that to succeed I must devour as much as possible. No time is afforded to savor the strange, psychedelic topography, to examine the wonderful array of objects (everything from thumbtacks to blue whales) scattered about in my path. Each stage is a terrain that must be gobbled up, emptied. A throbbing orb of light in the upper left corner of the screen, set within concentric rings representing target diameters, measures my progress toward the goal: a katamari “n” meters in size. The clock in the upper right corner pressures me to keep rolling.
Video games today may not be as blatant as the consumerist spectacle of the Nickelodeon game, and they may provide richly textured worlds posing greater problem-solving challenges than any electronic media that has preceded them. But it seems to me that many of them do not differ ideologically from that shopping cart contest.
Wouldn’t it be just as easy to read this game as a kind of critique of / ironic commentary on the consumerist enterprise as it is to read it as a blatant example of diaper training for young capitalists? In a way, I think the Simverse or for that matter any number of MMPRGs are more insipid in the way that reify the consumerist enterprise. Many current roleplaying games are based no longer on an arcade-style score, but on simulated wealth aquisition, and on simulated popularity that goes hand in hand with the gold. Better than simulated assaults of prostitutes for pocket change, I suppose. Of course I’m not ultimately convinced that Steven Johnson would disagree with you on the ideological impact of many contemporary games. It’s been a few months since I read the book, but my impression was that he was trying to separate the question of the ethics and ideological impact of simulation from the effects of contemporary games on shaping intelligence and cognition.
I agree the Sims and role-playing games present richer examples of the consumer training ground. But while the ironic element of Katamari has definitely not been lost on me, I doubt the same could be said for the pre-school kids that spend hours in its thrall.
I guess my problem is that you can’t really separate questions of ethics and ideology from questions of intelligence and cognition. The two are intertwined. Johnson may have tried to carve out safe space for his arguments about intelligence, but his bumbling passages on television and politics (not to mention his reliance on IQ data — a politically bloated metric if there every was one) open him up to critique.
I don’t mean to say that every brain-teasing puzzle must be interrogated for political subtext (we’re not talking about the subtle oppression of the Rubik’s Cube). But it seems video games (and all digital technologies) have for the most part been spared examination in terms of their effects on development — silly doomsaying about the morally corrosive effects of Grand Theft Auto etc. notwithstanding.
I think it’s fair to say that for many children (and adults), video games, tv, and the web constitute a large, immersive world of simulation, mediation, however you want to put it. Such an expansive sphere of activity surely has a moral dimension, but the techno-optimism that tends to dominate discourse (at least on the web) seems to tell us there’s nothing to worry about.
To be honest, I had the same questions as you mention about his use of IQ statistics. He didn’t, for instance, take into account the mammoth and rapid expansion of the American higher education system during the same period. That just may have also had some effect on the IQ of our population in general. Also, when he tries to justify the fascination with reality shows as improving our emotional intelligence, there is a bit of a stretch going on. That’s sort of like saying that the Romans went to the circus to watch the gladiators in order to deepen their understanding of interpersonal relations. The aspect of the book that most interested me was Johnson’s demonstration that complex nonlinear story structures are now pervasive in many media, including games and television, and that as a culture we now demand and appreciate complexity in a different way than we did fifty or twenty years ago. And while I appreciate the fact that everything is ideological and that, well, most of American mass media is in fact bad for us, I do think that we can separate out the different effects that those media have on us. Children playing Grand Theft Auto, for interest, may well end up with a convoluted understanding of relations between genders, races, and classes, at the same time as they are better able to perform certain types of problem-solving tasks, and to better recognize patterns in general than they did before playing the game.
I agree with the fact that popular culture has been one dominant change in society that has led to a smarter general public, but I also agree with Scott that the quality of education has also improved tremendously. Better education has been a major factor in the rise in IQs but at-home cognitive workouts have also helped strengthen skills that help students succeed academically. Johnson chooses to focus on the at-home cognitive workouts that video games and television provide. I do not think that he purposely neglects to talk about other factors just because they might weaken his argument. In previous posts, he keeps restating the fact that there is much more to be written about this topic and only chose to discuss the entertainment aspect in detail. I’m sure that someone will write a book that focuses on the improvement in education that is responsible, in part, for higher average IQ scores–that is if one hasn’t already been written. I think that Johnson successfully rationalizes our society’s infatuation with popular culture and has made an attempt to comfort worried parents by pointing out that their children are actually benefiting, at least in some ways, from watching television and playing video games.