Steven Johnson has written a bold little book that very nearly undermines the only moral precept of my adult life: thou shalt not get into video games, since then thou really won’t, ever, get any work done. Thank heavens, his argument wasn’t quite that good; but it came extremely close.
His key thesis is this: ‘popular culture has been growing increasingly complex over the past few decades, exercising our minds in powerful new ways.’ He economically dispatches the notion that culture has anything to tell us about moral right- eousness, which is a blessing, since I (racistly) never quite trust Americans to know the difference between proselytising and educating. It isn’t showing us the difference between right and wrong, this output, but it is making us more cognitively competent.
He starts on the video game, a more lucrative industry, worldwide, than music and books combined. Traditionally, people who seek to excuse the Grand Theft Auto fixation of their offspring concentrate on its benefits for hand-eye co-ordination. This is the least of it, Johnson argues, and rightly I think, since who needs co-ordination anyway? (I don’t have any— it costs me quite a lot in car insurance, but otherwise my intelligence is unimpaired.)
‘The first and last thing that should be said about the experience of playing today’s video games… is that games are fiendishly, sometimes maddeningly, hard.’ This is the price of the interactivity —unlike in fiction, you are in control of the narrative, but you don’t enjoy enough control to actually know the rules. Not unless you play an awful lot. It’s ‘ultimately about filling in the information gap’, which, in turn, gives you an element of deferred gratification, and teaches you ‘the probe, hypothesise, reprobe, rethink’ cycle, which is ‘the basic procedure of scientific method’.
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