Jan 1
Intelligent thoughts on video games
This was Ashok’s response to my piece on video games:
I agree with you, and I don’t agree. Video games aren’t the problem, and it is true that parenting and schools are to blame.
But OK. Let’s probe a little deeper, and let’s ask how one gets a culture to change. If we need parents and schools to teach their children how to read, how do we go about doing that?
The simplest solution, of course, is to strive for a culture that says “reading first, all other things second.” So that would mean television, movies and games are all out the window.
Now the simplest solution isn’t the best solution, nor is it the one in conformity with our society’s values. We’re all democratic and enlightened, so what we do is call for specialization on the business model. Note your continual use of business language in your response, words like “job” and “business” and on a deeper level, “solve problems” and “think creatively,” which could have come out of a marketing seminar. The only allusion to the fact that reading might involve taking the past more seriously is that yes, video games teach history, which I can attest they do very well. Whether they teach philosophy, ethics, appreciation of different religions, art history, or introduce people to epics and literature or the worldview that sometimes underlies different systems of mathematics even – note that the Greek concept of number was very different from ours, and purposely so – well, all that stuff might involve a logic that is divorced from specialization.
Yet it is specialization that is the answer that is implied in your post. There’s a “job” parents and educators have. And, of course, what do we have to tell them that they have such a job? Oh yeah, nothing, that’s right. The economic libertarianism that capitalism thrives on implies a moral libertarianism, because in order to make progress, you can’t determine in advance what is most efficient. But when the chips are down, of course, we can blame the traditional modes of doing things as if they were conceived in the light of market efficiency.
Look, I’m not going off on your response because you’re wrong. You’re not wrong. But your response has a meta-problem: It just hits false blame back with not-so-false blame.
The irony is that video games that truly engage show exactly how learning takes place. A world of the imagination is brought to life, and participants in that world imagine themselves to be someone else, and respond differently than they normally would to the circumstances of that world. When video games teach, then, they do so not accidentally, but because they transcend the logic of “each should do the best at what has been appointed.” If video games were optimized for the market, they would be like those cigarettes that are nothing more than nicotine delivery devices, where companies researched how to deliver the most addictive possible dose of nicotine to the consumer, all legally.
The fact is, when you think through the problem, video games are a good, but accidentally so, and whether society is better off having accidental goods or having made way for essential goods – like reading habits that explore the past conveyed by parents who do have authority and educators that are not merely thought of as laborers or experts but instead as caretakers – well, when that’s considered, it might turn out that video games, like television and movies, are a symptom of a decline we can’t even track, for we have no standard with which to work from.
1 Comment so far
Thanks for posting this. I regret how it sounds nasty in places; I need to work on phrasing a little better. I certainly owe you both for posting this and having given me the initial prompt.