Computer games are serious and the study of games even has a name: ludology, from the Latin ludere, to play.
'Everything Bad is Good For You' is the title of a persuasive book by Steven Johnson. The book suggests that modern popular culture is not, as some critics claim, relentlessly seeking out the lowest common denominator in entertainment but is, on the contrary, becoming more and more challenging. In Brave New World Aldous Huxley described a world in which 'soma' and 'feelies' had taken over from more demanding cultural activities, and people had become less human (see Woody Allen's Sleeper for a parody of this with hilarious 'Orb' scene).
Many contemporary critics have said the same about the present day but Steven Johnson begs to differ, he claims that the modern equivalent of soma and feelies make us smarter. TV shows have become more complex in their plot lines, they refer to previous episodes and other cultural artefacts and they include extensive social networks that the audience must retain. Johnson contrasts 'Starsky and Hutch' with 'The Sopranos' and '24' and concludes that the latter are much more demanding of cognitive (brain) activity (compare any sitcom such as 'I Love Lucy', 'Bewitched', 'Mr. Ed', etc. from the 1950s or 1960s with 'The Simpsons', 'South Park', 'Seinfeld', etc.)
Modern entertainment is complex and bears repeated viewing: it is deliberately made that way to increase sales; shows from 30-40 years ago were often 'pulp' but today's shows are carefully crafted and provide a "conversation with the individual". Even film, which has been least changed in recent times, has Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Syria and other complex stories. This sends you out to the video store (or online equivalent) to buy copies of your favourites so you can watch them over and over.
Johnson also makes a case for computer-based activities, in particular games, graphical operating systems (Windows, etc.) and the Internet. Millions of people are now not merely passive consumers of media products but active creators of their own content. 'Reality' TV includes real people (not always in the 'real' world!) and there is a fascination with watching their response to the machinations of the shows. People write 'blogs' in response to real-world events and provide their own commentary, some becoming famous. The principle of repetition clearly applies to computer games as people play them over and over again as they try to solve the puzzles they contain. Popular culture, therefore, has not 'dumbed down' but has become more sophisticated and intellectually demanding.
Dr. Spock's guide to bringing up children says that computer games are "a colossal waste of time" - but are they? In contrast Dr. Spock tells parents that they should "foster in your children a love of reading and the printed word". Andrew Solomon points out that "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."
On the other hand, Marshall McLuhan said that there is a problem with judging new cultural systems because of the hang over of cultural items from the recent past. Computer games are often compared unfavourably with books. But what if computer games had been invented before books, what might people then have said of books? Perhaps:
"They under-stimulate the senses, mere words on a page, solitary and isolating, stigmatise those who cannot read easily (the dyslexic), have a fixed linear narrative, no reader input, variation or creativity, reading is passive and submissive, following rather leading."
Non-literary popular culture has become more challenging over the last thirty years and is developing different skills that are as important as reading.
On the other hand the current education and jobs market values reading skills, you have to be a good reader to qualify in most professions and reading books forces you to create imaginary worlds in your head and informs you of worlds that the author has visited but which you couldn't imagine on your own. Gamers should read books as well.
Computer games are often very difficult to play and consume massive amounts of time - on-line games can consume weeks or months of time and a lot of money to achieve very little (in terms of the game itself). This is why there is a growing market in game artefacts, people are prepared to buy other people's time spent at a game; in China there are 'factories' of game players 'making' artefacts for sale and people write 'malware' to steal them.
Many computer games are so complex that they need lengthy 'walkthroughs' to describe all of their play. Games make sophisticated worlds with their own logic accessible to children of 9 or 10 e.g. SimCity and tax rates. Games can get people (children in particular) to learn without realising they are doing it (if they did realise they might stop!). Steve Jobs calls video games 'lean-forward' activities, the player participates actively. The Russian mathematician Andrei Kolmogorov defined complexity for any given string of information as the smallest number of bits of information into which the string can be compressed without losing any information (like compression algorithms for music and graphics). Early computer games (Pong, PacMan) could be summarised much more concisely than Grand Theft Auto (a walkthrough by one fan has 53,000 words).
Games tap into the brain's natural reward circuitry. The chief chemical involved in the reward system is dopamine. The dopamine system keeps track of expected rewards and sends out an alert if the rewards do not arrive as expected e.g. missing a cigarette at a fixed time, when a bonus is reduced or when a favourite beer is 'off' at the pub. The dopamine system encourages the brain to seek out new rewards in the environment and a desire to explore - who knows what rewards are out there waiting for us? It is well known that some drugs produce the same effect in the brain as natural chemical effects; in a way our brains are 'on drugs' all the time, this is part of the human condition. Games produce rewards that produce dopamine and pleasure in the brain, there is a 'buzz' that comes from performing a task correctly. The steady drip-feed of rewards keeps people with otherwise short spans of attention hooked for hours. Take away the rewards and people quickly lose interest, there's no longer anything in it for them.
The content of games remains pretty simple and basic: shooting and rescuing princesses. This, however, is true of most games, for example chess (demanding in the abstract mathematical sense but what is the content?) and bridge (likewise). Johnson, however, argues that it is not what you think about when you play games it is how you think when you are playing them. Like physical exercise playing games builds up mental muscle that you can apply to other situations. Educators sometimes talk about the 'hidden curriculum', the things that are not taught but which are still conveyed in lessons - described as "collateral learning" by John Dewey. Games force people to make decisions, to choose and prioritise - books, music, paintings don't do this. Weighing evidence, analysing situations, consulting long-term goals. Johnson identifies two modes of intellectual activity in game playing, probing and telescoping.
Video games are largely learned by playing them, the rules are revealed in game play rather than being set out and learned beforehand (as in chess or bridge). In video games the rules tend not to be set out so clearly, rather it is left to the player to discover them by playing the game. Johnson calls this 'probing' and likens it to scientific method:
Probing also seeks out the limits of the game or simulation where the player sees beyond the illusion to the "algorithms behind the curtain". Players often delight in describing the limits and flaws they have found in a game. Probing is one of the intellectual methods that is closely associated with playing video games and it has other uses in the modern technology-based world, as in figuring out how devices like video recorders and mobile phones work and in exploring how various interfaces work on computers and web pages. A game player receives a stream of empirical data from a game and uses this as the basis of decision-making: where to go, what to do, etc.
Johnson identifies another key intellectual achievement of playing video games as 'telescoping', whereby a long list of connected tasks and goals is collapsed like a telescope and expanded at will during game play. A stage of game play will have its own goal and in order to achieve it the player must solve a series of smaller puzzles that lead to the overall goal being achieved. The puzzles themselves may be difficult but they are only part of the whole. Typically a player must solve task 10 before he can solve task 9, which he must solve before task 8, and so on. When he is dealing with task 10 he must keep in mind that it lies at the end of a long chain of tasks that must be completed in order. While he is working on task 10 he must 'telescope' the previous nine, returning to them when he is ready. This telescoping is distinct from multitasking (which men supposedly cannot do!) and also from the narrative (story) of the game. Telescoping requires the distinct mental activity of planning long-term goals and in this respect is quite unlike reading a book, where the author does all the planning for you and the enjoyment comes from the author's skill and talent.
The mental activities of probing and telescoping are different from what is done when reading a book. It is often argued that 'reading', whatever the content, is a beneficial activity as, if nothing else, it prepares the reader for other more challenging material: it builds up intellectual 'muscle'. It is the same with playing games: probing and telescoping in video games do more than improve 'hand-eye coordination', they develop and enhance a whole range of intellectual skills and abilities that are useful both for playing more video games and for dealing with other important elements of the modern world. Video games are not separate from the 'real' world, they are a part of it and there is a two-way flow of skills into and out of games: put simply they are what we do. Another debate about video games is whether they are, as Dr. Spock observes, a 'colossal waste of time': the answer appears to be a resounding 'no'.
This mental activity, probing and telescoping, argues Johnson, is hard and has parallels in the increased mental activity needed to follow the plots and social worlds of modern TV and films. Contrast the limited world of Yogi Bear, Boo Boo and Mr Ranger or the limited characters in Scooby Doo with the vast social world and adult characters of The Simpsons, or Bambi and Dumbo with Toy Story and Finding Nemo. Probing and telescoping comes in useful in other situations, the 'mental muscle' has a purpose - what young person ever reads the manual for their new phone or other electronic device? Cognitive scientists believe that the most effective learning takes place at the edge of people's knowledge, building on what is already known with new problems. The problems should not be too hard or too easy or the student will give up. Game designers, along with TV and film script writers, if they want their products to be be successful, follow the principles of modern media design, that the product be challenging and suitable for repeated viewing or use.
The human brain does not, contrary to some opinions, seek out the path of least resistance (the Slacker theory), it casts around for new information and patterns to interpret. If the Slacker theory were true computer games would not have progressed at the rate they have over the last thirty years from Pong to GTA - why would slackers want to play them?
The content of video games is not as refined or as deep as that of literary fiction but video games are relatively young and it may be some time before game designers can produce the equivalent of Hamlet or Tender Is The Night (if ever). But video games are not meant to be literary masterpieces, their cognitive challenge lies elsewhere and it may be that they are more appropriately compared with mathematical puzzles and games than literary artefacts. This is scarcely surprising as games are by their nature formal mathematical systems and most players become aware of this. Video games run on digital machines on a grid of pixels, they feature arithmetic variables and scores and they are limited by the mathematical parameters on which they are based. The content of video games is dressing, a layer imposed on the underlying mathematical system and something of less interest for players than the core design and activities of the games. The achievement of video games is not that of portraying character or narrative or nuanced social world but in making the mind work hard in completing demanding tasks and making decisions
These changes in media artefacts probably help to account for the 'Flynn Effect', an observed increase in IQ over the last 50 years. Flynn's research was motivated by the conclusions of Arthur Jensen that there was a real gap between black and white IQ scores that was 'genetic' in nature as it couldn't be explained by education or social status. It was assumed by Jensen that the IQ tests used to reveal this gap between black and white scores were not culturally biased. Flynn used US army IQ data to set about proving that IQ scores were not culturally neutral in the way they measured intelligence and that differences between one group and another were due to "history not biology".
Military records showed an increase in African-American IQ scores over the past 50 years, suggesting that as access to education improved (through the Civil Rights movement) so too did IQ. However, Flynn also observed that white IQ scores had also risen: in 46 years Americans had gained an average 13.8 IQ points. This point had slipped by unnoticed because the IQ score is normalised to make 100 the average, whatever the actual scores around it. In recent years IQ has shown to be influenced more by environment than was previously imagined - the argument for the benefits of game playing strongly support this. Psychologists have also revealed that there are more aspects to intelligence than are tested by IQ. The Flynn Effect supports the influence of environment as it is the only viable explanation for a rise of 13.8 points in 46 years, people have not changed genetically in this period.
The significance of environment in IQ makes it difficult to compare scores between different groups and has recently led to calls for 'positive discrimination' in applications to university - post-code considerations, giving pupils from low-performing state schools lower offers, etc. But differences between generations of people from similar backgrounds are not so controversial as it is not the genes or the social position that have changed but something else in the environment. The parts of the IQ test that have improved are problem-solving, abstract reasoning, pattern recognition and spatial logic; tests of school-based material such as vocabulary and arithmetic have remained fairly static. What has stimulated these? You probably know the answer by now. The Flynn Effect is most pronounced in areas of IQ tests that deal with what is known as 'g', the index of 'fluid' intelligence that is not affected by environment or teaching.
Johnson notes that a person tested in 1920 with a score in the top 10% would, if he travelled forward in time, be in the bottom 30% in 2000 - a fact not taken account of in Dr. Who! Could the increase in IQ scores be the result of improved nutrition? Possibly, but improvements levelled out after the 1950s. Could the increase be due to improved teaching? The evidence is that skills taught in classrooms have been "flatlining or worse for much of the past forty years". The improved scores come in problem-solving and there is a strong possibility that this is due to the enriched media environment in which we now exist. Compare the cognitive environment of a ten-year old today with that of a child one hundred years ago. One had wooden toys, simple games chores and repetitive labour, the other has an X-Box, the Simpsons and Finding Nemo. Decision-making in video games, an increase in social and narrative complexity, the rewards of popular entertainment: which do you think has the higher IQ?
From Wikipedia:
Related to this, James Flynn's current explanation (Flynn 2007) is that environmental changes arising from modernization - such as more intellectually demanding work, greater use of technology and smaller families - have meant that people are far more used to manipulating abstract concepts such as hypotheses and categories than a century ago. Substantial portions of IQ tests deal with these abilities. He gives as an example the question 'What do a dog and a rabbit have in common?' - a modern respondent might say they are both mammals (an abstract answer), whereas someone a century ago might say that you catch rabbits with dogs (a concrete answer)
The Flynn Effect has little or no effect on the top 2-3 per cent of IQ scores, these people need stretching in ways other than those provided by video games if they are to improve. Newton and Einstein would have been the same with or without video games (they might never have found the time for the Laws of Motion or Relativity as they would have been too busy playing World of Warcraft!).
Flynn also suggests that what he discovered about changes in IQ undermines not only the genetics of IQ but also the link between IQ and real-world intelligence. He suggests that maths and science have made no more progress in recent years than they did fifty or a hundred years ago. Others might disagree with this. Some say that the 'easy' ideas have been picked from the tree and the remaining ones are harder to reach. Johnson points out that "the age of brain imaging, genome mapping and the microchip stacks up nicely against past eras - particularly when you look at the sheer number of individuals contributing groundbreaking work, as opposed to the isolated geniuses of the past." Also: "Flynn was right to say we should expect to find a cultural renaissance if the general rise in IQ truly measured an increase in intelligence. It's just that the culture turned out to be mass, not elite.
(From the book by James Paul Gee)
Video games allow the introduction of three areas of research:
Situated cognition - learning is situated in material, social and cultural world
New Literacy Studies - reading and writing are not just in people's heads but are social and cultural practices
Connectionism - humans are pattern recognisers, think best when reason on basis of patterns acquired from experience
Video games are a form of literacy, they create an ability to read the games themselves. Images can carry meanings independent of text; if you cannot 'read' the images they will not convey their meaning.
A semiotic domain is any set of practices that uses one or more modalities to communicate distinctive types of meanings (modality means the type of communication e.g. language, images, symbols, equations, graphs, sounds, gestures, artefacts). Examples: cellular biology, fashion adverts, any major theology, schools of painting, types of music (rap, folk, jazz, etc.), sports (football, cricket, basketball, etc.) and video games.
Everyday life is also a semiotic domain (dubbed the 'lifeworld domain' by Gee). People in the modern world need to be literate in a large number of semiotic domains. Becoming familiar with some semiotic domains may seem a 'waste of time'. Some would claim that playing video games is a waste of time because video games have no content and no one learns anything from them (except hand-eye coordination). Video games appear to offer nothing more than meaningless play, they do not supply knowledge of topics taught in school such as history or science. But an academic discipline is not primarily content in the sense of facts and principles, it is a lived and historically changing set of distinctive social practices through which 'content' is generated via distinctive ways of thinking, talking, valuing, reading and writing.
We never learn in general, we always learn something and that something is always connected to some semiotic domain. When we learn a new semiotic domain in an active way:
We learn to experience the world in new ways
We gain the potential to become affiliated with a social group (the existing members of the domain)
We gain resources that prepare us for future learning
We learn how to understand and produce meaning in the semiotic domain. For critical learning to take place the learner needs to understand the new domain as a system and also how to innovate in it. Learners will appreciate that each semiotic domain has its own design space that engages and manipulates people in certain ways and creates relationships.
Each semiotic domain has its own internal and external design grammar. The internal design grammar provides the principles and patterns that determine what is or is not acceptable in a semiotic domain. The external grammar is the principles and patterns that determine what is or is not an acceptable social practice in a semiotic domain. Semiotic domains are cultural and historical creations that are designed to engage and manipulate people in certain ways. They attempt to recruit people to think, act, value and feel in specific ways, to take on identities.
It is, argues, Gee, that in the non-lifeworld domains that people form affiliations with with others outside their own cultural groups and transcend the limitations of their own. Gee considers that "it is a poor form of respect for anyone to leave people trapped in their own culture and lifeworld as the whole and sole space within which they can move in the modern world. If this view comports poorly with some versions of multiculturalism, so be it." (Multiculturalism accepts differences between cultural groups so encourages them to remain within their own semiotic domains and not to venture into others and share meanings across cultural boundaries.)
Active, Critical learning principle - learning environment encourages active and critical learning
Design principle - learning about design and design principles is the core to learning experience
Semiotic principle - appreciation of multiple sign systems
Semiotic domains principle - learning involves mastering semiotic domains and participation in affinity groups
Metalevel thinking about semiotic domains principle - learning about the relations between different semiotic domains
Virtual identity is the one that you assume when playing a game. In first person shooter games this may be little more than a name (and what that reveals about you) while in role play games it may involve assigning more personality traits - inventive, truthful, mendacious, brave, quiet, reflective, meretricious, etc. with each quality playing a part in the game play.
Real identity is, as the name suggests, the real-world identity of the player.
Projective identity is a fusion of the virtual and real, the projection of real-world character traits (are you playing yourself?) into the virtual game character - "a creature whom I imbue with a certain trajectory through time defined by my aspirations for what I want that character to be and become".
To learn successfully an individual needs to commit themselves to an identity operating in the learning environment. If individuals have no faith in the learning environment then they will get nothing out of it. More, many individuals resist learning in school in the name of another identity that they see such learning as putting at risk e.g. a religious or ethnic identity or a 'cool', street-wise identity. Children from families that support classroom-style learning have fewer problems. Learners must: be enticed into trying, put in lots of effort and achieve meaningful success.
The learning environment should create a 'psychosocial moratorium' - a learning space where real-world consequences are lowered and the learner can take risks.
Skills need to be made automatic (like musical scales) and then extended and re-learned at a higher level - video games do this. General, purely verbal meanings that an individual cannot customise to specific situations and which offer the person no scope for embodied actions in different situations are useless (save for passing tests in school). If all you know are general meanings then you don't know anything that makes sense. In video games the player has to assemble understandings on the spot and face real consequences if he makes a mistake (e.g. his character is shot and dies). It is the consequences that allow the player to test whether the situation-specific meanings he has constructed are viable or not.
The four-stage probe-hypothesise-reprobe-rethink process underlies the formation of children's minds as they explore the world from infancy. Humans are voracious pattern-seekers and can see patterns even where there are none (faces in clouds, rocks, etc. - see the Grey Man of Merrick). People need patterns, based on experience, to solve new problems; a fact-based approach will not help with the new situation and a new fact must be learned.
Humans are poor at learning from information given to them outside of contexts where the information can be used. It is easier to assimilate new knowledge from information where the learner has some experience of the context and so can simulate the context in the mind. The dilemma is that humans need information but struggle to handle it without being immersed in the relevant context, and the contexts can be confusing without information and guidance. Video games have solved this problem (otherwise no one would buy them). Many games offer 'training modes' while others use existing knowledge of games to allow players to dive straight in and learn as they go.
"Our experiences in the world build patterns in our mind, and then the mind shapes our experience of the world (and the actions we take in it), which, in turn, reshapes our mind. Concepts are never set and finished. They are like a large tree that always seeks to rise higher (attain more generality) but that must always send into the ground deeper roots (return to embodied experience). This view of the mind... is quite different from the traditional one in psychology. In the traditional view, concepts are like general definitions in the mind (like definitions for words in dictionaries). In the traditional view, the mind thinks through stored 'facts' and grand generalisations that are like statements in logic. In the view I am developing here the mind thinks and acts on the basis of something like stored images (simulations) of experience, images that are complexly interlinked with each other (thereby attaining some generality) but that are always adapted to new experiences in ways that keep them tied to the ground of embodied experience and action in the world."
The first view leads to schools that teach children to memorise facts and important generalisations. The second view leads to schools that give children embodied experiences from which they can for networks of associations that must be rechecked against the world. Teachers need to guide the students as they create hypotheses.
These are images, narratives or metaphors that capture what a particular group finds 'normal' or 'typical' in regard to a given phenomenon. Social groups do not usually pay much attention to their cultural models unless one is threatened. Cultural models are the tacit, taken-for-granted theories we infer and then act on in the normal course of events when we want to be like others in our social groups. People with no cultural models would have to think, minute by minute, about their response to every situation, they would be paralysed. Cultural models do not give minute-by-minute accounts of interactions in society but provide general principles and guidance. Learners should have opportunities to think reflectively about their cultural models and about the nature of the semiotic domains they are trying to learn about. Video games provide the opportunity to play from the perspective of an alternative cultural model - from a 'good' or 'bad' perspective in Sonic or from a controversial perspective in 'Under Ash' (UnderSiege). Games could incorporate alternative cultural models with conversation and social interaction in place of violence (Sims-style). The virtual identities available might allow us to renew our hatred of other groups or to reduce it through understanding. Warfare games tend to treat heroes as superhuman and warfare as heroic - standing strong against the hordes. Some war games involve much less action than a fps and show that war is boring, confusing, things don't go as planned, orders are hard to follow, heroic behaviour gets you killed quickly.
School-oriented (baby-boomer) cultural models for learning: "The final goal is important, defines the learning, and good learners move towards it without being distracted by other things"; "Learning is a matter of some people being better or worse than others, and this is important"; When faced with a problem to solve, good learners solve it quickly the first time they try or soon after If you have to try over and over again this is a sign that you are not very good at what you are attempting to learn". These are linear models that stress the acquisition of greater skill until one has mastered the goal. Video games tend not to reward these models. They stress non-linear movement, exploring all around without necessarily moving forward, as well as linear movement. They stress multiple solutions judged by a variety of standards. Games can be competitive but players can set their own standards and play to those. In video games losing is not losing and the point is not winning easily or judging yourself a failure.
Video game play is often social in nature. Knowledge and skill is often distributed across a network or team of players. Knowledge and skills are distributed in tools and technologies. Game players' attitudes to games are reflective, they look at games as something to be explored and played with.
(By Raph Koster)
What is a game? An abstract formal system. Games are iconic, simplified, readily absorbed.
Why do we play games?
What makes a game interesting and fun? Mastery, understanding, solving puzzles. Learning is the drug.
What makes a game boring or hard or satisfying?
What parts of the brain do games work on?
Games are good teachers but what do they teach? A primal instinct to exercise power over a territory and its contents. To recognise underlying mathematical patterns.
Games once taught survival skills, running, jumping, shooting (enshrined in the Olympics), though some now teach skills for modern life e.g. networking.
There are 'get to the other side' games and 'visit every place' games that echo early cultural experiences.
We live most of our lives in the unconscious, action games let us stay there.
Games have improved their 'dressing' but the underlying models have stayed the same. For games to improve they need to develop their formal mathematical aspect.
(By Barry Atkins)
Can computer games be read as narrative fiction?
