_zombies or mad scientists?

1
_zombies or mad scientists?

• Computers and English
• Matt Barton

2
_old fashioned persuasion

• This book is an old-fashioned work of persuasion
  that ultimately aims to convince you of one
  thing popular culture has, on average, grown
  more complex and intellectually challenging over
  the past thirty years. (xiii)

3
_key claims

1. By almost all the standards we use to measure
   readings cognitive benefits, the nonlinearity of
   pop culture has been steadily growing more
   challenging over the past thirty years.
2. The nonliterary pop culture is honing different
   mental skills that are just as important as the
   ones exercised by reading.

4
_sleeper curve

• The landscape of popular culture involves the
  clash of competing forces
• The neurological appetites of the brain
• The economics of the culture industry
• The development of technology
• This is the ultimate test of the Sleeper Curve
  even the crap has improved. (91)

5
_nothing to canonize here

• I do not believe that most of todays pop
  culture is made up of masterpieces that will
  someday be taught alongside Joyce and Chaucer.
  (11)
• But they are more complex and nuanced than the
  shows and games that preceded them. (11)

6
_lets get cognitive

• I think there is another way to assess the
  social virtue of pop culture, one that looks at
  media as a kind of cognitive workout, not as a
  series of life lessons. (14)

7
_rewards of reading

• What are the rewards of reading?
• The information conveyed by the book
• The mental work you do to process and store that
  information.

8
_games

• Games are not novels, and the ways in which they
  harbor novelistic aspirations are invariably the
  least interesting thing about them. (21)

9
_this game is hard work

• The dirty little secret of gaming is how much
  time you spend not having fun. (25)
• The clearest measure of cognitive challenges
  posed by modern videogames is the sheer size of
  the cottage industry devoted to publishing game
  guides. (28)

10
_neuroscience

• The power of games to captivate involves their
  ability to tap into the brains natural reward
  circuitry. (34)
• Most of the crucial work in game interface
  design revolves around keeping players notified
  of potential rewards available to them. (36)

11
_rewards

• If you create a system where rewards are both
  clearly defined and achieved by exploring an
  environment, youll find human brains drawn to
  those systems. (38)
• No other form of entertainment offers that
  cocktail of reward and explorationwe dont
  explore movies or TV. (38)

12
_decisions

• Games force you to make decisions.
• Learning how to think is ultimately about
  learning to make the right decisions weighing
  evidence, analyzing situations, consulting your
  long-term goals, and then deciding. (41)
• These decisions are predicated on two modes of
  thinking probing and telescoping.

13
_probing

• In the videogame world, rules are rarely
  established in their entirety before you sit down
  to play. (42)
• You have to probe the depths of the games logic
  to make sense of ityou get results by trial and
  error, stumbling across things, and following
  hunches. (43)
• Gamers are learning the basic procedure of the
  scientific method. (45)

14
_telescoping

• I call the mental labor of managing simultaneous
  objectives telescoping because of the way the
  objectives nest inside one another like a
  collapsed telescope. (54)
• The closest analog to the way gamers are
  thinking is the way programmers think when they
  write code. (55)

15
_word problems

• I would argue that the cognitive challenges of
  videogaming are much more usefully compared to
  another educational genre the word problem. (58)

16
Raph Koster
17
_television

• What does televisions increased complexity look
  like?
• Multiple Threading
• Flashing Arrows
• Social Networks

18
_reality television

• Perhaps the most important thing about reality
  programming is that the format is reliably
  structured like a videogame. (92)

19
_emotional quotient

• TV turns out to be a brilliant medium for
  assessing other peoples emotional intelligence
  or AQa property that is too often ignored when
  critics evaluate the mediums carrying capacity
  for thoughtful content. (99)

20
_the internet

• The rise of the Internet has challenged our
  minds in three fundamental and related ways
• By being participatory
• By forcing users to learn new interfaces
• By creating new channels for social interaction

21
_the net

• TV and automobile society locked people up in
  their living rooms, away from the clash and
  vitality of public space, but the Net has
  reversed that long-term trend. (124)
• Google is our cultures principle way of knowing
  about itself. (121)

22
_film where the curve levels off

• Film has historically confronted a ceiling that
  has reigned in its complexity, because its
  narratives are limited to two to three hours.
  (131)
• Lord of the Rings is several times more
  challenging than Star Wars. (125)