Everything Bad Is Good For You

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Everything Bad Is Good For You

• Steven Johnson

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• There are deep-seated appetites in the human
  brain that seek out reward and intellectual
  challenge
• .a strong case can be made that the power of
  games to captivate involves their ability to tap
  into the brains natural reward circuitry
• The nonliterary popular culture is honing
  different mental skills that are just as
  important as the ones exercised by reading books

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• The popular culture has been growing increasingly
  complex over the past few decades, exercising our
  minds in powerful new ways
• Compare the epic scale and intricate plotting of
  the Lord Of The Rings trilogy to the original
  Star Wars trilogy
• Toy Story, Shrek, Finding Nemo all follow far
  more intricate narrative pathways than The Lion
  King, Mary Poppins or Bambi

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• Games arent into instant gratification. Theyre
  all about delayed gratification
• Most of the best-selling games of all time have
  almost no sex or violence in them
• The violent games may generate the most outrage,
  but the games that people reliably line up to buy
  are the ones that require the most thinking
• Most of the crucial work in games interface
  design revolves around keeping the players
  notified of potential rewards available to them,
  and how much those rewards are currently needed

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• When youre hooked on a game, what draws you in
  is an elemental form of desire the desire to see
  the next thing.
• Its not what youre thinking about when youre
  playing a game its the way that youre thinking
  that matters
• Far more than books or movies or music, games
  force you to make decisions
• A four-part process for playing a game Probe,
  hypothesize, reprobe, rethink (based on James
  Paul Gees work)

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• Continuous partial attention Youre paying
  attention, but only partially.
• The shows that have made the most demands on
  their audience have also turned out to be the
  most lucrative in television history
• Multi-threading when we watch TV, we intuitively
  track narrative-threads-per-episode as a measure
  of a given shows complexity
• And all the evidence shows that this standard has
  been rising steadily over the past two decades

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• London cabdrivers had, on average, larger regions
  of the brain dedicated to spatial memory than the
  ordinary Londoner (Uni College, London)
• The ability to analyse and recall the full range
  of social rships in a large group is just as
  reliable a predictor of professional success as
  your uni grades

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• The rise of the Internet has challenged our minds
  in 3 fundamental and related ways by virtue of
  being participatory, by forcing users to learn
  new interfaces, and by creating new channels for
  social interaction
• In just 2 yrs, the number of active bloggers in
  the US alone has reached the audience size of
  prime-time network television

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• A decade ago, Douglas Rushhoff talked of
  screenagers the 1st generation that grew up
  with the assumption that the images on a
  television screen were supposed to be
  manipulated that they werent just there for
  passive consumption
• The next generation is carrying that logic to a
  new extreme the screen is not just something you
  manipulate, but something you project your
  identity onto, a place to work thru the story of
  your life as it unfolds

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• The Sleeper Curve the steady increase in
  intellectual rigour and content in the popular
  culture of the past 3 decades
• The most important ingredient of this Sleeper
  Curve Time (the Lord Of The Rings trilogy lasts
  more than 10 hrs)

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• The Flynn Effect In the past 46 years, the
  American people have gained 13.8 IQ points on
  average
• The effect had gone unnoticed because IQ exams
  are routinely normalised to ensure than a person
  of average intelligence scored 100 on the test
• A person who tested in the top 10 in the 1920s
  would be in the bottom one-third for IQ scores
  today

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• Improved education is not responsible for the
  Flynn Effect
• There are some worrying trends in the statistics
  but beneath, a strangely encouraging trend
  continues Where pure problem-solving is
  concerned, were getting smarter
• At the very high end of IQ the top 2 or 3
  percentile the curve levels off. A Mensa today
  would not run rings around a Mensa in 1900

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• The historical increase grew more dramatic the
  further the test ventured from skills - like
  maths or verbal aptitudes that reflect
  educational background.
• The Flynn Effect is most pronounced on tests that
  assess fluid intelligence. These tests often do
  away with words or numbers, replacing them with
  questions that rely exclusively on images,
  testing the subjects ability to see patterns and
  complete sequences with elemental shapes and
  objects

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• Recent study on hard-core gamers, occasional
  gamers, and non-gamers..
• The gaming popn turned out to be consistently
  more social, more confident, and more comfortable
  solving problems creatively.
• They also showed no evidence of reduced attention
  span compared with non-gamers
• Violent crime in US schools had been literally
  cut in half between 1992 and 2002, dropping from
  48 to 24 incidents per 100,000 students

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• What we should be celebrating is not the 10
  year-olds mastery of a specific platform
  Windows XP, sya, or the Gameboy but rather
  their seemingly effortless ability to pick up new
  platforms on the fly, without so much as a
  glimpse at a manual.
• Make a game too hard, and no one will buy it.
  Make a game too easy, and no one will buy it.
  Make a game where challenges evolve along with
  your skills, and youll have a shot at success

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• the blurring of lines between kid and grown-up
  culture 50 year-olds are devouring Harry Potter
  the median age of the video game-playing audience
  is 29 meanwhile infants are holding down two
  virtual jobs to make ends meet with a virtual
  family in The Sims.
• The cultural race to the bottom is a myth we do
  not live in a fallen state of cheap pleasures
  that pale beside the intellectual riches of
  yesterday.
• The great unsung story of our culture today is
  how many welcome trends are going up.