Social isolation and academic publishing

I’ve mentioned before that I’m sick of the media focus on how computer games are bad because they make you forget to go to the toilet, and tired of the obsession they have with games as an ‘addiction’.

So I was quite amused to find the following excerpt, as quoted by bibliobibuli:

Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical sound-scapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of words on the page. . . .

Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. . . .

But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. . . .

This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one.

Bibliobibuli points out that the excerpt is from a book called Everything bad is good for you and is a pisstake, an “imagined rendition of what some pompous, self-satisfied gamer would say about books had he never actually sat down and read one.” The book suggests that tv and video games, which are always accused of making us somehow dumber, are actually helping to stimulate our minds and giving us vigorous mental workouts. I don’t know how true this is, but what I like about this “imagined rendition” is how it shows that so many of the arguments against games can be shown to be based on prejudice and a one-sided, ill-informed view of what games involve.

M just found this great article by Nick Yee, which presents a different argument. Nick suggests that games, and Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games in particular, shouldn’t be seen as just different forms of media, passive forms of entertainment, “pointless at best and might actually be highly addictive and dangerous”.

He points out that:

…video gaming is much more like a hobby or past-time[sic] than passive exposure to media, and the critiques along the lines of addictiveness seem misplaced when we consider our cultural attitudes towards other past-times and hobbies. We seldom ask avid book readers how often they stay up late at night just to finish a chapter from their favorite author. We don’t ask avid mountain climbers how distracted they are while working because they are thinking of their next climb, or whether their spouses feel neglected when they go mountain climbing. We also don’t ask aspiring writers or actors how often their art consumes the rest of their lives. In fact, it’s perceived as noble to be consumed by artistic endeavors.

And goes on to suggest that:

Non-gamers scoff at the joy derived from looting a rare item or when a dragon raid succeeds. They wonder how so much happiness can be derived from something that is not real. The answer is that it’s an exact parallel of any other game. After all, achievement is entirely defined by the rules scaffolding. Getting a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal is as much a game as defeating Vox in EverQuest. It’s about a set of rules that were defined by us, not some universal guideline for achievement. The universe could not care any less about what we do. [emphasis mine]

I like this point! I wonder if, next time I go on a Dreadmines raid in WoW, I will be able to summon the nerve to suggest to some of my colleagues that I will have achieved the equivalent of getting an article published in Nature…

P.S. We still haven’t heard anything from the tv station about our interview, and the interview with Cozalcoatl and her husband, being aired. I’m kind of hoping the whole thing just gets archived in their footage library, never to see the light of day ever.

Categories: games, MMORPGs, obsession