Slashdot Mirror
Up, Up, Down, Down: Part Three
Younger Americans are used to being denounced as ignorant, violent, obsessive, even uncivilized. Increasingly, they don't care; they've stopped paying attention. Involvement in gaming can be seen as both manifestation and cause this schism, a profoundly significant force in culture and society. Gaming has affected almost everyone who grew up with it -- which is to say, just about half of the country.
Adults may quake at the transformation, but kids are completely at home with the joystick, the key to a new kind of civilization. "They take the powerful sensory presence and participatory formats of digital media for granted. They are impatient to see what comes next," writes Janet Murry of MIT.
How is the influence of gamers showing up in society? Hardly anyone has studed that systematically, but a decade of e-mailing, talking with, teaching, visiting and working with gamers has given me some impressions.
We know something about gamers. They're quick decision-makers, sometimes to the point of impulsiveness. Since their virtual lives depend on fast reactions, their real-life decision making processes become visceral, instinctive. Wishy-washy gamers are unsuccessful gamers, so gamers make a lot of quick decisions and feel confident about them. Therefore, gamers grow impatient when real world institutions and situations plod cluelessly along. Delayed decisions are costly.
Social stereotypes aside, gamers are team players, not loners. They may sit along at their consoles, but ultimately few game alone. They share strategies, tricks and accumulated wisdom on sites all over the Web. They learn to work in pairs and groups, anticipating their teammates' or partners' reactions, learning how to move, build, create and hunt in groups and packs, often with total strangers. When they do game with people they know, they can form powerful social bonds; they came to know their friends' intellects and instincts in unusual depth. (Check out this UC Berkeley study of Sims users.)
Gamers become strategic thinkers. Their imaginations have been continuously stretched. In the same way that chess players learn to think many moves ahead, gamers are always anticipating the games, their moves, and the moves of their teammates and opponents, virtual and human. In a way, gamers are more battle-tested in their decision-making than most people get to be.
And gamers are bringing much of what they've learned to the workplace:
Gareth e-mailed this message after Part One of "Up, Down ... appeared: ".. gaming has also inspired me to take ideas to the software engineers within [my] company. There are several increidle advances in game technology that could be directly applied to the corporate environment. For instance MMORPG's (Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games) have provided a system where people can virtualy interact while still mainting the visual cues that are required for large converstations to take place. This is a key component missing from the standard audio conferencing that occurs in the workplace. Visual cues are absolutely important for maintaining a sense of order during meetings, it prevents the vocal 'free for all' that occurs otherwise."
It seems inevitable that similiar kinds of ideas will be brought by gamers to educational environments, perhaps even politics.
Gamers are story-tellers. They inhabit increasingly imaginative virtual environments; they spent a substantial portion of their formative years interacting with stories, graphics and representations on screens that nearly become part of their neural systems. They are always telling tales, to one another and to themselves. In the mid-1990's computing power had become cheap enough so that companies like Silicon Graphics could build enormously powerful machines devoted to computer simulations, including their Reality Engine, which began to approach the long sought figure of 80 million polygons a second. Like the PS 2, the Reality Engine turned out to have a powerful impact on gaming and virtual reality.
Finally, gamers are smart. Again like chess players -- except that many video games are more complex -- gamers are often mentally over-stimulated. They can grow tense, keyed-up and narcissistic. They can also become obsessive (and yes, irritable) from focusing so intently on a narrative, character or conflict. Needless to say, they're competitive, as well as resourceful and extremely determined. Successful gaming requires a level of patience and commitment rarely associated with entertainment or, for that matter, education.
Kids of this generation will be different from any that has preceded them. But whether they will able to bridge the generational chasm that separated them from their elders, whether they apply their strategic thinking, creativity and problem-solving skills to our broken educational and political systems -- it's too soon to say.
The computer is the most powerful representational medium ever conceived. Seers like Murray have argued that computing should be put to the highest tasks of society. We know that gamers are the new prophets and story-tellers of society, that gaming is approaching a universal generational experience. So gamers are important. It seems clear that the future is in their hands.
Here's a bit of my own, totally non-scientific, research:
Kids don't care if the games are full of the latest 3D-mega-graphic technologies or not. The games I've seen kids play are very often old platform games on the Nintendo emulator (the old 8 bit NES). OK, the graphics and sound aren't up to par with the newest games, but the gameplay keeps the kids involved for hours and hours, month after month.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Gamers are the new artists, visionaries, and story-tellers of our time, sparked by astonishingly inventive new technologies like the PS 2. Ready or not, they will become increasingly influential.
Bah. Sounds way to serious to me to be fun.
This is just like the cant you get from athletic "supporters" about football turning kids into leaders.
My hobby is martial arts, and we're totally infected by the ego tripping idea that just participating makes us better/more spiritual/more disciplined people. The fact is that plenty of us are short sighted, mean spirited and impulsive. The really important things -- leadership, creativity, spiritual development don't come from our hobbies -- they're more a matter of character. Sure there are a rare few in the martial arts world who do find a kind of transcendence in the practice, but I expect that it has more to do with who they are than anything else. Perhaps they'd find a kind of spiritual transcendence in philately. Frankly these people aren't the crashing bores who are droning on and on about their terrific spiritual development or superhuman discipline.
I expect that there's been too much hype about how video games rot your brain and degrade your morals. The answer to that isn't counterhype, just the recognition that sometimes you just need to have some fun, even if it isn't completely wholesome. I'm not going to stop eating chocolate because it has saturated fats and refined sugar, I just don't make it my total diet.
Freud said sometimes a cigar is just a cigar; sometimes a game is just a game. Even nascent ubermen to be need to take a break now and then.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Uh, no. Game developers are, maybe. And I'll include gamers who make levels or skins. But players? They're at best the new audience for artists and story-tellers.
Anyone else get the impression that Slashdot now functions largely as a self-esteem booster for teenagers? First, everyone here was made out to be an "open-source hacker". As the site filled with readers who can't compile, let alone code, everyone with a Red Hat CD he may or may not have installed became a "member of The Community".
Then the Columbine stuff drew a crowd that a) couldn't care less about Linux and b) craves flattery even more than the old gang did. Jon Katz steps forward with article after article about how Napster kiddiez, game console owners and pompous, disgruntled teenagers are "geeks", "visionaries", "artists", "revolutionaries"...
Come on, kids. If you're not willing to go outdoors or to talk to girls, at least learn to use your computer. Read this largely unnoticed Ask Slashdot and see what being a geek is really about.