Everything Bad Is

Good For You

Steven Johnson
• 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 brain’s natural reward circuitry
• The nonliterary popular culture is honing
different mental skills that are just as important
as the ones exercised by reading books
• 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
• Games aren’t into instant gratification. They’re 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
• When you’re hooked on a game, what draws
you in is an elemental form of desire: the
desire to see the next thing.
• It’s not what you’re thinking about when
you’re playing a game; it’s the way that
you’re 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 Gee’s work)
• Continuous partial attention: You’re 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 show’s complexity
• And all the evidence shows that this standard
has been rising steadily over the past two
decades
• 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 r’ships in a large group is just
as reliable an predictor of professional
success as your uni grades
• 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
• 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 weren’t 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
• 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)
• 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
• 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, we’re 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
• 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 subject’s
ability to see patterns and complete
sequences with elemental shapes and objects
• Recent study on hard-core gamers,
occasional gamers, and non-gamers…..
• The gaming pop’n 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
• What we should be celebrating is not the 10
year-old’s 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 you’ll
have a shot at success
• …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.