Books vs. Videogames

You know you're a Gutenbergosaur lumbering mournfully around in a post-literate ice age when you read something like this, from Farhad Manjoo's Salon review of Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good For You:

Of course, Johnson makes clear, he loves books (they provide, for starters, his livelihood). Still, his criticism of books' lack of interactivity -- even if it's offered as a purposefully specious point -- is valid. Books may promote a wide range of mental exercises, and a certain book may send your mind skittering in a dozen euphoric directions, but there are things that a book simply will not, cannot, do. Books don't let you explore beyond the narrative. Their scenery is set, and what's there is all that's there. You may have liked to have visited some of Gatsby's neighbors, but you can't. Books also don't ask you to make decisions, and in a larger sense don't require you to participate. You sit back and watch a book unfold before you. The book's possibilities are limited; what will happen is what's written on the next page. Read it a thousand times, still Rabbit always runs.

So this should be plain: Because they're interactive, video games promote certain mental functions that books do not.

Books don't require you to participate?? To a Gutenbergosaur, these hip young ADD-heads have it exactly backwards. It's TV (which Johnson and Manjoo also praise for making us smarter) and movies that are the passive experiences. Sure, when their plots and subplots are complex and their jokes fast and subtle, as in "Seinfeld" or "The Sopranos," they keep us on our toes, engaging our attention and quickening our perception-and-response time. But we're still just responding. Nothing is left to the imagination. When you read a book, you direct your own movie in your own head. You give the characters faces, bodies, voices. An extraordinary labor of visualization and bringing-to-life is involved, though passionate readers hardly notice because it is a labor of love. You drop some abstract ink squiggles into your brain, dissolve them, and give birth to living people and bustling scenes, drawing on the raw materials of your own experience, memory and fantasy to compose something you've never seen before. When you read, you are a co-creator. TV and movies have plot lines no less fixed and linear than books, plus you have no role in creating what you see: faces, bodies, voices and scenes are all provided for you, ready-made. Videogames do allow you to co-create plot, but you can only choose -- like a consumer -- the appurtenances of your character, not conjure them up fresh from the depths of your own imagination.

I once speculated that the hallucinogenic experiences of older baby boomers were much more elaborate, mystical and epic than those of their younger siblings (who mostly used LSD and the like for bizarre party fun) because older boomers were the last generation to grow up on books, when TV was small and black-and-white and an insignificant competitor. Everyone has the power to generate original mental imagery -- we all do it when we dream -- but I'll never believe that a mental diet of prefab pop-culture imagery can train that power the way reading does. That's why we've become such a culture of samplers and appropriators, with imaginations that are more recombinant than regenerative.

- amba

Comments

[wavemaker]

I have a son who has Aspergers Syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism that is characterized by certain social deficits and some form of unusual brilliance. One of his usual forms of socialization is on-line gaming with other kids from around the world. While they play, they gas and kibitz just like any group of kids at a skate park (minus the exercise). One of his talents is cartooning. He invents superhero-type characters and creates their adventures inside of a video game universe.

He likes to read, but he unfortunately doesn't have the capability of prolonged attention.

[amba]

The nature and quality of attention has changed for everyone -- kids with certain attention deficits are only the most obvious examples. There is so much coming at us that we have to be as quick as jugglers. Our minds are by nature fragmented and patchworked. Books are a medium native to times that had a very different consistency of time -- long, dark winters with little to do but sit by the fire.

That said, I should add that I think interactive videogames are a great and completely new medium. Ironically, the only one I've ever played . . . well, there was "Leisure Suit Larry," but never mind. The only one I've ever seriously played was "Myst," which was modeled on a book. But it wasn't a book. You could click on something in an illustration and go deeper in, which struck me as absolutely revolutionary, and which altered my way of seeing the world, as every genuinely new medium does.

[wavemaker]

My wife took away my Myst because I kept slinking into bed after 2am....Man, that tram ride between islands was awesome (especially in the dark).