Posts filed under 'Popular Perception'
Games are art. Many may be very bad art, and many gamers may not give one groat about the question. But games are art.
Roger Ebert published an article two days ago following up on the ongoing discussion he kicked off about a year ago on whether games are art. He said “no” a year ago, now he says “not high art.” His main opponent in this debate is Clive Barker, here.
Game bloggers and journalists are continuing to weigh in on the subject (here, for instance, and here).
I figure I’ll just add my own quick opinions.
Games in general and video games in particular are obviously a distinctive kind of art, although arguing about what is and isn’t a game is just as valuable as arguing about what is and isn’t art. (That is, it’s very valuable for trying to understand what a game is, useless if you’re just doing it to make some peripheral point.)
Games may not yet have reached their full potential as art, but they’re an extremely exciting form of it. Like movies, some games experiment with technique and craft more than art. But also like movies, modern video games share something with all other forms of art—visual artistry, music, narrative—while adding the very exciting element of interactivity.
It’s this interactivity which, for some bizarre reason, forms the crux of Ebert’s argument against games as art. The artist’s work is where art begins, but the audience—the players, when the artwork is a game—are where art happens. The Mona Lisa is much more than Da Vinci’s paint spread on poplar wood. It’s the crowds in the Louvre, the great capers and thefts, the doctoral dissertations, the imitations and parodies, the games themselves
, and even things like The Da Vinci Code (which inspired a movie, a promotional game like the Bourne game, and endless debates and discussions).
The Mona Lisa is the emergent cultural phenomenon born of the painting, not the painting itself.
No other art genre has ever been so open to audience participation as games. No other art genre has the potential for emergent phenomena. Do games weaken the role of the artist? No more than Hollywood did. And in fact, all Hollywood and feature films really did was make it possible for collaborative art to come into its own. Great movies are the collaboration of directors, writers (too often undervalued), actors, and even suits who sign the checks.
Games are too, but more than anything else, they not only invite their audience to participate, they are art as audience participation.
So get out the chess board, the dice, or the Xbox, and let’s make some art!
July 23rd, 2007
This is apparently true, and it isn’t good. A couple obsessed with some online video game almost let their kids starve to death: Police: Babies starved as parents gamed (MSNBC.com).
The article basically sticks to the facts and is fair. And the events are an argument in favor of at least recognizing that video game playing can be a problem behavior for some people. I’m still not in favor of labeling video games as clinically addictive, despite the article’s link to discussions on the subject.
No, video games are not the problem; it’s the people themselves (in this case the parents) who are the problem. Yes, more kids are abused by drug-using parents, and those cases are all too often completely ignored. Maybe ’cause we’re jaded. Maybe ’cause we’re scared of thuggish drug users but not nerdy gamers. But that doesn’t mean we can’t pretend that no problems exist.
Most people who play video games use them very healthily. Most people who drink alcohol use it healthily, too.
So what to do?
What do the non-alcoholic friends of people with a problem do that genuinely helps? What do you do when your friends spend all their time and money at casinos?
What doesn’t work is calling the problem behavior a disease (it doesn’t help). Outlawing it doesn’t do any good either. And since I don’t have friends who have what I recognize as addictive or compulsive problem behaviors, I don’t really have any experience.
But what does work?
(Tangentially: I wonder if this is actually an argument for more voice chat in online games. I am not thrilled by voice chat in MMORPGs, ’cause I fear it will interfere with my ability to roleplay. But making the people you’re gaming with real and facilitating players actually getting to know one another may enable the same social support online that people get when they have healthy groups of real-life friends and coworkers.)
July 16th, 2007
Tony Long at the venerable Wired tackled the issue of video game addiction today. The topic ain’t dead.
But the article strikes me as a little naïve. Saying that “the answer lies in education, enlightenment and—in the case of video games, at least—a little physical and mental exertion” is all well and good, but will a visit to the batting cage and a trip to Carneigie Hall really do the trick?
It’s sort of like yelling “eat less” at people with overeating disorders. Sure, that’s where they need to go, but they can’t just do it in one step.
Tony’s right, though, that video games are problems for different people to the degree that they’re problems for different people. Some people’s lives are being ruined or damaged with (not by) video games.
If you know you have a problem, seek help. If you know someone who has a problem, intervene. I am trilled that people are talking about video game addiction as a real (if unclassified) problem, rather than using “addictive” as a marketing slogan.
But I shudder when I hear people talking about further regulation. The rating system is enough. Let’s not forget what Prohibition got us!
July 5th, 2007
I learned via Gaming Today that the Federation of American Scientists (founded by Manhattan Project scientists committed to ethical pursuits) actually believes kids should play more video games!
They write that video games “can teach higher-order thinking skills such as strategic thinking, interpretive analysis, problem solving, plan formulation, and execution, and adaptation to rapid change. With many technology companies farming out lower-level work to countries where employees come more cheaply, these are the sort of skills American students will need to possess once they hit the workforce.”
Note that FAS are developing three “serious games,” including one called Immune Attack. I think the game looks a bit too serious and educational and not quite enough fun and educational.
I’m not sure kids actually need more video game time. But I do think gaming is less of a worry than parents think, has the potential to be very useful, and at the very leasts is something people can relax about at least a little bit.
July 4th, 2007
The good folks at the University of Michigan (publishing in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine) have revealed the amazing fact that playing video games can cut down on homework time. You can find more readable summaries on almost every news web site out there (here’s one at random), although they tend to put spin and interpretation on the story.
The fact that video games interfere with homework is not news. Everyone knows there are lots of people who play too much and don’t get real-life things done.
While I think kids who read 30% less than they would otherwise are missing out, I’m not too worried about kids taking time away from homework to do some modest gameplay. Evidence abounds that kids today have too much homework (as well as too many structured activities thrust upon them by parents who want to overachieve through them and make up for being uninvolved). In fact, not too long ago NPR hosted a four-part series on the topic!
In the end, the study is horribly flawed. Using surveys from about 1,500 kids (not a bad number), it examines time spent on one weekday and one weekend day, which is simply not enough information to go on. Some folks cram all their homework into a quarter of the time and still get good grades. And we all know that getting good grades on homework correlates only poorly to actual intelligence, learning, and life preparedness—key things that the study didn’t examine at all.
It wouldn’t be even a little bit surprising to find that, on average, gamers actually perform better in school, on intelligence tests, and in life.
I’m certainly not advocating for an “unschooling” approach, allowing kids to play video games for eighteen hours a day if they’re so inclined. Good parent—and kids themselves, for that matter—know when video game playing is interfering with other parts of life. By all means, take steps to make sure that doesn’t happen! Set limits if necessary.
But don’t discount even entertainment-oriented video games as stellar learning tools, either. Passion for anything challenging is a passion for learning.
July 3rd, 2007
Games are the best (and second-most effective) education tools available.
Slate had an article yesterday on educational video games that I think serves as a pretty good high-level survey of the ongoing discussion right now, especially since it pointed to Koster’s key point from some time ago that adding an artificial incentive to perform an educational activity isn’t very effective but requiring learning in order to achieve a genuinely interesting goal does. (Koster responds directly to Slate’s article here.)
Here are two things I know:
- People will go way out of their way to acquire skills and learn things that help them achieve a goal that interests them and that they perceive as achievable.
- When people are motivated to learn something for such goals, they learn it faster and more efficiently than they will under any other circumstance (except in cases where survival is at stake, in which case they may achieve an even greater efficiency).
In other words, when people understand why learning something is worth their while—when they recognize for themselves the reward—they have all the motivation they need. Thus self-motivated, they will learn more rapidly than they ever would in a classroom or at a parent’s insistence.
I know a dozen people whose vocabulary exceeded their own parents’ (though with a geekier slant) thanks to Gary Gygax’s sesquipedalianism.
I knew a boy, something of a slacker, who rapidly learned the fundamentals of programming when he got caught up in a game in which you could tweak the code of your virtual robot to increase its chances in fights. (Alas, I don’t remember the name of the game.)
To make a video game—or any game, for that matter—that is effectively educational, the designer or design team has to focus on two key elements: goals and obstacles.
This is, of course, exactly what any halfway decent game designer already does. MMOs, for example, primarily focus on power-acquisition goals that are just fun enough to justify the obstacle of spending more time playing the game. The goals have to be satisfying, however arbitrary, and the obstacles have to be just challenging enough that people don’t think they can’t surmount them but do feel a sense of accomplishment when they do. A series of increasingly difficult obstacles centered on a theme, ubiquitous in all game design, is the right approach.
But to be educational, the obstacles have to require something more than just dedication or quicker button-pushing. Some RPGs (such as some of the Ultima games) require a little bit of language acquisition in order to complete them.
I’m willing to bet that a child (or grown-up for that matter) could get the benefit of six years of class-learning in a foreign language in the course of about two months of regular gameplay in an immersive single-player spy-based roleplaying adventure game in which acquiring the actual skill to learn the language was essential to completing the game and the mini-goals along the way provided the tools to do so. Early goals would require demonstrable skill in simple vocabulary and easy phrases. Later goals would hone in on those subtle points of a language that can trip a non-native speaker up, punishing sloppy and quick reading with setbacks and rewarding fluency with access to better in-game skills and tools and, ultimately, the final parts of the story.
The game could offer language instruction directly, in the form of mini-games or simulated classroom learning, but also reward language fluency acquired outside the game. If people find they learn faster on their own, they’re free to do so, but if they enjoy the in-game learning, that’s available too.
A couple of months after the game’s release (if the game is done right), high schoolers across the country would be chattering in French during study hall.
(I’m not an expert on the economics of the game industry, but I’m willing to bet that an A-list game of this sort sold at $50 would be able to make far more money than a language-learning program sold at $150)
Am I crazy? I know I’d drop fifty bucks on a well-written game like that in a nanosecond. Not because I’d finally learn French, but because I’d like a damn good, immersive spy-themed adventure-RPG set in the period after World War II. (Base it on Tim Powers’s incredible Declare to get some good supernatural elements, and I’ll spend $150!)
June 28th, 2007
For the past several weeks, lots of stories concerning video game addiction have come out, in part because the American Medical Association has been chattering about it, trying to come to a conclusion on whether video games can properly be classified as addictive.
As a passionate gamer, I’ll ring in with my opinion. By the popular definition of “addiction,” I think it’s safe to say that some people do get addicted to video games, MMORPGs in particular. At least, many people play them compulsively, to the point that they ignore other important aspects of their life.
I know this because I have acquaintances who do this and friends who do this, and because I’ve done it myself. In fact, MMOs are specifically designed to entertain with a system of reinforcement and punishment that fosters addictive or at least compulsive behavior. Such games are certainly more worthwhile than slot machines—they have social dimensions and narrative richness and cost a lot less. But the lower cost actually means that people sink more time into leveling their characters or questing for gear than they’d ever do feeding slugs into a one-armed bandit.
Whether or not this behavior is properly defined as a psychiatric addiction is, to me, irrelevant. The fact is that it can mess up people’s lives.
So can alcohol, of course.
In fact, I think treating video game addiction like alcoholism is probably the best approach. We don’t need to outlaw or even further regulate video games, but we do need to watch ourselves and those close to us for signs of problem behavior. Let’s be honest with ourselves, seek help when we need it, and help others when they’re in need.
So even though I think the AMA and the media mostly say pretty silly things about video games and addiction, I’m very glad people are talking about it!
Do we have any other ex-addicts out there? If so, how did you break your addiction?
And hey, if you think you have a problem and don’t know where to turn, you can speak up here safely and anonymously. There are tried-and-true methods that work, and we can talk about them.
June 27th, 2007
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