[tt] Tom Chatfield: Rage against the machines

[Premise Checker]

This change in the way the brain is trained is far more important than all 
government school "reform" efforts.

Tom Chatfield: Rage against the machines
Prospect Magazine June 2008 issue 147
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=3D10209
[Linked by Arts and Letters Daily.]

Modern video games mean big business, and big controversy. Yet most
of the charges levelled against games--that they stunt minds and
spark addiction--are based on an outdated understanding of what
gamers do when they sit down to play

Tom Chatfield is assistant editor of Prospect. He is writing a book
about video games.

Mogwai is cutting down the time he spends playing World of Warcraft.
Twenty hours a week or less now, compared to a peak of over 70. It's
not that he has lost interest--just that he's no longer working his
way up the greasy pole. He's got to the top. He heads his own guild,
has 20,000 gold pieces in the bank and wields the Twin Blades of
Azzinoth; weapons so powerful and difficult to acquire that other
players often (virtually) follow Mogwai around just to look at them.
In his own words, he's "e-famous." He was recently offered $8,000
for his Warcraft account, a sum he only briefly considered
accepting. Given that he has clocked up over 4,500 hours of play,
the prospective buyers were hardly making it worth his while. Plus,
more sentimentally, he feels his character is not his alone to sell:
"The strange thing about this character is that he doesn't just
belong to me. Every item he has he got through the hard work of 20
or more other people. Selling him would be a slap in their faces."
As in many modern online games, co-operation is the only way to
progress, with the most challenging encounters manageable only with
the collaboration of other experienced players. Hence the need for
leaders, guilds--in-game collectives, sometimes containing hundreds
of players--and online friendships measured in years. "When I
started, I didn't care about the other people. Now they are the only
reason I continue."
When Mogwai isn't online, he's called Adam Brouwer, and works as a
civil servant for the British government modelling crisis scenarios
of hypothetical veterinary disease outbreaks. I point out to him a
recent article in the Harvard Business Review, billed under the line
"The best sign that someone's qualified to run an internet startup
may not be an MBA degree, but level 70 guild leader status." Is
there anything to this? "Absolutely," he says, "but if you tried to
argue that within the traditional business market you would get
laughed out of the interview." How, then, does he explain his
willingness to invest so much in something that has little value for
his career? He disputes this claim. "In Warcraft I've developed
confidence; a lack of fear about entering difficult situations; I've
enhanced my presentation skills and debating. Then there are more
subtle things: judging people's intentions from conversations,
learning to tell people what they want to hear. I am certainly more
manipulative, more Machiavellian. I love being in charge of a group
of people, leading them to succeed in a task."
It's an eloquent self-justification--even if some, including Adam's
partner of the last ten years, might say he protests too much. You
find this kind of frank introspection again and again on the
thousands of independent websites maintained by World of Warcraft's
more than 10m players. Yet this way of thinking about video games
can be found almost nowhere within the mainstream media, which still
tend to treat games as an odd mix of the slightly menacing and the
alien: more like exotic organisms dredged from the deep sea than
complex human creations.
This lack has become increasingly jarring, as video games and the
culture that surrounds them have become very big news indeed. In
March, the British government released the Byron report--one of the
first large-scale investigations into the effects of electronic
media on children. Its conclusions set out a clear, rational basis
for exploring the regulation of video games. Since then, however,
the debate has descended into the same old squabbling between
partisan factions. In one corner are the preachers of mental and
moral decline; in the other the high priests of innovation and life
2.0. In between are the ever-increasing legions of gamers, busily
buying and playing while nonsense is talked over their heads.
The video games industry, meanwhile, continues to grow at a dizzying
pace. Print has been around for a good 500 years; cinema and
recorded music for around 100; radio broadcasts for 75; television
for 50. Video games have barely three serious decades on the clock,
yet already they are in the overtaking lane. In Britain, according
to the Entertainment & Leisure Software Publishers Association, 2007
was a record-breaking year, with sales of "interactive entertainment
software" totalling =A31.7bn--26 per cent more than in 2006. In
contrast, British box office takings for the entire film industry
were just =A3904m in 2007--an increase of 8 per cent on 2006--while
DVD and video sales stood at =A32.2bn (just 0.5 per cent up on 2006),
and physical music sales fell from =A31.8bn to =A31.4bn. At this rate,
games software, currntly our second most valuable retail
entertainment market, will become Britain's most valuable by 2011.
Even books--the British consumer book market was worth =A32.4bn in
2006--may not stay ahead for ever.
In raw economic terms, Britain is doing rather well out of this
revolution. We are the world's fourth biggest producer of video
games, after the US, Japan and Canada (which only recently overtook
Britain thanks to a new generous tax regime for games companies).
Here is a creative, highly skilled and rapidly growing industry at
which we appear to excel. 2008, moreover, is already almost certain
to top last year's sales records thanks to the April release of the
hugely hyped Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA IV), the brainchild of
Edinburgh-based company Rockstar North. Worldwide, GTA IV grossed
sales of over $500m in its first week, outperforming every other
entertainment release in history, including the Harry Potter books
and Pirates of the Caribbean films.
The media analysis that accompanied GTA IV's triumph was of a
markedly higher quality than it would have been even a few years
ago. But truly joined-up thinking about the relationships between
games, society and culture is still rare. The Observer, for example,
let three of its higher-brow cultural critics loose on GTA IV--a
quasi-anthropological exercise typified by the author and critic
Bidisha's comment that "whoever scripted these incidentals should
call HBO and pitch a show, leaving the rest of the team to design
more hit-and-runs," seemingly unaware that for a budding
screenwriter, scripting incidentals for games like GTA IV might
represent at least as desirable a career path as pitching shows to
US pay television services. On the other side, the Labour MP Keith
Vaz responded to news of a reported stabbing in a queue to purchase
the game in Croydon by telling the Times that GTA IV "is a violent
and nasty game and it doesn't surprise me that some of those who
play it behave in this way." Given that the GTA series has to date
sold over 70m units worldwide, the fact that "some" players may be
violent is hardly a revelation.

***

That the media stumbles and gropes when discussing video games is an
old story. More dismayingly, however, similar failings are to be
found in a new book by Susan Greenfield, renowned neuroscientist and
head of the Royal Institution. Under the title ID: The Quest for
Identity in the 21st Century (Sceptre), Greenfield sets herself the
task of exploring one of the "great questions" facing us: what will
interactive electronic media mean for personal identity and society
over the next hundred years? Never one to avoid speculation,
Greenfield ranges widely. Her central concerns are, however, easy
enough to summarise: every individual's mind is the product of a
brain that has been personalised by the sum total of their
experiences; with an increasing quantity of our experiences from
very early childhood taking place "on screen" rather than in the
world, we thus face a potentially profound shift in the nature of
these minds. Specifically, Greenfield goes on to suggest, the
fast-paced, second-hand experiences created by video games and the
internet may inculcate a worldview that is less empathetic, more
risk-taking and less contemplative than what we tend to think of as
healthy. We may see people's mental lives transposed to "the
fast-paced, immediate world of screen experience: a world arguably
trapped in early childhood, where the infant doesn't yet think
metaphorically."
Greenfield's prose--a near-continuous train wreck of redundancies,
mixed metaphors and self-contradictions ("this literally incredible
concept," "an ever-changing visual image")--is perhaps the worst
enemy of her attempts to persuade. This is unfortunate, because
however much technophiles may snort, she is articulating widely held
fears that have a basis in fact. Unlike even their immediate
antecedents, the latest electronic media are at once domestic,
mobile and work-related, blurring the boundaries between these
spaces, and video games are at their forefront, both in terms of the
time users lavish on them and their ceaseless technological
innovation. A generational rift has opened that is in many ways more
profound than the equivalent shifts associated with radio or
television: more alienating for those unfamiliar with new
technologies, more immersive for those who are. How do lawmakers
regulate something that is too fluid to be fully comprehended or
controlled; how do teachers persuade students of the value of an
education when what they learn at play often seems more relevant to
their future than anything they hear in a classroom?
Greenfield asks plenty of compelling questions, but her answers are
disappointing. "If your life story is to be unique, if you are to be
truly individual, then you will need to see yourself as different
from everyone else," she postulates. True enough, but about as
sociologically potent as the observation that we are made of atoms.
If such criticism seems petty, it's important to note that
Greenfield's is an especially pernicious brand of imprecision, in
that it is likely only to harden opinion on both sides of the
debate: those outside the gaming culture will retain their fears and
prejudice, while gamers will become even more convinced that all
objections to their pursuit are ill-informed and irrelevant.
Yet beneath the hysterical rhetoric of many objectors, there are
eminently reasonable concerns. Spending time playing video games
means not spending time on more traditional leisure activities, such
as sport, reading or conventional socialising. And, seen from the
outside, the benefits of playing thousands of hours of video games
can be hard to pinpoint (improvements to hand-eye co-ordination
notwithstanding). What would Adam's life be like if he had been aged
15, or ten, when he started playing World of Warcraft, rather than
25? Might his life even now be better, and richer, if he didn't
spend quite so much time online?
The physiological and psychological mechanisms that electronic games
harness are certainly powerful. Not all the horror stories are
rumour. In September 2007, a 30-year-old Chinese man in Guangzhou
died after playing an online game for three straight days--the
fourth death since 2005 directly attributable to excessive
game-playing. In 2007, the American Medical Association looked into
defining video game addiction as a formal diagnosis, and although it
ultimately rejected this idea, there are already clinics treating
such addiction in China, South Korea and Amsterdam. Like almost all
activites we find somehow compulsive, gaming induces our bodies to
produce elevated levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine within a
part of the brain known as the nucleus accumbens. Certain kinds of
games are, however, especially adept at elevating levels of dopamine
over long periods of time via their combination of structured tasks
and varied, regular rewards. Gaming is undeniably a problem for
some. While there are no agreed-upon statistics, a recent study at
Stanford University suggests that men are more likely than women to
respond compulsively to games, while a 2007 poll of 1,178 US
children and teenagers concluded that 8.5 per cent of youth gamers
(aged 8 to 18) could be classified as pathological or clinically
"addicted" to playing video games.

***

Seeking further perspective, I spent an afternoon with a very
different kind of gaming insider: Adam Martin, a lead programmer for
NCE Studio, the British outpost of one of the world's largest online
games developers, NCsoft. Adam came to his post via a computer
science degree at Cambridge and several IT start-ups, and is
currently filling his spare hours writing games on his laptop to
help him master Korean--the language of a country with the most
highly evolved electronic gaming culture in the world. "Computer
games teach," he tells me. "And people don't even notice they're
being taught. They're having too much fun. I think the next big
change will come from the use of video games in education." But
isn't the kind of learning that goes on in games rather narrow? "A
large part of the addictiveness of games does come from the fact
that as you play you are noticeably getting 'better,' learning or
improving your reflexes, or mastering a set of challenges. But
humanity's larger understanding of the world comes primarily through
interaction and experimentation, through answering the question
'what if?' Games excel at teaching this too."
Adam is a believer, in a quietly evangelical manner--"The thing that
bugs me is this," he says as we circle around the implications of
the Byron report, "how many of the people dooming and glooming about
children and games have bothered asking a child what they think, or
why they play?" And the Byron report itself? "It seems a sensible
approach to the issues, albeit not very well informed when it comes
to gaming." So there's no reason to panic? "Not when probably half
the British population have now played an electronic game."
One view that chimes with these observations can be found in a book
Greenfield herself invokes at several points, Steven Johnson's
Everything Bad is Good for You (Allen Lane). Since the book's
publication in 2005, Johnson's argument in favour of what he labels
the "Sleeper curve"--the steadily increasing intellectual
sophistication of modern popular culture--has become something of a
shibboleth for futurologists. To some, such as Malcolm Gladwell
writing in the New Yorker, the book was a delightful piece of "brain
candy"; to others, like the Guardian's Steven Poole, it was "an
example of a particular philistine current in computer-age
thinking." Johnson's thesis is not that electronic games constitute
a great, popular art to be set alongside the works of Dickens or
Shakespeare, but that the mean level of mass culture has been
demanding steadily more cognitive engagement from consumers over the
last half century. He singles out video games as entertainments that
captivate because they are so satisfying to the human brain's desire
to learn. It's almost a mirror image of Greenfield's vision. Where
she sees an identity-dismantling intoxication, Johnson finds "a
cocktail of reward and exploration" born of a desire to play that is
active, highly personal, sociable and creative. Games, he points
out, generate satisfaction via the complexity and integrity of their
virtual worlds, not by their robotic predictability. Testing the
nature and limits of such in-game "physics" has more in common with
the scientific method than with a futile addiction, while the
complexity of the problems children encounter within games exceeds
that of any of the puzzles of logic and reasoning they might find at
school.
A similar proposition was put to Greenfield at the launch of her
book at the Royal Institution in May. Invoking Niels Bohr's famous
retort--"you're not thinking, you're just being logical!"--she
argued that there are ways of thinking that playing video games
simply cannot teach. She had a point. We should never forget, for
instance, the unique ability of books to engage and expand the human
imagination, and to gift us the means of more fully expressing our
situations in the world. Similarly, the study and performance of
music teach a unique beauty. But the patterns of player behaviour
found within many popular video games consist of far more than a
banal flattening of ideas and personalities, or a dryly "logical"
sequence of rote moves. Take the activities of Adam/Mogwai and his
fellow guild members during one of their three weekly "raiding
missions" within World of Warcraft. First, a team of 25 players with
a spectrum of abilities and equipment have to meet at a pre-arranged
time and place within the game world, under an agreed leader. All
players must remain in vocal communication, via microphones and
headsets, at all times. The raid itself might take up to ten hours,
and is to be conducted according to a painfully researched strategy.
Essentially an assault on a heavily fortified dungeon, it will
entail mass attacks on a succession of powerful computer-controlled
"boss" creatures, each with unique abilities, demanding a unique
attack strategy. Players with missile abilities will attack from a
distance, healers will keep other players alive, while melee
specialists will engage at close quarters, all to a strict
timetable. The rewards gained from each encounter--usually advanced
equipment--will be allocated according to an in-guild system,
depending upon rank, experience, need, contribution and the whim of
the guild leader. Those failing to pull their weight could face
being summarily ejected.
Still more elaborate is the science fiction game Eve Online, which
involves players ganging together to build spaceships. One of the
first of the largest class of such ships took a consortium of around
22 guilds--just under 4,000 players in total--eight months to
complete, a task that involved complexities of training, materials,
role allocation and management that would put many companies to
shame.
The complexity of games like Warcraft and Eve is not the only aspect
of modern gaming to defy stereotype. Consider demographics: where
once gaming was the preserve of adolescent males, players
increasingly come from all age groups and both sexes. According to
the Entertainment Software Association of America, the world's
largest gaming association, the average American video game player
is now 35 years old and has been playing games for 12 years, while
the average frequent buyer of games is 40. Moreover, 40 per cent of
all players are women, with women over 18 representing a far greater
portion of the game-playing population (33 per cent) than boys aged
17 or younger (18 per cent). Much of the recent growth in the value
of the gaming industry has been driven by the increased diversity
and affluence of its consumer base; the hard core of adolescent
males are no longer central. In Britain, Ofcom's annual
Communications Market report for 2007 noted that, despite the
electronic games market continuing to grow in value, significantly
fewer children were playing console and computer games than two
years previously (61 per cent of children aged 5-15 did so regularly
in 2005, compared to 53 per cent in 2007).
Perhaps most intriguingly, the video games industry is now growing
in ways that have more in common with the old-fashioned world of
charades and Monopoly than with a cyber-future of sedentary,
isolated sociopaths. GTA IV itself has a superb collaborative mode
for online gamers, while the games that have been shifting most
units in the last two years belong to a burgeoning new genre known
as "social-casual": games in which friends and relations gather
round a console to compete at activities that range from playing
notes on a fake electric guitar (Guitar Hero) to singing karaoke and
swapping videos of their performances, X-Factor style (SingStar), or
playing tennis with motion-sensitive controllers (Wii Sports). The
agenda is increasingly being set by the concerns of mainstream
consumers--what they consider acceptable for their children, what
they want to play at parties and across generations.

***

These trends embody a familiar but important truth: games are human
products, and lie within our control. This doesn't mean we yet
control or understand them fully, but it should remind us that there
is nothing inevitable or incomprehensible about them. No matter how
deeply it may be felt, atavistic fear is an inappropriate response
to technology of any kind. In any case, even the "worst" games are
often consumed in ways that defy critics' fears. Take GTA IV, my
pre-ordered copy of which joined the 608,999 other units sold in
Britain on 29th April. The game is full of pastiche violence; of
slyly explicit dialogue and ceaseless minor homages to cinema,
television and music. It has an 18 certificate, and I won't be
inviting any nine year olds to join me in investigating its world.
But the play experience is an open-ended delight of exploration and
wonder: "Liberty City," a lovingly detailed parallel New York city,
within which you can pass hours driving around in various vehicles,
watching the sun rise and set, trying to attract the attentions of
cops and then shake them off, and--in one especially memorable
moment--driving a stolen ambulance off a roadbridge on to a raised
section of trainline, then manoeuvring it underground and through
the "Manhattan" railway network. All this is best done in company,
and most of the pleasure I've taken from the game has involved
sitting on a sofa with friends, dissecting the city and dissing each
other's driving skills with gleeful abandon. Left to my own devices,
I tired soon enough of the main storyline and the tasks that have to
be undertaken for it to progress. But I remain enthralled by the
freedom of moving through the game's virtual city. I even whiled
away a happy half hour watching the in-game television channels and
laughing at the antics of such characters as the "Republican Space
Rangers." It's quite a thing, too, to be moved by the beams of an
unreal sun setting behind a not-quite-Manhattan skyline.
My GTA experiences are obviously not cultural engagements to be set
alongside attending performances of Othello, Otello or, for that
matter, watching my Sopranos DVDs. But games have begun to defy some
of the accusations traditionally flung at them by custodians of the
higher arts: that they cannot move you deeply, or expose you to the
moral frissons and complexities of a great narrative. To explore the
growing field of those games that set out to do exactly these
things, I talked to Justin Villiers, a scriptwriter and director who
six months ago moved from the world of television and film to that
of video games. "Video game titles are becoming increasingly
sophisticated," he told me. "They need to match voices and dialogue
with new, more realistic graphics." But won't his career move be
seen by many as a step down? "Games match films for scale of
production. Hundreds of people work on the big ones. The console has
come out of the bedroom and into the living room. And there is now a
real desire to craft stories with genuine arcs, to develop complex
characters and to craft whole and believable worlds. There are
already games out there you could describe as art." Such as? "There
was a game back in 2001 called Ico, on the PlayStation 2. You play a
little boy with horns, in a world that's visually based on Giorgio
de Chirico. The story is so simple and touching, the mise en sc=E8ne
is beautiful, and the characters move with such grace. That's art.
Still, in narrative terms, much of the games market is still
saturated with terrible stuff: super-enhanced soldiers fighting some
evil covenant or other. They're running out of ideas for that kind
of thing, which is partly why the industry is welcoming dedicated
writers, directors and artists."
Justin is represented by Sidelines, Britain's first specialist game
writers' agency. Launched in February, it is unlikely to remain
alone for long. GTA IV had a budget of around $100m and credits two
lead writers, 16 minor writers, over 250 voice actors and 40
artists, plus another few hundred animators, designers, testers and
researchers. Does Justin think that writing for games will ever
compete with writing for films, television or even books? "It's a
different set of skills. For the writing, you have to think in
non-linear ways, and of course all choices must be interactive. The
player must always be in your mind and cannot be left passive. It's
fun. If you don't have fun, the player won't. For the game I'm
dealing with now, I'm writing lines that would usually be the
preserve of the most flamboyant Hollywood epics." And does he worry
about gaming as a negative influence? "Entertainment has no
obligation to inform, instruct or make us better people. Having said
that, games can both instruct and inform. The problem for regulators
is not content. Kids have been acting out their parents' tales of
brutal war for hundreds of years. The potential problem with games
is their addictiveness and the consequences of this addiction." And
to deal with this? "We must make parents aware that it's not good to
leave your kid playing games for 24 hours, just as it's not good to
leave them a 24-hour supply of fast food." Quite. Although neither
the finest fast food nor the best-crafted television can, it must be
said, deliver eight hours of total immersion like a World of
Warcraft raid.

***

So far, the dire predictions many have made about the "death" of
traditional narratives and imaginative thought at the hands of video
games have at best equivocal evidence to support them. Television
and cinema may be suffering, economically, at the hands of
interactive media. But literacy standards and book sales have failed
to nosedive, and both books and radio are happily expanding into an
age that increasingly looks like it will be anything but lived
on-screen. Young people still enjoy sport, going out and listening
to music. They like playing games with their friends, and using the
internet to keep in touch and arrange meetings rather than to
isolate themselves. And most research--including a recent $1.5m
study funded by the US government--suggests that even pre-teens are
not in the habit of blurring game and real worlds. This finding
chimes with an obvious truth: that a large proportion of "problem
behaviours" in relation to any medium or substance exist for
resolutely old-fashioned reasons--lack of education, parental
attention, security, support and experience.
The sheer pace and scale of the changes we face, however, leave
little room for complacency. A month after the release of the Byron
report, the Guardian published an article by Richard Bartle, a
British writer and game researcher. Its thesis was brief and
triumphant. "15 years from now, the prime minister of the day will
have grown up playing computer games, just as 15 years ago we had
the first prime minister to have grown up watching television, and
30 years ago to have grown up listening to the radio. Times change:
accept it; embrace it." Just as, today, we have no living memories
of a time before the existence of radio, we will soon live in a
world in which no one living experienced growing up in a society
without computers. It is for this reason that we must try to examine
what we stand to lose and gain, before it is too late. Susan
Greenfield and others are right that there is no necessary
correlation between technological and moral progress, and that
unintended consequences have proliferated from all those leaps
humanity has made over the last hundred and even thousands of years.
In the past, such losses have barely registered in our daily lives,
because those who could tell us about them were long dead. But
today, with epochal change taking place on the scale of generations,
our past and our future are almost simultaneous--and the joyful,
absorbing complexity that games can deliver is also their greatest
threat.
Within the virtual worlds we have begun to construct, players can
experience the kind of deep, lasting satisfactions that only come
from the performance of a complex, sociable and challenging task.
Yet such satisfactions will always remain, in a crucial sense,
unreal. Whatever skills it teaches and friendships it creates, an
eight-hour World of Warcraft session is nevertheless solipsistic
like few other activities. Is a descent into precision-engineered
narcissism on the cards? I believe not: the ways we are already
making and playing games show that to be human is to demand more
than this. But the doomsayers are right in one important respect. If
we do not learn to balance the new worlds we are building with our
living culture, we may lose something of ourselves.