Book Corner- Everything Bad is Good for you
I just recently finished Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson. I would *highly* recommend this book, esp. to the parents out there. It talks about how TV and video games HELP kids with higher brain functions and doesn’t actually ‘dumb them down’.
I’m going to share two examples here; one for video games and one for TV.
The arguments Johnson has for television is pretty interesting… He points out that if TV was ‘dumbing’ down America, the programs would remain the same level of complexity- but in fact they’ve gotten harder. He has several examples of the level of complexity, but for this I’m going to use his comparison of Dragnet to Hill Street Blues to Sopranos. For each show’s plot Everything Bad is Good for you creates a graph as the episode follows it’s plot/characters. For Dragnet- you have a straight line. There is one story, a case that Joe Friday follows, there are very few details about Joe or his partner… the show is about the case. This is very different from Hill Street Blues, the show starts with the briefing to reminding the viewers what’s going on, and then shifts between storylines… so the graph skips around… and the viewer sometimes has to remember what happened last week (or even a few weeks ago) to realize what’s going on and how the scene in front of them fits in with the character’s storyline. In Sopranos, you end up adding layers to each scene, as not only do you have to remember how that fits in with what’s gone on before BUT characters in the scene are going to take something different away from it. One of my favorite episodes of Sopranos is where Christopher and Paulie were in the woods tracking down a crazed Russian, who wouldn’t die. Both of them were experiencing the same things, but like real people both of them were seeing the events differently. We the viewers could see Paulie changing the facts as the events happened to cover his mistakes… Paulie ended up telling a very different story then the one we saw and the one Christopher told to other characters later. There are layers to the Sopranos that you don’t see on old shows like Dragnet- which was a straight forward cop show… That’s not to say we don’t have straight forward cop shows today( Law and Order) but back then you didn’t have shows with layered complexities like Sopranos.
The case for video games is simple, they are a problem solving tool and have also got more complicated as time as gone on. Pac Man was a simple pattern game where you had to move Pac Man around the maze, the people who were the most successful were so because they realized that the ghost behaved in a predictable manner. This is different to the Zelda game, forgot which one as I don’t play Zelda, where you have to solve many puzzles in a specific order.
Johnson mainly stayed with the puzzle solving, though he pointed out that some of the best selling games like GTA, Sims and SimCity are ‘free range games’ where you don’t have to progress in a specific manner( like Zelda) but can play the game however you want and concentrate on the stuff that amuses you, which gives you positive feedback.
There’s a lot more in the book, and again I would recommend it, but I figured a couple of examples couldn’t hurt. I liked it as it reinforced the idea that the human mind doesn’t yearn to stop working, but wants to be challenged.
I’m going to share two examples here; one for video games and one for TV.
The arguments Johnson has for television is pretty interesting… He points out that if TV was ‘dumbing’ down America, the programs would remain the same level of complexity- but in fact they’ve gotten harder. He has several examples of the level of complexity, but for this I’m going to use his comparison of Dragnet to Hill Street Blues to Sopranos. For each show’s plot Everything Bad is Good for you creates a graph as the episode follows it’s plot/characters. For Dragnet- you have a straight line. There is one story, a case that Joe Friday follows, there are very few details about Joe or his partner… the show is about the case. This is very different from Hill Street Blues, the show starts with the briefing to reminding the viewers what’s going on, and then shifts between storylines… so the graph skips around… and the viewer sometimes has to remember what happened last week (or even a few weeks ago) to realize what’s going on and how the scene in front of them fits in with the character’s storyline. In Sopranos, you end up adding layers to each scene, as not only do you have to remember how that fits in with what’s gone on before BUT characters in the scene are going to take something different away from it. One of my favorite episodes of Sopranos is where Christopher and Paulie were in the woods tracking down a crazed Russian, who wouldn’t die. Both of them were experiencing the same things, but like real people both of them were seeing the events differently. We the viewers could see Paulie changing the facts as the events happened to cover his mistakes… Paulie ended up telling a very different story then the one we saw and the one Christopher told to other characters later. There are layers to the Sopranos that you don’t see on old shows like Dragnet- which was a straight forward cop show… That’s not to say we don’t have straight forward cop shows today( Law and Order) but back then you didn’t have shows with layered complexities like Sopranos.
The case for video games is simple, they are a problem solving tool and have also got more complicated as time as gone on. Pac Man was a simple pattern game where you had to move Pac Man around the maze, the people who were the most successful were so because they realized that the ghost behaved in a predictable manner. This is different to the Zelda game, forgot which one as I don’t play Zelda, where you have to solve many puzzles in a specific order.
Johnson mainly stayed with the puzzle solving, though he pointed out that some of the best selling games like GTA, Sims and SimCity are ‘free range games’ where you don’t have to progress in a specific manner( like Zelda) but can play the game however you want and concentrate on the stuff that amuses you, which gives you positive feedback.
There’s a lot more in the book, and again I would recommend it, but I figured a couple of examples couldn’t hurt. I liked it as it reinforced the idea that the human mind doesn’t yearn to stop working, but wants to be challenged.
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