Games End Literacy

A friend of mine has a precociously intelligent boy. Not surprising, really - she's a world-class astrophysicist with a mind like a swiss-army knife herself. [Comments on this notion moved to HeritabilityOfIntelligence]

So ... the lad has entered the terrible teens, and is dissipating himself in gaming. Not just the games we elder illuminati enjoyed when we were dissipating ourselves. Oh no, this fellow is one of the millions of deathmatch aficionados.

This is to say he likes hunting real people down and chopping them up with machetes. Blasting them with shotguns. Dissecting them with laser beams. He likes to watch the blood spurt and hear the screams of agony. He likes to fear that this will happen to him. And he likes to inspire that fear in others. He's a virtual tribal cult-mass-murderer.

Of course this is not unusual. Who among us has not enjoyed a game to the point of obsession? Gaming has led many of us to our choice of profession, to our friends and spouses, to our hobbies and fantasies. We engineers are in the business of making dreams real, after all.

The trouble is, the kid doesn't read.

Nor is he alone. Most of his friends spend most of their leisure time at this. They don't read any more. They play instead. Fiddling while Rome burns, they don't care what state the world is in. They don't care about history. They don't care about the future. Not only don't they care, they don't know.

And they won't know. Only a sincerely weird kid would ignore these umpteen-billion color hyper-rendered N-D splatter-worlds just to crack some mouldy old book. It's easier to get your kicks with a game console than a keyboard. And there's vastly more money in writing games than in writing text.

Haven't you noticed that there's no science fiction writers any more? Only formulaic hacks? We need not dwell on the FeedbackEffect here, but original thinkers/writers go where the money is. And the money is in games.

Literacy will survive, sorta kinda. You have to be able to crack open a manual. You have to be able to instant message. You have to be able to script your weapons-array. You have to be able to do what you need, in order to play.

Me, I'm going to dig out a bunch of the books that I used to like when I was a kid and make a present of it to the lad. So that he can ignore it and stuff it behind the dresser with last year's game cartridges.

Until TheMachineStops.

How come this precociously intelligent boy hadn't learnt to read by the time he was eight? Was he immersed in games when he was five, six and seven?

Okay, he can read. He just doesn't. Comments ammended above.

I wonder if this is really a new phenomenon. When I was a teenager (twenty years ago), everyone was saying my generation was rotting its brains with Atari and coin-op games. Some think my brain is rotten, but I think I have turned out to be an intelligent and useful member of society. And what about all the kids who wasted their free time by playing baseball, or working on their cars, or playing in garage rock bands, or working at part-time jobs? Many of them turned out to be reasonably intelligent people as well.

I don't know the statistics, but I'm pretty sure that "bookworms" have always been exceptional. Most kids, throughout the ages, have not done much reading outside of school, and adults have always been alarmed. Yet throughout the ages, some people have created great works of literature, and many people have read them. I see no reason to think that this is going to end, just because we have 3D games now.

If you truly think this young man is exceptional, please don't turn him off from reading forever with a hard-sell. Adolescents don't respond well when some grown-up says, "Stop having fun and read this, or you'll be stupid forever." If his mother is an academic superstar, and if he is being told that he has similar potential, then acting in an anti-intellectual manner may be his way of rebelling. A soft-sell is necessary if you want to influence him (or you could just leave him alone and let him find his own path).

Don't forget that there is value in his participation in his friends' activities. If I could be a kid again, I'd spend less time reading in isolation and more time socializing and playing with others. It bothers me whenever I hear someone complaining that kids are having too much fun and are not working hard enough - that's how childhood should be. Don't worry: once they grow up, he and all his friends will be forced to stop playing games so often.

-- KrisJohnson

Additionally, be aware that his friends are likely playing the same games he is. That gives him something to discuss with them and to compete with them, in short, to learn socialization. He isn't likely to be able to discuss this great classic book he just read, nor to compete to see who can read more. For kids, socialization is at least as important as knowledge. -- AndyPierce

Excellent advice. Here, though, are some GoodBooksForTroubledTeens ...

I think the "socialization with other children" argument is a license to let the computer game babysit your kid. I personally think computer games are now far too immersive to the point of being dangerous. In the Atari days, the favoring argument was that these games were building hand-eye coordination. Lame, lame, lame. Baseball does a far better job of that. Kids have many avenues to socialization that don't have the ghastly negative side-effects of immersive, passive fantasy worlds. If it comes down to a choice, I'd prefer to have my kids get socialized among my own adult friends than to socialize them among a pack of feral semi-conscious button-squeezers.

I also recently read a story about a study that found that game-playing impedes emotional development - that game-players tend to demonstrate antisocial behaviors and have a harder time relating to other kids.

Don't believe any statistics or studies like that without proof, they are nearly all misleading. That study does not imply or incorporate causality: If group A is drawn to task B, and task B tends to exhibit behavior C, it doesn't imply that B causes C. This is becase C could be associated with A (not B). In this case, geeks (group A) are already anti-social (behavior C). Therefore the game (task B) is totally irrelevant and any studies/statistics that correlate the two are useless. A (not B) causes C. The same illogic can be used to say tattoos cause crime.

Worse yet, that it is not merely a skills loss, but a measurable brain development problem. I regret that I cannot find references at this time, but I did find another supportive article (http://www.aap.org/advocacy/chm98nws.htm) from which I quote:

: Neuroscientists have shown that environmental experiences significantly shape the developing brain because of the plasticity of its neuronal connectivity. Thus, repeated exposure to any stimulus in a child's environment may forcibly impact mental and emotional growth, either by setting up particular circuitry ("habits of mind") or by depriving the brain of other experiences. While appropriate stimuli - close interaction with loving caregivers; an enriched, interactive, human language environment; engrossing hands-on play opportunities; and age-appropriate academic stimulation - enhance the brain's development, environments that encourage intellectual passivity and maladaptive behavior (e.g., impulsivity, violence), or deprive the brain of important chances to participate actively in social relationships, creative play, reflection and complex problem-solving may have deleterious and irrevocable consequences. [my emphasis]

Agree that having games babysit your child is not a good thing, but I'm not convinced that having books babysit your child is significantly better, that is, neither are a good substitute for "close interaction with loving caregivers; an enriched, interactive, human language environment; engrossing hands-on play opportunities; and age-appropriate academic stimulation". Then again, if the child already has all that, the odd game or book is unlikely to cause a lot of damage.

First, I do agree that it is not a new phenomenon or discussion. I am old enough to have my fathers complaining about how much time I was spending with Atari (and I was a book worm), Television, Board Games, etc... I am sure radio was once saw as a problem. On the other hand, parents of more athletic types of kids complain that they spend to much time surfing, at the beach, playing soccer, etc... Not to mention drugs and alcohol.

Anything that captures most of the time of a child can be seen as dangerous. It is almost crystal clear to me that if you do only one thing you will get a much smaller perspective of the world, with all the problems this can cause to a growing child. However, one must also be aware that up to a certain age we are very susceptible to "short-term addiction", mostly connected to some kind of challenge. After some time we master the challenge, just change addiction.

One thing parents must try to do is to not complain and force anything, however, to bring different interests. Your children play too much? How about learning how to build games? I have very good people working for me that spent months just playing and doing the MinimalNecessaryEffort to pass university exams. One day, they got bored with gaming and started thinking on how to do bots; later, they started to become interested in how to get money with their programming skills. And there comes an apt adult!

Woo hoo! Spending time reading with my kids, playing (non-computer) games with them, playing computer games with them, doing science experiments with them, watching TV with them, playing music with them, discussing the wonders of the world & life with them, &c., &c. will give them a great competitive advantage the more other people let their kids get sucked completely into any kind of flashy but shallow entertainment in place of spending time with & educating them.