I Thought I would share...

[Pansy]

tl:dr I don't think gaming is that bad.

This post makes me think of evolution and Coca Cola.

Several thousand companies were formed back when the Coca Cola company was formed but the majority of them selling corset laces and home telegraph delivery and mushrooms and back rubs and breakfast cereal and abortions are not around any more. Coca Cola was addictive and still is so the people who bought it a few times kept buying it. Not every one got addicted to it, but enough people did to keep the sales figures increasing. It became the cultural norm, so much so that carbonated drinks with no useful nutritional content is what people mostly drink instead of buttermilk, or vegetable broth or other possibilities. The chief competitor to carbonated drinks is another addictive beverage, coffee.

Things that are addictive tend to be more successful than things that are not. Being addictive gives you an evolutionary advantage. There are a lot of addictive activities on line -touching base socially with your friends, or searching for information, or getting the sense of productivity that H & H and other games give you. The result is that in this generation a heck of a lot of people are spending a heck of a lot of time focused on something electronic. I'm not saying that this is good or bad. I am saying that if there were a better alternative, that is what people would be doing, instead.

Those discontented guys working at Starbucks in their thirties because they worked at H & H in their twenties? Why are they not working at their careers instead? Yeah, it would be great if they were all working at being entrepreneurs and researchers and getting doctorates and learning to be fantasic computer programmers and so on. But the real world is that most entrepreneurs fail, most people do not come up with good ideas, many doctoral graduates are working in call centers, and there are plentiful unpaid internships being hawked around the local university for people who are being offered the opportunity to write good programs for free. A lot of those guys who are not computer game addicted and are working their tails off to do something ambitious right now are going to end up working at Starbucks in their thirties.

This is probably going to sound silly, but what I have observed about computer gaming is that it is something that people do while they are working on certain types of development that they do not get to make progress at in the real world. I know of a young woman who, struggling as an outsider in high school, got computer addicted to Furcadia and spend endless hours interacting with other players in power struggles, give and take relationships, and learning to create and cooperate with other people. At the time I was deeply concerned with her grades and all her friends murmured that she was wasting her time. However, at the end of that time she had developed a lot of social skills she previously hadn't had. In high school the other people had pretty much squelched her. After training herself to become a leader in her Furcadia world she had learned who to ignore and who to trust, how to motivate other people, how to use their different strengths and abilities and meet their needs. She liked people more and forgave them more easily too.

Yeah, probably in the right rl situation she would have learned more. And maybe the learning took place because she was developmentally ready for it. But the right rl situation did not show up, and on-line gaming was there for her to use those abilities when she needed a place to practice them.

So to me online gaming is like a remedial workshop in isolated skills. The rl world is like being thrown into a baseball game. The on-line world strips away a lot of the details so you can focus on only a certain facet of development. It's like batting practice.

Yes, too much computers is not good for you. Yes, it is better to get a little exercise and talk to real people in person sometimes. Yes, our brains are changing so that we process information differently than we did when kids used to read instead of stare at a screen. But there was a time when people didn't approve of kids reading either. It was just escapism that kept them from productive real life activities. The telephone was another terrible advance that tended to have a bad influence on the young. (Not only were they starting to socialize with other young people every day, but girls were socializing with boys as if there was no deep implication to that change!) No matter how the world changes, people are going to be alarmed with the way people grab new technology and embrace it like it is solving their problems. I think that is because people use the tools at hand to solve their problems.

Anyone who is spending sixteen hours a day in isolation hunched over a computer screen harvesting wheat and feeding silk moths would probably have been spending sixteen hours a day in isolation, if they didn't have the computer screen. But this way they are going to end up with a merchant's cape and their brain is going to be trained toward the habits of perseverence and problem solving and success.

[Yolan]

@ Pansy

I don't entirely agree, but v. interesting read.

[Humbaz]

Ok iam a bit drunk at the moment so dont take my comment to serious but:

Did you ever think of this whole e-entertainment or entertainment at all could be some realy big, bad kind of conspiracy? Of brainwashing, keeping people occupied and passive so they wont oppose, destroy or change the ruling political and economical system and their representatives? Sure the sob working at a coffeshop might have wasted his twenties with gaming, but ill bet my ass the executive committee members and COmyass didnt. Are they activly supporting the process of dumbing down a whole generation? And if so: how do they do that? Who are their minions? What can be done to stop them?

Its time to take the red pill ... choose truth or happiness, and read the first volume of Perry Rhodan allthough it is pulp and as brainwashing as any kind of media/medium its alarming like 60´s SF writers had forseen the dulling and degeneration of youth through artifical visualisations.

And by the way SF: This is our true destiny, the future of mankind - the final frontier! The conquest of space!

*the geek leaves wabbly to study astrophysics*

[theTrav]

Did you ever think of this whole e-entertainment or entertainment at all could be some realy big, bad kind of conspiracy? Of brainwashing, keeping people occupied and passive so they wont oppose, destroy or change the ruling political and economical system and their representatives?

Your theory has been well documented.

Personally, while I feel that the rulers (past and current) are indeed keen on people taking up these things and becoming more docile, on the whole computers, internet and greater social connectivity, has made our society far more democratic and egalitarian than it ever was before them.

I also think it's going to lead us into a bit of a mono-culture problem to a degree, but that's a whole different kettle of fish

[jorb]

computers, internet and greater social connectivity, has made our society far more democratic and egalitarian than it ever was before them.

Hey, I don't like that any more than you do, but let's not forget the good sides.

[burgingham]

computers, internet and greater social connectivity, has made our society far more democratic and egalitarian than it ever was before them.

Hey, I don't like that any more than you do, but let's not forget the good sides.

This is heavily debated by the way if the internet is really giving us more democracy. There are even people arguing it has achieved quite the opposite. Too bad my blog is in German, I critized a book there which is exactly arguing in that way. The author apparently read that blog and we had a back and forth about the topic. He did that on his blog he uses to promote himself btw. alongside with twitter or facebook....ah the irony.

[theTrav]

This is heavily debated by the way if the internet is really giving us more democracy. There are even people arguing it has achieved quite the opposite.

Yeah, I'm aware it's not an objective fact, which is why I started the whole paragraph with "personally I feel"

I suppose my opinion does not focus on democracy as "ability to influence decisions of the state" so much as it's about people's ability to be aware of information, to connect with others, and to make their own mind up as to whether they're going to follow laws or just go about ignoring them.

Too bad my blog is in German, I critized a book there which is exactly arguing in that way. The author apparently read that blog and we had a back and forth about the topic. He did that on his blog he uses to promote himself btw. alongside with twitter or facebook....ah the irony.

Links? Was it the book, or you, who was arguing that the internet had no positive impact on democracy?

[burgingham]

It was the book arguing that way. I opposed it mainly because of the fact that he the author had such a populistic black&white attitude. He is also arguing that the internet doesn't make us smarter but dumber, stuff like that. It is a german book but I might aswell give some links. Maybe some persons like to read about it.

Here is my blog article, an interview with the author Markus Reiter is linked in there as well.

The authors blog.

The book itself at Amazon. It is called: "Dumb 3.0. How Twitter, blogs and networking threaten our culture."

[jorb]

Grumble, grumble. Nothing annoys me more than uneducated dimwits writing books with buzzwords for titles, acting as if the challenges of our age are so completely and qualitatively different from those of any age past so as to render any comparison meaningless. We have them in Sweden to.

Im Netz lässt sich schwierig herausfinden, wer dumm ist und wer nicht. Das ist ja genau das Problem. In der alten Welt der Medien gab es Gatekeeper, also zum Beispiel Journalisten, die versuchten, das Gute und das weniger Gute, das Richtige und das Falsche zu trennen. Und wenn es diese Institutionen eines Tages nicht mehr gibt, dann müssen Sie all das selber machen. Und vor dieser unglaublichen Menge an Informationen werden viele kapitulieren.

"Thank God for the good old days when authority spared us these practical lessons in applied critical thought!" He does have a point, but not one I believe he'd actually care to make. Apart from the nonsensical argument, why the fuck does he use the English word gatekeeper? "Grindvakt" would be the Swedish equivalent. Certainly there is a German cognate.

Really, this is such a gross misunderstanding of the historical role of the journalist that I feel compelled to question his intellectual honesty. The historical role of the journalist has not been to keep information *away* from the public eye, but rather the exact opposite.

Wenn sie zehn mittelmäßige Barockmaler haben, die alle wenige Quadratzentimeter eines Bildes malen, dann ist es am Ende immer noch kein Caravaggio.

Thank god baroque painters did not work like that, and thank god the internet doesn't work like that either. The internet is a medium of communication, not some monolithic, communal graffiti wall. He should stop treating his subject matter as a vast, gray, undifferentiated mess, because the only thing he demonstrates here is his own inability to make distinctions. If his thesis is that our age is one of stupidity, he himself certainly seems to be living proof thereof. I am, however, not convinced that the internet is to be blamed for that.

[Gentley]

Wow, i couldnt read the whole interview, i rageclosed the tab after the first statement, "its hard to find out whos stupid and whos not on the web" srsly? So its easier while reading an offline newspaper with no chance at all to find out more about backgrounds and possible interests of the articles author?

That guy is a rolemodel of a hopefully soon to be extinct kind of "Journalist"

As far as it concerns me, the world would be a better place without good old "Gatekeepers" ( Torwächter in german, there might be journalism related word for that though ) like "Bild" ( Yellow Press ).