Slashdot Log In
Part One: Up, Up, Down, Down
from the gaming-and-the-playful-world- dept.
"The future of technology is about shifting to what people like to do, and that's entertainment...I'm telling you: all the money and the energy in this country will eventually be devoted to doing things with your mind and your time." --- AI pioneer Marvin Minsky.
Up, Up,
Down, Down,
Left Right, Left Right, BA Start.
Recite this combination to millions of younger Americans, especially males, and it's like a secret handshake: the cheat code for Contra and other games for the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Most will know that for two-player mode you insert "select." Recite the same sequence to most older people, and they'll think you're mentally ill. But the beautiful thing, e-mails James Sumner of Yale, "is that all I have to do is start "up, up, down, down ..." and any male my age will finish it."
"I would recognize it anywhere, instantly..." one gamer e-mailed me when I sent him the sequence. "Until my dying breath ...It's a cheat, that you use to get 30 lives instead of 3 ... You press that combo while the intro screen is sliding by, then start the game and you get 30 lives ..."
Another answered this way: "Sure, I know it, it's a reflex, a neuron. My parents still think gaming is a weird hobby. But for me, it's a way of thinking, a password."
In his remarkable new book Playful World, Mark Pesce reminds us of Mead's observation about the pace of change in the Western world.
In earlier times, Mead had written, elders could educate the young in their traditions and wisdoms, passing along important lessons that would serve the youngsters well.
In the past generation, though, cultural development -- centered around new forms of popular culture, mostly involving computers, has so intensified that the generational transmission of values has become even more outmoded, increasingly irrelevant. What's evolved is perhaps the widest gap --informational, cultural and factual -- between the young and the old in human history. In many ways, gaming is at the center of this chasm.
Adults still insist they have lessons to teach the next generation. But the young have come to believe, with increasing justification, that their elders know much less than they do, and have little worth passing along. All they have to offer are boring and outmoded educational systems, political structures that no longer work, and exhausted forms of fading, sacrosanct, heavily subsidized "culture."
Obviously many older people do have useful things to pass along, especially their experiences with life and their accumulated perspectives. But there are also cultural and technological advances, more all the time, that they simply can't grasp. It often seems that only adolescents really have the time, instincts and motor skills to grasp the mechanics of cutting-edge gaming, programming and other digital technologies.
This chasm first opened on the cultural front, with the evolution of distinctly youth-centered entertainment forms like hip-hop, rock 'n' roll and then Nintendo and Sega; it's widened as gaming has expanded beyond its subculture status. Gaming isn't just a hobby any longer. In fact, it needs a new label, something like VI -- Virtual Imagination. Well on the way to being culture itself , gaming has all sorts of implications for education, work and politics.
Gaming has exploded in the past few years until, according to Steven Poole's book Trigger Happy, videogame sales now equal movie ticket receipts. Sales of game consoles and software in the United States will top $17 billion a year by 2003 (the music industry, by comparison, reported revenues of $15 billion last year).
The average American child plays videogames forty-nine minutes a day, but games are no longer the province of kids; 61 per cent of videogamers are eighteen or older, and more than a quarter are over thirty-six. Videogames are no longer bounded by gender, either: players are evenly divided between men and women.
This revolution has spawned its own vast, diverse and complicated media culture -- gamespy.com, avault.com, gamespot.com, ign.com, ugo.com. These sites teem with games and reviews, from programmers, writers, artists and designers. Media sites like Myvideogame.com and gamecritics.com report on story lines and offer essays on the creative shortcomings of game programmers.
Newer sites like Joystick101.org are gaming weblogs; they fuse gaming with individual stories. Recently, that site ran stories about a player named Sheyla who faked her death in a ploy for sympathy from the Everquest community; the stories linked to a story about the kind of gaming work ethic that prompted a Starcraft programmer to bring his laptop to the hospital birth of his daughter. Ign.com covers Quake III like MSNBC covered the presidential election. Academics all over the country are using the Sim games to teach urban planning and financial and social interaction.
And eBay now routinely auctions off characters and property from games like Ultima Online to newbies who don't want to spend years developing their own characters. The gaming industry employs thousands of writers, artists, producers, animators, filmmakers designers and programmers.
Virtual characters are now sometimes worth thousands of dollars, something inconceivable outside of Hollywood just a few years ago.
No other form of culture is ascending as rapidly. Compared to gaming, traditional kinds of culture -- some elements of book publishing, opera and classical music, dance, appear declining and endangered.
Next: Gaming and Moral Panic.
Re:It takes a weak mind to be influenced by games (Score:3)
By the age of five, most of your personality and unconcious mind is formed. These facets of your brain are deeply ingrained and extremely difficult to change as an adult. (Indeed, I tend believe that our core never changes, and we merely filter it to varying degrees of success.)
The sensation of heat from chili peppers is not a part of your personality. It's illustrative, however, of how the brain will desensitize to common sensory input.
In other words, the more you eat chili peppers, the less hot they'll seem; and the more a shy adult attends ToastMasters, the easier it is for them to speak publicly (but they'll still be wallflowers at a party).
Whether you're a person that accepts or rejects behaviour that causes bodily harm to others is a personality issue, and *that* is where the risk of desensitization comes in.
An adult desensitized to killing because they're in the front lines in a war will not necessarily find it easy to kill in cold blood back at home once the war is over. Their personality hasn't changed. Just pray they haven't adapted, layered over their personality with a kill-happy filter.
A child desensitized to killing because they've been on the front lines in a war is another matter. Their personality is in the process of being formed: they are learning how the world works and how they should work in it.
The proof is in history: countries that have internal conflict tend to stay in conflict, generation after generation. Countries that are stable tend to stay stable.
But, hey, so you disagree with me. That's fine. Feed your kids whatever violent video, TV and game shit ya want... what kind of personality are they going to form?
Garbage-in, garbage-out.
Hope you enjoy your kids as adults. They're gonna be everything you made them to be.
--
Re:Not quite (Score:3)
I'm not a teenager. (Just turned 33, so I'm nearing 'old fart', actually.) But so far I have to agree with Jon. My generation may not be smarter or more experienced than the older ones, but we're a hell of a lot more flexible and capable. And the generation below me is just plain scary, as adept as they are.
Just this week at work I'm going to mandatory Lotus Notes training. That's right, they're forcing all employees to sit in a classroom for FOUR hours so they can teach us how to use an email client. Nevermind that I've used over a dozen different email clients, nevermind that I could WRITE Lotus Notes if I had to. Nevermind that for people my age and experience, an email client is about as interesting and as difficult to learn as a toaster. Nope...because some aging executive idiot thought it was difficult, we all have to waste our time training in it. (sigh)
As for games jumping in cultural importance...I'm reminded of that NASDAQ commercial, where some kid asks 'where is the center of the tech world?' He goes through an assembly line, a lecture by a scientist...and then is thrown into a first-person shooter game. That gaming is reaching the same status as high-tech industry and science is, I think, a very interesting observation. I don't know how gaming culture will affect society, but I think it's a good bet to say that it will, somehow.
And by the way -- the older I get, the dumber my father becomes. 'Filling my lungs with cigarette tar prevents me from catching colds!' Yeah, right, dad.
Check me into the nursing home please. ;) (Score:3)
I'm 25, and still a video game lover. I think it's a major culture shift. Sure, you had a few adults who were hooked on Pac Man and the like, but never anything like I've seen in the fast few years. More and more people my age are still keeping up with the latest trends in consoles and PC games. (I'm still waiting for my copy of Escape from Monkey Island...) I personally think that they're a great form of entertainment...better than just about anything the movie studios pump out. You're actually involved in the action somewhat, and they're a great way to kill an hour or two.
One of the things that can get out of hand, as my brother who is a senior in high school is seeing now, is that no one's reading anymore. I do, and he does, but he says he knows so many people who haven't picked up a book in quite some time. This has obvious drawbacks. However, kept in perspective, gaming is a great pastime for any age.
I'm feeling old right about now. Think I'll fire up NESticle after work. ;)
from an article I wrote a while ago... (Score:3)
Ask any old Nintendo players what the key combo for gaining unlimited lives in Contra Warriors is; chances are they'll immediately reply "up up down down left right left right B A B A select start". Ask those same old Nintendo players how to reach the first dungeon in Zelda and you'll see them try to visualize the landscape in their minds on how to reach the dungeon from the opening screen of the game. And if you ask one of your coworkers how to reach a certain point within the voice mail system, they'll probably rattle off a string of numbers and signs for the steps needed to get to a certain option.
"
this isn't learning. this is rote memorization. puzzle solving through trial and error.
explain to me how this puts children and their learning curve ahead of their parents and elders that, unlike the kids, have lived decades and have decades of experience dealing with people. Dealing with other people is how we learn the majority of our useful information. Not information we learn in books and such, but useful information about how to get through the day, interact with people, and be an integrated member of society.
JKatz, the fact that you preach this to a group of people that you think are loners is horrific. We don't learn the necessities about human interaction by playing by ourselves in a dark room. We learn the necessities of life by being outside an interacting with people. We learn this by our village elders (family, neighbors, etc.)
A little egocentric? (Score:3)
An example. Tech stocks DID take a 20% plunge this week if you (Katz) didn't notice. The reason for this is that tech stocks engender an amazing level of enthusiasm and excitement about the future...but that excitement simply does not transfer one-to-one to profit, as people learned when they realized that they needed to correct the market because their expectations simply weren't matching up with quarterly earnings reports. This is a perfect example of how our "new video game culture" that Katz worships simply does not create its own rules...we have to follow the basic rules of our predecessors just like every other generation in history.
This is how our elders can always teach us a lesson. Katz, you presume that we can reinvent our society. We can make it intelligent, connected, and more progressive and successful than any to date. While you have a nice vision, you need to realize that a) this has been tried before by people equally as naive and as visionary as you, and b) they succeeded to some, but certainly not an entire, extent. Whom am I talking about? I'm talking about the hippies and the free thinkers of the 60s and 70s. Their situation is VERY similar to ours today. Kids in that age thought their elders were stupid, constricting, and socially unhealthy. They were to some extent right. How are the hippes of that day and age any different from you, John? They, too, had a vision of the future. They, too, had ideas that destroyed the boundaries of the previous generation despite what your egocentric view says. Ever heard of feminism and the women's rights revolution? The civil rights revolution? The strides in engineering that gave your spoiled self the Internet that you take so much for granted as a tool of YOUR generation, when it was developed by your supposedly stupid predecessors? The strides in bio-engineering that have produced amazing amounts of advanced medicine? These were amazing innovations that their generation brought our country. And it is off of the foundation of these inventions that we will build our revolution. Please realize that while your visions of the future are wonderful, intelligent, and inspiring, they are made possible by the hard work and cultural revolutions of generations past.
And as wonderful as video games are, I refuse to say that my culture is built upon them. Our culture is built off of the Internet, personal computers, and other wildly expanding communications (and other) technologies. I can prove this quite simply. Katz's oh-so-worshipped sites, like Bluesnews.com and avault.com make piddles (as in millionths) compared to workers at Broadcom. What Katz is describing in his lengthy editorial on video games is not our generation's culture. It is one of our generation's sub-cultures. Katz may think that the Nintendo crowd of old is smarter and more innovative than the young AOL-ers of today, and he may be right, but the number of hard core video game enthusiasts simply does not approach the number of chat room users, personal computer owners, and young but non video game playing kids.
Re:It takes a weak mind to be influenced by games (Score:3)
From a detached, philisophical standpoint, yes. They are different.
Still, they may bring forth similar reactions in a non-detached audience.
Every time I watch the 'simulated' killing in Schindler's List, I get hit with an Emotion. That Emotion is, I would warrant, similar to that which I would experience were I watching the Real Thing. The more realistic the simulation, the more realistic the Emotion.
I recently watched Titus (starring Anthony Hopkins) on DVD. A very powerful adaption of Shakespere's most popular (in his day) tragedy. The director depicted some violent acts in a very symbolic manner (making it easy for a viewer to take a detached view) and others in a bloody, realistic view (intending to hit the viewer right in the gut). If you do watch it on DVD, be sure to watch the commentaries.
The problem with video games is that it's easy to develop a Pavlovian response. More guts->more points->more fun.
Now, I'm not 100% against video games, I'm a big fan of Diablo II and the Warcraft/Starcraft serieses. But it's unwise to say that people won't be affected by a certain kind of violence because 'it's only a game'.
We are influenced by what we do and the games we play. I've heard it said that a child at play isn't 'just' playing... This child is rehearsing for life.
---
Margaret Mead (Score:3)
Strangely enough (Score:3)
these little bits of trivia are part of the jargon and the secret signals that make up the clue, the code that hold a culture together.
be it the knowing discussions around the watercooler of monday nite football, or the lyrics of a favorite pop tune, or the ketboard sequence of a favorite game, those little words and signals allow members of that particular subculture to identify each other, among other things.
Just as an example, look at the name of THIS site. True, alot more folks are on the internet.
But how many even "get" the name of a place called slashdot?
Rebutting Katz (Score:3)
Gamers live, abide, and pursue their interests in very distinct layers, imposed by the "connectedness" of their favorite games. This layering has a huge effect on the interaction between gamers, and the cultural similarities they may (or may not) share. For example, until very recently, console games had no facility for connection to the net. And hence, console gamers have absorbed very little of that which we might call the "Gamer Culture".
On the other hand, the fans of id Software's games, including Quake X, Doom X, etc. use those games as a communications medium, as well as an outlet for fun (The same is true of Tribes players, UT players, etc. id, however, must be given credit as the company which invented the gamer culture as we think of it today). These players have internet connections (and usually the very fastest available), and spread the memes and mores of the gamer culture through direct interaction. Not only do they communicate directly in games, but they meet in Clans (teams) outside the game, socialize together in IRC on networks exclusively dedicated to gamers like irc.enterthegame.com, and troll forums on clan websites, and other gaming oriented sites. They also meet at popular events catering exclusively to gamers, like Quakecon [quakecon.org].
It is this interaction and communication that defines the gamer culture. And it is also why, for the most part, that which we describe as "the gamer culture", is in reality, the "id culture".
While I certainly do think the gamer subculture is interesting and worthy of description, I suggest that Mr Katz spend a little more time getting to know it, and what it's really about, before pontificating about it. It's a fact that the corporate websites of banner ad providers aren't setting any standards within the culture.
gg dewd.
Tapper
Friends or no friends! (Score:4)
Re:It takes a weak mind to be influenced by games (Score:4)
In many ways, our perception of reality *is* reality. The monsters in the closet of a five year old *do* exist for that child, at that time; and your fears of being mugged as you walk down that darkened street arouse a primal response that is as real as the real thing.
The brain adapts to its environment. Eat lots of chili peppers? Your brain will stop registering the sensation as being so hot. Stink in the office? Your brain will quit paying attention after a few minutes. If you're in Edmonton, you wear TShirts as soon as the thermometer breaks freezing; if you're in Mexico, a Wisconsin heatwave seems chilly.
There is a vast unconcious mind inside your brain. Most of who you are was determined by hardwiring in the womb: the reaction by a fetus to an unusual or unexpected stimulation can predict whether the child will be shy or outgoing, to a remarkable 90%+ confidence level. The child has no choice in being shy or sociable: it's *built right in.*
The rest of you was determined during the most plastic (read: pliable) years of your brain, between birth and about age five. Your experiences during those years made you who you are today. It's so far beyond your control that it's almost impossible to enact any significant change. You is what you is.
If you take a child and begin desensitizing it to violence -- the same as if you were to desensitize it to the heat of chili peppers -- you *will* end up with an adult who is not sensitive to violence.
And just as you, as an adult, can learn to love habenaro peppers, you can become desensitized to violence.
As proof, witness the behaviour and attitudes of children and adults in the war-torn parts of Europe, Africa and the mid-East. "I prefer my child to die a martyr than remain repressed!" Ethnic cleansing. "Necklacing." Machetes. The casual disregard for the supposed sanctity of human life: the willingness to kill on whim: the inability to stop the violence and enact peace.
I love playing Unreal Tournament. It appeals to the primitive lizard core of my brain: it's power and violence, hunting and hunted, it's caveman survivalism.
But it's an adult brain playing a poor imitation of reality: the graphics aren't good, the interface is queer and it all takes place on a tiny screen.
I don't believe a child will make that distinction (and, yes, QAPete can trot out his kid all he wants: time will prove me right). When imagined monsters in a closet are real, when Dad in a Santa suit is Kris Kringle, when playing house is dead-serious business -- well, playing violent video games *is* reality, and *is* desensitizing the child to violence.
To think otherwise is to ignore overwhelming evidence as to how children perceive and understand the world.
--
Culture (Score:4)
We still have games, but these games are not created by the owners of the culture, but instead are the culture themselves. Each generation is faced with the task of finding its own identity, creating its own culture, and having very little to go upon except the artifacts of every day life, and of the past generation.
And, at least partially, I think that this is why we are seeing more, unpredictable, violent behavior, and suicide in youth. Not because Doom made them do it. But because they do not have a culture to belong to, that gives them inherent purpose in life. Yeah, this is getting mushy, but I think studies have shown that those brought up with a strong sense of tradition, of culture, are better adjusted as adults than those just cast into an artificial world of empty commercialism. This is the basis of movies like Fight Club.
It's just my perception that coming generations are having to build their own culture block by block from scratch, as the sense of any common culture goes away. The same thing is happening in Japan, where the previous culture is being left behind, leaving young people with a sense of isolation, with no common bond with previous generations.
Which is not to say this is an entirely dire situation. I love pop culture, I love Andy Warhol, I love the sense that there are codewords and a culture that only my generation alone shares.
Re:Another conspiracy theory.. (Score:4)
"why are you sitting there listening to that noise coming out of that box?" - parent dealing with a child who was addicted to some newfangled invention called the radio
"why are you spending so much time staring at that stupid box?" - parent dealing with kids that watch too much tv instead of playing marbles
"what do you find so fascinating about typing back and forth with someone named "KewlHakerDude" on the Internet?"
it's the same generation by generation. each time with different obstacles.
Old news (Score:4)
This isn't news. Wasn't it Mark Twain who said something like, "When I was 20, my father knew nothing, but by the time I was 25, I was suprised how much he had learned in 5 years" - basically showing that throughout time, the younger generation has always seen the older generation as a useless anachronism until they reach their mid twenties or even thirties? Why do people keep presenting this as "news" or "something wrong with the word" when it's probably been like this since humans advanced enough to have a culture?
Not quite (Score:5)
I used to feel this way, but it seems that the older I get the less I know, and the smarter my father becomes. The young always think they know better. You can only know what you've experienced or learned from others, with the former definitely being of higher priority. Age is a limiting factor on how much you can have of either. The young have a relatively limited perspective, by definition, and therefore problems often appear simple and answers obvious. It's not till you get older that you realize that you're a dolt.
(Note to teenage flamethrowers: Yes, I know. You're smarter/more experienced/more mature/etc than everyone else. You don't need to remind us all. Thank you.)
No other form of culture is ascending as rapidly. Compared to gaming, traditional kinds of culture -- some elements of book publishing, opera and classical music, dance, appear declining and endangered.
Maybe they're declining because they're boring or being replaced by something more obtainable. Maybe they're only being replaced as entertainment for some. Video games are not a culture. They are entertainment.
In years past very few people ever had the opportunity to see an opera. The best that most people could get would be the county fair. Now everyone in the Western world is able to afford to hear music from their favorite artist, be it through CDs or radios. Concerts and TV have replace operas. Rock has replace classical music as the most popular, because now the populace chooses what's popular as opposed to the select elite rich.
Nothing has changed here, except that now more people have the money to buy their own choice of entertainment. Bother yourself to pull up a chart of Maslow's Heirarchy of needs and you will see that this is as it should be. Except for some extreme cases, the Western world has conquered homelessness, hunger, and all the other lower order needs. With nothing left to conquer, men (and boys) turn to destractions.
BTW, so some boys from one generation remember a secret code to a popular game? Do they know what the name of an oversized marble is? Gee, it seems that all the boys from the previous generation knew that. Did the marbles culture die?
Another conspiracy theory.. (Score:5)
Nothing has changed much except that most parents aren't raising their kids and teaching them the lessons they need for when they decide to grow up. These are just my own rants and any opions different from mine are wrong. Just kidding =P
The fall of the global empire? (Score:5)
Could it be that video games are turning our society, the global empire, into another society of spectators?
Food for thought. I'm just poking for ideas; don't think I'm that much of a pessimist.
Re:What a monoculture! (Score:5)