Everything Bad Is Good for You

[mmadsen]

Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good for You sounds right up the alley of most gamers -- it explains how complex video games and increasingly complex television shows may boost (rather than drain) intelligence -- but this passage from Wired's review, Everything Bad's Not Bad, hits particularly home for many of us here:

The essay begins with a rumination on Johnson's own boyhood experiences exploring dice-based baseball simulations and Dungeons and Dragons games, and describes how he graduated from playing those simulations to building his own in search of a more realistic experience.

Writes Johnson, "... (my) solitary obsession with modeling complex simulations is now ordinary behavior for most consumers of digital-age entertainment. This kind of education is not happening in classrooms or museums; it's happening in living rooms and basements, on PCs and television screens. This is the Sleeper Curve: The most debased forms of mass diversion -- video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms -- turn out to be nutritional after all."​

 

[mmadsen]

So, the natural question is, Has D&D made you smarter?

 

[Teflon Billy]

I know it's made me smarter.

When I took up the game back in the early 1980's I was a classic "Dumb Lougan" (Heavy Metal guy).

I mean honestly. Dumb as a post.

But D&D (and other RPG's of the era) pretty much forced my math skills to improve. My reading skills were already good (Thanks Grandma) but Gygax's bizarre vocabulary forced me to broaden my own to keep up.

I sought out books based on recommendations from RPG's (Michael Moorcock's stuff foremost), and found myself exposed to types of writing that I would not otherwise have ever approached (The Eternal Champion stuff can be pretty stock "Swords and Sorcery", but other of Moorcocks work is downright challenging).

I spent a lot of time playing RPG's as opposed to my old hobby: Hanging out at Video Arcades and Pool Halls with other no-hopers.

So yeah, all told, RPG's not only made me smarter (or at least provided an outlet for my nascent intellignece), but made me sort of "aim my sights higher" as well.

There'a reason I am distantly supportive of my kinds playing the games.

 

[der_kluge]

I think for me, it's hard to say. I've learned a heck of a lot of "stuff", but whether it made me any smarter or not, I don't know.

I got into a discussion one day about Egyptian Gods, and we found ourselves talking about Thoth among others. Another guy in the room couldn't believe that we knew the names of Egyptian gods, and just thought we were super smart. The other guy was super smart, but I didn't tell him that I learned all that stuff playing D&D.

So, I guess if you equate "knowing more stuff" to being "smarter", than I suppose so.

 

[Zappo]

That RPGs are overall good for your mind is something that I've known for a while. I'm not so optimistic about videogames, though. Videogames are much more diverse than RPGs, and a sizable portion of them rely on reflexes alone. Even those that do involve reasoning tend to become very repetitive after a while (they may still be fun, but you aren't learning anything).

 

[Joshua Randall]

I don't have any stats to back this up, but anecdotal evidence strongly suggests a correlation between "smartness" and propensity to play RPGs. Of course, this begs the questions: (1) What is "smartness" and how do we define and measure it? and (2) What is an RPG?

I think the sheer amount of reading and number-crunching required by most RPGs helps to weed out the truly unintelligent (or illiterate or innumerate). I also think that immersion in any hobby -- whether RPGs or gardening -- can impel people to do their own reading and learning about facets of the hobby. And that (reading and learning) is always a Good Thing (tm).

Random anecdote related to video-game playing: I was in college when Wolfenstein 3-D arrived on the scene. My friends and I played it a lot. Because of the snatches of German in the game, one guy decided to take a German language class. He liked it so much that he switched majors to German literature!

 

[Teflon Billy]

So, I guess if you equate "knowing more stuff" to being "smarter", than I suppose so.

I don't.

I've always known a bunch of "Stuff" (I absolutely kill at Trivial Pursuit), but RPG's built more of an ability at problem-solving, task resolution and self-directed learning (rather than just rote memorization).

Doesn't seem to have helped my overuse of parenthetical asides...but nothing's perfect

 

[EricNoah]

Yep, "problem-solving and self-directed learning" are good benefits; so is practice with in-depth deconstruction and re-construction of narrative. It helps you learn the "beats" of a story -- inciting incidents, conflict, climax, resolution, etc (even if you don't know what they're called). I think it helps you interact with media in a different way -- I know I don't just "consume" a book or a movie, but I'm always on the lookout for what I might have done were I the DM (or player) in this story. Helps you learn how to use a reference tool (using indices and tables of content to find material), read charts and tables, combine bits of information into a whole. Among many other things.

 

[mmadsen]

I'm not so optimistic about videogames, though.

From Malcolm Gladwell's review, Brain Candy:

Johnson develops the same argument about video games. Most of the people who denounce video games, he says, haven’t actually played them—at least, not recently. Twenty years ago, games like Tetris or Pac-Man were simple exercises in motor coördination and pattern recognition. Today’s games belong to another realm. Johnson points out that one of the “walk-throughs” for “Grand Theft Auto III”—that is, the informal guides that break down the games and help players navigate their complexities—is fifty-three thousand words long, about the length of his book. The contemporary video game involves a fully realized imaginary world, dense with detail and levels of complexity.

Indeed, video games are not games in the sense of those pastimes—like Monopoly or gin rummy or chess—which most of us grew up with. They don’t have a set of unambiguous rules that have to be learned and then followed during the course of play. This is why many of us find modern video games baffling: we’re not used to being in a situation where we have to figure out what to do. We think we only have to learn how to press the buttons faster. But these games withhold critical information from the player. Players have to explore and sort through hypotheses in order to make sense of the game’s environment, which is why a modern video game can take forty hours to complete. Far from being engines of instant gratification, as they are often described, video games are actually, Johnson writes, “all about delayed gratification—sometimes so long delayed that you wonder if the gratification is ever going to show.”

At the same time, players are required to manage a dizzying array of information and options. The game presents the player with a series of puzzles, and you can’t succeed at the game simply by solving the puzzles one at a time. You have to craft a longer-term strategy, in order to juggle and coördinate competing interests. In denigrating the video game, Johnson argues, we have confused it with other phenomena in teen-age life, like multitasking—simultaneously e-mailing and listening to music and talking on the telephone and surfing the Internet. Playing a video game is, in fact, an exercise in “constructing the proper hierarchy of tasks and moving through the tasks in the correct sequence,” he writes. “It’s about finding order and meaning in the world, and making decisions that help create that order.”​

 

[the Jester]

I absolutely agree that rpgs have pushed me to expand my mind in many ways, from increasing my fascination with history to making me learn better writing skills to a better understanding of human nature.

I think it helps you interact with media in a different way -- I know I don't just "consume" a book or a movie, but I'm always on the lookout for what I might have done were I the DM (or player) in this story.

This is another very good point- I hate the way people use tv as a pacifier. At least some of us are provoked into exploring the possible applications of what we see to our games or other aspects of life.