Again, ballocks.
Video games are active. Reading a book is passive. Writing a book may be active, but, for the vast majority of people out there, they will never write that book. Yet lots of people, at the very least, decorate their house in Second Life, interact with various other players in character, create stories and whatnot about their characters.
Yup, you might imagine the pictures when you read a book. But, again, it's entirely passive. You consume the book, your eyes scanning from side to side, never once actually contributing in the slightest to the text.
In a video game, you are contributing to the storyline of the game from the second you start.
Huss, I'm gonna disagree with this to a certain extent. I personally don't think any two people reading a passage from a book read it exactly the same way. Their own particular imaginations engage and interpret the passages differently than everyone else. (Or put more accurately, there is a certain baseline of "we're all reading the same thing here," and another baseline in which the individual's minds "interpret" whatever they see through the prism of how their own imagination functions.) For instance you reading a battle scene from Tolkien will imagine the visual and sensory and event and place-type particulars differently than will I because it is not a real place, and we each have a base of differently strode databanks of imagination and memory experiences. There is a certain degree of universality to human imagination, but also a high degree of individuality within human imaginations.
Therefore our own imaginations have to actively engage (to one degree or another), using our own particular experiences as a backdrop, in order to fashion "imagination images" of what we envision. Indeed the artist himself has his own images in mind, the reader their own, and critics their own, or there could never be different interpretations and disputes about the details and meanings of the contents of a book. That happens even with non-fiction works. So reading a book is not in that sense a "passive enterprise." You do have to contribute to the text by overlaying your own imaginative enterprises onto the text to give it meaning. Otherwise words would be just like numbers, they would have only a quantitative value, and no qualitative value.
I will agree with you that reading a book is a semi-passive enterprise in the sense that the reader is not normally expected by the author to "change, alter, or manipulate the environment, events, or characters," in the sense in which we now think of commonly occurring in many video or computer or alternative or virtual reality exercises. (This is actually where I think you and Merc are really disagreeing on this matter, not in the sense of "overall imaginative-reality," but in the sense of "degree of manipulability." And relatedly, I think you both feel that different tools for the imagination require different degrees of effort and exercise in order to successfully employ them. And I think that is both right in some ways, and wrong in others.) Or modern RP games for that matter. Though on occasion when reading a book I say to myself, within the confines of my own imagination, "what if that building were constructed this way, instead of that way?" or "what if the character were like this instead of that?" or "what if the battle goes this way instead of that way?" So even with a book you can change things with your mind by using your imagination in ways differently than is commonly employed. I'm sure I'm not alone in this respect. My buddies sand I used to argue Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky a lot and I often noticed they were considering storyline changes in our arguments.
How is this not just a rehash of "TV is killing our children's brains"? For decades, we heard how life would just get better if kids would turn off the TV and start reading. It's too simplistic. It's not the answer. "Video games are making people dumb" has been studied time and time again and proven false time and time again.
There's a very good reason why the video game industry is low larger than the movie industry. It actively engages the user. Unlike movies or novels, the user can actively participate in the story, shape the story by his or her own actions.
However what I said above being said I personally think even degrees of manipulability are really also variations "in kind of manipulability." That is to say, to use the examples already expressed, that television is not the culprit of imaginative decay, but that bad television is. Television, books, film, video games, RPGs, etc. are merely tools for employment. Every tool has built in advantages and built in disadvantages. (You can use a tool effectively to address and solve certain types of problems, but it cannot be used nearly so effectively to address other types of situations and problems. This is why there is no "Universal Tool." It really depends upon the exact nature of the problem, as much as the nature of the tool, as to how effective any particular tool will be in solving any particular problem.)
Bad television is a bad tool of the mind and the imagination. Bad RPGs are bad tools, bad books are poor tools, bad films are deficient tools. On the other hand really good television and really good films and really good RPGs and really good video games are excellent tools for the imagination and the mind and perhaps even the body (as in stimulating beneficial immune system and other types of biological reactions).
Now will television, even the best television, stimulate in the same way that an excellent book will? Of course not, they are different tools with different types of applications. However both can have really beneficial effects within their own sphere or domain of potential influence. (And personally it has been my experience that a really good book might inspire a real world action in me which is of enormous benefit and a really good video game or an excellent film might give me a real world idea very much worth pursuing. Again it is not the particular medium, it is the application that follows, which to me means that anything can inspire anything else. How many good religious or psychological ideas have I had develop out of my scientific experiments, and how many times have I sat in mediation and found that because of that spiritual exercise I developed a solution for a difficult problem or had a good idea for an worthwhile invention? To me imagination enterprises are fungible. They overlap, run parallel to one another, and cross-fertilize one another.)
Now will different types of people and different personality types tend to see one tool or set of tools as being of more widespread benefit than another tool or set of tools? Possibly so. I'd say probably so. At different times in my life, or at different times now (depending on the type of problem I'm addressing) I reckon I'm that way too. I suspect that's also probably a natural reaction.
But it might not be so, most certainly won't be so, in every circumstance or on every occasion. Plus I think part of the problem rests in the fact that different tools tend to lull us into, or sub-consciously condition us into, certain "mind-frames of operation and interpretation." Meaning that sometimes when one thing could easily inspire us in some beneficial field of activity seemingly totally unrelated to the original activity, we miss the cues and clues of the inherent possibilities because we are conditioned to think only within the operational parameters of the particular tool we are at the moment employing.
Which just reminds me about the old saw about bringing a knife to a gun-fight. Yeah, you might just very well be the very best hand to hand knife fighter in the world. But in a gun-fight will you ever get the chance to really prove that?
Well, I've rambled on long enough. Was gonna get ready for church, but I got a real bad headache. Probably from recent lack of sleep. I'm just gonna go lay down instead.
Nice yakking with you guys. Later.
