« General Game Playing Program Competition at Stanford today! | Main | eBay acquires Shopping.com for $620M »
June 1, 2005
Everything Bad Is Good For You
Steven Berlin Johnson 's new book, entitled "Everything Bad Is Good For You" is getting a lot of discussion lately, based on the New York Times excerpt. One point of the book is to argue that TV and Video Games are good for you, and to challenge the view that these forms of entertainment degrade our minds vs. reading written text.
On his blog, the author shares a book passage that was not in the NYT excerpt in which he provides a satirical perspective of how a video game purist might criticize book reading if video games had come first. For example:
But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can't control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. For those of us raised on interactive narratives, this property may seem astonishing. Why would anyone want to embark on an adventure utterly choreographed by another person?
I myself have always believed that video games, like games in general, are good for kids and adults alike. I will be interested to read his arguments about TV being good for you, as I must admit that TV feels for the most part like passive entertainment. With that said, I watched an incredible amount of TV as a child, to the point that I could identify commercials within the first 5 seconds. Since I turned out ok (for the most part, at least), it is possible that this was harmless or potentially even good for me. Or maybe if it hadn't been for all that TV, I could have been a contender...
Posted by barney at June 1, 2005 11:11 PM
This entry was posted in the following categories: Digital Media
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.barneypell.com/blog/mt-tb.cgi/21
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)