Everything Bad Is Good for You (12 page)

This is true even of games that have been rightly celebrated for their open-endedness.
SimCity
is famous for not forcing the player along a preordained narrative line; you can build any kind of community you want: small farming villages, vast industrial Coketowns, high-centric edge cities or pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods. But the game has a subtle reward architecture that plays a major role in the game's addictiveness: the software withholds a trove of objects and activities until you've reached certain predefined levels, either of population, money, or popularity. You can build pretty much any kind of environment you want playing
SimCity,
but you can't build a baseball stadium until you have fifty thousand residents. Similarly,
Grand Theft Auto
allows players to drive aimlessly through a vast urban environment, creating their own narratives as they explore the space. But for all that open-endedness, the game still forces you to complete a series of pre-defined missions before you are allowed to enter new areas of the city. The very games that are supposed to be emblems of unstructured user control turn out to dangle rewards at every corner.

“Seeking” is the perfect word for the drive these designs instill in their players. You want to win the game, of course, and perhaps you want to see the game's narrative completed. In the initial stages of play, you may just be dazzled by the game's graphics. But most of the time, when you're hooked on a game, what draws you in is an elemental form of desire: the desire to
see the next thing.
You want to cross that bridge to see what the east side of the city looks like, or try out that teleportation module, or build an aquarium on the harbor. To someone who has never felt that sort of compulsion, the underlying motivation can seem a little strange: you want to build the aquarium not, in the old mountaineering expression, because it's there, but rather because it's not there, or not there
yet.
It's not there, but you know—because you've read the manual or the game guide, or because the interface is flashing it in front of your eyes—you know that if you just apply yourself, if you spend a little more time cultivating new residents and watching the annual budget, the aquarium will eventually be yours to savor.

In a sense, neuroscience has offered up a prediction here, one that games obligingly confirm. If you create a system where rewards are both clearly defined and achieved by exploring an environment, you'll find human brains drawn to those systems, even if they're made up of virtual characters and simulated sidewalks. It's not the subject matter of these games that attracts—if that were the case, you'd never see twenty-somethings following absurd rescue-the-princess storylines like the best-selling
Zelda
series on the Nintendo platform. It's the reward system that draws those players in, and keeps their famously short attention spans locked on the screen. No other form of entertainment offers that cocktail of reward and exploration: we don't “explore” movies or television or music in anything but the most figurative sense of the word. And while there are rewards to those other forms—music in fact has been shown to trigger opioid release in the brain—they don't come in the exaggerated, tantalizing packaging that video games wrap around them.

You might reasonably object at this point that I have merely demonstrated that video games are the digital equivalent of crack cocaine. Crack also has a powerful hold over the human brain, thanks in part to its manipulations of the dopamine system. But that doesn't make it a good thing. If games have been unwittingly designed to lock into our brain's reward architecture, then what positive value are we getting out of that intoxication? Without that positive value the Sleeper Curve is meaningless.

Here again, you have to shed your expectations about older cultural forms to make sense of the new. Game players are not soaking up moral counsel, life lessons, or rich psychological portraits. They are not having emotional experiences with their Xbox, other than the occasional adrenaline rush. The narratives they help create now rival pulp Hollywood fare, which is an accomplishment when measured against the narratives of
PacMan
and
Pong,
but it's still setting the bar pretty low. With the occasional exception, the actual
content
of the game is often childish or gratuitously menacing—though, again, not any more so than your average summer blockbuster. Complex social and historical simulations like
Age of Empires or Civilization
do dominate the game charts, and no doubt these games do impart some useful information about ancient Rome or the design of mass transit systems. But much of the roleplay inside the gaming world alternates between drive-by shooting and princess rescuing.

De-emphasizing the content of game culture shouldn't be seen as a cop-out. We ignore the content of many activities that are widely considered to be good for the brain or the body. No one complains about the simplistic, militaristic plot of chess games. (“It always ends the same way!”) We teach algebra to children knowing full well that the day they leave the classroom, ninety-nine percent of those kids will never again directly employ their algebraic skills. Learning algebra isn't about acquiring a specific tool; it's about building up a mental muscle that will come in handy elsewhere. You don't go to the gym because you're interested in learning how to operate a StairMaster; you go to the gym because operating a StairMaster does something laudable to your body, the benefits of which you enjoy during the many hours of the week when you're not on a StairMaster.

So it is with games. It's not
what
you're thinking about when you're playing a game, it's
the way
you're thinking that matters. The distinction is not exclusive to games, of course. Here's John Dewey, in his book
Experience and Education
: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only that particular thing he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes, of likes and dislikes, may be and often is much more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history that is learned. For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.”

This is precisely where we need to make our portrait of the rhinoceros as accurate as possible: defining the collateral learning that goes beyond the explicit content of the experience. Start with the basics: far more than books or movies or music, games force you to make
decisions.
Novels may activate our imagination, and music may conjure up powerful emotions, but games force you to decide, to choose, to prioritize. All the intellectual benefits of gaming derive from this fundamental virtue, because learning how to think is ultimately about learning to make the right decisions: weighing evidence, analyzing situations, consulting your long-term goals, and then deciding. No other pop cultural form directly engages the brain's decision-making apparatus in the same way. From the outside, the primary activity of a gamer looks like a fury of clicking and shooting, which is why so much of the conventional wisdom about games focuses on hand-eye coordination. But if you peer inside the gamer's mind, the primary activity turns out to be another creature altogether: making decisions, some of them snap judgments, some long-term strategies.

Those decisions are themselves predicated on two modes of intellectual labor that are key to the collateral learning of playing games. I call them
probing
and
telescoping.

 

M
OST VIDEO GAMES
differ from traditional games like chess or Monopoly in the way they withhold information about the underlying rules of the system. When you play chess at anything beyond a beginner's level, the rules of the game contain no ambiguity: you know exactly the moves allowed for each piece, the procedures that allow one piece to capture another. The question that confronts you sitting down at the chessboard is not: What are the rules here? The question is: What kind of strategy can I concoct that will best exploit those rules to my advantage?

In the video game world, on the other hand, the rules are rarely established in their entirety before you sit down to play. You're given a few basic instructions about how to manipulate objects or characters on the screen, and a sense of some kind of immediate objective. But many of the rules—the identity of your ultimate goal and the techniques available for reaching that goal—become apparent only through exploring the world. You literally learn by playing. This is one reason video games can be frustrating to the non-initiated. You sit down at the computer and say, “What am I supposed to do?” The regular gamers in the room have to explain: “You're supposed to figure out what you're supposed to do.” You have to probe the depths of the game's logic to make sense of it, and like most probing expeditions, you get results by trial and error, by stumbling across things, by following hunches. In almost every other endeavor that we describe using the language of games—poker, baseball, backgammon, capture the flag—any ambiguity in the rules and objectives of the game would be a fatal flaw. In video games, on the other hand, it's a core part of the experience. Many game narratives contain mysteries of sorts modeled after Hollywood plotlines—Who murdered my brother? Who stole the plutonium?—but the ultimate mystery that drives players deeper into the gameworld is a more self-referential one: how is this game played? Non-gamers usually imagine that mastering a game is largely a matter of learning to push buttons faster, which no doubt accounts for all the “hand-eye coordination” clichés. But for many popular games, the ultimate key to success lies in deciphering the rules, and not manipulating joysticks.

Probing involves a nuanced form of exploration as well, one that often operates below conscious awareness. Video games obviously differ from traditional games like chess or basketball in that the entire game environment is created by a computer. Explicit rules are a crucial part of that environment: you learn that you have only three lives, or that you can't build a marina until you have fifty thousand residents, or that you can't open the gate on the third level until you find the key on the second. Some of these rules you can learn just by reading the manual; others have to be discovered by playing. But the computer is doing more than just serving up clearly defined rules; it's concocting an entire world, a world with biology, light, economies, social relations, weather. I call this the
physics
of the virtual world—as opposed to the rules of the game—though this kind of physics goes well beyond acceleration curves and gravity.

You're probing the physics of a world when you start detecting subtle patterns and tendencies in the way the computer is running the simulation. Sometimes these have to do with mass and velocity: you can't jump across the canyon if you're wearing your armor; the rocket launcher is the only weapon that can shoot far enough to attack from the rear of the fortress. Sometimes they have to do with physiology: you'll lose more blood if you're wounded in the chest than in the legs; you can jump from any height without injuring your character. Sometimes it's collective behavior: your neighbors stay longer at the party if you have a jukebox and a Lava lamp; the invading robots tend to swoop in from the right when you first land on the planet. When my nephew suggested lowering the industrial tax rate during my demo of
SimCity,
he was probing the game's physics. I had explained the official rules to him: players are allowed to alter the tax rates for different zones. The physics were fuzzier, more intuitive: if you lower the rate in a given area, you'll usually see some growth there, assuming the other variables—power, water, crime—aren't impeding development.

The game scholar James Paul Gee breaks probing down into a four-part process, which he calls the “probe, hypothesize, reprobe, rethink” cycle:

1. The player must
   probe
   the virtual world (which involves looking around the current environment, clicking on something, or engaging in a certain action).
   
2. Based on reflection while probing and afterward, the player must form a
   hypothesis
   about what something (a text, object, artifact, event, or action) might mean in a usefully situated way.
   
3. The player
   reprobes
   the world with that hypothesis in mind, seeing what effect he or she gets.
   
4. The player treats this effect as feedback from the world and accepts or
   rethinks
   his or her original hypothesis.
   

Put another way: When gamers interact with these environments, they are learning the basic procedure of the scientific method.

Probing often takes the form of seeking out the limits of the simulation, the points at which the illusion of reality breaks down, and you can sense that's all just a bunch of algorithms behind the curtain. The first celebrated instance of this arrived in the early eighties with the hugely popular arcade game
PacMan.
The game had its rules, which were so simple you could express them in three sentences: gobble all the dots to finish a level; avoid the monsters unless you've eaten one of the large dots, at which point you can eat the monsters; eat the prizes for extra points. But experienced
PacMan
players soon discovered that the monsters roamed the maze in predictable ways, and if you followed a certain course—literally called a “pattern”—you'd complete the level without losing a man every time you played. Patterns weren't built into the official rules of the game; they were a legacy effect of the limited computational power of those arcade machines, and the predictable way in which the monsters' behavior had been programmed. To detect those limitations, you had to probe the
PacMan
game by playing it hundreds of times, experimenting with different strategies until one sequence revealed itself.