Everything Bad Is Good for You (24 page)

These proliferating new recording technologies are often described as technologies of convenience: you watch what you want to watch, when you want to watch it, as the old TiVo slogan had it. If your
Sopranos-
watching schedule doesn't sync up with the network programmers at HBO, no worries: just order it on demand, or tape it, or TiVo it, or catch it later that week on HBO2. No doubt that convenience is an important selling point, but the technology has another laudable side effect: it facilitates close readings. Fans of
The Sopranos
who want to dissect every scene for subtle references and hidden meanings have half a dozen avenues available to them. Perhaps there would have been fans equally devoted to
Gunsmoke
or
Laverne & Shirley
when those shows first aired, but the technology of that era kept their passions at bay, by limiting the number of times they could watch an episode—which in turn caused the shows' creators to limit the complexity of the programming itself. Instead of adding layers and twists, they went with the least objectionable.

The technological revolutions of the past decade have aided the Sleeper Curve in another way. As technologies of repetition allowed new levels of complexity to flourish, the rise of the Internet gave that complexity a new venue where it could be dissected, critiqued, rehashed, and explained. Years ago I dubbed these burgeoning Web communities “para-sites,” online media that latches onto traditional media, and relies on those larger organisms for their livelihood. Public discussion of popular entertainment used to limit itself to the dinner table and the water cooler, but as we saw in the
Apprentice
fan site debate, the meta-conversation has itself grown deeper and more public. Even a modestly popular show—like HBO's critically acclaimed drama
Six Feet Under—
has spawned hundreds of fan sites and discussion forums, where each episode is scrutinized and annotated with an intensity usually reserved for Talmudic scholars. The fan sites create a public display of passion for the show, which nervous Hollywood execs sometimes use to justify renewing a show that might otherwise be canceled due to mediocre ratings. Shows like
Arrested Development
or
Alias
survive for multiple seasons thanks in part to the enthusiasm of their smaller audiences—not to mention the fans' willingness to buy DVD versions en masse when they're eventually released.

These sites function as a kind of decoder ring for the Sleeper Curve's rising complexity. Devoted fans coauthor massive open documents—episode plot summaries, frequently asked questions, guides to series trivia—that exist online as evolving works of popular scholarship, forever being tinkered with by the faithful. Without these new channels, the subtleties of the new culture would be lost to all but the most ardent fans. But the public, collaborative nature of these sites means that dozens or hundreds of fans can team up to capture all the nuances of a show, and leave behind a record for less motivated fans to browse through at their convenience. And so the threshold of complexity rises again. The
Simpsons
creators can bury a dozen subtle film references in each episode and rest assured that their labors will be reliably documented online within a few days. No minor allusion or narrative pirouette will ever go unnoticed, because there are a thousand archivists keeping track at home.

The new possibilities for meta-commentary are best displayed in game walk-throughs: those fantastically detailed descriptions that “walk” the reader “through” the environment of a video game, usually outlining the most effective strategies for completing the game's primary objectives. Hundreds of these documents exist online, almost all of them created by ordinary players, assembling tips and techniques from friends and game discussion boards. They condense the ambiguities and open-ended rule structure of these games into a more linear narrative form—conventionally using a second-person address, as in this walk-though for the game
Half-Life
:

Read a walk-through on its own, without knowing anything about the game it documents, and the text feels like an experimental novel stitched together out of passages stolen from the magazines
Guns & Ammo
and
This Old House.
(“Luckily, there's a ventilation duct just before the live wire. Crawl over to the duct and break the grate with the Crowbar.”) For the most part, the stories conveyed by game walk-throughs are unreadable, unless you're in the middle of the game itself, at which point all the stray details and observations carry the force of revelation: “So that's how you get down that hallway!” If you have your doubts about the spatio-logical complexity of today's video games, and don't have the time to sit down and play one yourself, I recommend downloading one of these walk-throughs from the Web and scrolling through it just to gauge the scale and intricacy of these gameworlds.

In the 1930s the Russian mathematician Andrei Kolmogorov arrived at a definition of complexity for any given string of information: the shortest number of bits of information into which the string can be compressed without losing any data. The text string “Smith Smith Smith” is less complex than the string “Smith Jones Bartlett” because you can compress the former into the description “Smith x3.” A series of numbers such as “2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc.” is less complex than a random sequence, because you can't express the random sequence with a simple formula. You can think of the text strings of game walk-throughs as compressed versions of the game's original, open-ended state: the walk-throughs document the shortest route from start to finish, with the minimal amount of meandering and false starts. They tell you exactly what you need to know. Judged by the size of these walk-throughs, the Kolmogorov complexity of your average video game has expanded at a prodigious clip. The compressed renditions of
PacMan
came in the form of those famous “patterns”: turn left, turn right, turn right again. You could convey the entirety of the
PacMan
universe in a few pages of text. By comparison, the walk-through for
Grand Theft Auto III—
by an Australian devotee of the game named Aaron Baker—contains 53,000 words, around the same as the book you are currently reading. Printed out in single-spaced twelve-point type, the document is 164 pages long.

The economics of repetition's race to the top are easy enough to grasp: syndication and DVD sales offer great financial reward to creators who generate titles complex enough to remain interesting through repeat encounters. But where is the economic reward in encouraging meta-commentary? The answer to that puzzle lies in the culture industry's growing emphasis on “thought leaders” or “key influencers.” The old way to market a new cultural product was to sell it like detergent: get your brand and your message in front of as many people as possible, and hope to persuade some of them to buy the product. If that means billboards and full-page newspaper ads, great. If that means getting the show in the 8:30 slot after
Cosby,
even better. That's the philosophy of mass marketing, and it may indeed work well for consumer goods where the consumers themselves don't have a huge emotional investment in the product. But where culture is concerned—movies, books, television shows—people don't just build relationships with products based on the dictates of mass advertising. Word of mouth is often more powerful, and where word of mouth is concerned, some consumers speak louder than others. They're the early adopters; the ones who pride themselves on their pop culture mastery, their eye for new shows and rising talent.

The meta-commentary sites have endowed these armchair experts with venues where their expertise can flourish in public. Before the Internet, a rabid fan who wanted to compose a 53,000-word inventory of his favorite video game didn't have an easy way to get his opus in the hands of people who might be interested in reading it—short of distributing xeroxed copies on the sidewalk. Now the experts can convey their wisdom to tens of thousands of eager recipients desperately trying to reach the second city in
Grand Theft Auto
or figure out why Tony Soprano had that guy killed last night. There's no real financial reward for these key influencers and mavens themselves; Aaron Baker doesn't write 164-page walk-throughs because he thinks they'll make him rich. He does it for the public pride he takes in creating the authoritative guide to one of the most popular games of all time. (There are social rewards, in other words, not financial ones.) But a significant financial reward does exist for entertainment creators who attract people like Aaron Baker to their products, because it is precisely those experts who end up persuading other people to watch the show or play the game or see the movie. The way to attract the Aaron Bakers of the world is to make products complex enough that they
need
experts to decipher them. Key influencers like to think of themselves as operating on the cutting edge, detecting patterns or trends in cultural forms that ordinary consumers don't perceive until someone points them out. The way to attract these experts, then, is to give them material that challenges their decoding skills, material that lets them show off their chops. Instead of rewarding the least offensive programming, the system rewards the titles that push at the edges of convention, the titles that welcome close readings. You can't win over the aficionados with the lowest common denominator.

 

T
ECHNOLOGY AMPLIFIES
the Sleeper Curve in one final respect: it introduces new platforms and genres at an accelerating rate. We had thirty years to adapt to the new storytelling possibilities of cinema; then another twenty for radio; then twenty years of present-tense television. And then the curve slants upward: five years to acclimate to the VCR and video games; then e-mail, online chats, DVDs, TiVo, the Web—all becoming staples of the pop culture diet in the space of a decade. McLuhan had a wonderful term for this accelerating sequence, “electric speed”:

McLuhan believed that this rate of change shed light on the hitherto invisible ways in which media shaped a given society's worldview; it let us see the impact of the medium, and not just the message. When your culture revolves exclusively around books for hundreds of years, you can't detect the subtle ways in which the typographic universe alters your assumptions. But if you switch from cinema to radio to television in the course of a lifetime, the effects of the different media become apparent to you, because you have something to measure them against. That enlightenment is a profound thing, but it is only part of the legacy of electric speed. Adapting to an ever-accelerating sequence of new technologies also trains the mind to explore and master complex systems. When we marvel at the technological savvy of average ten-year-olds, what we should be celebrating is not their mastery of a specific platform—Windows XP, say, or the GameBoy—but rather their seemingly effortless ability to pick up new platforms on the fly, without so much as a glimpse at a manual. What they've learned is not just the specific rules intrinsic to a particular system; they've learned abstract principles that can be applied when approaching
any
complicated system. They don't know how to program a VCR because they've memorized the instructions for every model on the market; they know how to program a VCR because they've learned general rules for probing and exploring a piece of technology, rules that come in handy no matter what model VCR you put in front of them.

Cognitive scientists have argued that the most effective learning takes place at the outer edges of a student's competence: building on knowledge that the student has already acquired, but challenging him with new problems to solve. Make the learning environment too easy, or too hard, and students get bored or frustrated and lose interest. But if the environment tracks along in sync with the students' growing abilities, they'll stay focused and engaged. The game scholar James Paul Gee has observed precisely this phenomenon—called the “regime of competence” principle—at work in the architecture of successful video games. “Each level dances around the outer limits of the player's abilities,” he writes, “seeking at every point to be hard enough to be just doable…which results in a feeling of simultaneous pleasure and frustration—a sensation as familiar to gamers as sore thumbs.” Game designers don't build learning machines out of charity, of course; they do it because there's an economic reward in creating games that stay close to that border. Make a game too hard, and no one will buy it. Make it too easy, and no one will buy it. Make a game where the challenges evolve alongside your skills, and you'll have a shot at success. And you'll have built a powerful educational tool to boot.