Everything Bad is Good For You
I’m sure we’ve all heard enough about how our culture is making our generation stupider and how video games, TV, movies, and the many Internets are destroying our brains. Actually, when I was typing that up, West Hill’s brilliant new reading program popped into my mind. It’s almost as if they felt the need to save us from our own idiocy and make us read to offset the technology around us that is making our minds degenerate and our souls depraved.
The thing about reading is that I need to be sufficiently interested in what I’m reading to even be able to do it. If I’m not interested, I can’t get past the first few pages. If I am, I’ll spend every possible moment finishing it. That’s what I don’t like about the twenty minutes of mandatory relaxation and reading. What happens when there’s no book that will interest me? I read on my own quite a bit, but there are going to be weeks when I can’t find anything good. This whole reading period thing is analogous to those Drop Everything and Read times back in good old Grade 3. It’s a joke, really, when you think about it, that you have to force high school students to read.
But I digress. “Everything Bad is Good For You” is a book that addresses the common perception that our popular culture is causing our generation to be less intelligent than those past. At first glance, video games and the like seem to be nothing more than the future of entertainment. There could be nothing of worth in those things. However, the author takes a look at where very few opposed to gaming do.
I remember a few weeks ago, my cousin rented one of the Splinter Cell games. I think it was Chaos Theory. Anyhow, we were excited in the anticipation of some co-operative tactical stealth action. We found that it was incredibly hard. We moved in the shadows very slowly, making no noise at all. We walk into the light and there happens to be a guy who starts shooting at us. My cousin’s dead before you know it and I had to whip out my cool looking rifle and blast the hell out of him. Then I revived my cousin and we proceeded to enter a rundown building. We were subsequently mowed down by two more guys.
At the second attempt, we took out the first guy and snuck behind and shot out the lights. Then we moved in darkness to do some cool stealth killing of those two inside. We proceeded to the next mission, where we needed to capture some guy and get some information about him. The mission starts and there’s this guard talking to a guy standing up top. He turns around and walks off and we proceed to shoot the guy in front of us. The top dude walks back, jumps down, and starts shooting. Being the violence-conditioned gamers that we are, we shot him many times. Our commander then came on our radios to shout at us because we killed the guy we needed the information from.
Ohhhhh. So that was that Jung guy. Alright. I guess we won’t kill him then.
In the end, it took about fifteen shots at the mission before we completed it. We tried knocking him out, taking the guard out, taking the guard out up top, taking them both out, running up to him, and combinations of the above. Either we ended up dying or he ended up dying. In the end, we discovered that we could “interrogate” him in our action menus.
What’s the moral of the story? Well, anyone who tells you that games are rot your mind can stuff it, because I sure as know that no idiot can have fun with Splinter Cell. It requires loads of patience and planning.
That is the gist of “Everything Bad is Good For You.”
All of this time, we’ve been comparing the new media to the tried and true printed word. It’s easy to dismiss film, television, and video games as intrinsically inferior to the high-classiness and enlightenment of print. We look at film and television and say that it doesn’t make our minds process the word; it’s all there for you to see. We look at video games and regard them as the pasttime of the young’uns. We look at the Internet and claim that it feeds our impatience and creates an insatiable hunger for instant gratification.
The author argues that to judge them by the standards of books is flawed, because their cognitive value lies elsewhere.
For instance, let’s have a look at Warcraft III. It has quite a good story and breaks out of a few fantasy cliches. But as good as the story is, it’s no contest up against something like Lord of the Rings. The main draw of Warcraft III isn’t the story. Yes, I myself bought it just to find out what happens after Warcraft II. The gameplay, though, is where games matter most. A game can be written beautifully and it will not be a good game until the mechanics of the game are good.
It is through playing the game that the value of the medium is displayed. Read again what my cousin and I went through just to interrogate this one guy. We had to figure out what to do with the guard at the bottom, figure out when the guard up top comes out to the roof and figure out what to do with him. Then, we have to figure out how to get up to Jung and interrogate him without causing all hell to break loose. This doesn’t even involve thinking about how to use the surrounding geography to our advantage or our wide array of tools at our disposal. In fact, much of the time, we didn’t even know what we were supposed to do!
Or take a Real Time Strategy game. There’s a pattern to how it’s played, but there are plenty of individual choices that you have to make within the boundaries set by the game. It’s a lot like chess. There are rules about how the pieces can be moved and the size of the board is set, but there’s plenty of room for you to move around within those boundaries and rules to make the game challenging and interesting.
So in Starcraft, you start off with a Command Centre and four workers. You would probably go and build a Barracks first, but you might want to start with a supply depot to make sure you have enough supplies to support your troops. After the barracks, you could go with an academy to get those beefy Firebats, or speed up to a factory and try to roll out some siege tanks before your opponent finds you. Or, you could even get a factory and speed on to a starport and get some wraiths and surprise your opponent. Or, you could get some dropships and start popping out tanks for some quick drops.
No, you don’t analyze the dramatic significance of your sieges upon your enemies’ bases like you would analyze Malcolm’s strategies against Macbeth’s castle. On the other hand, you don’t get to be Malcolm and conceive the strategies you would use to lay siege against Macbeth.
The author comes to the conclusion that as a result of all of these new media: games, the Internet, TV, film; our generation is actually become smarter.
And it’s not just games. Think about how complex today’s shows are compared to those in the past few decades. Think about how the Internet has made us more aware of the world we live in. I don’t think that our parents would have been discussing foreign policy and making fun of political alignment the way we do in our schools right now.
Basically, much of the alarm over the effects of our culture causing us to be a bit dimmer than the previous generation in general is bunk. I will admit that there are some less desirable portions of our culture, but it doesn’t make us the worst generation ever, like we’re lead to believe. There was good and evil long before video games and there will be for quite a while after.