Timing is everything.
A starred review --- the very best kind --- from Publishers Weekly is not a small thing, so an enterprising publicist at Penguin Books sent me the rave. The book, coming out in January, is by Jane McConigal. The title: "Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World." (To pre-order the book from Amazon, click here.) The review, in part:
As addictive as Tetris.... For the nearly 183 million Americans who will spend an average of 13 hours a week playing games, McGonigal's book is a welcome validation of their pursuits. But for those who don't understand, or who may worry that our growing preoccupation with games is detrimental to society and culture, McGonigal argues persuasively that games are in fact improving us.
In an experiment at the German Sport University in Cologne in 2007, boys from 12 to 14 spent an hour each night playing video games after they finished homework. On alternate nights, the boys spent an hour watching an exciting movie, like "Harry Potter" or "Star Trek," rather than playing video games. That allowed the researchers to compare the effect of video games and TV. The researchers looked at how the use of these media affected the boys' brainwave patterns while sleeping and their ability to remember their homework in the subsequent days. They found that playing video games led to markedly lower sleep quality than watching TV, and also led to a "significant decline" in the boys' ability to remember vocabulary words.
"Who wants to read starting in the middle of Page 137?" she [Ms. Blondel, the teacher] asks. One student begins to read aloud, and the rest follow along.To Ms. Blondel, the exercise in group reading represents a regression in American education and an indictment of technology. The reason she has to do it, she says, is that students now lack the attention span to read the assignments on their own.
"How can you have a discussion in class?" she complains, arguing that she has seen a considerable change in recent years. In some classes she can count on little more than one-third of the students to read a 30-page homework assignment.
Just to be clear, I'm a big fan of collaboration --- when it's real. For example, when 250,000 people submitted drawings that became a Johnny Cash video. Or every page of The Collaborative Habit, the book I worked on with Twyla Tharp. But playing games that lead to communities that go on to solve real problems --- I think we're more likely to see Sarah Palin publish her translation of "The Iliad."
Jane McGonigal has a husband. And a dog. No kids yet. I don't point that out in the way of a jerk who says, "What does she know?" I mention it only because her admiration for smart kids who suck at schoolwork but play 10,000 hours of computer games before they're 21 might get re-examined if it were her kid zoning out in the back row.
It's well and good for kids to play. And to play computer games --- in limited doses. But I'm thinking about a photograph I recently saw. It was of an 8-year-old girl in China. She was on her way to school. She got there by crossing a raging river on a zip line.
That Chinese girl is our 8-year-old daughter's future competition --- or collaborator. Somehow I feel she's not coming home to play games. Call me crazy, but I don't think an American kid who's passionate mostly about World of Warcraft is going to present much of a challenge to her. And I think it would be good if pretty much everybody read --- for starters, because it's about the real world of real war --- "The Things They Carried."
PS. I just read a Thomas Friedman column inspired by the Times piece on Digital Distraction. Here's the last paragraph:
If you want to know who's doing the parenting part right, start with immigrants, who know that learning is the way up. Last week, the 32 winners of Rhodes Scholarships for 2011 were announced -- America's top college grads. Here are half the names on that list: Mark Jia, Aakash Shah, Zujaja Tauqeer, Tracy Yang, William Zeng, Daniel Lage, Ye Jin Kang, Baltazar Zavala, Esther Uduehi, Prerna Nadathur, Priya Sury, Anna Alekeyeva, Fatima Sabar, Renugan Raidoo, Jennifer Lai, Varun Sivaram.
[Cross-posted from HeadButler.com ]
Jane, apparently knows.
Not the terrible schools, awful teachers, and lazy parents.
It's video games. Just like it was music before this.
And movies before that. And books before that.
Let's call everyone A.D.D and sell them some pills.
I bet I have more books on my kitchen table that most kids read in high school.
That and the fact that I had spent my summer hitch hiking to the west coast
Joined the Navy for an education and now I build whatever I want I don't buy things I buy tools and materials (mostly salvage) and make them
4 years Navy 4 Trans Atlantic crossings Sailing Tall Ships 6 months off the coast of Africa 1 yr chartering the Carribean 2 hurricanes at sea open ocean rescues 4 yyrs as a guidance counselor for German street kids doing open ocean sail traing and taught myself to speak German
Why??
Frodo and Bilbo Baggins and the realization that if you keep going in spite of hard setbacks you will eventually reach the light
What doesn't kill you will make you stronger and relishing the challenge
School is a mind numbing expierience that teaches you math but doesn't explain why If your goal is to be an automaton than it works for you If you have an imagination it will kill your soul
To not recognize the possibilities with what this woman is suggesting is to not realize the potential in what we have here
This is more than about killing zombies It's about using real world technology to solve real world problems
From the negative posts here its easy to understand why smart people prefer games
If that's NOT happening, you're wasting your time.
Just had that conversation at thanksgiving dinner with a bunch of highly educated recent graduates
They agreed with my opinion
Along with a a Harvard MBA who said the paper he has is overrated and oversubscribed
And I didn't get out and find myself in debt for 10's of thousands of dollars
I create my jobs they have to apply for them
But they are dark and endless, you can never win, you can never kill all the monsters unless you cheat. I realized that the shooting did not interest me, it was the *exploring*.
I was saved by Google Earth. I get the same sense of exploration, but it is REAL, and I can hop in my car and GO THERE, and I have!
American Immigrants raise hungry, hardworking children.
American's raise self-entitled, spoiled, ignorant, patriotic wimps. If we are going to fix our predicament, then we need to find a new way to raise our youth, preferably one that does not advocate Warcraft, and other super enlightening games. I have a 3 year old niece who has spent her last three years learning her alphabet on my sister's iphone!! Now the kid is all about any screen, what happened to coloring, oh, wait you can now color on the wii...........We are screwed, albeit for the immigrants of America, who at least for the first generation, will be ok and hardworking, then once they have their roots secured in America, the next few generations will for sure spawn the great collapse of the 21st.....entitled "american dreamers" Well people...The American Dream has been sold in the name of progress. We have seen what the first round of entitled brats (the 60's generation) has done to our country, and now we have round two coming!! Hold on tight!!
Three words: Folding @ Home. (Well...two and a half)
God...would a little research kill you?
If you can't see the possibilities here you must open your up imagination
I'm not going to get into snide remarks but there is a reason why so many kids are opting out of the system as it is now
Mind numbing boredom and a complete lack of concrete challenges
This concept is more than just killing zombies its about solving real world challenges with real world technology
I think the book author has valid points.
I feel this articles' author is dead wrong.
I would teach British Literature through video games if they let me. (I already incorporate Watchmen, Ex-Machina, and Lupe Fisaco in my class).
Someone must grow the food.
Who will do it?
This is a generational rant...I'm sure the same your parents gave when you were flippin out to the Beatles or whatever.
I teach seniors in high school. I also have two kids. I also have been playing video games since I was two. I think my two degrees, numerous certifications, articles, and novels do not fit into your simple analysis.
Short attention spans don't belong in video games. This is obvious but...have you EVER played a video game? You know, the thousands of games that take dozens of hours to complete? Exactly. I understand Tetris is all YOU know but...
Johnny can't read. Or think (this is a fragment BTW)- because of garbage books and movies mixed in with a society that is all about faster and shallower. Johnny is stupid because of 24-7 sports and our dysfunctional value system.
Pay attention to the progression of language. As society sped up our language became more truncated and instruction manual-like. Language moves at the speed of life.
Instead of the adults understanding what was happening around them they decided to just ostrich out. Games are the future. Hell, games are the NOW.
Yet kids still read. Facebook is still words. The multi-billion dollar resurgence of teen books (Potter, Percy, Twilight) does not point to some wide spread failure. The world has always been full of stupid. The intelligent few have always shouldered the burden for the mindless masses. Wake up.
If your kids are automatons they'll do fine under your tutalage but if they have an imigination and a sense of adventure your going to have serious trouble as they get older
Read my above posts
I totally rebelled against the lock box of school and my brother told me his kid will never behave like me
I said yeah good luck with that
I do. But even more sinister is Twitter and cellphones. Teens communicate and listen in 146 character pieces. A thought that takes more than that cannot be communicated and so they do not develop the mental facility to follow a long complicated sentence, such as you find in any of the classic writings.
To get my daughters attention, I make a "bzzzt!" noise just before speaking. It mimics the sound of an incoming text message and instantly grabs attention. If I do not do that, I might as well speak to the wall.
Yikes! That's crazy.
Teens aren't the only ones using Twitter and they're certainly not the only ones glued to their cell phones. I've seen grown women who can't get their phones away from their faces to save their lives. I agree that there is something to the fact that our ability to concentrate and discern and deliberate is being altered by the technology and applications in use today. I guess I'm just pessimistic, but it often feels as if people are just too lazy to invest their time.
Being the good middle class parents that mine were they preached a college education as a way into a middle class life for their children, all the while failing to understand what it really meant to labor in an intellectual endeavor as a student. So, of course, they were completely uninvolved with my academic life, and my life in general, preferring, instead, to let the media raise me. The results were predictable. I dropped out of high school and floundered for 13 years before I decided that I wanted to free myself from willful stupidity and get an education. I'll graduate in the spring with my masters degree from Hamline University, but, more importantly, I've freed my mind from ignorance and superstition. And I read a LOT more now, too.
I was a product of the system that Mr. Kornbluth writes about here. I fear, however, that my story is the exception.
It didn't matter that s permanent occupation wasting trillions based wasn't rationally defensible. The manipulators calculated that it presented the right fantasy image to Americans who, having helpfully replaced their books with video games, could no longer think.