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What it is
Everything Bad Is Good for You is bad for you
18 Feb 2007, 3:44

Have any of you read this book?

I haven't. I'm reading this review of it. And I think this review is as much of it as I need to read.

So it seems Steven Johnson's key thesis is that the format of pop culture is becoming increasingly challenging, more engaging, and that it is and will be producing, as the generations go, an increasingly smarter population. Generally, that pop culture—by that I think he means people who prefer television or video games to books—is making us better and smarter and everything good that supercilious, self-contented people who read books believe that books make them. That the benefits to be gained from engaging yourself in a go with Halo 2 or 24 are not only as good and valid, but are getting better, than the benefits to be gained from reading a book. That the vulgar hordes are going to be ok. Because the entertainments they consume, you've got to admit, are getting better all the time.

Sample from the review which is a sample from the book: "Perhaps the most dangerous property of ... books is 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 ... This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as if they're powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it's a submissive one."

He has a certain point. A book is a string or set or an array of words. And whatever else they can do or indicate, those words are written. On the page, in stone, they're written. But so is a sitcom script. So is a newsprompt. So is a computer program. While watching TV, you can't decide that you'd like to write in a little subplot in which Jerry falls in love with Newman and they start taking clandestine long weekends to Montreal together. You watch them as they scowl at one another before doing whatever the writer decided that they'd do. And you lie awake at night wondering what they'd order from room service in their secret love hotel. Reading a book is no more inherently passive than watching a TV show. Not at all.

But it is true that playing a video game is inherently a more active process than watching TV—without activity on your part, the game goes nowhere. There are puzzles to solve, terrains to learn, other characters to interact with, and in some cases a compelling plot to follow. And with the advent of the Nintendo Wii games can now not only demand a certain level of mental activity, but physical activity as well. To play a tennis game you swing the controller like you would a real tennis racket. A guy I work with told me about this. He was surprised by how tiring it actually was. After a night of Wii Tennis with the wife he was pooped and nostalgic for the thumb-and-eye sit-down style gaming he was used to.

But it is also true that, while you have a certain amount of control over the characters you play in video games, your activity in the game is restricted to the set of possible activities that the programmers have allowed. After a tiring Wii Tennis match, you can't invite your opponents back home to spunk up with an orgy. In Grand Theft Auto, you can't decide you want to quit the hustler's life, move to rural Illinois and start it over again as a spelt farmer. The game just wasn't written that way. You're a hustler. You'll thug it 'til you die. Or until you get tired of the game.

So, sure, reading a book can be a relatively passive activity, a relatively submissive process. Reading a book can be simply following a string. Reading a book is a thumb-and-eye sit-down style activity. You can't make Humbert stop loving Lolita any more than you can make Jerry start loving Newman. No, you can't go meet Gatsby's neighbors. But that complaint has about as much clout and pertinance as mine about the irredeemable life your play in GTA. (Gatsby's neighbors? Please. Go meet your own. Invite them over for a game.)

The difference between reading a book and watching TV is the difference between eating and being fed. When you read a book, you can stop reading it to make a connection clear, to look up a word, to take a walk and wrestle with an unfamiliar notion. You can annotate in the margins, you can skim for favorite quotes, you can ferret out all the subplots, you can have your lover read passages out loud while you go down on them. You could even hide it in your freezer (3rd paragraph).

Terminology break: by "book" I mean any literature, and by "literature" I mean any written word.

A book is a simulation of a voice. And a voice is an opportunity for dialogue. With a book, you can't tune out and simply gaga all the images sliding by, slipping into your brain unimpeded by your capacity for comprehending them. With a book, you can't understand its images without understanding its words. With a book, you're in total control of your mode and rate of consumption.

You have some of that kind of control with a video game. You don't have any of that kind of control with a TV show.

Well, you have a tad with TiVo. They're getting better all the time.

Anyway, anyone who complains that reading books doesn't provide opportunities for (I'm biased, but I would say expects) mental engagement either hasn't read any of the right books or hasn't read any books at all in the right way. That guy I work with doesn't read books anymore. I don't watch television anymore. Maybe I never watched it in the right way. May be. You can watch an episode of The Simpsons and walk away dumber, or you can walk away inspired to write a book about the philosophical underpinnings you either see or read into it.

So the real moral of this book, Everything Bad is Good for You: How TV and games make us smarter, I think, is that you should choose and enjoy your media, whatever media you choose, for the right reasons, and don't listen to or be dissuaded by all that "high art, low art" scat because every media has its highs and every media has its lows. You have Final Fantasy 7, we have The Catcher in the Rye. World of Warcraft, River City Ransom—Calvin & Hobbes, The Waste Land. Dance Dance Revolution, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. You have Mortal Kombat. We have Razor Wire Pubic Hair. You should choose what you want because you like it, and like it because it turns you on, because it gets you going, because it engages you and activates you in whatever way and because know you're a better and happier person with it in your life.

Because at the end of the day that's the only narrative path you can control. And have total control over. And it could be the most engaging game you'll ever know.

Having said all this, I really think that this book is a big game of reverse psychology.

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