Everything Bad Is Good for You by Steven Johnson Page A

ones that require the most thinking. Somehow in this age of attention deficit disorder and instant gratification, in this age of gratuitous violence and cheap titillation, the most intellectually challenging titles are also the most popular. And they’re growing more challenging with each passing year.
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    S O THIS is the landscape of the Sleeper Curve. Games that force us to probe and telescope. Television shows that require the mind to fill in the blanks, or exercise its emotional intelligence. Software that makes us sit forward, not lean back. But if the long-term trend in pop culture is toward increased complexity, is there any evidence that our brains are reflecting that change? If mass media is supplying an increasingly rigorous mental workout, is there any empirical data that shows our cognitive muscles growing in response?
    In a word: yes.

G AMES
    Y OU CAN’T GET much more conventional than the conventional wisdom that kids today would be better off spending more time reading books, and less time zoning out in front of their video games. The latest edition of Dr. Spock —“revised and fully expanded for a new century” as the cover reports—has this to say of video games: “The best that can be said of them is that they may help promote eye-hand coordination in children. The worst that can be said is that they sanction, and even promote aggression and violent responses to conflict. But what can be said with much greater certainty is this: most computer games are a colossal waste of time.” But where reading is concerned, the advice is quite different: “I suggest you begin to foster in your children a love of reading and the printed word from the start…. What is important is that your child be an avid reader.”
    In the middle of 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts released a study that showed that reading for pleasure had declined steadily among all major American demographic groups. The writer Andrew Solomon analyzed the consequences of this shift: “People who read for pleasure are many times more likely than those who don’t to visit museums and attend musical performances, almost three times as likely to perform volunteer and charity work, and almost twice as likely to attend sporting events. Readers, in other words, are active, while nonreaders—more than half the population—have settled into apathy. There is a basic social divide between those for whom life is an accrual of fresh experience and knowledge, and those for whom maturity is a process of mental atrophy. The shift toward the latter category is frightening.”
    The intellectual nourishment of reading books is so deeply ingrained in our assumptions that it’s hard to contemplate a different viewpoint. But as McLuhan famously observed, the problem with judging new cultural systems on their own terms is that the presence of the recent past inevitably colors your vision of the emerging form, highlighting the flaws and imperfections. Games have historically suffered from this syndrome, largely because they have been contrasted with the older conventions of reading. To get around these prejudices, try this thought experiment. Imagine an alternate world identical to ours save one techno-historical change: video games were invented and popularized before books. In this parallel universe, kids have been playing games for centuries—and then these page-bound texts come along and suddenly they’re all the rage. What would the teachers, and the parents, and the cultural authorities have to say about this frenzy of reading? I suspect it would sound something like this:
    Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of