Gaming the system

Of late, it has been widely, if somewhat sheepishly, reported that the video game industry in the United States is now ‘bigger than Hollywood,’ meaning that games outsell movies (but as The New York Times recently noted, only in terms of box-office sales). The industry has grown into a $10.5 billion juggernaut, up from $6 billion in 1998. To those who have next to no knowledge of video games—that would include most senior citizens and many women of all ages (gamers are mostly male and under 40)—it must come as a surprise that this silly little piece of popular culture now lords over the allied entertainment industry. Film aficionados wax poetically about the power of film, the artistic achievement of film, about how great movies are the 20th century’s version of a Gothic cathedral. Does that make Street Fighter II the new Chartres? Well, of course not, they say—it’s a sign of how base and malign the culture has become.

As video games have proliferated, and as they have worked their way into the national consciousness, there has been a raft of complaints concerning their ‘nefarious’ effects on children (and grown-ups, too). Many of the complaints are recycled, having been levied against film and books in the past—too violent, too sexually explicit, merely prurient rubbish. Some go further and say that video games, because of their interactivity, are worse. Other complaints center upon the culture that has grown up around gaming. A typical movie may last 110 minutes, but gaming sessions, particularly the so-called MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), can extend for many hours, days even. To sit in front of a computer monitor for hours on end can’t be good for physical conditioning, detractors reason. Such devotion to a parallel fantasy world can’t be good for one’s mental life.

But of course, excess in any endeavor tends to the same state; how is the film junkie substantively different from the MMORPG devotee? I go to the movies sparingly, not because I dislike them, but because their power overwhelms my imagination for days afterward—I enter a dreaded ‘movie stupor.’ For example, I recently saw George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck and could not shake the jazzy, smoke-filled, black-and-white ambience of the movie for days. And for the imaginatively alert, books, too, possess such power. I remember being similarly transported of late to French Indochina by Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, to pre-war Los Angeles by Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, and to the coaling stations and intrigue of the ancien regime in historian Constantine Pleshakov’s The Tsar’s Last Armada: The Epic Voyage to the Battle of Tsushima.

On one level, if one must depart reality now and again (and one should), these are fine vessels for the trip; however, a sound argument can be made against tripping into fantasy too often—all things in moderation. And when we do trip into our make-believe worlds, shouldn’t there be some knowledge, some perspective, that we bring back with us to the real world?

The very nature of gaming (at least, some forms of gaming) wars against moderation; the MMORPGs, for example, make immoderate demands on one’s time. Game play in these instances transcend dry exercises in strategy, or cartoonish and indiscriminant episodes of violence, but rather, delve into carefully nuanced parallel worlds where players have ersatz psychological profiles and can entertain a dizzying number of choices. As the amount of data computers can crunch explodes in volume, we find that verisimilitude is composed of interrelational databases and strings of program code, the end result being certain aspects of the real world really do resemble the game, and the inoculating force of a suspended disbelief is needed less and less.

Last spring, popularizing science writer Steven Johnson took a different approach in examining the effects of popular culture—and by implication, video games—in Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. Johnson suggests that, contrary to many complaints concerning the brainlessness of pop culture, today’s pop culture is more cognitively stimulating than its antecedents. Survivor, so the logic goes, is far more an intellectual exercise than The Price Is Right, The Sims far more intricate than Pong or Pac Man.

On its own terms, I agree completely with the main thrust of Johnson’s argument. Increased computing power has increased our ability to model life, or at least, certain aspects of life. It has also pointed out how faulty our supposed intuition is in some respects. A few years ago, The New York Times published a story concerning how a ‘rookie’ poker player could walk away from the World Series of Poker having defeated so many seasoned veterans. The young man in question had never so much as shared a poker table with others until he won the biggest event of them all. It turns out, though, that the winning player was not quite the rookie everyone had thought; rather, he had assiduously cultivated his poker-playing talents on the internet, playing in virtual tournaments, or as the reporter artfully noted, ‘The experience of playing thousands of games in roadhouses and casinos is being eclipsed by a cyborg-like intelligence produced by humans weaned on machine play.’ The hands come more quickly, and the game is reduced to its essence: recognizing a set of overlapping patterns—the patterns of playing cards, the patterns of betting and how the money falls. In this environment, the so-called rookie had witnessed, experienced, and tested far more strategic possibilities than any old salt could possibly imagine and had internalized them all to a degree that all the ‘human’ components of the game, like bluffing, simply ceased to matter. Passionless, unromantic, but effective.

In very similar fashion, many observers of chess were astounded when Deep Blue, IBM’s chess-playing supercomputer, finally defeated world champion Gary Kasparov 3.5-2.5 under tournament conditions in 1997. Prior to the historic defeat, chess aficionados felt very much the same way poker players used to feel—although very much a game about strategic limitations, success in chess demands a certain human intelligence; feelings, instinct, and intuition can all make a difference. Well, so much for that.

Or take the sport that gaming geeks love most of all, baseball. There are generations of American men raised on the statistical abstracts baseball generates, but real baseball players will tell you that the game is really about stuff statistics can’t measure. Tell that to Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics. As explained in Michael Lewis's book Moneyball, Beane had devised a numbers-based system of player evaluation that enabled his perpetually underfunded baseball team to compete against the heavyweights of the sport. Likewise, only after hiring Bob James—the godfather of baseball’s statistical abstract—as a management consultant did the Boston Red Sox defy the Curse of the Bambino in 2004 and win its first world championship in 86 years. In games, human intuition adds up to a lot less than we think and begins to resemble so much Romantic bunk. So far as it goes, Steven Johnson’s theory concerning the cognitive superiority of today’s popular culture makes sense—and when you compete against a computer, you begin to think like a computer.

But a game is just that—it is not life. This is not revelatory to most of us and wouldn’t bear mentioning were it not for some overreaching arguments offered by a few suggesting that games have as much to teach us as, say, literature, and certainly, the use of computer simulations—games—in many educational disciplines and vocational skills training courses is commonplace. I remember as an undergraduate that one business class project was basically a large Sim City tournament. Upon playing the game for the first time, there is an immediate, if vague, sense of competing demands at a budgetary level, but moving a slum or dynamiting a tenement is just a matter of pixels in gameworld. You learn in a colorful way how gentrification can improve a neighborhood economy and add funds to your coffers via taxes (isn’t this pretty elementary stuff?), but you learn nothing of the ethics behind the action or of the political skill to pull off such a plan—When is it okay to move a slum? What words are used to tell families they have to move? How do you convince the city councilman who represents the slum to back your project? Would students not have benefited more from a vigorous discussion of ethics and city planning, or the aesthetic component of gentrification (for instance, why do all gentrified neighborhoods look like outdoor shopping malls)?

More dramatically, take an example from the turn-based strategy game, Civilization III. This is a game that pits ‘civilizations’ against one another, and as one can imagine, occasionally, there are wars. During a war, it is possible for one civilization to capture its enemies’ cities, but the captured cities retain their ethnocultural characteristics. If conditions in the city don’t improve, it could revolt and rejoin its original civilization; therefore, it is sometimes necessary, after capturing such a city, to alter its demographic makeup by starving out its original inhabitants and/or replacing them with one’s own settlers. In gameworld, this is called good strategy; in the real world, this is called ethnic cleansing. One might scoff at such a comparison, and admittedly, it’s over the top, but think not of the specific example; rather, think of the set of mental operations inculcated by the game—games privilege strategy over all other considerations, and as gaming technology grows more powerful, as we model reality more closely and the line between the real world and the virtual blurs, is there not a danger when people become very skilled in the application of strategy (through constant game play) and not so skilled in applying moral judgments?

At its heart, Steven Johnson’s thesis turns on the idea that it is essentially beneficial for our amusements to become more engaging. On its face, this does not appear malign—surely, there is no harm in making games, movies, and TV shows more cognitively challenging. Presumably, however, the opposite also will occur—our engagements will become more amusing, and this would have important implications. One such potential effect is the inversion of our priorities: a culture that takes seriously its trifles, and trifles with things serious. Such a reversal is the touchstone of decadent cultures, and it is amid such intellectual confusion that certain artistic genres flourish, chiefly satire. It is through this lens we can understand the success of South Park and The Simpsons. To be sure, these cartoons are brilliant, witty, trenchant even. They inspire endless water-cooler conversations, but those conversations, more times than not, never move beyond the adventures of Cartman. As brilliantly satirical as they are, such cartoons still operate as entertainment, even when topics like global environmental disaster, genocide, and civil rights constitute the subtext of the entertainment. Try subjecting those same water-cooler conversationalists to a detailed discussion of the Kyoto Protocol and you’ll likely receive blank stares and hostile indifference, and so satire proliferates, if only because, in a disordered culture, it is the only way to bring into general view topics of great importance. Satire exposes—at least, can expose, given a certain aptitude on the part of the viewer—but a healthy culture also needs the power of remediation that only comes from giving serious thought to serious issues. In life, one cannot jest one’s way to salvation or hit reset when plans go awry.