I had to read a section from Everything Bad is Good for You for Communications 200 last fall, and when I saw the whole book in Half Price the other day, I bought it.
His basic claim is, without arguing about the content, that the cognitive tasks involved in video games and TV shows are good for you. I'm just going to write this entire thing like he's correct, though I don't have the expertise in psychology or anything to back it up.
In video games, he finds an enormous amount of effort. Games have puzzles and force you to solve all sorts of logical, reasoning, pattern-spotting things. They involve long-term thinking - he quotes a line of tasks in one of the Link games that gets incredibly, incredibly complicated. The amount of guessing, and just figuring out what to do is intense. You have a general guideline for what you're supposed to do, but often it takes some guessing and running around to get it right. He cites the length of game walk-throughs as evidence of complexity that non-gamers vastly underestimate.
He also completely denies the idea that games decrease players' patience by giving instant gratification. I don't know where this idea came from, but it's one of the more annoying ones to me, so I'm going to talk about it. I do remember my dad walking by and citing it while I was playing a game on the PS2, Jak and Daxter. I was trying to beat the final boss for the 20th or so time in a row. The same fight, over and over, for probably an hour. After untold hours of playing the game to get to this point, and with untold hours left to complete every task and find every orb so I could finally have that coveted "100%" on my file. I probably could have read every well-known Jane Austen book in the amount of time I spent playing this one game, my very first full RPG.
In the next part of the book, he talks about TV shows. His claim is that TV shows have gotten increasingly socially complex, with more characters, more plot lines at any particular time, more expectations that the viewer will figure out what's going on without the answer thrown on a silver platter. Reality TV may be dumb in content, but it uses the parts of our brain dedicated to figuring out social connections and how to work with them.
What I wonder is what his perspective on online worlds is. The book was written in 2005, before the big boom. If keeping up on social relations and sharpening people skills is a good thing, and the basic structure of games is a good thing...shouldn't my WoW addiction be a very good thing? I do feel like WoW quests are not generally very complex, with a few exceptions, but the long-term strategy stuff definitely plays a huge role. For most people, I hope.
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