Video games make you smarter

Archived from groups: rec.games.video.classic,alt.games.video.xbox (More info?)

From a book review in this week's New Yorker of “Everything Bad Is
Good for You” by Steven Johnson:

"Most of the people who denounce video games, he says, haven’t
actually played them—at least, not recently. Twenty years ago,
games like Tetris or Pac-Man were simple exercises in motor
coördination and pattern recognition...This is why many of us find
modern video games baffling: we’re not used to being in a
situation where we have to figure out what to do. We think we only
have to learn how to press the buttons faster. But these games
withhold critical information from the player. Players have to
explore and sort through hypotheses in order to make sense of the
game’s environment, which is why a modern video game can take
forty hours to complete...Playing a video game is, in fact, an
exercise in “constructing the proper hierarchy of tasks and moving
through the tasks in the correct sequence,” he writes. “It’s about
finding order and meaning in the world, and making decisions that
help create that order.”

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/b [...] crbo_books


--crymad