[evolvingconnections] MIT Tech Review article about how computer games help kids to develop newcompetencies

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/print_version/wo_jenkins080103.asp

Videogame Virtue
Playing computer games doesn't shorten kids' attention spans?it helps them
to manage competing demands in the new era of "continuous partial
attention."
By Henry Jenkins
Digital Renaissance
August 1, 2003

Frank Lantz, the head of game design at New York GameLab, demonstrated
Arcadia at the Game Developers Conference a few years back. Astonishingly,
Lantz played four basic Atari-style games on the screen at the same time.
In one window, he was arranging puzzle pieces. In another, he was making a
funny little man run through a scrolling maze. In another, he was defending
the Earth against alien invaders. And in a fourth, he was moving his paddle
to deflect a Pong ball. His mouse circled between windows, always seeming
to be in the right place at the right place at the right time to avert
disaster or grab an enticing power-up. Each game created a different
spatial orientation?in and out, up and down, right and left. To anyone who
respects skilled game play, Lantz gave a virtuoso performance.

As Lantz played, Eric Zimmerman, GameLab's cofounder and resident game
theorist, offered explanations for what we were seeing, demonstrating the
fusion of insightful and innovative design that has been the group's
hallmark. The folks at GameLab create games that make you think about the
nature of the medium. I want to use their provocation to explore some key
questions at the intersection of games, attention, and learning.
I am old enough to have played Pong and to have spent whole evenings
mastering some of those Atari games when they first appeared. Those games
used to be hard. Now, gamers like Lantz can handle four of them at a time
and not break a sweat. What happened?

When I spoke to him by telephone, Zimmerman reassured me that there was a
trick?the games had been simplified and slowed down from the originals. As
soon as any one game got interesting enough that you wanted to play it on
it on its own, it was probably too complicated for Arcadia. Yet, when I
tried to play Arcadia, even on its easiest setting, I found myself
constantly losing lives, frantically racing from place to place, and
always, always, always arriving too late. To use a technical term, I
sucked. Arcadia is set to launch at Shockwave.com in early August, so you
can see how you stack up.

GameLab works outside the mainstream industry, designing games for the Web,
not for the PC or the various game machines. Zimmerman, who recently
finished a book, Rules of Play, with Katie Salen, sees each game as an
experiment in interactive engineering. Much as punk rockers tried to strip
rock music down to its core, GameLab embraces a minimalist retro aesthetic,
shedding fancy graphics to focus on the mechanics of game play. In one of
its games, Loop, there aren't even mouse clicks: you simply encircle
butterflies by moving your mouse across the screen. Another GameLab title,
Sissyfight 2000, was a staging of Prisoner Dilemma as a multiplayer game
set in a schoolyard. All of the emphasis is on social interactions?the
choice to tattle, tease, bond with or abuse your classmates.

Arcadia began as a game about minigames?small, simple games that are
increasingly embedded within larger and more complicated games. It evolved
into a game about multitasking, one that links the management of game
resources with the management of one's own attention. That's actually a
core issue for many of us right now?how to manage our perceptual and
cognitive resources in what digital community builder Linda Stone
characterizes as an age of continuous partial attention.

Stone argues that there is a growing tendency for people to move through
life, scanning their environments for signals, and shifting their attention
from one problem to another. This process has definite downsides?we never
give ourselves over fully to any one interaction. It is like being at a
cocktail party and constantly looking over the shoulders of the person you
are talking with to see if anyone more interesting has arrived. Yet, it is
also adaptive to the demands of the new information environment, allowing
us to accomplish more, to sort through competing demands, and to interact
with a much larger array of people.

For my generation, this process feels highly stressful and socially
disruptive. But for my son's cohort, young men and women in their late
teens or early twenties, it has become second nature. I am amazed watching
my son doing his homework, chatting online with multiple friends, each in
their own chat room window, downloading stuff off the Web, listening to
MP3s, and keeping an eye on the Red Sox score. My parents couldn't
understand how I could do homework and watch television. My students sit in
class discussions, take detailed notes, and look up relevant Web sites on
their wireless laptops.

Our classic notions of literacy assume uninterrupted contemplation in
relative social isolation, a single task at a time. Some have characterized
the younger generation as having limited attention spans. But these young
people have also developed new competencies at rapidly processing
information, forming new connections between separate spheres of knowledge,
and filtering a complex field to discern those elements that demand
immediate attention. Stone argues that for better or worse, this is the way
we are all currently living. Therefore, she claims, we had better design
our technologies to accommodate continuous partial attention, and we had
better evolve forms of etiquette that allow us to smooth over the social
disruptions such behavior can cause.

Contemporary aesthetic choices?the fragmented, MTV-style editing, the dense
layering of techno music, the more visually complex pages of some
contemporary comic books?reflect consumers' desires for new forms of
perceptual play and their capacity to take in more information at once than
previous generations. Think for a moment about the scrawl?the layering of
informational windows?in today's TV news. Like Arcadia's minigames,  there
is a trick: any given bit of text is simplified compared to previous news
discourse. Such graphical busyness also has an advantage?we can see the
interrelationship between stories and pay attention to simultaneous
developments. We probably don't read everything on screen, but we monitor
and flit between different media flows.
All of this brings us back to games like Arcadia. Much as earlier
civilizations used play to sharpen their hunting skills, we use computer
games to exercise and enhance our information processing capabilities.
Researchers at the University of Rochester found that kids who regularly
play intense video games show better perceptual and cognitive skills than
those who do not. It isn't just that people who had quick eyes and nimble
fingers liked to play games; these skills could be acquired by non-gamers
who put in the time and effort to learn how to play.

Zimmerman argues that what makes playing Arcadia possible is the degree to
which each of the minigames builds on conventions. We take one look at
these games and we know what to do. Yet, the Rochester research suggests
something else?that people over time simply become quicker at processing
game information and can play more sophisticated games. In a new book, What
Video Games Can Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, James Paul Gee argues
that games are, in some senses, the ideal teaching machines. Gee suggests
that educators can learn a great deal about how to sequence a curriculum
from watching how game designers orient players to new challenges and how
they organize the flow of activities so that players acquire the skills
they need just in time for the next task; the goal is for players to find
each level challenging but not overwhelming. Games teach us, Gee argues,
without us even realizing that any education is taking place.

All of this research points in the same direction. Leaving aside questions
of content, video games are good for kids?within limits?because game play
helps them to adapt to the demands of the new information environment.
Surgeons are already using video games to refine their hand-eye
coordination for the ever more exacting demands of contemporary procedures.
The military uses games to rehearse the complexity of coordinating group
actions in an environment where participants cannot see each other. And all
of us can use games to learn how to function in the era of continuous
partial attention.

These multitasking skills will be most developed in those who have had
access to games from an early age. Our sons and daughters will be the
natives of the new media environment; others will be immigrants.  Educators
have long talked about a hidden  curriculum, things kids absorb outside of
formal education that shape their thoughts, tastes, and skills and that
enable some groups to advance more quickly than others. The same pattern is
developing around new media technologies?those who grow up with them as
part of their recreational life relate to them differently than those who
only encounter them later at school or work.

While the skills derived from playing video games expand human creative
capacity and broaden access to knowledge, they should not come at the
expense of older forms of literacy. The challenge is to produce children
who have a balanced perspective?who know what each medium does best and
what kind of content is most appropriate in each, who can multitask but can
also contemplate, who play games but also read books.

So, get thee to Arcadia but also get thee to a library.


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Henry Jenkins is director of the Program in Comparative Media Studies at
MIT.

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