----- Original Message ----- From: "Eubulides" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> the idea of ending the work/play distinction isn't possible under capitalism, except for a small number of elite workers such as academics.
----- I agree although the claim is contestable and is the source of the usual contentions from various schools of political-economy yada yada. However I was pointing out what Jobs et. al. were asserting. They saw the breakdown of the work/play binary in positive terms, as part and parcel of a libertarian ontology of voluntarism; in analogy to KM's quip about work and fishing, it was write code in the AM/PM, get high and play the games made via code in the PM/AM --who needs sleep when in computational/psychedelic/narcissistic bliss.............For them the enemy was television, not capitalism. ----- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34784-2004Dec4.html It's No Contest Boys Will Be Men, and They'll Still Choose Video Games By Patrick Welsh Sunday, December 5, 2004; Page B01 Jake Stephens, a senior in my AP English class at T.C. Williams High School, is hooked. "The narrative is so exciting you lose all track of time," he said to me last week. "Three hours can go by and it seems like 15 minutes. Once I'm into it, it's hard to think of anything else; all my focus is on finishing the story line." Was Jake talking about "All the Pretty Horses," the novel I'm currently having my students read? I wish. Personally, I find Cormac McCarthy's coming-of-age cowboy tale enthralling, with its tragic love story, graphic violence and lyrical writing. But Jake probably thinks it's pretty tame. He's seduced by a different kind of narrative -- the car-stealing frenzy of one of his favorite video games, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I've known for a long time that a lot of the boys in my English classes are more interested in connecting with their Xboxes in the evening than with the next three chapters of Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon." But ever since I observed their mounting hysteria over last month's "premiere" of Halo 2, the new combat game from Microsoft, I've been trying to find out what's behind the lure of video games. As the boys I teach have endeavored to enlighten me, I haven't known whether to laugh, cry, or go find a new job. What they told me has me wondering how what I teach can possibly compete with the fast-paced razzle-dazzle of this ever-evolving entertainment form and worrying about the young guys who spend so much time divorced from reality and the life of the mind as they zap away the hours before their video screens. I had to chuckle at the image of otherwise reasonable boys keeping a vigil outside the Best Buy store in Potomac Yards until the doors opened at midnight on Nov. 9, when they could charge in to be the first to snap up Halo 2, which added $125 million to Bill Gates's company fortune on its debut day alone. But I didn't think it was so funny when some guys skipped school that day to stay home and try to beat the game. Senior Steve Penn (who wasn't one of the skippers) told me that the following weekend, he played for six hours straight (minus bathroom breaks) at a friend's house. When he got home at 1 a.m. on Sunday, he went at it for two more hours, fell asleep, got up at 7 and fired up the game again. "My mother had to remind me to change my clothes and take a shower," he said. Steve, like Jake, is a good student; he even finished "All the Pretty Horses" (which he said he appreciated because it "wasn't sappy") a week before it was due. I'm not especially worried about the boys who manage to balance their passion for video games with their responsibilities to school and to themselves. But I have to wonder what effect this widespread, intense obsession with the games is bound to have on the boys who can't, or don't, manage that balance, the boys whose time and concentration the games suck away. And suck them away they do. I'm not the only one to see it happening. T.C. girls have told me that at parties they are often totally ignored as the guys gather around TV screens, entranced by one video game or another. "Girls sit around watching the guys play until they get fed up and drive off looking for something else to do," says junior Sarah Kell, for whom the games range from "stupid and boring" to "disgusting." (Most girls tell me they find the games silly.) "We try to tell them they're wasting their time, but they just keep going. Some guys stay up playing until 3 in the morning on school nights, and then they try to do their homework." I figured I would finally discover what all the excitement was about when I went to a Halo 2 party at a friend's Internet company recently. But as I wandered among the four offices where teams of three to four guys -- bright, highly educated guys in their mid-twenties and early thirties -- were competing, I kept asking myself: "Is this all there is to it?" I'm not sure what I was expecting, but certainly it was something more than a game where you shoot at moving objects until you get 50 "kills." I know that Halo 2 aficionados will say that's a gross oversimplification. And as one who gave up video games after several failed attempts at Pac-Man in the early '70s, I may be the last person who should be commenting on them. Like many others, though, I find the rampant violence, misogyny and sexual and racial stereotyping of some games beyond offensive, and wonder about the negative messages they're sending to young people. But my more immediate concern is how to get books back on the playing field. I became an English teacher because I love literature and wanted to share it with students. Literature, however, demands that we enter into an imaginative world slowly, through the written word. It forces us to re-create this world in our minds, through the power of our imaginations. When my students finish "All the Pretty Horses," I'll show them some scenes from the 2000 movie. I know that the students who really got into the reading will say, as kids in previous years have said, that the world the movie creates -- even enhanced by the star power of Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz -- can in no way compare to the richness of the world the book allows them to evoke for themselves. But I also know that many of the boys won't care one way or the other. They won't have engaged with the novel on the level that really makes an imagined story come alive. Entering the fictional world of a novel takes a different set of skills from getting to the "next level" in a video game -- as I found out during my pathetic attempt to steal a car when I played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas last week. As much as I love "All The Pretty Horses," I admit it can't compel the focus or generate the kind of excitement that guys find in Halo 2, Madden '05, Grand Theft Auto or any of the other new generation of games. Whatever vicarious experience a novel or even a movie can offer, "gamers" say it can't approach a video game's intensity of experience. "A video game is like a novel -- it has a plot, a setting and a theme. But it's the interaction that a novel doesn't have that makes the video games so intriguing," said Steve Penn, in a patient effort to enlighten me. "With a video game you're seeing the action happen in front of you; you have some control, which creates an illusion that you're in the game." Jake Stephens feels the same way. "It's like reading an exciting book, except you feel you are in the book," he says. "Once I start a game like San Andreas, I am so into it that I sit in class thinking about how I can get to the next level when I get home." I have to confess that when I was in high school, reading novels wasn't too high on my list of priorities, either. So maybe, you say, I shouldn't worry about my students. They'll come around to literature later. But the video craze apparently isn't something that wears off with adolescence. In fact, it seems to intensify in college. Old Dominion University freshman Nick Pratt said that as soon as Halo 2 came out, some guys skipped classes for three straight days to play the game in the dorms. Duke freshman Sarah Ball told me she can walk down the hall of a male-only floor in her dorm and hear video games going in every room. "Lately they've been having Halo 2 tournaments," she reports. "There will be wall-to-wall bodies in a room, the lights are off for that video game ambience. I stuck my head in once to ask a friend a question and got death stares." Video games have taken over the lives of some guys in her dorm, says University of Virginia freshman Remy Kauffmann. "I've never seen anything like it. It's hard to have a conversation with these guys. If they're not playing, they want to start up a game." "One of the reasons so many kids bomb out of college in their first year," says Silver Spring educational psychologist Bill Stixrud, "is that without parents to set some boundaries, they can't control the video games and other electronic entertainment available to them." How often do you think that happens with a good novel? T.C. Williams senior L.J. Harbin has played his share of video games, especially the ones involving cars, like Gran Turismo. He agrees that the games take time away both from studies and from the development of physical abilities. "There are more and more couch potatoes -- guys who are 30 to 40 years old and organize tournaments. Some work just to pay for their addiction," L.J. says. "I know two guys who are Halo fanatics and both chose the game over their girlfriends. They would rather be sitting on their butts pushing buttons than doing something with their girlfriends." T.C. Williams football coach Greg Sullivan says that he sees fewer and fewer kids playing outside when he drives around Northern Virginia. "They are inside playing video games," he says. "More kids are finding real sports too demanding." I know we all need entertainment and downtime, and I've certainly thrown away a few hours in my life myself. I would love to have back all the time I've wasted watching professional football games. And I take a little solace from the predictions of cyberspace gurus at places like MIT, who say that video games are creating a new art form -- the interactive narrative -- as revolutionary as the printing press or the invention of movies. Interactive narratives will put us right in the story and allow us, at the push of a button, to choose from many plot lines, they promise. But while we're waiting for the next Orson Welles or Francis Ford Coppola to come out of Silicon Valley or MIT, I see a whole generation of boys being manipulated by mercenary video game designers who aren't terribly interested in creating high art. I worry that video games are contributing to the growing gap I see in the academic achievement of boys and girls and to the disproportionate number of boys being labeled LD and being put on Ritalin. A recent Japanese study compared the brain activity of children adding single-digit numbers to that of children playing Nintendo games. It found that the Nintendo games stimulated only the temporal lobes, which regulate basic sensory activity, while doing the simple math problems stimulated not only the temporal but also the frontal lobe, which governs impulse control, goal-directed behavior and memory. "Young brains grow on a 'use it or lose it' principle," says Stixrud, who fears that video games may be stunting the brain development of young children. He sees kids in his practice who have developed sleep disorders because they spend three or four hours a night playing electronic games. Tomorrow, I will give my first-period class a test on the final section of "All the Pretty Horses." There are some great boys in that class, and I hope they've been able to take the time and find the solitude to give themselves a chance to get into the novel. If they don't like it after a solid effort, so be it. I won't argue over questions of taste. But I will be royally bothered if they've been cheated out of a chance to experience the beauty and power of the book because a marathon of video game-playing dissipated their time and blunted their sensibilities. Author's e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
