Are Video games slowly turning us into a nation of losers?

Lewis Pulsipher, January 2006

I have a "white paper" from a major educational group that describes the "new student", essentially addressing generational differences of people of high school-college age with students of the past. One of their ten assertions is that "Nintendo"--that is, trial and error--is superior to logic. As a teacher, I found this paper so interesting that I made up a survey based on this, and found that some students, especially the younger ones, agree with many of the ten assertions.

I've also seen evidence in their activities that this particular assertion is true--that trial and error is used instead of logic.

So I wondered, how did this inefficient (from my middle-aged point of view) method become entrenched in "Generation Y"? The following is a set of generalizations, and as with all generalizations there are exceptions.

An answer (as implied in the assertion): video games. In video games, you don't have to worry about making bad decisions, because you can always go back to your save point and try again. You don't have to analyse the best way to do things, you can just try whatever strikes your fancy and see if it works. You don't even have to remember what is happening, because the game remembers for you. After you've found what appears to be the best course of action, you can try other possibilities just to see what happens.

Players don't need to employ thoughtful analysis and critical thinking. It's nirvana for those who like "the lazy way out", to guess rather than to think. Nowadays in some games the save spots even heal you--not the norm ten or twenty years ago.

Console gaming, in particular--Playstation, Game Cube, Game Boy, Xbox--seems to encourage this point of view, as compared to PC gaming. But PC gaming is much less popular, and evidently appeals more to older people (I don't play video games much, but they're always PC games, not console games). A game available for both console and PC sells three to ten times as much in the console version.

In contrast to this, baby boomers tend to be competitors. In those phases of my life when I've played computer games, I tried not to go back to save points, but to succeed "the first time". Given the nature of video games, designed to include the likelihood of multiple deaths and many reversions to saves, this is quite difficult to achieve. But I tried.

The basic plots of video games are quite linear; the idea again is to make it easy on the player, who is, in effect, led along the path. I wonder if the passivity I see in students partly comes from this characteristic of video games. Are we losing flexibility?

Young people are much more likely to be video game players than book readers, today. And video games are no longer just a "fan-boy" occupation, with almost as many female as male players. The majority of young people play video games of some sort. Unfortunately, commercial video games are not nearly as educational as books. Even fiction (as opposed to non-fiction) books teach the reader more about human nature and how the world functions than video games can provide, in most cases. Video games tend to teach the same thing over and over again, while each book teaches something new. (I won't get into the question of whether video games encourage violent behavior--I doubt it--but we do have to recognize that most "big box" video games promote success through the use of violence rather than other means.)

How much do you learn from a video game? You learn that persistence pays, but you also learn that precision is not important, because you can always try again. What I see in young students is this same notion, that imprecision is not a problem. It isn't in a video game, but I don't want my airline pilot, my surgeon, or my accountant to think that precision is unimportant.

I am not against games in themselves; I have had several of my own boardgame designs published (most recently Britannia Second Edition in February 2006). I also teach a class that introduces students to games of all kinds, video and "manual" (boardgames, card games, etc.) I think boardgames help develop critical faculties and encourage analysis and planning. The important difference between boardgames and video games is that, if you play boardgames by the "trial and error" method, you'll lose a lot of games! As each game is a relatively short entity in itself, rather than a continuing, long struggle as in a video game, if you play by trial and error you become . . . a loser. (Many modern "Euro" boardgames are designed to be played quickly; one benefit of this is that the trial-and-error types can learn, in a relatively short time, what the better moves and strategies are.)

Video games encourage a different view of reality, where there are not only second and third chances, but fourth and fifth and tenth and so on. What is going to happen to people who learn to cope with life this way--it seems to be further encouraged in K12 schools, where students are insulated from the effects of failure--when they get into the "real world"?

One of the fascinating aspects of video games is "cheat codes". A "Gen Y" person explaining the characteristics of his generation to college teachers said that a "Y" person would get the cheat codes to go to the last level of a video game, play until he won, and then say he "beat the game". Baby Boomers would say, "no, you cheated; beating the game involves going through all the steps". Gen Y might say that the result (beating the game) is the fruits of his research (finding the cheat codes, which is actually quite easy to do on the Internet)--he did what he needed to do to beat the game. I'm not sure what this teaches young people, but it is surely different from the way previous generations have viewed the situation, and not a method normally available in the real world.

Some people point out that video game players usually concentrate on a new game and play until they "beat" it. The concentration is excellent, but players seem to forget the many times they lost before they finally "won". And the lesson to the player is that long effort is rewarded, whereas in the modern world we need to have people learn to "work smarter, not harder" to achieve their goals.

In college we have many young students who won't read anything of significant length, who don't take notes, and who have poor memories. Somehow they expect that what they need to know will stick with them, or that they'll easily find it when they need it. Can we blame some of this on video games, where "mini-maps" and save games mean the player rarely needs to remember anything, where the games often use voice instead of text to explain what's going on (and hence reading becomes even less important)?

Many students rely on guessing instead of problem-solving; use of logic seems to be foreign to them. In some fields of endeavor in the "real world" you might be able to get away with this, but not in others. In computer programming, for example, you can tell which students haven't really "got it" because they guess at fixes to programs that don't work, instead of trying to figure out why they don't work.

Today we continue to see the trend in video games toward simplicity and ease-of-success in video games. World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online game, has over five million subscribers, far more than its older competitors. It is popular for many reasons, but according to some commentators, the biggest reasons for its popularity is that it is much easier to "level up", and much easier to survive in solo adventuring, than it is in older games of this type.

Some readers might say, "wait a minute, at least video games result in a strong familiarity with technology". My answer, as someone who teaches networking and other computer subjects, is "familiarity yes, capability no". Video game consoles, in particular, exist because so many people have been afraid of devices so complex that they include keyboards! Console games are particularly non-technical, and while console game players may think they know a lot about technology, there is no apparent connnection. For example, I know of a person whose son plays video games at great length, but who says the TV remote is too complicated! While many people say that, the technically competent generally do not.

You could say that at least video games improve eye-hand coordination. True, but even here we are becoming lazy; most "shooter" games now allow automatic aiming. You point your gun or character in the general direction of the enemy and the game does the rest! We don't even have to aim any more! (This has been added to games so that people who are not well-coordinated can still enjoy the game: laudable perhaps, but not improving eye-hand coordination.)

Most video game players are "casual" rather than "hard-core" players. The hard-core ones do employ analysis and critical thinking more than the casual players, but the hard-core are very much a minority.

Some video games encourage information gathering and planning. Always we know we can play again if we lose, but at least some element of analysis and critical thinking can be involved.

By the way, arcade games are different. If you play poorly, it costs you money, so you're more likely to strive to play well from the get-go. If you play a home video game poorly, it only costs you time.

The next generation of console games, already previewed in the XBox360, will have more of the capabilities of PCs. We can hope that the games become richer and more "realistic" in some respects, but we'll still have the fundamental inability to lose. Another good sign is that more games are played online against other people; there we have a loser (albeit an anonymous loser) as well as a winner. (Of course, players generally don't go online until they've beaten the solo version of a game, until trial-and-error has shown them the best way to play.) So you lose, but there is no cost to losing, you can try to play again and again...

Are video games turning us into a nation of losers? More likely, video games are a symptom of a particular set of attitudes, not a cause. Do I really believe we're becoming a nation of losers, as these folks get older? To some extent, yes. The question is, will these people learn that trial and error is inefficient, even dangerous, and adjust, or will they continue to use this method their entire lives? If the latter, this country is in big trouble.

Lewis Pulsipher