_zombies or mad scientists?

Computers and English

Matt Barton

_old fashioned persuasion

• “This book is an old-fashioned work of persuasion that ultimately aims to convince you of one thing: popular culture has, on average, grown more complex and intellectually challenging over the past thirty years.” (xiii)

_key claims

1. By almost all the standards we use to measure reading’s cognitive benefits, the nonlinearity of pop culture has been steadily growing more challenging over the past thirty years.

2. The nonliterary pop culture is honing different mental skills that are just as important as the ones exercised by reading.

_sleeper curve

• The landscape of popular culture involves the clash of competing forces: – The neurological appetites of the brain– The economics of the culture industry– The development of technology

• “This is the ultimate test of the Sleeper Curve: even the crap has improved.” (91)

_nothing to canonize here

• “I do not believe that most of today’s pop culture is made up of masterpieces that will someday be taught alongside Joyce and Chaucer.” (11)– “But they are more complex and nuanced

than the shows and games that preceded them.” (11)

_let’s get cognitive

• “I think there is another way to assess the social virtue of pop culture, one that looks at media as a kind of cognitive workout, not as a series of life lessons.” (14)

_rewards of reading

• “What are the rewards of reading? – The information conveyed by the book– The mental work you do to process and store

that information.”

_games

• “Games are not novels, and the ways in which they harbor novelistic aspirations are invariably the least interesting thing about them.” (21)

_this game is hard work

• “The dirty little secret of gaming is how much time you spend not having fun.” (25)– “The clearest measure of

cognitive challenges posed by modern videogames is the sheer size of the cottage industry devoted to publishing game guides.” (28)

_neuroscience

• “The power of games to captivate involves their ability to tap into the brain’s natural reward circuitry.” (34)

• “Most of the crucial work in game interface design revolves around keeping players notified of potential rewards available to them.” (36)

_rewards

• “If you create a system where rewards are both clearly defined and achieved by exploring an environment, you’ll find human brains drawn to those systems.” (38)– “No other form of entertainment offers that

cocktail of reward and exploration—we don’t explore movies or TV.” (38)

_decisions

• “Games force you to make decisions.”– “Learning how to think is ultimately about

learning to make the right decisions: weighing evidence, analyzing situations, consulting your long-term goals, and then deciding.” (41)

– These decisions are predicated on two modes of thinking: probing and telescoping.

_probing

• “In the videogame world, rules are rarely established in their entirety before you sit down to play.” (42)– “You have to probe the depths of the game’s

logic to make sense of it—you get results by trial and error, stumbling across things, and following hunches.” (43)

– “Gamers are learning the basic procedure of the scientific method.” (45)

_telescoping

• “I call the mental labor of managing simultaneous objectives “telescoping” because of the way the objectives nest inside one another like a collapsed telescope.” (54)– “The closest analog to the way gamers are

thinking is the way programmers think when they write code.” (55)

_word problems

• “I would argue that the cognitive challenges of videogaming are much more usefully compared to another educational genre: the word problem.” (58)

Raph Koster

_television

• What does television’s increased complexity look like?– Multiple Threading– Flashing Arrows– Social Networks

_reality television

• “Perhaps the most important thing about reality programming is that the format is reliably structured like a videogame.” (92)

_emotional quotient

• “TV turns out to be a brilliant medium for assessing other people’s emotional intelligence or AQ—a property that is too often ignored when critics evaluate the medium’s carrying capacity for thoughtful content.” (99)

_the internet

• “The rise of the Internet has challenged our minds in three fundamental and related ways: – By being participatory– By forcing users to learn new interfaces– By creating new channels for social interaction

_the net

• “TV and automobile society locked people up in their living rooms, away from the clash and vitality of public space, but the Net has reversed that long-term trend.” (124)

• “Google is our culture’s principle way of knowing about itself.” (121)

_film: where the curve levels off

• “Film has historically confronted a ceiling that has reigned in its complexity, because its narratives are limited to two to three hours.” (131)– Lord of the Rings is several times more

challenging than Star Wars. (125)