Everything Bad Is Good for You (11 page)

Why? Anyone who has spent more than a few hours trying to complete a game knows the feeling: you get to a point where there's a sequence of tasks you know you have to complete to proceed further into the world, but the tasks themselves are more like chores than entertainment, something you
have
to do, not something you want to do: building roads and laying power lines, retreating through a tunnel sequence to find an object you've left behind, conversing with characters when you've already memorized their lines. And yet a large part of the population performing these tasks every day is composed of precisely the demographic group most averse to doing chores. If you practically have to lock kids in their room to get them to do their math homework, and threaten to ground them to get them to take out the trash, then why are they willing to spend six months smithing in
Ultima
? You'll often hear video games included on the list of the debased instant gratifications that abound in our culture, right up there with raunchy music videos and fast food. But compared to most forms of popular entertainment, games turn out to be all about
delayed
gratification—sometimes so long delayed that you wonder if the gratification is ever going to show.

The clearest measure of the cognitive challenges posed by modern games is the sheer size of the cottage industry devoted to publishing game guides, sometimes called walk-throughs, that give you detailed, step-by-step explanations of how to complete the game that is currently torturing you. During my twenties, I'd wager that I spent somewhere shockingly close to a thousand dollars buying assorted cheat sheets, maps, help books, and phone support to assist my usually futile attempt to complete a video game. My relationship to these reference texts is intimately bound up with my memory of each game, so that the
Myst
sequel
Riven
brings to mind those hours on the automated phone support line, listening to a recorded voice explain that the lever has to be rotated 270 degrees before the blue pipe will connect with the transom, while the playful
Banjo-Kazooie
conjures up a cheery atlas of vibrant level maps, like a child's book where the story has been replaced with linear instruction sets: jump twice on the mushroom, then grab the gold medallion in the moat. Admitting just how much money I spent on these guides sounds like a cry for help, I know, but the great, looming racks of these game guides at most software stores are clear evidence that I am not alone in this habit. The guidebook for the controversial hit game
Grand Theft Auto
alone has sold more than 1.6 million copies.

Think about the existence of these guides in the context of other forms of popular entertainment. There are plenty of supplementary texts that accompany Hollywood movies or Billboard chart-toppers: celebrity profiles, lyrics sheets, reviews, fan sites, commentary tracks on DVDs. These texts can widen your understanding of a film or an album, but you'll almost never find yourself
needing
one. People don't walk into theaters with guidebooks that they consult via flashlight during the film. But they regularly rely on these guides when playing a game. The closest cultural form to the game guide is the august tradition of CliffsNotes marketed as readers' supplements to the Great Books. There's nothing puzzling about the existence of CliffsNotes: we accept both the fact that the Great Books are complicated, and the fact that millions of young people are forced more or less against their will to at least pretend to read them. Ergo: a thriving market for CliffsNotes. Game guides, however, confound our expectations: because we're not used to accepting the complexity of gaming culture, and because nobody's forcing the kids to master these games.

The need for such guides is a relatively new development: you didn't need ten pages to explain the
PacMan
system, but two hundred pages barely does justice to an expanding universe like
EverQuest
or
Ultima.
You need them because the complexity of these worlds can be overwhelming: you're stuck in the middle of a level, with all the various exits locked and no sign of a key. Or the password for the control room you thought you found two hours ago turns out not to work. Or the worst case: you're wandering aimlessly through hallways, like those famous tracking shots from
The Shining,
and you've got no real idea what you're supposed to be doing next.

This aimlessness, of course, is the price of interactivity. You're more in control of the narrative now, but your supply of information about the narrative—whom you should talk to next, where that mysterious package has been hidden—is only partial, and so playing one of these games is ultimately all about filling in that information gap. When it works, it can be exhilarating, but when it doesn't—well, that's when you start shelling out the fifteen bucks for the cheat sheet. And then you find yourself hunched over the computer screen, help guide splayed open on the desk, flipping back and forth between the virtual world and the level maps, trying to find your way. After a certain point—perhaps when the level maps don't turn out to be all that helpful, or perhaps when you find yourself reading the help guides over dinner—you start saying to yourself: Remind me why this is fun?

 

S
O WHY
does anyone bother playing these things? Why do we use the word “play” to describe this torture? I'm always amazed to see what our brains are willing to tolerate to reach the next level in these games. Several years ago I found myself on a family vacation with my seven-year-old nephew, and on one rainy day I decided to introduce him to the wonders of
SimCity 2000,
the legendary city simulator that allows you to play Robert Moses to a growing virtual metropolis. For most of our session, I was controlling the game, pointing out landmarks as I scrolled around my little town. I suspect I was a somewhat condescending guide—treating the virtual world as more of a model train layout than a complex system. But he was picking up the game's inner logic nonetheless. After about an hour of tinkering, I was concentrating on trying to revive one particularly run-down manufacturing district. As I contemplated my options, my nephew piped up: “I think we need to lower our industrial tax rates.” He said it as naturally, and as confidently, as he might have said, “I think we need to shoot the bad guy.”

The interesting question here for me is not whether games are, on the whole, more complex than most other cultural experiences targeted at kids today—I think the answer to that is an emphatic yes. The question is why kids are so eager to soak up that much information when it is delivered to them in game form. My nephew would be asleep in five seconds if you popped him down in an urban studies classroom, but somehow an hour of playing
SimCity
taught him that high tax rates in industrial areas can stifle development. That's a powerful learning experience, for reasons we'll explore in the coming pages. But let's start with the more elemental question of desire. Why does a seven-year-old soak up the intricacies of industrial economics in game form, when the same subject would send him screaming for the exits in a classroom?

The quick explanations of this mystery are not helpful. Some might say it's the flashy graphics, but games have been ensnaring our attention since the days of
Pong,
which was—graphically speaking—a huge step backward compared with television or movies, not to mention reality. Others would say it's the violence and sex, and yet games like
SimCity
—and indeed most of the best-selling games of all time—have almost no violence and sex in them. Some might argue that it's the interactivity that hooks, the engagement of building your own narrative. But if active participation alone functions as a drug that entices the mind, then why isn't the supremely
passive
medium of television repellant to kids?

Why do games captivate? I believe the answer involves a deeper property that most games share—a property that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has spent time in this world, but one that is also strangely absent from most outside descriptions. To appreciate this property you need to look at game culture through the lens of neuroscience. There's a logical reason to use that lens, of course: If you're trying to figure out why cocaine is addictive, you need a working model of what cocaine is, and you need a working model of how the brain functions. The same goes for the question of why games are such powerful attractors. Explaining that phenomenon without a working model of the mind tells only half the story.

This emphasis on the inner life of the brain will be a recurring theme in the coming pages. Cultural critics like to speculate on the cognitive changes induced by new forms of media, but they rarely invoke the insights of brain science and other empirical research in backing up those claims. All too often, this has the effect of reducing their arguments to mere superstition. If you're trying to make sense of a new cultural form's effect on the way we view the world, you need to be able to describe the cultural object in some detail, and also demonstrate how that object transforms the mind that is apprehending it. In some instances, you can measure that transformation through traditional modes of intelligence testing; in some cases, you can measure changes by looking at brain activity directly, thanks to modern scanning technology; and in cases where the empirical research hasn't yet been done, you can make informed speculation based on our understanding of how the brain works.

To date, there has been very little direct research into the question of how games manage to get kids to learn without realizing that they're learning. But a strong case can be made that the power of games to captivate involves their ability to tap into the brain's natural reward circuitry. Because of its central role in drug addiction, the reward circuits of the brain have been extensively studied and mapped in recent years. Two insights that have emerged from this study are pertinent to the understanding of games. First, neuroscientists have drawn a crucial distinction between the way the brain seeks out reward and the way it delivers pleasure. The body's natural painkillers, the opioids, are the brain's pure pleasure drugs, while the reward system revolves around the neurotransmitter dopamine interacting with specific receptors in a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens.

The dopamine system is a kind of accountant: keeping track of expected rewards, and sending out an alert—in the form of lowered dopamine levels—when those rewards don't arrive as promised. When the pack-a-day smoker deprives himself of his morning cigarette; when the hotshot Wall Street trader doesn't get the bonus he was planning on; when the late-night snacker opens the freezer to find someone's pilfered all the Ben & Jerry's—the disappointment and craving these people experience is triggered by lowered dopamine levels.

The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp calls the dopamine system the brain's “seeking” circuitry, propelling us to seek out new avenues for reward in our environment. Where our brain wiring is concerned, the craving instinct triggers a desire to explore. The system says, in effect: “Can't find the reward you were promised? Perhaps if you just look a little harder you'll be in luck—it's got to be around here somewhere.”

How do these findings connect to games? Researchers have long suspected that geometric games like
Tetris
have such a hypnotic hold over us (longtime
Tetris
players have vivid dreams about the game) because the game's elemental shapes activate modules in our visual system that execute low-level forms of pattern recognition—sensing parallel and perpendicular lines, for instance. These modules are churning away in the background all the time, but the simplified graphics of
Tetris
bring them front and center in our consciousness. I believe that what
Tetris
does to our visual circuitry, most video games do to the reward circuitry of the brain.

Real life is full of rewards, which is one reason why there are now so many forms of addiction. You can be rewarded by love and social connection, financial success, drug abuse, shopping, chocolate, and watching your favorite team win the Super Bowl. But supermarkets and shopping malls aside, most of life goes by without the potential rewards available to you being clearly defined. You know you'd like that promotion, but it's a long way off, and right now you've got to deal with getting this memo out the door. Real-life reward usually hovers at the margins of day-to-day existence—except for the more primal rewards of eating and making love, both of which exceed video games in their addictiveness.

In the gameworld, reward is everywhere. The universe is literally teeming with objects that deliver very clearly articulated rewards: more life, access to new levels, new equipment, new spells. Game rewards are fractal; each scale contains its own reward network, whether you're just learning to use the controller, or simply trying to solve a puzzle to raise some extra cash, or attempting to complete the game's ultimate mission. Most of the crucial work in game interface design revolves around keeping players notified of potential rewards available to them, and how much those rewards are currently needed. Just as
Tetris
streamlines the fuzzy world of visual reality to a core set of interacting shapes, most games offer a fictional world where rewards are larger, and more vivid, more clearly defined, than life.