Books vs. Video Games

From Proudly Serving: The Benefits of Pop Culture? 

The excerpt below is from Steven Johnson’s book Everything Bad Is Good for You. I can’t stop laughing at this – it’s hard to argue with the analysis, much though I love books!

AdamBa (Proudly author) says: “I love Johnson’s imagined popular opinion of books, if they had arrived centuries after video games instead of the other way around:“

“Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical sound-scapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of words on the page. . . .

Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. . .

But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion: you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. . . . This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one.”