Q&A: Author Steven Johnson interprets our world

The game industry's dirty little secret is out. And it's Steven Johnson who is responsible for the information surfacing. Johnson, a prolific writer of books (Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life and Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software), and magazine articles (for Wired, The New York Times, and Discover, among others) has written an engaging book titled Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. In it, he argues that video games and television--with their multiple plotlines and problem-solving demands--are toughening young minds rather than degrading them.

While many have found fault with the book's premise, interpreting it as a condemnation of book reading, for example, a close read finds it nothing of the sort. It merely states the obvious: Games present challenges that test and toughen the minds of the players rather than making them flabby and weak. GameSpot spoke with Steven shortly after he had made one of his many appearances promoting the book--on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart no less... Not bad for someone writing about the mind-building powers of Zelda and Gordon Freeman.

GameSpot: Your book has been getting an almost absurd amount of coverage--with many in the game industry having read and enjoyed it. What is the kernel or seed that set you off on the path to writing it in the first place?

Steven Johnson: I think the first seed was planted sometime around the Columbine shootings and the first wave of popular outrage about the first-person shooter violence of Doom and Quake. I'd been a semiregular gamer for most of my life (at least since we got an Intellivision when I was 12), and I'd seen this tremendous explosion of complexity and depth in the games starting in the mid-90s with Myst, SimCity, Age of Empires, not to mention the complexity of the sports sims. And so there was something surreal about the mainstream coverage of games--it seemed to be ignoring the most interesting development of all, which was that kids were willingly engaging with incredibly complicated systems in their spare time--for fun!

GS: One reviewer aptly posed the following question in her review: When everything is good, how do we tell what's bad? Are you able to offer some guidance?

SJ: Well, the title is certainly meant to be taken as a little tongue in cheek. The argument is not that all games are good for you--it's that games in general are much more cognitively challenging than we give them credit for. And some are more challenging than others. The best games have forced you to think on multiple levels at the same time--evaluating the situation in front of you, thinking about the resources you've got at your disposal, looking for patterns in the recent events that have occurred in the game, and juggling short- and long-term objectives. That kind of thinking is everywhere in most games on the market. Everything from the god games to the quest genre (like Zelda) to Halo to the MMORPGs to the sports simulations (particularly when you're managing a franchise through an entire season). But some games are more one dimensional than that, like some of the first-person shooters and some of the puzzle or racing games, etc. So I tend to think that those games are less "good for you" than the others.

GS: If both television and games are making us smarter, which is a more rigorous trainer of the mind: TV or games?

SJ: For the most part, I'd say games. I think television has grown significantly more complex over the past 30 years, which is the time frame I look at in the book. But that's in part because there's a generation of gamers who have grown up expecting to be challenged by their entertainment. You take a 10-year-old who has played one of the Zelda games all the way to the conclusion, and make him or her watch Three's Company and they're going to be bored to death. And so the TV creators have realized that if they're going to attract younger audiences, they need more complicated shows, hence Lost, Sopranos, Alias, 24, etc.

GS: If games, as you say, enhance problem-solving skills, concentration, and memory, which of the current crop do it best?

SJ: I'd be inclined to say the god games, because you have to work through so many different variables, and they demand so much patience. I mean, in The Sims you literally have to clean up after your meals, or else there are negative consequences! I love that the most popular PC game of all time actually forces you to do chores.

GS: Assuming you are a gamer, what advice do you have for the retail community in terms of how it sells games?

SJ: It depends on whether they're selling to kids or to parents. I think the kids probably mostly want to hear about the graphics and the zombies, but if parents can hear more about the cognitive challenges involved in playing these games, that's got to help. One of the things I suggest in the book is that we should have ratings for mental challenge alongside the ratings for violence, sex, etc. As a parent, I'm much more concerned about that than I am about a little bloodshed or the occasional four-letter word.

GS: Does the industry stand to improve what it already put into its games by reading your book? Now that the dirty little secret of games influencing IQ (one manifestation, at least) is out, might there be nuances that could be added to gameplay that would accelerate their training and teaching powers?

SJ: I would hope so. I'm sure that some of the arguments will be familiar, but I suspect some of them might generate the response of "Oh, I'd always sensed that about games, but I'd never quite put my finger on it." And the form of the argument, I think, might be helpful for people who sometimes have to defend what they do for a living. I'm very proud of the way the argument is structured in the book. It deflects a lot of standard criticisms in fun ways, which I imagine industry people (and gamers) will find useful in their own debates about gaming and its cultural impact.

GS: If you were to be approached by a game publisher or developer seeking your input on a game--to increase its teaching component--would you? Have you?

SJ: I've often said that the one real job that would tempt me away from the stay-at-home writer lifestyle would be working on creating a game, so I'd probably be inclined to say yes if someone asked for my help. No one has yet, though.

GS: What games are making you smarter these days? What games are you introducing to your own kids?

SJ: The truth is the games are becoming too hard for me these days--I don't have the time to get into them in any other way than a quick exploratory way. I'm becoming an old fogy! I still play each new iteration of SimCity when it comes out, and I can't wait for Black & White II. But I have two little kids now, and so the idea of spending 40 hours to complete a game just isn't in sync with my lifestyle anymore. But when the kids are a little older (they're just toddlers now) maybe I'll be able to get in more game time by playing with them.

GS: Thanks, Steven.