Masood Mortazavi's Weblog

Monday February 06, 2006

[ Technology ] Video Games and Presence

I have a young brilliant friend who is now a student at UC Berkeley, well ahead of his class of electrical engineers. He says, like many other video game enthusiasts, that the games can have great effect on imagination and mental speed.

I think there is also a down-side.

Children who spend more time with video games than real games in the real world will miss out on real experience of presence in the real world. (See Hubert Dreyfus' On the Internet.)

According to my daughters' first-grade teacher, who has been teaching in the same elementary school for the last 30 years, children have progressively become less and less skilled in motor coordination. "It just takes them much longer to learn jump ropes," she says.

With the advance of technology, convergence brings the games everywhere and the content of games have taken new turns, combining media techniques that make them more attractive by the day.

The whirlpool proves too strong to resist, and the average age of the players keeps rising, says Gerhard Florin, executive vice president and general manager of international publishing at Electronic Arts. (See Thomas Crampton's article for IHT.)

You start early, with the games, and leave them much later, and yes, what you miss is real experience of presence in the real world. You spend most of your time in the virtual human-built world, so deeply embedded that you're taken ouside of the physical, human-made world with all its machinations, which in itself, even if physical, is some steps removed from presence in world surroundings.

For the next-generation media empire, see Thomas Crampton's article in IHT.

2006-02-06 05:48:47.0 -- Comments [4] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Comments:

I agree completely that games are taking over folks life from a very early age and engrossing them in these virtual environments. But doesn't that in a way also help society by breaking kids from the troublesome ways that the real world offers them? It keeps them at home, or under supervision of friends/family more, keeps them away from drugs, gangs, and other things because of their ties to these games.

And I also agree that not forcing your kids to do something else besides games is very unhealthy. But perhaps we just aren't approaching the issue correctly? Take for instance those GPS games now that folks play where you track down various things at a location around the world and sign a book saying you where there, well why can't you do such things for kids? Games where you track various aspects, like various sports activities. Engross your kids with something like gps tracked bike riding so they can see where they rode, how far it was, and make it a game unto itself? With the growing trend of WIFI and smaller portable devices, why couldn't you make some game where you have competitions for things like mountain climbing, group trail hiking, etc... The web could be fully used to make a community of this stuff, to help kids feed and learn from both the real world and tech. Perhaps we just aren't utilizing this type of tech for what we truly could in this aspect?

Posted by Jeffrey Olson on February 06, 2006 at 07:16 AM PST #

I think the positive effect of how games can prevent drug use (or other destructive behavior) could be exaggerated when other long-term, behavioral costs are ignored.

More ideal would be social relationships that do the same. As our social relationships are emaciated in the present time --with very few members of large extended families of the last century around -- we fall more and more to the mercy of individual pleasures. Of course, this is O.K. for a society whose main economic drive is either technology and consumerism. When we don't spend time with each other, we spend it with goods and services we consume . . .

GPS games are a good example of how technology can be used in a more creative way to create new games that actually enhance our knowledge of our environment.

The other examples that you give are also great examples of how technology can actually enhance our interaction . . . Wonderful, great ideas!!!

So, I agree with you, there!

Posted by M. Mortazavi on February 06, 2006 at 07:30 AM PST #

>I think the positive effect of how games can prevent drug use (or other destructive behavior) could be exaggerated when other long-term, behavioral costs are ignored.

I completely agree with you on that, the idea that it helps is at some point a falsehood because it truly does destroy other more important aspects of human interactions. From my personal history I know that gaming can have a very profound cost on ones life, as it almost cost me my degree at one point while I was going to school. It was a rather eye opening experience as I was helped by a very close friend to see the destruction it was causing in my own life with everything I was ignoring just for "a few more minutes of game time".

Now I watch what I do, I make sure I do other things, and if I notice I'm far to engrossed with a game taking up the majority of my free time, I make sure to get away from it for an extended amount of time. They seriously do hinder the growth of social skills, they hender the growth of personal abilities & motorskills because they don't require you to do anything more then to type & use a mouse, though at times people use voice communications isntead of text. I honestly don't know what to do to help fix this, except that I make a concerted effort for myself and for my family to make sure it doesn't happen to anyone else.

Besides those ideas we talked abotu earlier, what else can one do? Espically when one has no real voice at all, and humanity as a whole doesn't do what is right for itself to stop harm to itself?

Posted by Jeffrey Olson on February 06, 2006 at 07:53 AM PST #

It looks like you found more balance through self-control. Not everyone is fortunate enough to have the right friends to put one straight.

Given the time and place in which we live, other than new, creative modes of using technology in a way that enhances our experience of the world (along the lines you and I suggested above), a de-emphasis of technology and consumption would also help.

We need to see what else, other than consumer mass technology, has value.

Posted by M. Mortazavi on February 06, 2006 at 09:25 AM PST #