Take a moment now to pause, step back, and consider just what was going on here: Every day, month after month, a man was coming home from a full day of bone-jarringly repetitive work with hammer and nails to put in a full night of finger-numbingly repetitive work with "hammer" and "anvil" - and paying $9.95 per month for the privilege. Ask Stolle to make sense of this, and he has a ready answer: "Well, it's not work if you enjoy it." Which, of course, begs the question: Why would anyone enjoy it?
In his book Everything Bad is Good For You, Steven Berlin Johnson expands on the mystery:
The dirty little secret of gaming is how much time you spend not having fun. You may be frustrated; you may be confused or disappointed; you may be stuck. When you put the game down and move back into the real world, you may find yourself mentally working through the problems you've been wrestling with, as though you were worrying a loose tooth. If this is mindless escapism, it's a strangely masochistic version. Who wants to escape to a world that irritates you 90 percent of the time?
And expands some more:
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 stifle development. ... Why does a seven-year-old soak up intricacies of industrial economics in game form, when the same subject would send him screaming for the exits in a classroom?
Then he quickly dispenses of three obvious possible explanations:
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 repellent to kids?
Nor does the answer appear to lie in benefits derived from the games' content:
Gameplayers are not soaking up moral counsel, life lessons, or rich psychological portraits. They are not having emotional experiences with their Xbox, other than the occasional adrenaline rush. The narratives they help create now rival pulp Hollywood fare, which is an accomplishment when measured against the narratives of PacMan and Pong, but it's still setting the bar pretty low. With the occasional exception, the actual content of the game is often childlish or gratuitously menacing -- though, again, not any more so than your average summer blockbuster.
So the answer is not as obvious as it first appears. It's hard to imagine a question more important than understanding the psychological forces that drive people to collectively spend more than three billion hours a week cuttingly absorbed in video games. Fortunately, SBJ does eventually offer an answer, and I submit that it's a good one, but I think the answer will be more meaningful if you are forced to think about it first. I have his answer scheduled to publish Wednesday morning.
