I am perplexed. I had turned a blind eye to this for a time, mostly because I thought it was a rant about how video games and the people who play them are obviously devious miscreants and society's waste, and mostly I seem to have been right, but intrigue got the better of me. I was right in thinking it would be a well-worded bit about how videogames induce lethargy and apathy for anything not presented in a presentation-friendly media format, but I did not expect the age old argument of video games are the reason for the lethargy and apathy for everything else in life, or that playing video games lead to societal deformation and a stagnation of educational progress. Her examples are that specific kind of cliche-driven analogy that is usually the result of a fairly educated person appealing to a group of less educated persons, but since the persons she analogues are the outset members of even their own communities, it just looses effect, and pronounces her merely as pompous. It's a radical view, but not an unheard one--it's easy to take the same approach, if you don't give yourself enough time to cool down from a torrential downpour of "lol stupid *****"'s. She's going about it rationally, and it makes sense in reading her point of view, but I still have a bit of trouble wrapping my head around the part in her soliloquy concerning educational progress from games; mainly I take issue with her statement regarding that there's nothing to learn from them.
Video games are quite akin to books, no matter how much one could protest the fact--both are someone else's idea that you are attempting to understand, with complete story, characters that have been thought of and given histories, locations that can lead the mind's eye to places it would not normally have gone, and can even offer dialogue options that would not have been occasioned otherwise. The difference is that video games take the experience one step further than their verbose and published partner, by filling in the pictures for you. When you read a novel, you picture the characters, but you can't keep all the details of each character in your head at a time--it's not that you've forgotten them, you just fail to think of the spacial dimensions that, say, two characters in a cramped underground cavern next to a subterranean lake, those two characters would occupy in regards to their scenery. Is one character wearing a large hat, and is the ceiling low, so the brim of the hat is being pushed down by the weight of millions of tons of rock above? How do the characters boots echo around the space, becoming diluted as the sound hits the water? When a group of people encounters another group up to devious intent in an alleyway, or minds do not process how wide the alley is, or that there are walls immediately to the side--we see two groups in an open space, and then fill in the resulting scenery and activities as they take place, but never all at once.
Video games allow just that--definite proportions, spaces, characters, and interactions fully defined before you, while still treating you to the same story, events, characters, and happenstances that would normally have to be processed, all while allowing you to feel for an instant that you're still quite as involved as if the entire sequence from walking into the alley all the way up to stepping over the limp body with the broken arm to continue your date was fully written out, in eloquently verbose text that you'd just read. There is no experience that a book can deliver (save the scent of a book aged for a few years on a shelf amongst others, but that is not the question here) that cannot be portrayed as equally by the video game medium.
Certainly, I could go on here about how video games are the current generation's form of steadfast interaction and entertainment, or how in seeing the imaginations of men who put graphical designs into their games will occasionally inspire an insight to those not looking for one, like an alternate design for a helicopters rotors, or maybe a new style or article of clothing, but that is digression at worst, and extraneous at best. They are a medium for someone to portray their ideas, and that is as fact as it has been since the development of communication led one man to want to show another what was over the hill. That we continue to make them, view them, play them, analyze them, we see ideas we never would have had, and we see them now better than ever. As an explorer myself, as someone who has been several hundred feet below the surface of the ocean, to be greeted by everything from sharks to turtles to eels to sunken ships, to the tops of mountains to get harassed by squirrels, to watching the sky fly past my face and the ground grow closer, shifting from a panoramic as far as the I can see to an up-close image of the ground as I jumped from a plane, I feel I can safely say I have experienced enough to say there are certain things I could never imagine, and it is there that all media of some form or other come in. Video games allow me to almost quite literally walk in their shoes and see through their eyes, books allow me to think their thoughts, and cinema allows me to watch the entire interaction as if I was a particularly observant fly upon the wall. And in saying so I come to my conclusion; that yes, indeed, there are things to learn from video games, especially if you have already opened your mind to wanting to know, which clearly you and your children have, which, incidentally, reminds me of this, for the capstone on this literary gaming debate:
"I do not like
green egss
and ham!
I do not like them,
Sam-I-am.
You do not like them.
So you say.
Try them! Try them!
And you may.
Try them and you may I say."
