There's a very positive article in this week's Observer Review about games, penned by Everything Bad is Good For You author Steven Johnson.
Far from relying upon the usual schtick (and it's good schtick but it's nice to see something new), Johnson suggests that one of the reasons the general public don't take games seriously is because they have no idea what it's like to play a game.
... we rarely hear accurate descriptions about what it actually feels like to spend time in these virtual worlds. I worry about the experiential gap between people who have immersed themselves in games, and people who have only heard second-hand reports, because the gap makes it difficult to discuss the meaning of the games in a coherent way.
He makes no reference to how games should be covered, but perhaps "New Games Journalism" is reminiscent. What he argues is most important to get across to the uninitiated is that games are hard. Ah, challenge.
He does a great job of explaining that they're hard, literally spawning the Walkthrough and FAQ industries, that they're able to make hard concepts accessible to players and that they're hard to break.
The interesting question here for me is not whether games are, on the whole, more complex than most other cultural experiences targeted at kids today - I think the answer to that is an emphatic yes. The question is why kids are so eager to soak up that much information when it is delivered to them in game form. 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 taxes in industrial rates can stifle development. That's a powerful learning experience.
More press like this in the mainstream, please, particularly as the article points out that the baby bible, Dr. Spock's Baby and Childcare calls them "a colossal waste of time".
I'm looking forward to the book when it's released on Thursday.
