Monday June 05, 2006

CYBERSMART : SMART :: ROAD APPLES : APPLES. Semi-popularizer of the South Park Conservative fad, Brian C. Anderson, says video games are good for your brain. Since he's writing at OpinionJournal, he drops the kind of comments that gets right-wingers excited: Dr. Spock is (posthumously) against gaming -- gaming good! Hillary Clinton is against violent gaming -- gaming good, cut off bitch's head! And the Ol' Perfesser likes it, etc.

But even beyond the customary, specious political identification, there is plenty of just plain stupidity in here:

Video games can also exercise the brain in remarkable ways. I recently spent (too) many late-night hours working my way through X-Men: Legends II: The Rise of Apocalypse, a game I ostensibly bought for my kids. Figuring out how to deploy a particular grouping of heroes (each of whom has special powers and weaknesses); using trial and error and hunches to learn the game's rules and solve its puzzles; weighing short-term and long-term goals--the experience was mentally exhausting and, when my team finally beat the Apocalypse, exhilarating.

Anderson seems to have cribbed this notion from Malcolm "Blink" Gladwell, and my response to the knockoff is the same (though less respectful of course) that I had to the original:

It has been my experience as a remedial English tutor that even the brightest students are undertrained in, and often unaware of, the simplest analytic tools -- including grammar, sentence structure, and outlining. These are not nearly so easy to absorb as the [computer gaming] skills Gladwell values, but the fact that he can make himself clear in essay form shows that he has himself mastered them, which makes it rather disturbing to me that he seems not to care much that we make so little effort to wrench our kids away from their entertainment modules long enough to learn how to diagram a sentence or tie three supporting details to a main idea.

...If we don't teach our young citizens to think rather than merely process information, all the video-savvy in the world isn't going to save their sorry asses...

Yeah, so I'm quoting myself. Busy day. Besides, I fought the Battle of Tompkins Square Park for the likes of you! Get off my lawn!