sabotabby | I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by CounterStrike

In which I alienate every gamer on my friends list.

The Toronto Public Library is getting into the gaming business.

My initial reaction: "Oh, no, sweetie. No."

My reaction, having thought it over a bit more: See above, but with more words.

At the risk of sounding like Tipper Gore in a hysteria about Satanic messages buried in heavy metal music (I'm old, ya dig), my position on video games has taken a turn for the moral panic since I started teaching. I used to be open-minded, passionate in defense of whatever the Kids These Days were into, quick to quote that famous Socrates line about rotten youth. As a teenager, I devoured everything Douglas Rushkoff wrote and babbled on about new media and snowboarding and how having no attention span was a sign of higher-level thinking.

As an aging curmudgeon, I'll just come right out with it: I think video games are worse than drugs for kids, I think they make kids less intellectually curious and less apt to learn, and I think they're part of a broader trend of cultural and educational dumbing down. I also think there's not a hell of a lot adults can do to about the situation, given that forbidding something tends to make it more attractive, but we can certainly refrain from making the problem worse than it already is.

There is a growing body of research that says some video games promote literacy. Not only do players have to read the text to pass the level, but they learn to quickly decode abstract meaning from symbols, Neiburger said.

This meme needs to be run over with a car and then backed over like a hooker in Grand Theft Auto. I mean, the key phrase is "some games," and what they mean is edutainment, but even in the case of games specifically designed to be educational, I remain unconvinced. Video games promote literacy in the way that Facebook and text messaging encourage literacy, which is to say not at all.

Sure, kids are reading words when they play games. But they are not becoming more literate. One doesn't become more literate by reading "lol i teabag u fuckin n00b." Yes, those are words, and they're strung together in an arrangement that is close to being a sentence, and probably, yes, the kid who typed engages in a greater volume of written communication than a kid in another generation might have done. But don't call it literacy. Oddly enough, I encountered the same sort of thinking as a teenager myself, when writing a standardized literacy test in ninth grade. They had us reading cereal boxes. Yes, there are words on cereal boxes. But being able to decipher them is not the same as being literate.

Everything we know about learning suggests that it happens most when our boundaries are pushed. When we learn to read, we begin with easy books, and then go on to read books with more difficult vocabulary, longer and more complicated sentences, deeper layers of meaning. We leave our comfort zones, either willingly, because we are curious, or by coercion, because Miss Tabby made us read stupid boring Shakespeare. (Not that I'm an English teacher. So it's more like "Miss Tabby made us read a stupid boring article on accessibility concerns in website design.) Facebook may make us readers, but it does not make us better readers, because in general, what we read there does not challenge our previously accumulated knowledge.

Okay, Miss Tabby, what proof do you have? What turned you into a reactionary hardass?

Observation. Gamers don't read. Correlation is not causation; it's possible that gaming attracts "reluctant readers" who wouldn't ever pick up a book by choice, or simply kids who aren't very academically inclined in general. But I don't think that's the case, because my kids who are into gaming aren't necessarily less intelligent or talented than the rest of the kids. But they do spend less time on school, less time in extracurricular activities, and less time expanding their brains in other ways. They tend to be quite addicted. If they're allowed to game in the library, for example, they will forgo eating and even going home to finish that next level. If I catch them doing it in class and I shut off their computer, they've been known to cry out as if in pain. It's not just teenage recalcitrance—they simply can't stop. With many of the games, they'll keep playing long past the point of it being any fun.

Current educational trendiness suggests making educational material more like video games to hook the kids. Hence, we see a proliferation of flashy educational software, SmartBoards, and so on. Fewer words, more "interactivity" and "fun." Except, remember what I said earlier about pushing boundaries? Publishers are being told that kids can't handle large amounts of text and need more flashiness, and so even educational material has less text and more flashiness, and it becomes a vicious cycle in which children never learn to, well, read large amounts of complicated text.

Enter the TPL, making the problem any worse. $300,000 to start a gaming collection? That's $300,000 that won't be spent on new books. Try making a kid read an old book. It's harder than making a kid read a new book. Not to mention the computer use issue. Wanna tell the unemployed woman desperately trying to update her CV that she needs to wait for the gamers to finish one more round?

I love Cory Doctorow, but I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I read this post. The problem is that he's my age, and gaming was different then. It was intrinsically connected with other geek pursuits (and we had text-based games where you did have to read). Today's gamers aren't going to foment any sort of rebellion any more than a bunch of heroin addicts would, nor do they write for their school papers. I actually did a straw poll in one of my classes about this book, because a lot of the kids are gamers and I thought they might want to read it. But they said they didn't read books. Not even books about gamers.

So I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts, particularly those of you who are educators, librarians, and gamers who haven't defriended me before getting to the end of this post. Am I just being a stick-in-the-mud or is this as batshit insane as I think it is?