Books suck

From a book:

Imagine an alternate world identical to ours save one techno-historical change: videogames were invented and popularized before books. In this parallel universe, kids have been playing games for centuries預nd then these page-bound texts come along and suddenly they池e all the rage. What would the teachers, and the parents, and the cultural authorities have to say about this frenzy of reading? I suspect it would sound something like this:

Reading books chronically under-stimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying謡hich engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements傭ooks are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of the sensory and motor cortices.

Isn’t that an interesting idea? the author, Steven Berlin Johnson, doesn’t actually believe that books are under-stimulating or that games are necessarily that good for you. It’s just something ge says in his new to get you thinking about “realize how selective and short-sighted most of the criticism about gaming is.”

At first glance it seems absurd to think that books could be terrible isolating while video games are so engaging, but after a few seconds it almost starts to make sense. I still think books are better than video games myself, but I like gaming too, once in a while. I think I will have to read this book of his.

Johnson also has a piece about TV in this week’s NY Times Magazine.