Of Games and God by Kevin Schut

Author:Kevin Schut
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL012000, REL109030
ISBN: 9781441240514
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group

The School of Mario

The Brain, Education, and Video Games

Video games are not sinful, they’re just stupid. And they’re stupid in this way. Young, particularly men, and now women are joining it, they want to get on a team, be part of a kingdom, conquer a foe, and win a great, epic battle. So they do it with their thumbs and it doesn’t even count. Nobody’s really liberated. The Taliban is not really conquered. Women are not really freed from oppression. Generations are not really changed. It’s all fake. It doesn’t count.

Pastor Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle[1]

Making School Cool with Games?

Is anything as big a waste of time as video games? A player pours tears, sweat, and gallons of virtual blood into something that results in little more than an unsatisfying victory cut scene—if he or she even finishes the game.[2] Could there be a less productive activity? Then why on earth would a bunch of intellectuals and educational experts today be arguing that schools should start taking video games more seriously? They don’t mean to push students into the relatively low-paid career of game testing. No, this coalition of respectable academics, intelligent game developers, and wide-eyed technology boosters argues that video games are the equivalent of an exercise gym for the mind. The video-game medium, so the argument goes, engages us mentally in just the way that we should be engaged in a digital culture. This is a pretty significant claim, and would certainly go a long way toward redeeming the medium if it were true.

This chapter looks at these claims about the benefits of video games and also considers some critiques. First, we’ll examine the complaints lodged against today’s digital media environment. Then, we’ll look at the new enthusiasm for video games as tools of education and social reform. We’ll evaluate both of these sets of arguments with the help of media ecology theory, a body of work partly based on the work of media guru Marshall McLuhan. In the end, we’ll see that video games are neither a panacea for all our ills nor a destroyer of all that is good. Rather, they bring intellectual changes that are both positive and negative, and it is our responsibility to engage the new medium wisely.

Digital Media Critics

The title of Mark Bauerlein’s 2008 book is unsubtle: The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or: Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30). It neatly summarizes his main contention. Young people today, argues Bauerlein, have squandered an incredibly rich media environment:

The fonts of knowledge are everywhere, but the rising generation is camped in the desert, passing stories, pictures, tunes, and text back and forth, living off the thrill of peer attention. Meanwhile, their intellects refuse the cultural and civic inheritance that has made us what we are up to now.[3]

Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, likewise connects today’s digital environment (along with Christian fundamentalism) with a surge of anti-intellectualism in today’s American culture.

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