Trigger Happy

Shoot first, ask questions later

Steven Poole on the relative worth of ‘gitting gud’ at videogames

Here is what the researchers’ critique boils down to: some competences are just better than others

We all know videogames are bad, but just how bad are they really? An organisation called the Children’s Screen Time Action Network has written to the American Psychological Association claiming that they are very bad indeed. The authors want, they say, to “call attention to the unethical practice of psychologists using hidden manipulation techniques to hook children on social media and videogames”, which results in “risks to their health and well-being”. Outbreaks of moral panic have, of course, been a regular occurrence over the last four decades of popular videogames, but this latest critique is expressed in scientific terms and is signed by an impressive roster of psychology professors and other researchers. So how seriously should champions of the medium take it?

The first thing to note is that the letter addresses “social media and videogames” together, which is usually a warning sign. Social media is a consciously toxic method of attracting eyeballs to adverts, while videogames are entertainment. According to the letter’s authors, however, the problem that connects them is the use of “persuasive design” to encourage more use than they consider good for you. Persuasive design in games, they say, deliberately trades on “the inherent developmental drive in preteen and teen boys to gain competencies, or abilities that have helped them throughout history [to] become evolutionarily successful”.

This, I suggest, does put its finger on something about videogames that I have previously remarked upon. We all know that one of the fundamental pleasures of a game is getting better at it. Whatever the subHollywood scripted storyline, indeed, the real psychological plot of most games is one of skill acquisition. The problem might be, though, that these skills are useless.

You might say it’s harmless to invest time in acquiring useless skills, or throwaway single-purpose competences. After all, isn’t every competence really single-purpose? Playing the guitar doesn’t make you better at cooking. But then, playing the guitar is a skill considered much more culturally valuable than being able to play firstperson shooters well. And here is what the critique boils down to: some competences are just better than others. “Psychologists and other UX researchers create videogames with powerful rewards doled out on intermittent schedules that convince kids … that they are mastering important competencies through gameplay,” write the authors. “This is contributing to a generation of boys and young men who are overusing videogames at the expense of obtaining real-world competencies, including a college education or job.”

We might not agree here with the implicit argument that “real-world competencies” are just those that will render us more desirable fodder in the labour market, but are we really going to argue that some competencies are not better than others? It was recently reported that parents have been paying coaches to help their children become better at Fortnite, because there is so much pressure from their peers to be good at it. Is that really no worse than paying for piano lessons?

The counterargument to all this will be that, just as chess lessons have been found to help inner-city children acquire not just expertise in that particular game but a newfound sense of focus, discipline, and selfrespect, so any kind of skill acquisition could potentially have similar positive consequences. The difference, the opposition will say, is that videogame skills are designed and, in effect, owned by the corporations that publish the products; they can be changed or rendered invalid at will. Competence at playing the piano, by contrast, is not something controlled by any for-profit body.

Does any of this really matter when we just want to sink into the couch and explore some frondy paradise while expertly shooting bad men in their distant faces? Only in this sense: if we defend videogames by saying that they are about learning skills, which many people have done over the years, we had better be ready to have that debating point thrown back in our faces by people arguing that those skills are highly specialised and evanescent, and therefore useless, and therefore harmful if they crowd out the acquisition of more valuable ones. Only then can we have a more fruitful debate about how to balance some skills against others, and what kind of activities – on screens or off them – might promote the meta-skill of learning itself. Steven Poole’s Trigger Happy 2.o is now available from Amazon. Visit him online at www.stevenpoole.net