_zombies or mad scientists?

1. _zombies or mad scientists? Computers and English Matt Barton

2. _whippersnappers 2

3. _old fashioned persuasion • “This book is an old-fashioned work of persuasion that ultimately aims to convince you of one thing: • popular culture has, on average, grown more complex and intellectually challenging over the past thirty years.” (xiii)

4. _key claims • By almost all the standards we use to measure reading’s cognitive benefits, the nonlinearity of pop culture has been steadily growing more challenging over the past thirty years. • The nonliterary pop culture is honing different mental skills that are just as important as the ones exercised by reading.

5. _sleeper curve • The landscape of popular culture involves the clash of competing forces: • The neurological appetites of the brain • The economics of the culture industry • The development of technology • “This is the ultimate test of the Sleeper Curve: even the crap has improved.” (91)

6. _nothing to canonize here • “I do not believe that most of today’s pop culture is made up of masterpieces that will someday be taught alongside Joyce and Chaucer.” (11) • “But they are more complex and nuanced than the shows and games that preceded them.” (11)

7. _let’s get cognitive • “I think there is another way to assess the social virtue of pop culture, one that looks at media as a kind of cognitive workout, not as a series of life lessons.” (14)

8. _rewards of reading • “What are the rewards of reading? • The information conveyed by the book • The mental work you do to process and store that information.”

9. _games • “Games are not novels, and the ways in which they harbor novelistic aspirations are invariably the least interesting thing about them.” (21)

10. _this game is hard work • “The dirty little secret of gaming is how much time you spend not having fun.” (25) • “The clearest measure of cognitive challenges posed by modern videogames is the sheer size of the cottage industry devoted to publishing game guides.” (28)

11. _neuroscience • “The power of games to captivate involves their ability to tap into the brain’s natural reward circuitry.” (34) • “Most of the crucial work in game interface design revolves around keeping players notified of potential rewards available to them.” (36)

12. _rewards • “If you create a system where rewards are both clearly defined and achieved by exploring an environment, you’ll find human brains drawn to those systems.” (38) • “No other form of entertainment offers that cocktail of reward and exploration—we don’t explore movies or TV.” (38)

13. _decisions • “Games force you to make decisions.” • “Learning how to think is ultimately about learning to make the right decisions: weighing evidence, analyzing situations, consulting your long-term goals, and then deciding.” (41) • These decisions are predicated on two modes of thinking: probing and telescoping.

14. _probing • “In the videogame world, rules are rarely established in their entirety before you sit down to play.” (42) • “You have to probe the depths of the game’s logic to make sense of it—you get results by trial and error, stumbling across things, and following hunches.” (43) • “Gamers are learning the basic procedure of the scientific method.” (45)

15. _telescoping • “I call the mental labor of managing simultaneous objectives “telescoping” because of the way the objectives nest inside one another like a collapsed telescope.” (54) • “The closest analog to the way gamers are thinking is the way programmers think when they write code.” (55)

16. _word problems • “I would argue that the cognitive challenges of videogaming are much more usefully compared to another educational genre: the word problem.” (58)

17. Raph Koster

18. _television • What does television’s increased complexity look like? • Multiple Threading • Flashing Arrows • Social Networks

19. _reality television • “Perhaps the most important thing about reality programming is that the format is reliably structured like a videogame.” (92)

20. _emotional quotient • “TV turns out to be a brilliant medium for assessing other people’s emotional intelligence or AQ—a property that is too often ignored when critics evaluate the medium’s carrying capacity for thoughtful content.” (99)

21. _the internet • “The rise of the Internet has challenged our minds in three fundamental and related ways: • By being participatory • By forcing users to learn new interfaces • By creating new channels for social interaction

22. _the net • “TV and automobile society locked people up in their living rooms, away from the clash and vitality of public space, but the Net has reversed that long-term trend.” (124) • “Google is our culture’s principle way of knowing about itself.” (121)

23. _film: where the curve levels off • “Film has historically confronted a ceiling that has reigned in its complexity, because its narratives are limited to two to three hours.” (131) • Lord of the Rings is several times more challenging than Star Wars.(125)