Video games: Important upside

"This is why many of us [read: "parents"] find modern video games baffling: we're not used to being in a situation where we have to figure out what to do. We think we only have to learn how to press the buttons faster." This from Malcolm Gladwell, author of the best-selling "The Tipping Point" and now "Blink," in his review of "Everything Bad is Good for You" in the New Yorker (see also "TV makes us smarter?!"). Gladwell's referring to how we're more comfortable with games like Monopoly or gin rummy, which "don't have a set of unambiguous rules that have to be learned and then followed during the course of play." Video games, on the other hand, aid the *other* kind of learning we need: "collateral" as opposed to "explicit [textbook] learning," Gladwell explains.

"Players are required to manage a dizzying array of information and options. The game presents the player with a series of puzzles, and you can't succeed at the game simply by solving the puzzles one at a time. You have to craft a longer-term strategy, in order to juggle and coordinate competing interests. In denigrating the video game, Johnson argues, we have confused it with other phenomena in teen-age life, like multitasking.... Playing a video game is ... [is] about finding order and meaning in the world, and making decisions that help create that order." Gladwell goes on to show how we discount this collateral learning in favor of the explicit learning with which we're more familiar. (Wish ESRB.org rated games for their collateral-learning value!)