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Chris Reed: Video games don’t undermine society. Instead, they stealthily reinforce it.

Famous video games
When young video gamers feel elated by steady progress in mastering the tasks before them, they’re being conditioned to have such views of the challenges they will face as adults.
(AP)

The task-completing, progress-rewarding nature of gaming is straight out of the Protestant Ethic. The result: worker bees who are cogs in capitalism.

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In 1958, when physicist William Higinbotham of the Brookhaven National Laboratory invented the first video game — the primitive “Tennis for Two” game that was a direct forerunner of Atari’s “Pong,” a 1970s phenomenon — he did so as a lark to spice up an annual open house for the public at the federal lab on Long Island, N.Y. While the game drew crowds of repeat users, the lab retired it two years later, with the oscilloscope and computer it used shifted to other tasks.

A console war between Sega and Nintendo in the 1990s made video games a hallmark of modern life, and by the early 2010s, hundreds of millions of people were playing mobile games like “Angry Birds,” “Fruit Ninja” and “Candy Crush Saga” while waiting for a ride, a class or a light to change.

Given how much people fear change, it’s no surprise that this ubiquity led to a huge backlash. For decades, many parents have seen the games as addictive distractions wasting time that could be spent much more productively on other activities. Many health experts see them as only compounding the dangerous physical lassitude of the couch potatoes first captivated by television’s mid-20th century emergence as a hugely popular source of mindless entertainment. Deep thinkers wrestle with the question of whether a moral distinction can be made between a virtual killing and one in real life. Many religious leaders have never stopped believing there is something sinister — perhaps even demonic — about video games, to the point where mega-popular televangelist Pat Robertson said good Christians should steer clear of them.

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But a case can be made that far from 1) being a destructive force dumbing down Americans and 2) undercutting key institutions, video games have the opposite effect.

The first argument — that video games sharpen cognitive skills — has been around for years. It’s gone from scorned to borderline conventional wisdom. No one still likens passively watching TV to the experience of games which require a constant series of consequential decisions.

In 2009, the European Union concluded that “video games can stimulate learning of facts and skills such as strategic thinking, creativity, cooperation and innovative thinking, which are important skills in the information society.”

In 2021, a comprehensive analysis of 27 studies of the topic found a common theme: “Cognitive skills such as perception, attentional control and decision-making improve when subjects were trained with video games. ... High school and undergraduate students who played video games exhibit better results when given tasks related to cognitive abilities compared to students who do not play video games.”

But the second argument — that video games provide enormous, stealthy reinforcement for what many social scientists consider one of the foundational elements of life in Western democracies — is rarely heard. The argument is particularly intriguing because it goes against cultural tides that hold this foundational element in contempt.

I refer to the concept of the Protestant Ethic. In his hugely influential 1905 book, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” legendary German sociologist Max Weber argued that Puritan values emphasizing doggedness and hard work — and demeaning idleness — had morphed into a mass societal version of Benjamin Franklin’s aphorism that “time is money.” The notion that religious devotion required a rejection of worldly affairs and materialism, Weber wrote, had been obliterated. No, this isn’t “greed is good.” But this view can be seen as an engine of capitalist conformity — one that pressures worker bees to play their part.

In 2014, Paolo Pedercini — a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a game maker in his own right — offered his update on Weber: “Videogames and the Spirit of Capitalism.” He argued that the repetitive, task-completing, progress-rewarding nature of gaming reflected the same “compulsion for efficiency and control” that animated capitalism. When 10-year-olds feel elated by steady progress through the Mushroom Kingdom in “Super Mario Brothers,” they’re being conditioned to have such views of the challenges they will face as adults. When they function in a virtual universe in which “all the elements and relationships ... tend to be reduced to means and ends,” Pedercini wrote, they are developing the tunnel vision that will serve them — and capitalism — as worker bees.

This is anathema to some progressives who increasingly challenge norms of Western professional behavior — including “perfectionism” and “timeliness” — saying they reinforce the oppressive power structures that dominate affluent First World nations.

But these values don’t put off gamers. When they rebel against the status quo, it’s not because they reject the capitalist rat race. It’s because they prefer the virtual version — even if for the vast majority of them it comes without a paycheck.

Gamers are happy to settle for the euphoric satisfaction that comes with a moment like finally beating Malenia in “Elden Ring.” (Trust me. It’s a big deal.)

Reed is deputy editor of the editorial and opinion section. Column archive: sdut.us/chrisreed. Twitter: @calwhine. Email: chris.reed@sduniontribune.com.

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