A few things in your last post caught my eye, Icarus...
Icarus wrote:There has been scientific study on the benefits to a person's mental agility and visual awareness through videogame play. There was
an article at New Scientist Online that discusses this.
The article is interesting, but it doesn't seem to have a heck of a lot of relevance to what's (mainly) being discussed on this topic:
But kids will not be able to use the findings as an excuse for gaming instead of doing their homework. "This certainly doesn't mean children can learn by playing video games all day long," says Bavelier. She doubts the games cultivate the sustained attention needed for tasks such as reading, for example...
The pair found that, compared with nonplayers, students who had played action games such as Grand Theft Auto3, Spiderman and 007 almost daily for at least six months performed far better in certain visual tasks.
These included identifying the location of a target object on a cluttered computer screen, counting the number of quickly flashed objects and correctly identifying two objects flashed in quick succession.
This article, at least, seems to credit video gaming with, basically, causing players to be able to react to visual stuff faster. This is fine, and I don't think anyone on this topic has suggested that games have NO benefits at all (since the article proves that they do enhance at least some things), but at least for awhile on here, gaming has been compared mostly to the fine arts, which is a completely different ball of wax altogether. The arts are not about quick reaction time, but a completely different type of mental ability. More below...
Literature on the other hand has very little creative application outside of the actual writing of. While it is true that you do use your imagination when immersing yourself in a good, well written book, and that the imagery you can portray in words can be just as good as the imagery you see when studying a classic painting, once you are done with reading the book, and have almost full understanding of the plot, morals and portrayed imagery within, it has very little use. A videogame features ever-changing environments (shmups at least) and always requires creative application.
How is this so? Barring relatively minor changes caused by variations in rank or set difficulty level, when you start up a shmup or any other game you almost always get the same levels, enemies, obstacles, items, and whatnot thrown at you every time...yes, if you shoot an enemy in a different spot than last time you'll have to move differently to escape his suicide bullet and/or collect the medal he leaves behind, but you're talking
instant reaction and
memorization more than
analysis, at least as it relates to the arts. Once you've played a game enough to know when everything appears, what it does, and how optimally to react to it, how is it any different from having read a book enough to know "everything" about it? Once you've figured out the optimum route through a portion of a game, what good is it to play it any more, in terms of what you "learn" from it, or "stimulate" in doing so? Unlike knowing a game's layout like the back of your hand, memorizing a book word-for-word doesn't help the interpretation of it one bit; a completely different type of thinking is needed.
As you say, a shmup, unlike a painting or a poem, doesn't give you an eternity to react to it, and demands quick action on your part. Again, no argument from me on that, but just because "fine art"
does allow someone more time to take it in and draw conclusions about it doesn't make it somehow less intellectually stimulating than the game is. Interpreting Act 3, Scene 2 and finding a path through Loop 2, Stage 4 are very different processes. In addition, a particular point or message found within a work of art
can influence the way that a person looks at everything from then on, if it strikes said person strongly enough; yes, reading the book for the 87th time probably won't enhance your viewpoint a heck of a lot more than the 86th time, but the book has likely already sunken its roots long before then. Then again, perhaps someone just reads a book for the umpteenth time for the same reason he plays a game through for the umpteenth time; there's not much left to "learn" from it, but he still just plain
enjoys experiencing it. No one calls a gamer's affinity with "the classics" a misguided affinity; why do the same for someone's affection for a particular work of art?
And some of the stuff that people call "fine art" can be likened to a six year old going crazy with a few buckets of paint and an A1 sized canvas.
Heh, as an art student you could get me going for awhile on that one...
I red the thread in its entirety, and I agree with you that the first two pages were a reasonable attempt to a serious discussion (although honestly far from "very interesting"). Actually, Warpzone's first reply might have ended the whole topic, since the initial question is evidently a false problem (it compares a generic idea of Japanese hardcore gamer, to a generic idea of a lazy westerner, it's just toying with urban myths).
