Three cheers for video games

Video games? Those testosterone infested death-fests?

My son, 15, is a video gamer. Let’s not use the word addict. The only reason I am not one is that I fear my addictive tendencies enough to hold up garlic and crosses when in range of a game simple enough for me to learn.

My son favours role-playing games so complex they require full immersion. He tells me that 300,000 people are online playing Final Fantasy XI. (Can this be true?)

I like this thing that keeps him away from books? I was reading at his age, for God’s sake. All kinds of pop trash, but I built my own brain, dammit, and so when it came to real study I could read fast and understand (well, sort of).

But you should have seen him on SimCity as a little boy. At age 7 he was building an entire city – he liked laying the train tracks most at first, but before long he was constructing budgets! To grow a city in this game you have to bring everything along together. You can’t have a town without employment, factories without houses, more people without more food, schools and police. You orchestrate all these things with clicks of your mouse on icons that mean buildings, roads, airports. You drag and drop things, open menus, read tables of figures that tell you how much you can afford. It’s getting the big picture with each detail in context. Holistic not linear thinking. Logic + screen = ecologic.

Good grief! If a 7-year old can get hooked on this, what might his brain be like at 27? Might he understand how things fit together in the real world, everything impacting sixteen ways on everything else? In an ecology things don’t change in simple single chains of causation – you have to look in all directions at once for the webs of feedback.

The utopias I was in love with in my 20s – socialist, anarchist – seemed overly naïve as I grew older; as if we had been taken in by linear lines of argument that come from linear lines of print. The logic of starting with the assumption that the profit motive is sinful, that people can construct a new society based on public ownership seems to ignore a lot about human nature. The way we built up our certainties seem as naïve as those on the opposite side: the logic of starting with the idea that a market can and should be free. Or that if you introduce rabbits or cats in Australia it will be nice. The real world is messier than these visions.

I feel the same about much theology I studied: that the sacrifice of a god/man 2,000 years ago can wipe away our guilt today is an idea that requires a linear chain of reasoning that seems all left brain (I doubt Jesus would approve).

There is little humility in ideology. The opposite of ideology seems to me to be awareness of paradox. Puns, pictures, parodies, parables, pragmatisms.

We hear that the left brain is the side where we process logical, linear, abstract thoughts. For the right-handed majority, the left brain guides the hand that holds the spear, hunts and kills the animal. Arrows through a landscape. The trick to focusing is to shut out extraneous information. These are the skills that have flowered in science and modern technology. Without them we would be poor, nasty, brutish and several inches shorter. They also kill us.

The right brain is the one that processes pictures, webs, multiple simultaneous inputs. The right brain helps the gatherer see the big picture and make her choices of what to gather while keeping the kids in view, talking with fellow-gatherers, constructing the menu from what’s at hand, avoiding predators. This side sees the other side of every coin.

A good society has the two halves of the brain in balance. There’s more focus in the left brain, more compassion in the right. The mob that stones the woman caught in adultery is all left brain; Jesus was more of a right-brain guy.

Is there really some neurology to all this? Of course, says Leonard Shlain, surgeon and writer. If you want a glimpse of how we will increasingly be talking about ideas, faith, religion, political ideology, read Shlain’s The Alphabet and the Goddess. A pretty wacky book, to be read with many pinches of salt, but there is something in it and neurologists and sociologists have to get together to track it down.

Shlain argues that the values that dominate our society (left- or right-brain values) are dependent on our dominant mode of communication. An oral/visual society is less patriarchal, murderous, scientific. When elites become literate, like the clergy of the religions of the Book, they tend to denigrate women, pictures (idols), colour, wrong believers. When whole populations first become literate they can go through collective spasms of hysteria (testicularia would be a better word, says Shlain) in which they define perfectly normal people as other, beyond the pale, to be killed. The witch craze and the religious wars of Europe are prime examples.

But the graphic/oral revolution, with its photos, radio, TV, computers, is bringing us out of the long left-brain hunter-killer patriarchal era, says Shlain. It doesn’t matter what people say on TV, it’s that you are seeing it with your right brain. It doesn’t matter that my son’s thumbs blast imaginary people away by the dozen, it’s that he uses his left as well as his right thumb to do it, he sees the whole picture as well as reading the text, thus activating both sides of the brain, thus making it less likely he will kill in reality, more likely he will respect the other, the woman.

That’s a paradox I could buy.

Read the book – it reads like a novel – and then we can have a discussion about it.