This ought to throw a bucket of cold water on the overheated belief that Play is an aptitude only for the hackey-sack set. The reality is more surprising: just as General Motors is in the art business, the U.S. military is in the game business. (Indeed, had the military sold the game at a price comparable to other video games, the Army would have earned about $600 million in the first year.6)
“Games are the most elevated form of investigation.”
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
The military’s embrace of video games is just one example of the influence of these games. From their humble beginnings thirty years ago, when Pong, one of the very first, made its appearance in arcades, video games (that is, games played on computers, on the Web, and on dedicated platforms such as PlayStation and Xbox) have become a booming business and a prominent part of everyday life. For example:
• Half of all Americans over age six play computer and video games. Each year, Americans purchase more than 220 million games, nearly two games for every U.S. household. And despite the common belief that gaming is a pastime that requires a Y chromosome, today more than 40 percent of game players are women.7
• In the United States, the video game business is larger than the motion picture industry. Americans spend more on video games than they do on movie tickets. On average, Americans devote seventy-five hours a year to playing video games, double the time they spent in 1977 and more time than they spend watching DVDs and videos.8
• One game company, Electronic Arts, is now part of the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. In 2004, EA earned nearly $3 billion, more than the combined revenue of the year’s ten top-grossing movies. Nintendo’s Mario series of video games has earned more than $7 billion over its lifetime—double the money earned by all the Star Wars movies.9
Still, unless they live in a home with thumb-twitching teenagers, many adults haven’t fully comprehended the significance of these games. For a generation of people, games have become a tool for solving problems as well as a vehicle for self-expression and self-exploration. Video games are as woven into this generation’s lives as television was into that of their predecessors. For example, according to several surveys, the percentage of American college students who say they’ve played video games is 100.10 On campuses today you’d sooner find a short-tailed tree frog taking calculus than an undergrad who’s never fired up Myst, Grand Theft Auto, or Sim City. As two Carnegie Mellon University professors write, “We routinely poll our students on their experience with the media, and typically we cannot find a single movie that all fifty students in the course have seen (only about a third have usually seen Casablanca, for instance). However, we typically find at least one video game that every student has played, like Super Mario Brothers.”11
Some people—many of them members of my own fortysomething geezer set—tend to despair over such information, fearing that each minute spent wielding a joystick represents a step backward for individual intelligence and social progress. But that attitude misunderstands the power of these games. In fact, James Paul Gee, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, argues that games can be the ultimate learning machine. “[Video games] operate with—that is, they build into their designs and encourage—good principles of learning, principles that are better than those in many of our skill-and-drill, back-to-basics, test-them-until-they-drop schools.”12 That’s why so many people buy video games, and then spend fifty to one hundred hours mastering them, roughly the length of a college semester.13 As Gee writes, “The fact is when kids play video games they can experience a much more powerful form of learning than when they’re in the classroom. Learning isn’t about memorizing isolated facts. It’s about connecting and manipulating them.”14
Indeed, a growing stack of research is showing that playing video games can sharpen many of the skills that are vital in the Conceptual Age. For instance, an important 2003 study in the journal Nature found an array of benefits to playing video games. On tests of visual perception, game players scored 30 percent higher than nonplayers. Playing video games enhanced individuals’ ability to detect changes in the environment and their capacity to process information simultaneously.15 Even doctors can benefit from a little time at the GameCube. One study found that physicians “who spent at least three hours a week playing video games made about 37 percent fewer mistakes in laparoscopic surgery and performed the task 27 percent faster than their counterparts who did not play.”16 Another study even found that playing video games at work can boost productivity and enhance job satisfaction.17
“Play will be to the 21st century what work was to the last 300 years of industrial society—our dominant way of knowing, doing and creating value.”
—PAT KANE, author of
The Play Ethic
There’s also evidence that playing video games enhances the right-brain ability to solve problems that require pattern recognition.18 Many aspects of video gaming resemble the aptitude of Symphony—spotting trends, drawing connections, and discerning the big picture. “What we need people to learn is how to think deeply about complex systems (e.g., modern workplaces, the environment, international relations, social interactions, cultures, etc.) where everything interacts in complicated ways with everything else and bad decisions can make for disasters,” says Gee. Computer and video games can teach that. In addition, the fastest growing category of games isn’t shooter games like America’s Army but role-playing games, which require players to assume the identity of a character and to navigate a virtual world through the eyes of that figure. Experiences with those simulation games can deepen the aptitude of Empathy and offer rehearsals for the social interactions of our lives.
What’s more, games have begun to reach the medical field. For example, children with diabetes can now use GlucoBoy, which hooks up to a Nintendo Game Boy, to monitor their glucose levels. And at California’s Virtual Reality Medical Center, therapists are treating phobias and other anxiety disorders with video games that simulate driving, flying, heights, tight spaces, and other fear-inducing situations.
To be sure, games aren’t perfect. Some evidence points to a correlation between game-playing and aggressive behavior, though it’s unclear whether a causal link exists. And certain games are utter time-wasters. But video games are much more valuable than hand-wringing parents or family-values moralists would want you to believe. And the aptitudes players are mastering are especially well suited to an age that relies on the right side of the brain.
Along with being an avocation of millions, gaming is becoming a vocation for hundreds of thousands—and an especially whole-minded vocation at that. The ideal hire, says one game-industry recruiter, is someone who can “bridge that left brain-right brain divide.”19 Companies resist segregating the disciplines of art, programming, math, and cognitive psychology and instead look for those who can piece together patches of many disciplines and weave them together into a larger tapestry. And both the maturation of games and the offshoring of routine programming work to Asia are changing the emphasis of the gaming profession. As one gaming columnist writes: “Changes in the way games are built indicate less of a future demand for coders, but more of a demand for artists, producers, story tellers and designers. . . . ‘We’ve moved away from relying simply on code,’ said [one game developer]. ‘It’s become more of an artistic medium.’ ”20
That’s one reason that many arts schools now offer degrees in game art and design. DigiPen Institute of Technology, near Seattle, which awards a four-year degree in video gaming, is, as USA Today puts it, “fast becoming the Harvard among joystick-clenching students fresh out of high school.” The school’s nickname: Donkey Kong U.21 The University of Southern California’s renowned School of Cinema-Television now offers a master of fine arts degree in game studies. “When USC started a film school 75 years ago, there were skeptics,” says Chris Swain, who teaches game design at USC. “We believe games are the literature of the twenty-fi
rst century. When you look at games today, it may be difficult to see that. But the pieces are in place for this to happen.”22
The purest expression of the centrality of gaming in the emerging economy might exist at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center, a collaboration between its College of Fine Arts and School of Computer Science. Carnegie Mellon offers an entirely new degree: a master’s in entertainment technology, which it bills as “a graduate program for the left and right brain.” Students study everything from programming to business to improvisational theater—and earn neither an arts degree nor a science degree but an interdisciplinary degree that the school says is “the academic pinnacle of studies in this field, thus having greater significance than the M.A. or M.S., and the equivalent academic weight of the M.F.A. and/or M.B.A. degree.” If the MFA is the new MBA, one day soon the MET might be the new MFA. It’s a degree that requires and enables a whole new mind.
Humor
With the subject of games fresh in our heads, let’s play a game. I call it “Pick the Punch Line.” Here’s how it works. I’ll give you the first part of a joke—the setup. Then you select the correct punch line from four choices. Ready?
It’s a Saturday in June and Mr. Jones sees his next-door neighbor, Mr. Smith, outside and walks toward him. “Hey, Smith,” Jones asks. “Are you using your lawn-mower this afternoon?” Smith replies warily, “Uh, yes I am.” Then Jones says:
(a) “Oh well, can I borrow it when you’re done?”
(b) “Great. Then you won’t be using your golf clubs. Can I borrow them?”
(c) “Oops!” as he steps on a rake that nearly hits him in the face.
(d) “The birds are always eating my grass seed.”
The correct punch line, of course, is (b). Answer (a) is logical but not surprising or funny. Answer (c) is surprising, and its slapstick quality might elicit laughs, but it doesn’t follow coherently from the setup. Answer (d) is a complete non sequitur.
I didn’t hear this joke at a nightclub or on an HBO comedy special. I plucked it from a 1999 neuroscience study published in the journal Brain (which might explain why the joke isn’t exactly a side-splitter). To test the role the two hemispheres of the brain play in processing humor, two neuroscientists, Prabitha Shammi and Donald Stuss, conducted an experiment in which they administered this pick-the-punch-line test to a series of subjects. The control group, people with intact brains, chose (b), the punch line you probably selected. But the experimental group, which consisted of people with damage to their right hemisphere (in particular, that hemisphere’s frontal lobe), rarely chose that answer. Instead, they usually selected one of the other answers, with a slight preference for answer (c), in which Mr. Jones gets clonked in the nose by a rake.
From their research, the neuroscientists concluded that the right hemisphere plays an essential role in understanding and appreciating humor. When that hemisphere is impaired, the brain’s ability to process even semisophisticated comedy suffers. The reason has to do with both the nature of humor and the particular specialties of the right hemisphere. Humor often involves incongruity. A story is moving along when suddenly something surprising and incongruous occurs. The left hemisphere doesn’t like surprise or incongruity. (“Golf clubs?” it yelps. “What does that have to do with mowing the lawn? This doesn’t make any sense.”) So, as with metaphors and nonverbal expression, it calls over for help from its companion hemisphere—which in this case resolves the incongruity by making sense of the comment in a new way. (“You see,” explains the right side, “Jones is tricking Smith. Har, har, har.”) But if the joke-loving, incongruity-resolving right hemisphere becomes hobbled, the brain has much greater difficulty understanding humor. Instead of surprise being followed by coherence—the chain reaction of an effective joke—the attempted yuk just lingers, an incongruous, confusing set of events.
The importance of this joke-getting specialization goes beyond the ease with which someone can choose the proper punch line.* Shammi and Stuss maintain that humor represents one of the highest forms of human intelligence. “This entire story has profound implications,” they write. “The right frontal lobe has been (and in some cases still is) considered the most silent of brain areas. In contrast, it may represent one of the most important human brain regions . . . [and] is critical to the highest and most evolved human cognitive functions.”23
Humor embodies many of the right hemisphere’s most powerful attributes—the ability to place situations in context, to glimpse the big picture, and to combine differing perspectives into new alignments. And that makes this aspect of Play increasingly valuable in the world of work. “More than four decades of study by various researchers confirms some common-sense wisdom: Humor, used skillfully, greases the management wheels,” writes Fabio Sala in the Harvard Business Review. “It reduces hostility, deflects criticism, relieves tension, improves morale, and helps communicate difficult messages.”24 According to the research, the most effective executives deployed humor twice as often as middle-of-the-pack managers. “A natural facility with humor,” Sala says, “is intertwined with, and appears to be a marker for, a much broader managerial trait: high emotional intelligence.”25
"There is no question that a playfully light attitude is characteristic of creative individuals."
—MIHALYI CSIKSZENTMIHALYI
Humor can be a volatile substance in organizations, of course. “Attempts to manufacture humor can actually suppress it, while the suppression of jocularity may also lead to its resurgence,” writes David Collinson, who related the tale of the dour Ford plant and who studies humor in organizations.26 And it comes in different strengths with varying side effects. Negative humor, for instance, can be especially destructive. It can rip through an organization, carving divisions that are difficult to bridge. “Far from always being a source of social cohesion, humor can reflect and reinforce, articulate and highlight workplace divisions, tensions, conflicts, power asymmetries, and inequalities,” Collinson writes.27
But used more sensibly, humor can be a clarifying organizational elixir. “Jokes that people tell at the workplace can reveal as much or perhaps more about the organization, its management, its culture, and its conflicts than answers to carefully administered surveys,” Collinson says.28 Thomas A. Stewart, editor in chief of the Harvard Business Review, has suggested mining corporate skits for clues about an organization’s soul—after he discovered that many of Enron’s shady dealings were lampooned at the company’s talent show well before auditors had any inkling of wrongdoing at the now notorious energy company.29 And humor can be a cohesive force in organizations—as anyone who’s ever traded jokes at the water cooler or laughed over lunch with colleagues understands. Instead of disciplining the joke-crackers, as Ford did in the last century, organizations should be seeking them out and treating a sense of humor as an asset. It’s time to rescue humor from its status as mere entertainment and recognize it for what it is—a sophisticated and peculiarly human form of intelligence that can’t be replicated by computers and that is becoming increasingly valuable in a high-concept, high-touch world.
Joyfulness
Everything always starts a little late in India, except the laughter club, which begins exactly on time. At 6:30 A.M., Kiri Agarawal blows her whistle, and forty-three people—including Dr. Kataria, his wife, Madhuri, and I—assemble in a shaggy semicircle. Agarawal pauses—and then all forty-four of us begin walking about, clapping our hands in unison while shouting “Ho-ho, Ha-ha-ha . . . Ho-ho, Ha-ha-ha” over and over again.
We’re in the Prabodhan Sports Complex, a few miles from Kataria’s home in a residential section of northwest Bombay, where what passes for a “sports complex” is a crumbly concrete wall surrounding a muddy soccer field and a cracked running track. For the next forty minutes, I do things—in public, with strangers—I’ve never done before. With the other members of the laughing club, I move through a series of exercises that resemble yoga and calisthenics—with a little
Method acting thrown in for good measure. One of our first exercises is the “Namaste laugh.” We place our palms together, bring them prayerfully before our faces in the traditional Hindu greeting, gaze at another participant, and then laugh. I find it difficult. Self-induced laughter is much tougher than those fake smiles I squeezed out in Chapter 7. So I begin simply bellowing the syllables, “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.” Then something strange happens. My forced guffaws begin to feel more natural, and the laughter of others seems to call my own out of hiding.
A bit later comes an exercise called “just laughter.” I follow the lead of Kataria, who’s come decked out in jeans, a diamond earring stud, and a red T-shirt that reads THINK GLOBALLY, LAUGH LOCALLY. He raises his palms upward, walks in circles, and repeats aloud, “I don’t know why I’m laughing.” I do the same. Kataria’s laugh—he often shuts his eyes tight—seems to transport him to another realm. Then, after each laugh, we do another one-minute round of clapping to the 1-2, 1-2-3 refrain of “Ho-ho, Ha-ha-ha.”
The experience is simultaneously weird and invigorating. It’s weird to see forty-three people—most of them older women dressed in saris—doing the “lion laughter,” in which they stick out their tongues, hold up their hands as if they’re claws, and screech like people possessed. But it’s invigorating to be outside and to laugh for no reason, because—despite my skepticism—it does feel good.