Why video loses out to the game

While working out recently on my elliptical, I've taken to watching my older son play videogames on Xbox Live and I've come to realize why, while he still loves movies, he spends more time on the game: It's just the movie where you get to be the star.

Watching him play "Left 4 Dead" with a pickup team of three online compadres, the zombie movie of my youth seems a bit dull. I mean, it's cooler if you get to blow them away and decide where to head next on your group's search for sanctuary and whatnot.

The expectation for interactive control is simply different with this generation.

Comments

[Seth]

I went through a two week Army training sequence last spring in Kentucky that was based on “contemporary operating environment”, in other words Iraq scenario. There was a general story line and the platoons went on missions that built upon themselves. If the platoon didn’t find the intel or talk to the person they were suppose to then there was some prodding in the right direction. Sound familiar? It’s basically a video game. It was also the best training that I have ever done.

[zenpundit]

Not just expectation of interactive control, totally different "flow" to their thinking. If we can get the school system to impart rigor and depth ( a big "if") America will have the greatest generation of horizontal thinkers in a century or more. On a global scale, perhaps since the Renaissance.

The key though will be getting the depth in there as well - this generation naturally skips around the way previous ones would "drill down".

The "classic" paper on this theme is Prensky's " Digital natives, Digital immigrants".

http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf

Another great one, better actually as it is up to date, is " Minds on Fire" by the eminent computer scientist John Seely Brown:

http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0811.pdf

BTW: We have Xbox360 ( for me) and a Wii ( for the kids - not ready for "Left 4 Dead" yet - SuperMario Sluggers is more their speed)

Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs, has been doing a lot in the area of

[zenpundit]

Sorry - comment unfinished:

Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs, has been doing a lot in the area of digital social learning.

Social learning - particularly if orientated around "Problem Based Learning"- is the next big thing in education, mark my words.

[Cobb]

As I've often lamented about the lack of pickup sports in neighborhoods in upscale 'burbs, I also recognize that XBox Live is a national, even international pickup sports network.

Our kids are mostly unsupervised in their networking forays in the way we were in our fruit tree raids of yesteryear. They don't have 'street smarts' but they do have 'net smarts' which does involves some significant amount of self-policing. They recognize the dark alleys of cyberspace in ways some of us don't.

But there is a great strength in their implicit understanding of the value of collaboration. Within a number of genres of gaming, our kids know how to get online, meet in a lobby, compete and cooperate, give props, trash talk, shun, friend, break away and come back and do it all over again in a number of different games. It's truly a complex web of relationships they are managing.

[Aaron B. Brown]

I'm of the generation that pretty much grew up with video games starting with space invaders, and I had on TI 99 computer with cassette tape games that had basic role-playing capabilities. Later in the 90s I was hooked on driving games like Grand Turismo. These days I really enjoy flight simulators, specifically IL2, which re-creates some of the greatest World War II era aircraft.

Bf 109 vs Spitfire

I did a little flying in my youth, and I always wanted to be a fighter pilot during that time, and now I can actually get an idea what it was like to fly a late clip-wing Spitfire or an early Zero, or my all-time favorite the de Havilland Mosquito. I can almost experience the absolute terror of piloting a Grumman Avenger torpedo bomber on a wave hopping run at a Japanese carrier like the Akagi, while my gunner tries to hold off the A6Ms dogging us and I try to navigate a barrage of flak so heavy you can barely see the ship, than letting that fish go at precisely the right moment. The guys who did that for real must have had balls of steel.