I’m a bit late to the party, as I only just had the chance to read through Steven Johnson’s latest book, “Everything Bad Is Good For You - How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter“.

The book makes a very convincing case for how, indeed, popular media (games, movies, TV, the web, etc) have been increasing in complexity over the years, and how that complexity is making us smarter (ie, higher IQ, better problem solving skills, etc). Certainly, as someone who’s written on neuroscience, Johnson has the chops (and data) to back up his claims.

Very early on, Johnson tosses aside concerns related to questionable content, in effect saying “let’s just ignore all that for the time being”. His case for the benefits of pop culture (the making us smarter part) is made without reference to the moral value of the content saying that content is just (often meaningless) dressing on top of the all the good stuff. And, in fact, this is a similar approach taken by Jim Gee in his “What Games Teach Us…” book as well as Raph Koster in his “Theory of Fun” book. The message being, look deeper than the surface and all shall be revealed…

But, as someone who deals with the emotional side of the debate over the goodness/badness of games, it is clear that not everyone can appreciate the orthogonality of content vs gameplay complexity. So, I was happy that Johnson came back to the issue in the last few pages of the book, in effect arguing that content is pretty irrelevant and has minimal impact (and pointed to some pretty useful references in the process).

As an industry, we really need to do a better job of conveying the benefits of games/gaming. A heavy consequentialist approach to ethics looks at games as providing only bad consequences with very few good things to offset. Would society (or rather the critics) be more forgiving if there was a greater perception of balance?

Anyway, all good stuff to think about as I prep for the big panel on censorship at Future Play next week!

(FYI, you can check out Metacritic for an extensive list of reviews/info on the book.)