When
I was a teenager in the 1980s I spent a number of years playing video games in
the arcade. I didn’t have a game system
at home, though some friends had Atari and Commodore 64. I loved playing Asteroids, Pac-Man, Galactica,
Donkey Kong, RBI Baseball, a football game (I forget the name) with x’s and o’s controlled by a
small bowling ball, and the very first video game of the 70’s – table
tennis. Nintendo came later, as did Xbox
and Play Station. Now you can download
games on your tablet. I thought I was
done playing video games, save for the occasional, random game here and
there. But my nine-year-old son has me hooked back
in. What a rush!
They
say you never forget how to ride a bicycle and I would add that you never lose
your competitive gaming instincts once you’ve logged thousands of hours of
playing. We are wired to play – and keep playing as long as we see progress and as long as we beat other people and
crack personal records.
It’s
amazing how quickly you can revert to an aspect of your old self, long dormant
and forgotten. I haven’t played
video games with any kind of frequency since the rend of my college days some
quarter-century ago, but there I am completely focused and lasered in on a
single task, looking to get past my high of 1,610,000 points/level twelve of a
game up until a few days ago I’d never heard of or even cared to know
existed. Now I can’t get enough of
Torpedo Run.
If
video games can be combined with books, we’d have a smarter society and a
stronger book industry.
Video games
seem like a time-waster but they are really an amazing opportunity for players
to express the competitor within them.
Most people compete with the world on different levels – for a job, a
parking space, a concert ticket. But
with video games everyone and anyone can play.
It doesn’t matter if you are a genius or an athlete or black or white,
man or woman. In the gaming world, we
start out on an equal footing and get to live out a battle without risks, but
many rewards.
With
video games we get to express many skills, such as:
·
Strategy
·
Speed
·
Resourcefulness
·
Discipline
·
Endurance
·
Overcoming
Handicaps
·
Treading
Into The Unknown
It
doesn’t matter what the game is or how cool the graphics are. They are all the same in that through a
screen we have a playing field rich in opportunity to serve as our proving ground. We have a forum by which to grow, improve,
and win.
Video games
also teach us about failure, learning from our mistakes, repeating stages until
we get them right, and improving our hand-eye coordination.
The
only downer is they suck hours of our life away and theoretically divert
brainpower and resources from pursuing real-life solutions to real-life
problems. If we took the billions – no
tens of billions of hours spent annually by Americans on video games – imagine
what else we could accomplish. Or would
those hours just get transferred to other activities that are no more important,
like watching TV, surfing the Internet, or some other passive endeavors?
What
of the programming power that uses bright minds to develop these games? Wouldn’t we want to use their talents in a
better way, to develop things that will help change society? Or maybe video games are truly their best
possible contribution?
What
if a tenth of the time spent on playing video games was used for reading
books? If tens of millions of people
play video games daily, each on average of an hour a day that could be hundreds
of millions of hours per day. Take 10%
of that and you have maybe 10, 20, or 50 million hours that could go towards
reading books. Wow! The book industry would skyrocket.
But
that isn’t happening.
Is
there a way for the book industry to capitalize on the video game craze?
Books
about video games – how to play and win, the impact on society, how to become a
programmer, etc. – exist. Do we need
more of them? Not necessarily, but could
there be a way to attach books to video games?
How
about books that morph into the video games, where reading is part of the game or
strategy to win? Let’s take the game I
play. It’s a game of war vs.
battleships. I shoot, things explode. I’m shot at, I defend. Repeat and rinse. Faster, harder, faster, harder. Is your heartbeat racing? What if there were pauses in the game where
one reads passages about military boats and then uses that knowledge to help
play the game? You, in essence, are
tested on this information based on how well you play (as a result of reading
up).
Or
maybe we make book reading an entry fee to play free video games. Before you play Torpedo Run, you need to log
30 pages of a book. It’s like not being
able to watch TV unless you power it by working out on a stationary bike. You watch if you exercise. You play video games if you read.
How
about video games themed after books? In
order to play a video version of The Hunger Games, you need to read the
trilogy? Before you play some kind of
baseball video game you read about Jackie Robinson or Babe Ruth. Before you play a game about war, you read a
history book on War World II.
I
could be way off base here. Books and
video games seem, in some ways, the opposite of each other. The rush of playing is superior to reading
about an adventure – or is it? Maybe
they are more linked than we realize.
Perhaps books and video games don’t just coexist or compete for mindshare
and time by rather, they collaborate so we get the best of both.
Well,
until you figure this out I’ll be on my mini-iPad trying to improve my score
and redefine the limits of my capabilities.
I’ll also be reading books. I can’t choose one over the other. They each are an important piece of who I am and
how I develop as a person.
Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog
are his alone and not that of his employer, Media Connect, the nation’s largest
book promoter. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him
at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the
third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2014
