PREFACE
Our aim is to shed light on the intriguing phenomenon of video games. Along the way, we'll introduce some of the most farranging ideas in modern psychology and also provide an entrée to the world of computers, for the appeal of the games is largely psychological and video games owe their very existence to the computer revolution.

When we set out to write a book on the psychology of video games, we tried to adopt a relatively neutral stance. We read everything we could about the games. We went to video arcades to play the games and to talk to the owners, players, and onlookers. We talked to parents and critics. At the same time, we explored the contributions that research in psychology might provide for an understanding of the games.

After we had poked around for a while, some themes began to emerge. A major one was the computer theme: video games are fundamentally different from all other games in history because of the computer technology that underlies them. The marriage of games and computers has produced both costs and benefits. It enables, for example, the design of games that are extremely compelling to play. Critics would call the games addictive. Proponents would call them great fun.

A second theme involves ability. Playing a video game requires intricately tuned skills. How are these skills acquired? What are the mental components that go into them?

A final theme revolves around education. We believe that the games combine two ingredients—intrinsic motivation and computer-based interaction—that make them potentially the most powerful educational tools ever invented. We have discovered, much to our delight, a number of research projects that are striving to harness this educational power. Some are succeeding. More will succeed in the coming years.

While writing this book, we've had help from a variety of people who deserve special thanks. Craig Raglund provided a number of perceptive suggestions about the potential uses of video games in education. Hank Samson and Jim Diaz, who are much better players than we've yet become, engaged us in lively discussions about reinforcement. Ellen Markman, Delia Gerhardt, and Brian Wandell read and provided useful comments on early versions of several chapters. And, finally, there's no way to adequately thank Judy Greissman, our editor at Basic Books, who initiated the whole idea and who did a magnificent job shepherding it through all stages from start to finish.

CHAPTER 1: VIDEOMANIA
Venturing into a video arcade, you find a decidedly mixed crowd. To be sure, most players are "typical teenagers," who play the video games for at least a few hours every week. 1 But a not uncommon sight is the corporation executive, the housewife, the construction worker. According to one survey, about half the game players (in arcades and elsewhere) are over the age of twenty-six. 2

The economics of the video game craze are staggering. Each year more than $5 billion is spent in the video arcades alone. 3 And while the video parlor operators are busily collecting their quarters, microcomputer manufacturers are expected to make similarly large sums selling both home computers and the software to go with them. Advertisements for home computers in traditional publications describe the virtues of keeping the checkbook balanced, maintaining Christmas card lists, and teaching the children to program. However, by far the major use of home computers is for video games, and indeed the potential home video game market provided a major incentive for the development of many home computers in the first place. Six or seven years ago hardly any video games existed. But today arcade and home video games comprise an industry that has reached over $7 billion.

While questioning people in the course of preparing this book, we uncovered a wide range of feelings about the games, most of them quite passionate. A twenty-three-year-old computer engineer, David, was playing portable video games non‐ stop on a flight we shared with him. "What do you like about these games?" we asked. His answer was quite definite: "I think they're entertaining. They fascinate me. I can't believe I can hold something almost as small as a credit card that can play a game I haven't mastered. They're a challenge. What's most intriguing is that I know because of my work that there is a pattern to these games. And I haven't yet figured it out. But I keep getting closer. I keep getting better."

On the other hand, Glen, a twenty-five-year-old property manager, hates video games. He says just as definitely: "I get no satisfaction out of beating a machine!" And Jane, a thirty‐ eight-year-old management consultant, sees them as a soporific for teenagers, an aesthetic nightmare, and is adamant that they are no good at all for anything whatsoever. The opinions of public figures reflect this controversy. The U.S. Surgeon General, Everett Koop, decries video games, while Isaac Asimov, one of the most respected science writers in the United States, extolls their educational benefits. 4 Given these extreme differences of opinion, we find the job of trying to understand the video game explosion even more challenging.Figure 1.1 shows the "family tree" of video games. Their immediate parents were the digital computer and the arcade game. The computer side of this parentage will be traced in chapter 6; the arcade side, in chapter 4.Most games involve competition of one sort or another. But somewhere along the line, solitary games evolved, in which competition, if it even exists, is with yourself (for example, trying to top your previous best score) or with some abstract entity such as a deck of cards or a machine. Most video games are, or can be, solitary games. You play chiefly against the machine.

Three conceptual ingredients enter into the immediate background of video games:

1.    Sound and fury. Flashing lights, bizarre noises, and continuously displayed, astronomical scores were incorporated in pinball machines. Often associated with sleazy bars and arcades and thought to be controlled by organized crime, nonetheless pinball machines managed to build up a mystique. They were colorful and gaudy. Presumably in an effort to give the illusion of variety, different games in an arcade represented an enormous variety of concepts, ranging from the Vietnam War to the Indianapolis 500 to the Playboy penthouse. However, all these games were virtually identical in terms of how they were played and what the goals were.

FIGURE 11 The family tree of video games.

2.    Death and destruction. In the 1960s a new kind of game began to compete with pinball for arcade space. These games were usually automated in some fairly sophisticated way and usually involved violence of one sort or another. In Bomber Pilot, for example, the player, after inserting a quarter, was seemingly placed at the controls of a bomb-laden jet plane and presented with varying terrain passing below. The goal was to drop bombs on targets that would appear for a few seconds beneath the aircraft and then vanish. Points were awarded for successful hits, with the highest numbers of      points being awarded for the destruction of high-density population areas, such as large cities, and strategic targets, such as enemy missile bases. The player was constantly under threat of enemy antiaircraft fire and therefore had to worry about taking evasive action as well as aiming the bombs. Like pinball, these arcade games were supplemented by exotic flashing lights, violent noises, and rapidly increasing scores, which were prominently displayed.

3.    Computer control. In the 1970s another game arrived, unobtrusively, on the scene. This newcomer, Pong, differed from its predecessors in several ways. First, and most important, it was entirely under the control of a computer, and except for the player's joysticks, there were no moving parts. Everything was electronic. In a major way, Pong heralded the dawn of a new era.
Pong's second distinction was that it somehow acquired an immediate, broad social acceptance. It suddenly appeared in all sorts of places—in cocktail lounges, train stations, airliners— where no one would dream of putting either pinball or the death and destruction games. Although the reasons for this broad social acceptance are not entirely clear, it is interesting to speculate. First, size doubtless played a part. The older games, which used heavy mechanical parts, were large and difficult to transport (and were certainly not welcome in places like airplanes where size and weight are at a premium). Pong, with a computer at its heart, was much more mobile. Second, in the years following its introduction, Pong's price—along with the prices of all other computer-based goods—fell rapidly, and thus the game became widely available. In fact, in the mid-1970s versions of Pong—primitive by today's standards, but revolutionary then—began to find their way into individual households. And, finally, Pong's central theme was not the violence and kitsch of the previous arcade games. Instead, it mimicked the then-genteel racquet games such as tennis and squash. This feature may well have provided the lubrication necessary to ease the game into polite society.

For whatever reasons, Pong managed to escape from the smoky, seedy atmosphere of its pinball arcade predecessors, and it set the stage for the widespread status currently enjoyed by today's video games. As we have indicated, the computer basis of Pong, with its attendant implications for cost and mobility, was a critical ingredient of this transition. In chapter 6 we shall summarize the computer revolution and its critical role in the psychology of video games.

Throughout this book, we are going to take the theories and experiments of psychologists and use them to understand the video game phenomenon that has sent many children into video arcades and many parents into fits of nervousness. When the surgeon general marches through the country crying, in essence, "Warning. Video games may be hazardous to your children's health," should we believe him? Dr. Koop has argued that there is nothing constructive about the games and that in fact they may be teaching children to kill and destroy since that's what most of the games are about. In this book, however, we'll take the position that his fear may be completely unwarranted. Video games, at least in some form, are going to be with us for quite some time, and it is important to analyze dispassionately their psychological costs and their benefits. We should not ban video games without a deep and thoughtful analysis, any more than we should ban hopscotch or Monopoly.

When people ask "What good are these games, anyhow?" the suggestion is often heard that they have a direct benefit of increasing some skill like eye-hand coordination. But so do many activities, such as baseball and sewing. What are not usually considered are the indirect benefits that video games can and do yield. These can be quite unexpected and enormously powerful. We refer to such benefits as the creation of an intense interest in computers, which has led many of the game players of the early 1980s to jobs as computer programmers with major corporations. We interviewed one such man, Greg, who at the age of twenty-three had landed a programming job with a growing software company just south of San Francisco. Greg spends his days writing computer programs and claims he's happier than he has ever been in his life. Five years earlier, Greg's parents worried that he was spending too much time playing video games. They thought he might be "addicted" to the games the way other kids seemed to become addicted to drugs or alcohol. Now—five years later—they take tremendous pride in their son's work. They have come to realize that the games were the start of his intense interest in computers that led to his career.

What was it about video games that Greg found so appealing? Why was he willing to forgo sporting events and trips to the beach to spend time in video arcades? To address such questions, we now draw upon the field of psychology.

Please tell me you didn't sit down and actually type all of that out...

GoldfishX wrote:

Please tell me you didn't sit down and actually type all of that out...

You can copy-paste from PDF files nowadays, you know?

I got similar response in another thread. When you post something like that I can only interpret that you are blowing off the article because of the time period it took place in and missing out on the whole point of this topic: a discussion of psychology relating to videogames. The psychological hooks one gets from playing these 80s games have not changed with modern gaming. They just haven't.

You know, I'm not saying Amazingu needs to be defended, but the tone of this response is so condescending that I think you need to be called out on it.

Just because you didn't get the response you wanted or the topic isn't going in the direction you want it to doesn't mean his post is uninformed, it just means he doesn't feel it's necessary to write a book to express his opinion. Using more words to express a viewpoint doesn't always make it more valid or welcome.

Amazingu doesn't have to express his opinion by writing a book, but it would be nice if he showed more tact in his responses.

Modern pinball offered basically no correlation between what you do (pull a plunger) and the “reward” of a hundred buzzers and doodads making a racket. Its addiction quotient was low. Space Invaders offered a regular reward schedule: ten, twenty, or forty points per ship hit. Its addiction quotient was high. Donkey Kong had an irregular reward schedule, since what earned you points changed each level, and you could also score points by speed. Like a slot machine with the slightest house advantage, this was a formula for a stratospherically addicting game, one in which either your skill or your luck may make all the difference next game. That is, until you were out of quarters.

Pop psychology would saw that while most every other game offered a way to destroy, and Pac-Man offered a way to escape, Donkey Kong offered a way to rescue. That didn’t affect the mimetics of the game play, but it certainly changed the motivation of the players; a girl’s life was at stake here!

Since people are standing there having their money taken away, they must develop the attitude that whatever they're doing is a lot of fun.

In other words, if games were free, people would probably like them less.

Malone also asked the children what they liked about the games. Almost 40 percent of the reasons the students gave deal with fantasy.... Interestingly, while the children talked a lot about fantasy, the games they rated most favorably were notably low in fantasy: perhaps children are no better than adults at reporting their own motivations.