Everything Bad Is Good For You Analysis

In the excerpt from his book "Everything Bad Is Good for You" Steven Johnson "defends the value of computer games", arguing that nonliterary popular culture, and video games in particular, has grown more complex and intellectually challenging over the years and is making consumers smarter as a consequence, an effect he calls the Sleeper Curve. "Video games are the fastest growing form of entertainment in the world, with a global market value of $67 billion in 2010 and a predicted value of $112 billion by 2015." (Adachi, Willoughby, 2013). They have become an increasingly popular hobby and are even starting to be incorporated in several fields. Yet only recently have the potential positive outcomes of playing video games began to be investigated.

"You can't get much more conventional than the conventional wisdom that kids today would be better off spending more time reading books, and less time zoning out in front of their video games." (Johnson, 27) But Johnson argues that people shouldn't try to determine the value and potential benefits of playing video games by comparing them to reading books, or by using the same criteria they would use to evaluate books, because the two are different mediums, and have their own advantages and limitations. Reading has enormous benefits and should be encouraged more, especially in children, but most people will also engage in other forms of media, which have their own rewards, even if those benefits don't surpass the advantages of reading. "Novels may activate our imagination, and music may conjure up powerful emotions, but games force you to decide, to choose, to prioritize. (…) No other pop cultural form directly engages the brain's decision-making apparatus in the same way." (Johnson, 64) Over the years, nonliterary media has also evolved closer to meeting the standards by which we evaluate books. "By almost all the standards we use to measure reading's cognitive benefits - attention, memory, following threads, and so on - the nonliterary popular culture has been steadily growing more challenging over the past thirty years." (Johnson,