Do Console Games Promote Stupidity?

That's NOT "Do they make you stupid?" It's more along the line of, "Do they do too little to make you think well?"

I became a hardcore gamer via a path that started with Chess. I moved onto boardgames, then on to paper-and-pencil RPGs. Then video games appeared with the advent of Pong. Of course, video games existed before Pong; it's just that the only place you could find them was in an arcade where you spent vast quantities of quarters/tokens to get in several hours of gameplay. But arcade games are NOT what I considered to be "real" gaming. They seemed much more like playing a sport than like playing what I had grown up thinking of as being what a game should be. That is, something that made you think.

The first video games were obviously for the PC -- meaning your controls consisted of a mouse and keyboard. That meant most early video games were not actually video games at all. They were mostly text adventure games like Zork and the aptly named Adventure. But along came Epyx and many arcade games ported to your PC. But at the same time, so did many RPGs like Bards Tale and Wizardry and umpteen other fantasy adventures, most of which seemed to come from SSI. The wonderful thing about SSI was that it also carried over umpteen boardgames (mostly from the Avalon Hill collection). Those games made the player think about what he was doing. Of course, the Epyx-style of arcade wannabes continued to evolve, but it soon became apparent that keyboard-and-mouse controls just couldn't cut it for achieving the feel of playing an arcade game. Really: how does flying an F-15 Eagle have anything to do with mashing certain keys on a keyboard? So along came the joystick, and suddenly PC games **could** be closer to the arcade. But it still wasn't there. Pole Position, even with a joystick, was a pale imitation to the arcade.

Enter console games. First with the Odyssey (Pong), then with some false starts and stops from other companies. But when the Nintendo arrived with Super Mario Brothers, console gaming REALLY took off. A parade of contenders followed, championed by Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox, and the Wii, each with a flood of game titles that sold in the millions of copies. And it seemed that the overwhelming element of that torrent of titles revolves around one key gamer quality: reflexes. Jump NOW. Dodge NOW. Punch NOW. Hand-eye coordination rules supreme. Martial combat games. Action/Adventure run-and-jump marathons. Sports games. All of them requiring nothing more than "Punch the button NOW!" Or twitch the joystick NOW. "What" you think during gameplay isn't anywhere near as important as "when" you decide to hit the button.

For an entertainment genre that started with the PC and involved myriads of puzzles to be thought through and solved, console games have come to seriously dominate the marketplace. Well over two-thirds of the video gaming pie is consumed by console games, while the PC portion seems to be shrinking at light speed. PCs, which used to literally be the only game in town, are disappearing under a tsunami of "twitch" titles. Manufacturers that used to service the PC market are going for the larger potential of marketing to consoles. Just as devastating to my style of gaming is that what games that are still developed for the PC seem to be increasingly in the twitch category. It seems that for every PC title involving puzzle-solving and character development and thoughtful dialog selections, there's probably ten others that are essentially shooters/slashers/bashers. Even Fallout, which had been an intensive plot development storytelling game series was converted into something that was overwhelmingly a twitch shooter game. Companies that used to specialize in making their customers **think** are now putting more and more of their effort into developing games with flashy graphics that make the player twitch at the optimal moment.

It may not be that console games are making you stupid, but they're certainly not working to make you smarter than you were before you acquired the games. Heck, they're not even bothering to tell you entertaining stories that make you sort out who the actual Good Guys or Bad Guys are. Now it's all about "If it moves, shoot it" and if there's any thought required, it's only to the extent of "Which Bigger Gun is a better choice?"

So, go jump on the console of your choice. Then, if you're still capable of doing so, try to keep track of how many times you actually have to think through a puzzle or situation, versus the number of times you need to twitch NOW. Console gaming may be fun, I won't deny that. But it certainly is doing next to nothing to teach you how to think well. When I consider the scores -- nay, hundreds of hours consumers spend regularly twitching instead of thinking, I long for the days when something as awesome as Civilization would appear every couple of months instead of the every couple of years that is the case nowadays.