Rage Against the (Video Game) Machine!

A recent news story featured the TV Kart, a shopping cart designed to continuously entertain children while their adult companions shop. The principal entertainment offered is exactly what the cart's name implies.

After the children and their adults all clear the store and jump into their minivan, the kids can pop a video into the DVD player mounted above their heads.

When the car needs gas, an adult member of the party can venture out to the gas pump and watch CNN on the monitor embedded into the pump.

Are we well serviced by the electronic life, or have we become too dependent on instant entertainment?

Over the span of human evolution, play and entertainment have played important roles. Psychiatrist William Glasser, who writes extensively about children and adult mental health, argues that fun constitutes a basic human need. One of the most potent adult defenses against stress, anxiety, and aggression that adults have is the ability to take short time out and regress, allowing ourselves to play the way we did as children.

Play evolved over time to serve human needs and civilizations developed games to improve physical agility and to improve mental operations such as language, memory, planning, developing strategies, using math, and tolerating frustration. Imagine playing a checkers game, picturing yourself controlling the impulse to make a careless move, reflectively planning ahead, concentrating on a goal, imagining what you will do in the next few moments if your goals are fulfilled or frustrated.

Now, imagine playing with a refrigerator box as a child, using language to create a narrative story with your friends, then starring in your own drama. Imagine learning language from an older playmate and modeling language to a younger child. Finally, imagine driving with your kids: Sometimes you talk about the small details of life, and sometimes you ride in silence. Each of you practice living in your own interior world, responsible for your own mental stimulation, deciding how to cope with boredom, learning how to be patient and self-reliant.

Electronics and microprocessors offer us instant entertainment without the need for language or complex mental operations. When do we encounter unplugged, quiet moments? When are we called upon to tolerate boredom, frustration? When do we practice mindfulness, living in our own interior world? Electronics are the antithesis of social, creative, and narrative play: The essential creative act in electronic play was the creation of the game: Players need only react quickly to the highly stimulating environment the game creator imagined for you.

The electronic life, from Ipods to video games, to ubiquitous video monitors, robs us from opportunities for mental work. Unfortunately, the brain is a use-it-or-lose-it organ. Children, especially, need to exercise language, social skills, planning, organizing, imagining, and visualizing the future. They need a mentally demanding world with its inevitable periods of frustration and boredom. They need to learn to live in quiet moments, comfortable with their own interior world. Neither children nor adults need to believe that they have a right to instant entertainment in every setting of daily life.

We need to reconsider the electronic life and the instant entertainment culture. We need mental fitness and that demands that we rely on ourselves for entertainment rather than on electronic chips. We need to see a Blues Harp as the ultimate musical gift instead of the Ipod, and a chess set the ultimate game rather than ViceCity.

Co-written with Brent Thompson, D.N.Sci.