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Where's Jane?

I don't know, but she was at PAX.

TV is Good For You

According to Steven "Emergence" Johnson in the New York Times, television makes you smarter. Why? Because it's getting more and more like videogames in the following ways.

Cognitive Multitasking
"But another kind of televised intelligence is on the rise. Think of the cognitive benefits conventionally ascribed to reading: attention, patience, retention, the parsing of narrative threads. Over the last half-century, programming on TV has increased the demands it places on precisely these mental faculties. This growing complexity involves three primary elements: multiple threading, flashing arrows and social networks."

Learn by Doing
"Many reality shows borrow a subtler device from gaming culture as well: the rules aren't fully established at the outset. You learn as you play."

Emergent Television
"Reality programming borrowed another key ingredient from games: the intellectual labor of probing the system's rules for weak spots and opportunities. As each show discloses its conventions, and each participant reveals his or her personality traits and background, the intrigue in watching comes from figuring out how the participants should best navigate the environment that has been created for them. The pleasure in these shows comes not from watching other people being humiliated on national television; it comes from depositing other people in a complex, high-pressure environment where no established strategies exist and watching them find their bearings."

"Interactive" Television
"You have to focus to follow the plot, and in focusing you're exercising the parts of your brain that map social networks, that fill in missing information, that connect multiple narrative threads."

The New Criteria for Smart Culture
"In pointing out some of the ways that popular culture has improved our minds, I am not arguing that parents should stop paying attention to the way their children amuse themselves. What I am arguing for is a change in the criteria we use to determine what really is cognitive junk food and what is genuinely nourishing. Instead of a show's violent or tawdry content, instead of wardrobe malfunctions or the F-word, the true test should be whether a given show engages or sedates the mind. Is it a single thread strung together with predictable punch lines every 30 seconds? Or does it map a complex social network? Is your on-screen character running around shooting everything in sight, or is she trying to solve problems and manage resources? If your kids want to watch reality TV, encourage them to watch ''Survivor'' over ''Fear Factor.'' If they want to watch a mystery show, encourage ''24'' over ''Law and Order.'' If they want to play a violent game, encourage Grand Theft Auto over Quake. Indeed, it might be just as helpful to have a rating system that used mental labor and not obscenity and violence as its classification scheme for the world of mass culture."

Videogames Join Ranks with Baseball and the Civil War

PBS, that's the United States' public television network for the rest of you, has produced a two hour documentary on the video game industry. The Video Game Revolution has interviews with a great many industry names, including Ralph Baer, Shigeru Miyamoto, Jason Rubin, Will Wright, Chris Taylor and Peter Molyneux. The official site for the program provides details on local air times.

Not having seen the program myself, I can only speculate as to what sort of image it paints of the industry. Still, there's something kind of magical about videogames being so entrenched in American society that PBS will go and make a documentary about them. If any of you get a chance to see this, be sure to post your responses!

Game - Oh, Forget it

Are you watching the new sitcom on UPN, Game Over? The little network that could is breaking into ever more niche territory. Well, I will let you know how it is.

I watch bad tv, friends, so you don't have to.