The quote below is taken from Heather Chaplin in conversation with Tom Bissell in the Feb 2009 issue of The Believer magazine. They’re talking about ways of looking at video games. This is Chaplin:
Maybe there’s something relaxing about playing at war instead of being at it. Although I also wonder if it’s just the opposite — if the games just keep you pumped up and ready to be at war twenty-four hours a day. And to go back to the “show me the games of your children, and I’ll show you the next hundred years” thing, you could rationally look around and say we’re moving into an increasingly militarized society. I mean, the army advertises in gaming magazines like crazy and shows up at first-person shooter competitions. This colonel I interviewed once broke down for me exactly what video games foster above all else — the ability, amid a sea of chaos, to discern, in seconds, what’s important and what’s not. That’s the reason so many grown-ups feel only fear when they look at a video-game screen — there’s so much going on and they don’t know how to begin to make that kind of instantaneous decision. But any modern-day kid can see the same screen and know immediately what he’s supposed to do and how — no matter how much chaos there appears to be. That’s a good skill for a soldier to have. It also sounds like a pretty good skill for any twenty-first-century citizen to have, considering the amount of information with which we’re surrounded and how fast it flies.
If that’s true (and I’m not sure it is), then what “good skills” does a person who spends a great deal of time staring through a camera have over people who don’t? The ability to instantaneously spot the essential and expressive framed by rectangles of the appropriate proportions? The good skill of paying attention to everything in the world that they’re looking at, not just the homo sapiens that are one part of it?
-Julie
