I have a friend – let’s call him Bean (his real name). Bean is a tech support specialist at Apple. He is 38 years old. He lives with his girlfriend Jen in midtown Sacramento. Bean is a hardcore gamer. At least I think he is. Recently he has been role-playing in Fable II. That was last week, anyway. I wonder if he’s finished it yet. The thing was released almost a month ago, after all. C’mon Bean!

I like hanging out with Jen and Bean; I wish they came over here more than they do. That’s partly because there is no screen to hog all the attention and suck all the energy out of the room in my place. That’s how hardcore this dude is. He is a sparkling conversationalist, more sharp-witted than most I know, passionate, engaging. But man, I am sure I have never been to their house once – not once (no, that is not true: once).- where for the entire time somebody there was not engrossed in a game, sometimes me. The conversation picks up during smoke breaks.

I’m really bad at it, but my favorite game is Guitar Hero; any version, really, since I’m a beginner every time. Last time I was trying to master the bass licks for Heart Shaped Box. Gawd, what a rush! The thing that amazes me most though is the cerebral fact that there is something else contributing to the experience – something beyond the twitchy attempts at coordination. Just accessing the game takes savvy. It’s nothing, really, for Bean or Jen. They’ve internalized the process. But I have to take a moment each time to realize I need to treat this television-like thing in the middle of the room as I treat a file-system on the LAN at work. That is not really easy for me. It requires a shudder and a shift from my upbringing … from my customary environment (not that this is a huge difficulty, but I have to go through it). Here is why we have stereotypes (and stereotypes are exaggerated but rooted in truth) about old people who are naturally technophobic. “They” cannot figure out anything as simple as their new television remote control because their new television remote control is not actually so simple. The operating system it serves demands so much more than what they are accustomed to doing for a TV program. Any sort of popular remote control system at all has only been introduced during my own lifetime. Before that we just turned a couple of knobs.

This goes for games too. I played Pong on Atari game systems when I was young. Hooking up the box, switching the toggle to “on,” and turning a dial to move the paddle up and town … so simple. Sigh. Now I need years of experience and a brief lecture before I can play Guitar Hero, a game that in itself requires only a little more hand-eye-ear arrangement than Pong used to do. Others on the other hand – the role-playing games, the battle games, the popular culture and trivia games – require as much or more concentration and attention as the set-up and the accessing of the games. You have to read. You have to know maps. You have to make connections. You have to think in abstractions. And you have to know your joystick like you know your keyboard with its shortcuts.

I like that Jenny Levine connected gaming to television as a way to illustrate the growing complexity of popular culture by discussing Steven Johnson’s book Everything Bad is Good for You. I never read the book, but I did catch Johnson on a couple of interviews. Arguing that entertainment grows ever more complex, demanding ever more of the audience, he illustrates his point with the curve of television narrative. In fact, Levine refers to the 1970′s cop show Starsky & Hutch as an example of the old bare, simple form of content, whereas Johnson himself has said that show indicates the beginning of the trend upward. The main part of the show was always straightforward and tended to tell one story that stood by itself. But there were always bookends – some added dimension to the story featured in the show’s opening moments, and returned to again in the epilogue. These dimensions were usually comical, supernumerary to the plot, but they required a shift in perspective of some sort: e.g., Starsky’s car needs a tune-up, or Hutch meets a girl in a bar, then sees her again before the closing credits (which will be plastered over a series of freeze-frames from the episode to recall what we just watched). Progressively, programs have been adding fancier structure, tangled plots, multiple lines. Shows like Hill Street Blues, Thirty-Something and LA Law in the 1980′s; Ally McBeal and NYPD Blue in the 1990′s; CSI, The Sopranos and The Shield in the 2000′s. I recently finished the last season of The Wire. Everything that is said about this show is true. It is not to be missed, and it is not a show that forgives missing a single episode. I used to subscribe to HBO, but having missed the first couple of seasons of The Wire I could not jump in to it. I needed to go back to the early season DVDs. It’s epic, operatic, tragic, terrifically difficult and eminently rewarding. It inspires the viewer to read, to study, to follow the reality it reflects. It does not only demand, it compels. By the time we get to The Wire we have come almost impossibly far from the time Lucy met Bill Holden in the Brown Derby, or the time Whitey talked Beaver into getting trapped in that billboard coffee cup.

The challenge presented by much programming reflects the challenge involved with accessing it in the first place. Credit the environment. The challenge of gaming extends beyond the content of the games. Credit the environment. It is a challenging environment – but, again, a rewarding one. It is rather difficult for me to imagine LAN parties and Dance, Dance Revolution competitions being hosted within the walls of any traditional library. But we are moving into that period where the walls are tumbling down for some purposes. Library blogs like this one maintained by the Ann Arbor District Library in Michigan provide the necessary background for gamers so they may discuss not just events, but what is new in their world and how to navigate in it. Navigation is key; no ship ever made port without a competent navigator (or set of navigators). Everything I have been writing so far in this post touches on this fact.

The skills that gamers cultivate are comprehensive. They take an encyclopedic approach to life, and what they do is necessary and marketable. I remember an old Far Side cartoon (I’ve been trying to find it online, but have not yet). The caption says something like “Hopeful Parents.” It depicts a middle-aged couple standing in the middle of their living room. They are watching their little boy who sits on the floor before the television with a joystick in his hand. The two parents share a thought-bubble featuring a set of future classified ads, each one of which is geared to the skills their boy is mastering: “Nintendo Expert Needed – $75,000 per year;” “Can You Save the Princess? – $100,000 per year;” that sort of thing. It seemed hilarious at the time. Totally absurd. I think Gary Larson, though, turns out to be an unwitting prophet.