Ed Note: Boingboing's current guest blogger Steven Johnson is the author of six books, most recently The Invention Of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution and the Birth Of America, for which he is currently on book tour. He's also the co-founder of the hyperlocal community site outside.in.







Anyone with children over a certain age will tell you that one of the best things about being a parent is how much time you get to spend playing games with your kids. In my case–I have three boys, aged 2 to 7–the experience has always had a split-screen quality to it: half belonging to the 21st century, the other belonging to my childhood in the mid-seventies. We spend a ton of time together playing Little Big Planet on the PS3–or more accurately, we spend a ton of time with me marveling at their skills at Little Big Planet and woefully attempting to keep up with them. But there's also the parallel track, where I get to revisit the games that I played as a child. Just last week it was Battleship. Before that it was Sorry, Bingo, Go Fish, Candy Land, and so on.

There's a consistent theme to all these old-school game introductions: almost without exception, I have been mortified by the pathetic game that I've excitedly brought to the kids. Not because they're made out of cardboard and plastic, instead of 1080p HDMI graphics. (My boys still spend just as many happy hours with Lego as they do the PS3.) What's irritating about the games is that they are exercises in sheer randomness. It's not that they fail to sharpen any useful skills; it's that they make it literally impossible for a player to acquire any skills at all.

Take Battleship. I spend thirty minutes setting up the game, explaining the dual grids and how one represents their fleet, and the other represents their opponents'. I have to explain the pegs, and the x/y coordinates of the grid, and the placement of the ships themselves. And then when we're finally ready to go, I explain how the actual game is played.

"So pick a random point on the grid," I explain, "and see if he's got a ship there."

"Nothing? Okay, now you pick a random point on the grid."

"Nothing? Okay, let's do it again…"

I hadn't thought about this until I actually played the game again last week, but there is absolutely nothing about the initial exploratory sequence of Battleship that requires anything resembling a genuine decision. It is a roulette wheel. A random number generator could easily stay competitive for the first half. But even when some red pegs appear on the board, the decision tree is still a joke: "Now select a co-ordinate that's next to the red peg." That's pretty much it. Yes, at the very end, you might adjust your picks based on your knowledge of which ships you've sunk. But for the most part, it's about as mentally challenging as playing Bingo.

And Battleship might as well be Battleship Potemkin compared to something like Candy Land, which was fiendishly designed to prevent the player from ever having to make a single decision while playing the game. You pick a card from a shuffled deck, and follow the instructions. That's it.

I realize that games of pure chance have a long history, but that doesn't make them any less moronic. (And it goes without saying that Checkers, Chess, Go, and other strategy games are great tests of decision-making.) I take this as another example of how much more mentally challenging kids' culture has become in recent years. The digital generation doesn't seem to have much of an appetite for games structured around total randomness. My older boys have been playing Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii since they were four and six, and there is more decision making in ten seconds of that game than there is in ten hours of Candy Land or Sorry.

Just as a thought experiment: Imagine what the manual for Super Mario would read like were it structured like Candy Land:

To explore Super Mario Galaxy, just hit the "action" button. At that point the game will randomly determine what action you have selected, and whether it was successful. When the action is over, hit the button again to see what's next!

You think that game would have been a runaway hit? Even dressed up with accelerometers and adorable graphics? Of course not. But that's what most of us who grew up before videogames accepted as normal when we were five. I'm not big into the "moral message" interpretation of pop culture, but plenty of critics of digital games are, so just for the record: what sort of message does Candy Land send to our kids? (And I'm not just talking about all the implicit advertisements for cane sugar products.) It says you are powerless, that your destiny is entirely determined by the luck of the draw, that the only chance you have of winning the game lies in following the rules, and accepting the cards as they come. Who wants to grow up in that kind of universe?