At the same time, players are required to manage a dizzying array of information and options. The game presents the player with a series of puzzles, and you can’t succeed at the game simply by solving the puzzles one at a time. You have to craft a longer-term strategy, in order to juggle and coördinate competing interests. In denigrating the video game, Johnson argues, we have confused it with other phenomena in teen-age life, like multitasking—simultaneously e-mailing and listening to music and talking on the telephone and surfing the Internet. Playing a video game is, in fact, an exercise in “constructing the proper hierarchy of tasks and moving through the tasks in the correct sequence,” he writes. “It’s about finding order and meaning in the world, and making decisions that help create that order.”

Der überhaupt sehr gute Malcom Gladwell im New Yorker über die Frage, ob Popkultur der Verdummung dienlich ist oder nicht. Auf der Suche nach einer Antwort zieht Gladwell Steve Johnsons Everything Bad Is Good for You zu Rate, das zu lesen sicher auch nicht verkehrt wäre.