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Obama Warns Of 'Distractions' Of PlayStation, Xbox Era
by Kris Graft [PC, Console/PC]
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May 10, 2010
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President Barack Obama explained Sunday how he thinks technology, including video games, has become a distraction to more important issues in life, such as education.
Speaking in a commencement address at Hampton University, Virginia, he said, as relayed by an AP report, "With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, -- none of which I know how to work -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation."
It's not the first time that Obama has mentioned video games in public addresses. During presidential campaign, in light of Grand Theft Auto's April 2008 release, he told parents, "those video games are raising our kids. Across the board … kids are spending a huge amount of time, not on their studies, but on entertainment."
In 2007, Obama had also told youths, "It's time for you to turn off the TV and stop playing GameBoy. … We've got work to do."
But in the past, Obama also used video games' popularity to reach the video gamer demographic by placing campaign ads in video games such as Madden NFL and Burnout Paradise.
And The New York Times also reported in January 2009 that his daughters received a Wii for the family's first Christmas in the White House following Obama's election.
Obama encouraged the graduates at Hampton University to adapt to changes in media, adding that education can help cut through the noise of blogs and talk radio.
"Education... can fortify you, as it did earlier generations, to meet the tests of your own time," he said.
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Granted, I was "raised" on gaming - it's darn fun. But my parents did do their job of keeping me from going overboard with it. Also, I didn't have a dedicated console - I had a PC. My interest in gaming eventually (or rather, quickly) led to an interest in programming - BASIC was already installed on my PC - and the computer came with a book showing me how to use it. One thing led to another, and this ultimately resulted in the career I have today as a software engineer.
Current generations don't have that opportunity sitting right in front of them. Instead it's CoD XX: Viet-Germany Black-Ops, Chicken and Egg development programs (unless you like .NET). There's no learning involved, or (unbounded) space for curiosity and experimentation on closed consoles....just a steady stream of (distracting) paid content.
Just have to take issue with this statement though: "With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, -- none of which I know how to work -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation." Not true! His iPod track listing was the subject of numerous "it's a slow news day" reports during the 2008 campaign. He also notoriously gave the Queen an iPod during he and the first lady's visit to England.
@ Jen - some adults as well. I'm still addicted to playing baseball and my honey-do list is suffering terribly. :-)
Also I love how he gave the Queen of England an iPod for a gift, and the PM of Britain a stack of American DVD movies as a gift. And he has used in-game ads with Madden and Burnout. And he calls all of this "technology" a big distraction? Love how he thinks he can tell Americans what to do and how to run our lives with pretty much very speech he gives.
But don't blame I voted for McCain. lol :)
While other countries are funding starts ups, fostering their video game and interactive industry, we seem to be falling behind, I'd go out on a limb and say we haven't even moved towards the starting gate. The Pres, in my opinion should be addressing the sheer number of unemployed devs in the past couple of years.
Personally, it was comic books and video games that opened up my mind, they gave me an extra interest in mythology, scifi, science and art.
As far as parenting goes, its up to the parents to put guidelines and restrictions on their family.
[I hope the President never critiques a book he's never read.]
Parents need to do their job as parents. Take away the console if studies aren't being accomplished. Teach the wee one to balance fun and priorities.
"...adding that education can help cut through the noise of blogs and talk radio."
What happens when you read Steven Hawkins blog, or listen to talk radio about how the Gulf oil spill is threatening local fish markets?
My point from all the above is technology can be a valuable educational tool, and should not be demonized because of popular culture. Pres. Obama has his heart in the right place. I understand his fear of the people knowing more about video games then academics. (This happens anyway with traditional print media--see sales of Inquior, Cosmo, and Maxium vs. Time, Newsweek, and Newspapers.) This popular median, however, is not going anywhere.
Don't fight popularity. Use it to your advantage.
BS, Mr President. BS.
I think the point is being missed here. The point is not that we play games, read books, watch movies, read books. The point is that we attempt to do all of those at the same time and sometimes while trying to become educated. Our society is on information overload, and information is not education. One does not become educated by learning lots of things. One becomes educated by learning how to collect, collate, analyze, experiment with, re-arrange, extrapolate, and summerize information. To do that takes focus. The multitasking of our media, our careers, and our culture "distracts" from that need to focus and develop our intellectual muscle. If you were able to download the specifics of a black-belt in karate to your brain you would still not be a martial artist. Why? Because your muscles, tendons, bones, lung capacity, optical and auditor centers are not developed and trained to work together to produce those moves.
Does that mean that technology has no place in education? Of course not. But it does not replace education. You can't prove a theory just because you site 300,000 occurances of a certain word string via Google. The purpose of eduation is to give you the cognitive tools to think and create for yourself. Not become the equivalent of a tall blade of grass blown by the wind of massive information and electronic stimulants.
Wouldn't it be ironic if the world became dominated by consumers (both material and electronic) and the lowest paid jobs in the least developed part of the world were knowledge workers, scientists, and creatives?
/sarcasm
If I ever have a kid, I certainly wouldn't want them playing video games while neglecting their schoolwork. But, that's just me.
Took the words right off my keyboard, Daniel.
Hopefully there will be parents as good as ours in the future.
*holds breath*
This is how my brother did to his kids.
I totally agree.
@Daniel Biesiada
I think the entire Internet in general should be mentioned and not just Facebook. All of us have a lot to learn when it comes to the Internet.
@Achilles de Flandres
I wished that more parents would think like that. More discipline is needed in this world.
Playing the games and learning are driven by the same psychological devices (remember Raph Koster?..)
Why not "exploiting" that in a socially useful way?
There is a long way to go, sure. Can we walk this way?
Yes, we can.
If anything, the belief he seemed to want to assert was that a benefit of “education” is that it acts to protect fragile minds against the many and varied sources of information about the world. In other words, smart people ignore mere “entertainment” forms like computer games, blogs, talk radio and Fox News -- the educated elite get all the information they need from the state-approved media outlets.
That sounds to me rather like the opposite of the point of education, which I’d say ought to be more about exposing people to many sources of information so that they can learn how to judge the good sources from the bad and to begin functioning as adults in society with others who may believe different things.
At any rate, I’d say the shot at computer games was just a stray round in this thin-skinned administration’s latest drive-by aimed at information sources that don’t suck up to it. It’s understandable that folks on this site would want to discuss the words about gaming, but I think that’s giving those words more attention than they merit.
“Regardless of your feelings for a given individual this is still a professional site for reasonable discussion.”
Yes, I thought so, too, until I criticized the “copyleft” notion behind the GNU General Public License. I guess some subjects (usually peripheral to actually developing computer games) will always generate a few needlessly hostile responses.
For the most part, though, I agree with you; Gamasutra remains a place where people are capable of disagreeing in a thoughtful and professional way. Here’s hoping it can stay that way even when political or religious subjects marginally related to game development come up.
He's using gaming as one example (he did also say iPad and iPod which are not exclusively game devices) because some kids spend too much time playing instead of studying. If kids were spending too much time knitting he would have mentioned that.
The message of 'study more, engage in various forms of entertainment less' is not a bad one especially in a country that is going through a severe economic crisis.
Oh noes!
To add to the list of things where I see a lot of noise and not a lot of educating: Washington DC as a whole. Whether it be in the form of Congress' incessant bickering over the most trivial of reasons to support/oppose current issues, their adept ability to gridlock the entire process for the whims of their supporting special interest group, or the woefully depressing interpretation of history that inundates our media in their pedantic campaign ads, Washington DC has become nothing but a hub of static hiding behind a veil of faux leadership that's rapidly losing its opacity.
Even in education itself, there's a ton of noise. We see an unending volley of examples in higher education of professors, self-appointed "purveyors of truth," saturating the classroom with conspiracy theories and wild bigoted rhetoric. At the other levels, even as young as Kindergarten, education itself is wrought with noise, and transforming into a veritable battlefield of creationism vs evolution, American history vs Mexican heritage, and abstinence vs sexual precautions.
Video games are a source of noise?
Open your eyes, Obama. The noise is echoing off every wall in every American system. It's everywhere, and don't push the blame solely upon television and video games. It's not the medium that is failing to make best use of the information revolution. It's the partisan fanatics and cronies infiltrating it that are driving it to ruin.
But I still feel that it's inappropriate, considering the current approval rating of this Congress and how little work they're actually doing, to press such responsibility upon us when their own field can't get their information clear.
That said, Obama has a point here. video games of most flavors are addictive and letting a child become or remain addicted to them will make life harder on that child for the missed opportunities. Society is the poorer as a result. This si the same as any other addiction would do.
The political Left (of which Obama is a part) has on occasion wrung its hands over the digital violence of many video games and I don't find much in those critiques to agree with. This is different and should not be treated with with same dismissive/couter-attack reflex we often have for "violence" critiques.
Much as we dislike seeing our industry singled out negatively, the addictive product we peoduce is relatively cheap and freely available in US society. We're a bigget target than comics or sports or most other addictive/abusable activities aavilable to kids. Since we're guilty as charged in thise case, the least we can be is graceful when called on it.
Bonus Questions:
Are there design traits that make a game more or less addictive?
Can we design games to be enagaging and immersive while minimizing a game's addictive side-effect?
If and how much would reducing addictinveness in games reduce sales? :)
I'd not bet on the whole Internet being disruptive. Take Gamasutra - a distraction or educational? :>
I agree that what Obama has probably meant is to highlight problem in education rather than problem with games, being just an example of switched priorities of up-coming grown-ups.
Funny if there is a real problem with the education or just we're living at the beginning of post-crisis era where kids will probably have to work harder than their parents to achieve similar status quo.
“Meanwhile, you’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t rank all that high on the truth meter. With iPods and iPads; Xboxes and PlayStations, information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment.”
“With so many voices clamoring for attention on blogs, on cable, on talk radio, it can be difficult, at times, to sift through it all; to know what to believe; to figure out who’s telling the truth and who’s not. Let’s face it, even some of the craziest claims can quickly gain traction. I’ve had some experience with that myself.”
That he follows this dismissal of perspectives he doesn’t like by telling graduates to keep their minds open, and to hold government accountable, is just the usual ironic flourish. Overall, the jab felt out-of-place in what in places was an uplifting speech -- like he just can't help himself.
I think games-as-entertainment got off pretty lightly, all things considered.
The lot of you seem to be missing the underlying message here. Then again, I'M DISTRACTED!
You were right when you said that I shouldn't bet on the entire Internet being disruptive, but that still doesn't change the fact that you have to be careful with it. The Internet is like a double-edged sword. If it is used the right-way, then it can become a powerful tool/weapon that helps you find useful and accurate information, network with people, and promote your work to potential employers (and all that are just for starters). However, there are people that tend to either waste away their time on the Internet or use the Internet for the wrong reasons (like pornography, spreading false information, etc.). Of course, we can’t let the bad overshadow the good, but keep in mind that it is not because Internet surfing can be more than a hobby that it can’t be as addicting as game playing if you are not careful with it. As for Facebook (which you mentioned earlier), like some of the stuff that exist in the Internet or that require Internet connection to work, it also has its good points and its bad points. It is just matter of responsibility, education, and discipline. By the way, the only time that it is truly OK to stay on the Internet for a long period of time is if it is part of a job demand (like web designing).
I agree that Internet is full of rubbish and with the best possible technology for search you can get lost and waste your time often. I agree it's frequently misused. That's all what I find negative about it.
I believe your opinion comes from some conclusions I also have, I'm just not eager to go that far with judgement:
Internet for me, personally is first about networking, then knowledge, then entertainment.
It's because I grew up in 90ties and I have my habits built mostly then.
In those times networking was equal to IRC (Internet Relay Chat).
Knowledge was usually FTP downloaded text files with tutorials, demoscene e-mags and early hypertext PC manuals embedded in some DOS apps, mostly again, downloaded from FTP or early HTTP vertical portals, quite amateur comparing to what we used to see nowadays. Then I discovered Gamasutra, Flipcode and other much more mature sites of the end of 90ties.
As for entertainment back then it was really bad experience mainly because it's early development stage and bad infrastructure in country where I live.
If I was same teenager today I'd probably say priorities have changed to Entertainment/Networking on equal position then Knowledge. Facebook is interesting example of pole position prioritity while it gives a lot of entertainment and cosmic opportunity to network with 400M+ people around the world (theoretically :>).
Thing that Web 2.0 era introduced is that networking these days is not only about chat (like I had on IRC and IM back at the beginning) but also about sharing stuff people think is important to their peers while usually it's not. At the same time less and less people care about privacy so all that garbage is public, open to everybody who by definition should not care either.
That's why it's so much a time killer as any other medium that consumes time in addictive way. But I'm still rather curious what next generation will like to propose on their experiences with modern Internet rather than banish bad, bad, bad behavior of wasting time and misusing the medium.
As noted, this is also a man who advertised heavily in these "distracting media". There is more than a hint of hypocrisy in the message.
It's up to the individual to figure it out. It's been that way for a long time. True objectivity does not exist in humans. Get used to it.
I agree with you!
Where I do agree, is that the Nintendo Wii, PS3, Microsoft Xbox 360, Apple's iPad are good and un-tapped devices for moving higher education directly into the homes.
It is well-known that some kids learn faster from software than a teacher in a crowded classroom. I personally had my son on the PC at an early age learning from just about ever educational program I could find. He was reading, writing and doing math before he stepped one foot into a classroom.
I think its time to stop point fingers at video games and start looking at the technology we have on hand and totally rethink how we teach our kids! Pard the pun, but the old-school way of doing things is totally broken and its only getting worse!
I don't always agree with you Bart but I've got your back on this one. The Wizard is saying "there is no man behind the curtain". I think I'm mature enough to shift through all the data that's out there and manage the consumption of said data with my kids. Frankly, if I left it to academia to tell my kid what is and isn't important, I'd have teenage morons on my hands. And as far as gamings concerned, it's always been a reward not a right to game in my house. Good grades translate into hassle free summers and hot new titles..... works great for me. If the source of information is suspect I'll deal with it, but to be honest a lot of the suspect data is coming from this administration.