Re: People prefer videogames to the outdoors

MTB said

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Mountain biking started well over two decades ago, but advanced suspension designs and highly tuneable bikes are just now becoming standard.

As it happens, Gary Fisher, who is credited with the invention of mountain biking, was in the same university outdoor club as Barb and I were, and was starting to modify what are now called "cruisers" in the mid 1960s. On your point that "advanced suspensions ... are just now becoming standard", to quote some of my historical re-enactment buddies, what's your point? Bicycles have been around for a couple hundred years, and their spinoffs include automobiles and airplanes (remember a couple of brothers named Orville and Wilbur? - bikemakers!). If you look at road racing bikes, or touring bikes, or other bicycles, they are still evolving, with some pretty major new innovations becoming standard - improved aerodynamics, carbon fiber frames, ultralight wheels, transmission systems, etc etc. Just about everything produced is evolving rapidly (not necessarily improving, though IMHO).

And then he said

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From kindergarten on into college films have been used to teach, so calling the TV a useless item for teaching is just ridiculous.

Multimedia teaching tools (we used to call them "audiovisual aids" and "demonstrations") have been around for literally thousands of years, from the dissection of cadavers in medieval medical schools to current computer-driven visuals and modeling simulations. When my son was growing up, we had Speak and Spell, and the math equivalent (he also had a personal computer when he was 3 or 4, mainly to keep him away from Mom and Dad's remote access terminal at the house - this was in the early 1980s). Films and lantern slides (the 3x5 size, which preceded 35mm slides by a century) were used in teaching classes (and delivering professional research papers) for many decades. Now we use Powerpoint to electronically deliver slides and video (Barb and I were university professors for some 20 years before going into industry). The original video games were experiments with computer graphics, used for development and experimentation. The original internet (called Arpanet) was a communication and data sharing service (the real inventor of the internet, Vint Cerf, was doing his original work on the same campus where I was in grad school, in the next building over, and Barb was becoming a computer scientist before the term was invented - you were an applied mathematician or an electrical engineer in those days).

But the fundamental difference is not the device, but how it is used. The devices on which video games run and the software techniques which produce the graphics can be used for education, scientific research, and the bettering of mankind and the environment, or they can be used for mindless timewasting "recreation" and "entertainment". Hand-eye coordination can be developed by activities like baseball and other outdoor activities that develop the whole person and develop an appreciation for the environment and the tiny place of humans in the universe, or a specialized, highly restricted set of hand-eye coordination can be developed by videogames presently existing and likely to be developed.

The problem is only partially the physical limitations (the obesity of the kids). It also extends to the lack of interaction with the surrounding real world (not the limited one that exists on the screen or the coming holograms and "touch" simulators). Social interaction is extremely limited (look how many "gamers" circle of "friends" is limited to only cybercontacts), and there is no development of an awareness of the world's environment on our own planet, much less the greater universe.

Yes, multimedia and films (TV, videos, ...) can and have been for centuries used for education. But that was bringing a small piece of the real world into the classroom (which goes far beyond the traditional classroom with 4 walls and a roof, to places like f_klock teaches), with the purpose of developing the rudimentary skills that the students and learners needed and would be eager to use to get out there to see, feel, smell, and experience for themselves. Your beloved videogames are, for the majority of "gamers" a limited electronic universe that has lost touch with reality ("reality TV" is NOT!)