So I was having this talk with some friends last week. Surprisingly the same topic came up more than once, which doesn't happen all that often when it's outside our normal conversation paths. Liz was one of these people, and she was remarking about the fact that she spent the night before playing Pokemon on her Gameboy Advance SP (which is a really nice piece of hardware). And she was sitting there in her office saying (to paraphrase) 'Yea, I spent all last night playing game. Sometimes I wonder about playing games with my time, you never really have anything to show for it'. And I thought this was pretty interesting, because you don't really have anything to show for it. I mean, I have a level 9 million wizard in Neverwinter Nights - but so what? That doesn't really mean anything to anyone, and it shouldn't. As Liz and I were talking I came to realize something - she felt guilty. Guilty at having wasted the time playing a game, when other past times would offer a more tangible result. But then she said a very interesting thing. She said (again to paraphrase) "I know myself. I wouldn't have spent that time working. Don't get me wrong I'm not lazy, I work a lot, but sometimes you need 'non-work' time. I would have spent it reading a book or watching a movie or something, but instead I wasted it."

Now that's pretty interesting, because it starts to point at a kind of societal acceptability scale for our free time in which games rank last. Why is that? Doesn't playing games teach things like good logic skills and hand-eye coordination? Granted not many of us make a living off of hand-eye coordination any more, but still. Some folks have been using games very much like Sim City to teach economics and city planning in junior high. The military uses games to teach planning and strategy, as well as real-time reaction drills. But no, playing games is wasted time. And to be perfectly honest, I've sat up and blinked after a few good hours of Everquest and said 'Boy, that was a complete waste of a day'. And I felt guilty. And in many cases it is a waste of a day: I didn't do anything around the house, or wash the car or anything. But as Liz pointed out, I wouldn't really have done that anyway.

What I might have done is read. Or watched a movie. Or TV. If I was watching Discovery channel, that would be better right? More productive than Animal Crossing? But if I were watching Dexter's Laboratory, would that still be better? If I were reading that would clearly be better than all of them - does that include Star Trek novels? Ok, I don't read Star Trek novels, but you get the idea. We, as a society, are quick to dismiss any relative merits of game playing as compared to almost any other media: but are we willing to apply the same focus to what we actually do with other media? Part of this is that we really don't know a lot about what games teach us, or our youth. Don't worry though, Joe Lieberman is calling for national funding to study the effect of games. I smell a non-biased study if there ever was one [insert dripping sarcasm]. But this is not just a Congress out of touch with mainstream culture. I offer you this challenge: think of something to do in your free time that is 'less meaningful' or 'worse' than playing the new Zelda that doesn't involve breaking the law. I bet the list is short.

The final issue is one that a student at another university and I were discussing the other day. One of the groups on campus wants to have a very large LAN party on campus. (A LAN party is one in which the party members each bring a computer, network them all together, and then play a multi-user game with/against each other). And the university in question wasn't sure if that was really 'a social event' that they could fund, because the students would just be 'staring at the computers instead of meeting and greeting one another'. Now, is that just ignorance on the part of the school officials because they have never seen a LAN party, or is that how we as a society think of gaming culture and collaboration? Is the stereotype still a teenage male in the basement all by themselves? Haven't we moved beyond that?