It started pre-Christmas, reading in the Grauniad about how pink is being used more than ever in marketing and packaging for toys for girls. Becky Francis, an educational researcher at Roehampton reviews the gender divide in toys and notes:

“The very clear message seems to be that boys should be making things, using their hands and solving problems, and girls should be caring and nurturing,” she says. “It is likely that many of the boys in the study sleep with a teddy, but this was not noted by parents as a favourite toy.”

A similar article appeared a few days ago in the Torygraph bemoaning the ‘Pink Plague’.

I recall a genuine feeling when I was an undergraduate that the strictly defined gender roles were being eroded and greater equality between the genders was being reached, so its a bit of a shock to realise that in the world of toys the differences are more entrenched than ever. For example, buying what I considered a very gender neutral toy a few years ago – a basic Lego set – I noticed that the store had decided it was a ‘boys toy’ and it had been stickered as such.

JeongMee Yoon has been making a pictorial archive of the blue/pink divide, and it makes interesting viewing here. There is some scientific work trying to determine the origin of this preference, although I think this has some way to go and is open to criticism currently – such as for studying the colour preferences of adults who are presumably already affected by cultural factors (Hurlbert & Ying, 2007) or for failing to take account of the history of colour/gender ties. As JeongMee notes:

Pink was once a color associated with masculinity, considered to be a watered down red and held the power associated with that color. In 1914, The Sunday Sentinel, an American newspaper, advised mothers to “use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention.” The change to pink for girls and blue for boys happened in America and elsewhere only after World War II.

Indeed, had pink always had the same associations it now holds, perhaps Fenton Tower in the Scottish Borders might not have seemed particularly fearsome because of its girlish hue…

But what has this got to do with computer games and computer science? More below…

The gender divide in Computer Science has long been an issue of some concern. While the world’s first even computer programmer may have been a woman, and the current president of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery – the largest professional/academic computing society worldwide)  may be female, but the career path does not currently attract good numbers into university.

Many of my colleagues have pointed out to me that female recruitment into CS degrees is actually behind what it was 20 years ago. We are somehow going backwards, not forwards. (Although there are some pockets of progress… see, for example, Joanna Goode’s NSF work on bringing the under-represented into CS – some details and wider discussion here.)

When it comes to computer games, however, there has been dramatic changes. 20 years ago the general perception (and no doubt figures existed to back this up) that computer games were almost exclusively a ‘boys’ thing. Today, without doubt, games have moved beyond this narrow demographic – with a wide range of titles aimed at all children and at families. Nintendo deserve special praise for their impact in this area – the ‘Touch Generations’ titles on the DS and Wii in particular. And aside from making the DS also available in Pink (from a large range of colours to suit all tastes), they have achieved this by making games interesting to as wide an audience as possible – not by trying overhard to make ‘games for girls’.

But where Nintendo have shown that girls will play computer games…

… the more marketing led have been busy producing wide ranges of games for girls. In any colour as long as it is pink. Gender stereotypical role enforcement now available on DS. Making games for girls is not a bad thing as such – but the ‘make it pink, make it girly’ approach is selling short, IMHO. Nintendo show that games can be made that appeal to all children, or to entire families – but I fear that over time the marketers will win. The games shop of the future may well have the blue shelves on the right, the pink shelves on the left.

All these stories point to challenges in establishing serious and informed debate over the benefits and risks of new media, with the sensationalist undeniably winning in mainstream media column inches.

More than a decade after the Internet went mainstream, the world’s richest information source hasn’t necessarily made its users any more informed. A new study from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press shows that Americans, on average, are less able to correctly answer questions about current events than they were in 1989. Citizens who call the Internet their primary news source know slightly less than fans of TV and radio news.

The BBFC recently issued a report on classification, and generally has a good relationship with the game industry in the UK, which makes the decision interesting. Some links for further reading below…

• ELSPA director general Paul Jackson has said that the decision taken by the BBFC to ban Manhunt 2 from sale “demonstrates that we have a games ratings system in the UK that is effective”.
  Interesting yet unexpected reaction from the games industry trade body ELSPA
  
• Jack Straw, the UK’s Leader of the House of Commons, has said that he does not see games developers and publishers taking responsibility for the content they produce.
  Unsurprising government reaction. Keith Vaz mentioned in the article has been an active anti-games violence campaigner since the first Manhunt title was (mistakenly) identified as being owned by a teen in his constituency who murdered another teen.
• “Manhunt 2 is an entertainment experience for fans of psychological thrillers and horror. The subject matter of this game is in line with other mainstream entertainment choices for adult consumers.”
  The publishers outline their position on the BBC.
• Manhunt 2 banned because of the publishers previous games? One analyst thinks so.
• An lastly, a good discussion piece on the whole business from gamesindustry.biz

I’m going to quietly avoid making my own position clear, because I don’t think I have one here. I haven’t seen the game… I didn’t play the first one… but its no secret that Rockstar regularly push boundaries with their games – technical boundaries, gameplay boundaries and acceptability boundaries. Pushing too far on the limits of public acceptability has not paid off this time.

I think the amount of information that is available blinds some people to what it means to be ‘informed’ – Postman clearly sets out a strong argument for supporting the notion that TV led to a society awash with ever greater amounts of information yet at the same time much less well informed. Those lines that scroll by at the bottom of the screen on the 24 hour news channel give plenty of information – but very little context or analysis. News reports themselves, many will argue, are less probing or analytical than they were at some indeterminate time in the past.

However, thanks to another link Scott included, I found the following quote from Steve Johnson himself:

Most of this revolves around how you complete the sentence: “Watching TV Makes You Smarter… Than What?” If you read the article (and of course even more so the book) you’ll see that the proper end to that sentence is: “Watching TV makes you smarter than it would have thirty years ago.” There are plenty of things out there that will make you smarter than watching TV will — the point is that there is a long-term trend in television towards more nuance and complexity…

So what he is saying is that popular culture isn’t actually making people smarter than other forms of culture. No, it’s making people smarter than popular culture used to do. But use of the word ‘smarter’ implies a lot about the effect on overall intelligence – and it should not be too unexpected that having been trained to consume television since a young age that people get better at consuming television. Even Postman argues that this is the case – that whatever else is learned, watching television teaches people how to watch television. But it is a big leap from here to say that people are actually ‘smarter’ due to this – especially if we can point to problems in other areas of intellectual development (see elsewhere on this blog).

Further, Johnson’s book (as far as I read at any rate) completely overlooks the not-insignificant Twin Peaks effect.

Against some resistance from the networks, David Lynch and Mark Frost were able to produce a show with considerably more “nuance and complexity” (to use Johnson’s words) than the norm for the beginning of the 90′s. And the show was a big hit and huge commercial success. It didn’t just win a big audience – it won an audience whose demographics included a wealthy and literate audience who often didn’t watch television. Rather than some gradual ‘smartening’ of the audience, the show proved that there was an existing audience who wanted more complexity and nuance that television was delivering at that time.

Did pop-culture make this audience smarter, or did the discovery of this audience, this demand, force the networks – in their search for advertising revenue – to allow creative and imaginative programme makers room to smarten pop-culture?

By all means have a read, and make your own opinion. My first comment I’ll put below…

I want to start with a bit about the section titled “Fantasty vs. Reality” (page 6). Does this make any sense at all? I could be wrong but weren’t fantasy and science-fiction really big in the 60′s? And all this stuff about the under 30′s being more surrounded by science-fiction and fantasy than older people just doesn’t seem particularly relevant to anything – let alone particularly true.

For a start, at the time Prensky wrote this I was under 30, and so part of the group he is discussing here – and though I was heavily into fantasy and science-fiction during my youth I was very aware that this was not usual or typical. Being into football or Top of the Pops – usual. Tolkein? Dungeons and Dragons? A lot less usual.

So the start point of this section seems false. The explanation – that young people like fantasy and science-fiction because of computers seems even odder. I thought it was mainly due to books and films – Lord of The Rings, Bladerunner, Star Wars, Star Trek, and so on. Extending forward to todays children, they get a lot of fantasy and science-fiction now through Harry Potter, Buffy, Games Workshop, Lord of the Rings… more films, TV, books and table-top gaming.

Then all this is followed by a non sequitur leap into how young companies – or companies with young employees – may feature more informal furniture and settings with play areas. He says that this follows on from the original observation, but I really can’t see the link at all. Sense Make Not Does.

So what we have is a short section of paper in which a dubious assertion is followed by an equally dubious explanation then a disconnected leap to a conclusion that has nothing to do with either.

But this is the fluff part of the paper – and not, I think, very important. Tomorrow – or soon after – I’ll return with part 2, where I’ll try and argue that the paper has more significant problems than this.

A very core point is that digital visual media present the world in a very different way from type.

“Television’s strongest point is that it brings personalities into our hearts, not abstractions into our heads.” (p. 123)

“Arguments, hypotheses, discussions, reasons, refutations or any of the traditional instruments of reasoned discourse turn television into radio or, worse, third-rate printed matter. Thus, television-teaching always takes the form of story-telling…” (p. 148)

With television, or graphical games, how can we teach philosophy or spirituality? Or are these subjects to be considered unsuitable for the 21st Century? It is not that games or television cannot or do not have content about philosophy or spirituality, but these mediums are simply not suited to dealing with abstractions. Instead, we might expect programmes centred on the lives and characters of preachers, philosophers or scientists, rather than their abstract notions (‘Longitude’ is only one of many programmes that comes to mind here). If it can’t be shown easily in an image flashed on screen, it doesn’t work well in a visual medium.

Postman relates (p. 149-153) the story of the “The Voyage of the Mimi” – a project which, with several million dollars in government funding, created a series of television programmes, books and computer programmes. The central story of the programmes was of children travelling with a research ship to research the behaviour of humpback whales.

What Postman thinks is of greatest significance here is that the topic – and hence the curriculum is being shaped by what makes good television, rather than what makes good education. Whales and youngsters travelling with a ‘crusty sea captain’. I don’t recall ever seeing a programme that was any good at teaching calculus – perhaps some that could show why calculus is useful, but never one that was actually much good at teaching it. But perhaps calculus, like philosophy, is a topic that won’t be required in the 21st Century.

Postman is well aware that children brought up with television as a constant companion will grow up with quite different expectations of their education system – this is one point where he is in agreement with Marc Prensky, although they have quite different takes whether this is a good or bad thing. From page 144 of Postman:

“…every television show is educational. Just as reading a book – any kind of book – promotes a particular orientation toward learning, watching a television show does the same.”

“[The television] style of learning is, by its nature, hostile to what has been called book-learning, or its hand-maiden, school learning.”

“Television educates by teaching children to do what television-viewing requires of them. And that is…. remote from what a classroom requires of them…”

This is the effect of collateral learning, “the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns” (p. 144). Is it beyond possibility for schools to teach students how to learn at school?

Indeed, I think I mentioned previously that a number of British universities are now introducing first year classes to teach students how to learn at university. Perhaps advocates of games-based learning might prefer it if instead the teaching were changed to adapt to the students. For university level physics, maths, philosophy and many other topics, I see this as being quite a challenge. Indeed, this is a major objection of Postman’s – that popular culture has led to a state of affairs where education is now seen as something that should be entertaining. Engage me or enrage me, as Prensky puts it.

Postman is worried that, in watching educational television, children are learning that “learning is a form of entertainment or, more precisely, that anything worth learning can take the form of an entertainment, and ought to” (p. 154). Prensky wants educators to become entertainers.

Is it possible that as pop culture sharpens the abilities to deal with visual media, the speed by which people react to visual cues increases, the ability to track multiple threads grows (to accept Johnson’s arguments) that the abilities to search for depth rather than breadth, to concentrate on individual tasks, to build extended and reasoned arguments is impaired?

It’s not that I think games are bad, or that games can’t be educational – but rather that the educational value of games is wildly overstated by some of the GBL evangelists. I think some of the claims made are a little wild and outrageous and, as far as I can see, are lacking in strong supporting evidence. It will take me a while to detail all of these – but first lets go back to the Marc Prensky quote from a few days ago.

Marc recommended to a hall of over a thousand Scottish primary and secondary school (ages 5-17) teachers that they just mention a game – say ‘Civilization 3′ – and gain instant respect and cred, even if they don’t play games at all. Its basically the same as having a teacher pretend to like the current crop of bands. Anyone who ever had a teacher pretend to be trendy knows how that comes across. Even if they happen to pick the right band/game, what realistic chance do they have of kidding the pupils?

Last time I had a room full of secondary school pupils, and was talking about games, I was discussing and playing Burnout 3 and SingStar for my examples (idea blatantly stolen from Hull’s Jon Purdy). They wanted to talk about and play Grand Theft Auto – if it gains ‘cred’ is it right for a teacher to discuss strategies for playing an 18 rated game with significantly younger pupils?

Modern life leads to more depression among children… so claims an open letter to The Daily Telegraph. A range of the usual suspects are rolled out – junk food, ‘screen based entertainment’, and a lack of contact with parents and carers.

It’s actually all (well, see below) very reasonable and, reading it closely, it’s a lot less reactionary than one might expect of a letter sent to The Daily Telegraph. Well, at least the opinion piece and comments doesn’t disappoint in reactionary content with talk of a ‘sinister cocktail’ of modern life.

But, back to the letter itself. One of the points it argues against is the excessive amount of assessment in UK primary schools. The increase in assessment in UK schools does appear to have led to an increase in teaching-to-the-assessment. In particular because it’s not just the pupils who are graded based on assessments – the schools are too. So it has become in the interest of schools to focus teaching as tightly on what get assessed as possible. Not a good development, and not good for children.

I have to say that I’m not quite so sure about a couple of the points though.

First, “Since children’s brains are still developing, they cannot adjust – as full-grown adults can – to the effects of ever more rapid technological and cultural change.” Is this right? I thought it was adults that struggled to keep up with technological and cultural changes!

But the rest of the paragraph really just emphasises the need children have for a diet of good food, for play, and for quality human contact – which seem like fairly common sense points to me. The phrase “real play (as opposed to sedentary, screen-based entertainment)” gave me some pause for thought. The letter doesn’t say ‘computer games are bad’ or even ‘television is bad’, simply that children need “real play”.

The “as opposed to” bit got my wife and I into a serious argument discussion, however. I love playing “Guitar Hero” on my PS2 – screen entertainment all right, but is it sedentary? What about when a bunch of people are playing games together in a social environment? Is it just passive television watching that they are complaining about? I don’t agree with computer games evangelists claiming that games are near universally good and wonderful, but I’m uncomforable with this suggestion of a clear cut distinction between real play and the other kind. What is real play anyway?