Arne Duncan, U.S. Education Secretary on Xbox: "Not a fan. No, absolutely not." | Hacker News Reader

Arne Duncan, U.S. Education Secretary on Xbox: "Not a fan. No, absolutely not."

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10 pointscwan24 comments

Not surprised. No, absolutely not. I am locked in an epic struggle with my 11 year old to get him to take his homework seriously instead of playing video games all day. It's been a years-long familial Battle of Ypres; trench warfare, heavy losses, hazy strategic objectives.

We are relatively attentive parents. In many areas, most parents can't be this attentive; they're working multiple jobs. It's hard to imagine that the children of multiple-shift parents who have Xboxes wouldn't be suffering in school.

I'm glad my son has games to play; for one thing, you'd be at a social disadvantage in 2010 not to. But it absolutely does create a drag on schoolwork.

In my family, the rule was no video games at all Sunday night through Thursday night. A little draconian perhaps, but it solved this problem.

When was this? Attitudes and customs about video games are rapidly changing. As 'tptacek mentioned, it's now also a huge social disadvantage for a kid to not be playing video games (or be severely limited in their access to them).

it's now also a huge social disadvantage for a kid to not be playing video games

Excuse my language, but give me a fucking break. I was a teenager not that long ago, my siblings are in their teens, and I know other teens who have zero interest in video games. Aside from the fact that I think the claim of impending ostracization for non-gamers is bullshit, if your friends shun you because you don't play 20 hours of video games a week, get some new friends. You could easily make the same arguments for drugs and promiscuous sex, which I understand are popular among some groups of teenagers. I'm sure there's a lot of people that would argue that it's a "huge social disadvantage" to not being into sports, but I've lived in many places were sports seemed to be all most people cared about and I managed to maintain plenty of rich friendships, despite not giving two shits about any professional sports.

Be who you want to be and who you should be, and if your "friends" give you grief, get some new ones.

EDIT: I'm not arguing that video games are negative either, just that this is the dumbest reason ever to let your kids do something.

I agree to a large part with what you wrote, and I certainly didn't mean to imply that kids would be completely ostracized for not playing games. And of course, I also see the problem with letting kids do whatever they want simply because their friends do it. But a few things:

* I was actually thinking about much younger kids -- elementary school, not teens in middle or high school. They often don't really have the option of getting new friends, since they're in the same class all day with the same (small) group of kids.

* The line has to be drawn somewhere (and understandably at different points by different people). What if you never let your kids watch any tv or movies or listen to any music? At what point does not allowing such experiences fall into the category of "cultural deprivation" (or whatever vaguely evil term people like to use)?

What if you never let your kids watch any tv or movies or listen to any music?

My access to TV and movies was severely limited as a child, and as an adult, I kind of wish I had grown up in a house without a TV at all. I don't remember getting anything good out of it at all, but I remember reading books, writing, and creating things on the computer that made me who I am today. I'm not optimistic that what's on TV and movies for kids today is any more enriching than it was 20 years ago.

I grew up in the '90s and early '00s. I really doubt that it is or ever will be a significant social disadvantage to only be allowed access to video games on the weekend.

Games are designed to be engrossing and entertaining in ways that other media can't approach. It's hard enough for adults to consciously think "X hours of gaming a night is too much, maybe I should work on this side project". I can't imagine how distracting it is for a 15yr old when the side project is say a French essay.

At the end of the day the only way I win the argument is to realise that spending 100 hours playing Dragon Age is great but it's 100 hours I could have ploughed into fixing tickets for my favourite OSS project. One of those has a lasting benefit. Still a difficult decision to make when I have Mass Effect 2 sitting there unplayed...

As a game designer, when I look at this problem, I don't see kids being distracted away from something worthwhile by something pointless, but rather kids being distracted away from something boring by something fun. The thing is, there is nothing intrinsically boring about the subjects taught in school--rather, the boredom is created by the linear, contextless, no-immediate-feedback method of batched homework questions.

Really, there needs to be game design thinking put into the design of homework and projects--either as a separate editorial step after the creation of the actual academic content, or, better yet, done by the teachers themselves, made capable by having taken courses in game design (psychology, applied economics, and UI design, mostly) as part of their own schooling.

Ah, how I wish it were that easy. Yes, school assignments and homework could (and should) be made more fun and engaging but the reality is that life is chock full of linear, contextless, boring, repetitive tasks with no-immediate-feedback that must get done. I'm not saying it should be this way, or that homework should be shitty to prepare kids for reality, or that kids should be adults at 11, or that adults shouldn't have fun and eliminate every bit of useless dreck from their lives that they can. I'm not saying any of that. I am saying that sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and get shit done, no matter how unpleasant. That habit seems to often be learned at an early age. The most unproductive people I know still haven't figured it out, and instead go watch TV or play video games. And then wonder why they haven't accomplished much at 40.

I am assuming you are implying that the real purpose of school, then, is to teach kids to "grit [their] teeth and get shit done, no matter how unpleasant." In other words, to teach kids self-control. Reminds me of Robin Hanson: http://www.overcomingbias.com/tag/academia

Actually, I specifically said that's NOT what I was saying. I do think that there's a lot of stuff that should be taught in school that will never be as engaging as a well-made video game. It's just the nature of reality.

There's a difference between what you want to communicate, and what the words you type end up actually implying. I understand that you said "I'm not saying that [...] homework should be shitty to prepare kids for reality"—but saying that there are shitty things that should be taught, because that is reality, is the same idea behind a different facade.

We live in a socially-constructed reality. There are laws of physics and biology that say how the world around us acts, but really, we get to decide how we act, and make the rules for human behavior. If you entitle a group to an idea, make them think it is perfectly deserved—even if their own elders can't give them that thing—then, when they grow up, they will give the generation coming after them the opportunity they never had.

Entitle children to the idea of human rights and, having grown, they will not own slaves, and free those passed down to them. Entitle children to game-designed work, and, having grown, they will believe that game design has a place in I/O psychology, and that any organizational consultant worth hiring will need to optimize for fun.

Now, you might rebut with "but what about those laws of physics and biology you mentioned? Surely they necessitate some form of un-fun?" The interesting thing about that is, evolution has made sure that all the things we have to do to survive and reproduce are fun already.

* Running (and hunting, catching, killing), and exploring (and gathering, washing, preparing, and cooking) are both fun.

* Having sex is fun (think about how arduous procreation would be if evolution didn't make us think otherwise!)

* Being creative (telling stories, doodling, humming a melody to oneself) is fun.

* Competing and collaborating are both fun.

* Inventing and using tools is fun, as any programmer would tell you.

* Understanding why things work the way they do is fun (and funny! Laughing is the basic response to a sudden realization that makes you dump cache and re-parse a narrative.)

Other examples abound—the only things that aren't fun are the things we force ourselves to do to live in this strange, post-agricultural lifestyle—commuting, being "objectively evaluated", producing things that disappear into an aether and for which one never receives feedback from the people on the receiving end... we're not going to change this process from the end-side. School beats people down and makes them accept this kind of life, and thus they won't bother to change it once they get there, even if it could be better. We need to entitle these new people, to make them angry that they aren't getting something because it doesn't exist yet, so that when they get the power to do something about it, they will.

Your examples of fun seem terribly biased. I notice you didn't mention agriculture, which is probably a more common source of food for most of human history than hunting (maybe not, I'm no anthropologist). Like a lot of other things on your list, I imagine that agriculture is "fun" pretty seldomly, but mostly just hard work that is often quite dull and boring. You might get some deep satisfaction out of them, but I get satisfaction out of doing many things that are hard and non-fun at first. Your list feels very cherry-picked.

Sorry, I just don't see any way that an objective observer would look at the whole of human existence and conclude that evolution has optimized everything we need to do for survival and reproduction so they're fun!

This. Without massive automation, agriculture is such a merciless ordeal that people actually prefer migrating to work in sweatshops.

School is a game, too. I played it religiously, but I have to say, it kind of sucked. The quests are meaningless, the story insipid, the amount of grinding insane, and the devs have their hands too busy with noobs and griefers to change anything. (Plus the devs are ignorant of good game design, and do not have to learn, since everyone has to play their game anyhow.)

I mean, seriously: you get points linearly. There are no achievements, and your account gets forced reset every year. You can't show your points to people on Facebook. There is no "Ding" sound when you level up, which only happens once a year, happens to everyone at once, and happens regardless of your XP so why bother. Oh yeah, supposed to be your primary social outlet but pretends Facebook doesn't exist.

Oh, Good Lord, the 11-year-olds. Yeah. Mine just got a Wii - our family's first game console. Our daughter somehow managed just fine with PC games on her laptop, but that's not quite cool enough for the boy.

The rule is simple: do my wife's college algebra grading, gain game time. So far it's working great. It's the first job we've assigned him that he does without complaint.

American students on busy work, shitty teachers, the tied hands of the non-shitty teachers, teaching to tests, promoting attention to apathetic and failing students at the expense of the ones who excel and care, inability to get any kind of credit for learning about things interesting to them that aren't on the district's curriculum, and not explaining to them how anything being taught to them is supposed to impact their lives: "Not a fan. No, absolutely not."

Video games are a formidable player in the war for childrens' attention, but they're not going anywhere, so making them a scapegoat when you can't get rid of them isn't going to help anything. Even if we eradicated them from the face of the earth, something else would take their place.

The goal shouldn't be to erase the distractions that the world provides or pretend they don't exist, it should be to learn how to deal with them.

I recently told my five year old, that once he can pick up any of the books we have in his room, and read it, that I will buy him a game console. I was thinking I would get him an XBox, since MS Research has a program that let's kids build their own games, and without their knowing, learn to program. Maybe I should rethink this offer and hedge some.

Well, just slip a copy of Ulysses into his room. That should buy you until he goes to college.

Seriously, though, there's no way to avoid this battle. I haven't got any magic wisdom on how to win, but our culture is incredibly wealthy, the temptation to consume rather than learn is always going to be there and the temptations are only going to get worse, and the need to learn how to resist those temptations is only getting more acute. If it's not video games it will be TV or movies, if not that then books, if not that than online social media, if not that then something else. The only way to dodge the problem is to become a modern-day hermit.

Maybe Gödel, Escher, Bach instead of Ulysses?

We have a Wii hooked up but my 3 and 5 year old only use it to stream cartoons on Netflix.

If it's not video games it will be TV or movies, if not that then books, if not that than online social media, if not that then something else.

I've argued the point before that video games, TV, movies, books, social media, etc. can all have equal value and merit, but I'm not sure I really believe it. It seems rational, but something about reading books or Hacker News just feels more valuable than anything I've seen on TV. Maybe I'm watching the wrong stuff.

I would argue they can have equal merit, and correspondingly, they can have equal worthlessness as well. It really isn't the medium, per se.

For the record I'm a parent, but my kid is 2 and there's one in the oven, so like I said, no great font of wisdom, I've just been pondering the problem. But I do observe that one problem is that there is probably an unavoidable phase of consumption of "childish things". I played a lot of video games as a kid, but you know, I turned out alright, and looking back I can not honestly say that I would be in a very different place if I had instead been doing "worthwhile" things. In the excellent Hardy Boys story today on HN, adults go back and read their beloved books of their youth and discover they are tripe. Is there necessarily a way around that? I'd be surprised. You can't become a person of taste and discrimination without acquiring taste and discrimination and that necessarily entails a period during which you do not have taste and discrimination. Is there anybody who does not essentially "fritter away" their childhood? (Yes, but not very many, and even fewer of them do it by their own choice.) Do we not often feel sorry for those who have been forced to "not fritter" away their childhood, do we not often feel sorry for the 15 year old forced to play piano four hours a day, even if it produces spectacular results? Am I the only one who looks at the top-level gymnasts and feel a bit sorry for them?

But that's just more questions, not answers. I'm not convinced anyone really has answers. Who can prove that playing a lot of video games is actually a bad thing? People mostly just assume it without proof.

This is pretty depressing. There have been so many studies as of late regarding all the benefits of playing video games(in moderation).

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