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Comment by James_K | Hacker News Reader

I think you are fooled by the general societal perception that reading makes you smart. This originates from a time when books were expensive and most people couldn't read without paying for private school which made reading the exclusive pursuit of the rich and educated. This is no longer the case. The truth of the matter is that a book is simply one way among many of presenting information. If a person spends 9 hours reading a fiction book for entertainment, they are not substantially better off in life than someone who spent that same time playing video games.

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The book, even a crappy book by a weak author, will be more thought provoking than the video game.

What do you mean? What makes a book more thought provoking than video games? Disclaimer: I do not play videos games. I just don't enjoy them. I'm not in defence of them. I'm just thought-provoked about why you think video games are essentially less then books.

Writing is literally the conveyance of thought itself, and nothing else.

A picture of a rock might or might not provoke any particular thoughts about rocks in the viewer.

But if I write anything more than the purely descriptive "there is a rock" then I have conveyed some sort of thought about the rock or rocks in general, and at the very least you have been introduced to my thought, and very likely you have also reacted with some thought of your own. And the mechanical process of reading gave you the time and venue for that to happen.

Even if I do try to be purely descriptive, it's impossible to seperate my perception from the output. I can only describe what I noticed and considered noteworthy. I litetally cannot write the equivalent of a photograph of a rock, but can only write my thoughts about that rock.

The photograph may contain more data, but no opinions and no understandings. The viewer can possibly have no thoughts at all about it, and not actively notice most of the data, or the significance of various bits of the data, but the reader must have at the very least the thoughts of the writer, and it will be almost impossible not to have some sort of thougts of their own in reaction to reading the writers.

Other things also provoke thought, including video games. But I only asserted "more".

Just because you choose not to think about games doesn't mean they don't provoke thought. There are many people who read books such as "50 Shades of Grey" and don't think very much about them at all. Indeed you can think equally about a video game as you could some fiction book. They are likely intellectual objects of similar complexity. A book can, however, provide useful information. I assert this is the benefit that a book has over a game. You can think about either as much or little as you want, but the benefit of a book comes from the information therein and not from some kind of abstract mental exercise involved in the process of reading.

I assure you that Baldur's Gate 3 is more thought provoking than Green Eggs & Ham.

The existence of contrived exceptions does not disprove anything, and I would not agree this would be an exception anyway.

An incurious person can fail to think about anything at any time.

> An incurious person can fail to think about anything at any time.

And you fail to think about games. Interesting what you say about yourself.

I said nothing that proves I don't or didn't think about games. That is pure fabricated assumption.

It is a contrived exception because you have to pick a special video game and a special book to make it work, and the example will not hold when picking 100 books at random and 100 games at random, and that's even granting that the cherry picked example even holds, which I actually deny.

It's not contrived. Pulp fiction is real, and there are plenty of computer games that aren't "pulp games".

> reading makes you smart

The tone of your post suggests you're refuting this wholesale. I think you're wrong, reading books makes you smart(er) at least by expanding your vocabulary and widening your understanding of the world by putting in front of you experiences from people that are not exactly like you.

You're offering video games as an alternative, but people that invest a lot of time in playing video games as opposed to reading, usually do it with terrible games, where the lesson to learn is that life is expendable, enemies must be stopped at all costs, genocide is valid as long as you're the main character, etc. Games as art form rarely engage people in the same way as mass murder types of games. What are the sales numbers of Disco Elysium vs Call of Duty?

And yes, pulp exists in writing too, probably to an even greater extent, but at the same time the peaks are higher and, in my opinion, the benefits, as subjective as they may be, greater.

> where the lesson to learn is that life is expendable, enemies must be stopped at all costs, genocide is valid as long as you're the main character, etc

You make an almost credible post but then totally undermine it with this statement. It's rather like saying Looney Tunes is bad because the intended lesson is that you should set your cat on fire.

Maybe you're right, but if you see no connection between the trivialization of violence and murder (that most media, not just games is pushing) and the attitude society has to the same violence I feel like maybe we're living in different worlds.

My problem is not that games make kids shoot schools, is with the fact that games in order to "be fun" and have people play them need to follow this recipe in the first place. The violence is probably intellectually understood as "wrong" by the large mass of players, but in my opinion it still desensitizes and erodes normal reactions against it to a level that should not be acceptable.

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