Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: Daydream and Doodle Your Way to Success & The Artistry of Video Games

Episode Date: January 18, 2020

People who overeat tend to do so at the same time on the same days. This episode begins with me telling you exactly when those times are so you can defend yourself against temptation. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2306736/Fat-oclock-7pm-Sunday-revealed-time-likely-comfort-eating.html Solving problems and developing new ideas doesn’t come from focus and concentration as much as it does from “unfocusing” and letting your mind wander. Psychiatrist Dr. Srini Pillay author of Tinker, Dabble, Doodle, Try: Unlock the Power of the Unfocused Mind (http://amzn.to/2pMIVy3) explains the science behind how the creative brain works better when it is distracted rather than when it is trying to be creative.  There is something called “double standard parenting.” In other words, when you accidentally break a lamp – well it’s just an accident. But what happens when your kid accidentally breaks a lamp? Does he or she get punished and shamed for doing it? We’ll explore some sage advice on why you shouldn’t hold your kids to higher standard than you hold yourself. Source: The Awakened Family by Dr. Shefali Tsabary (https://amzn.to/2R9kLtC). The world of video games isn’t all about war, aliens, shooting people and blowing things up. Andrew Ervin, author of Bit by Bit: How Video Games Transformed Our World (https://amzn.to/2NeohBU) reveals an entirely different world of video games and also discusses the importance of video games as a true art form. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, if you tend to snack a bit too much, there are certain times of the day you are most likely to overdo it, and you should know what those times are. Also, when solving a problem or creating a new idea, there's no one

right way to do it. And I think that the creative process becomes halted when we try to go in a very logical way from the beginning to the middle to the end because the creative process is anything but that. Also, double standard parenting. A lot of parents do it unknowingly. And video games. They're not all about shooting and blowing things up. There's a whole other side of video games you probably don't know.

There's one game called Passage. It takes five minutes to play, and it's a profoundly moving experience because every decision we make in the game opens up new options and closes off some, which to me sounds an awful lot like my real life. All this today on Something You Should Know. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you

about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to, called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology.

That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Have you ever had that experience where you thought something was true?

It's your experience that it's true. And then, sure enough, along comes some scientist to confirm that what you thought is actually true. And that's going to happen today. I've always thought, at least in my own experience, that my best work doesn't come from sitting down with a pen and trying to solve a problem or to sit down and focus on the problem at hand. Very often, my best work comes from distracting myself or, you know, standing in the shower or doodling or doing something else. And that's going to be confirmed today by my first guest coming up in just a moment.

I think you're going to find it fascinating. Our first topic today is about weight loss. If you're watching your weight, beware of 7 p.m. on Sunday night. That's fat o'clock, according to a snacking survey. 7 to 10 p.m. on Sunday is prime time to crave fattening comfort food. And if you manage to make it through that three-hour time period on Sunday, be careful of the next day from 3 to 5 p.m. Those afternoon hours are the next most dangerous danger zone for dieters on any given day, followed by the period of 5 to 7 p.m. Another fat phenomenon discovered in this survey is that you can derail your dieting by eating lunch at your desk.

Those who do say they tend to eat more later in the day, likely because they're less satisfied by their multitasking lunch. And that is something you should know. How many times have you been told to focus, pay attention, work on the problem, come up with an idea, get to work? And the idea behind all of this is that you'll do your best work by focusing on and trying to do your best work. Well, maybe not, at least not in all cases. Maybe to get the best ideas, we need to unfocus, doodle, daydream, and not pay such close attention to what we're doing, but allow your mind to wander and go someplace else.

Dr. Srini Pillay is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist. He's founder of NeuroBusinessGroup, an executive coaching, consulting, and technology business. And he has a new book out called Tinker, Dabble, Doodle, Try. Welcome to the program, Srini. Thanks so much for having me. So this idea that we need to focus, that that's how we do our best work, is with this laser-like focus. Are you saying that's all wrong? Well, focus in general is obviously important. You know, it's not possible to finish tasks if we don't actually focus on things. But for a long time, people believed that focus was

the most important faculty. And what we've now found is that unfocus may be at least as important, if not more important, than focus. Because in the brain, there are both focus and unfocus may be at least as important, if not more important, than focus. Because in the brain, there are both focus and unfocus circuits, and they need to work together for optimal productivity and creativity. And yet the things that you recommend that people do to unfocus are exactly the kind of things that people think of when they think of someone who's not getting the job done, who's lazy. Well, they may sound like that, but they're not exactly the same. So I'll give you an example. So I'm definitely not prescribing just distraction, because I think distraction and daydreaming by itself is not necessarily helpful.

And there are three kinds of daydreaming that have been studied. Jerome Singer, who studied this since the 1950s, has pointed out that slipping into a daydream is more like falling off a cliff. And having some kind of guilty rehashing of something is also not helpful. But what is helpful is positive, constructive daydreaming. And what's different about this is, number one, you can build it into your day. Number two, you initiate it with some kind of playful or wishful imagery. And number three, it is best done with some kind of low-key activity like knitting or gardening rather than doing it when you are completely wiped out. And these three things will allow you to then withdraw your attention from what's outside, reorient your attention to what's inside,

and what studies are now showing is that it activates the unfocused circuit in the brain, which then does what seems like something quite magical. The moment you start to redirect your attention using positive constructive daydreaming, which can be abbreviated as PCD, you actually change the way the brain operates. And to make this simpler, if you think about the brain like a silverware set, just metaphorically, when focus is on, your brain acts like a fork. It essentially picks up the solid pieces of your identity. However, when unfocus is invited to the table, it then invites a bunch of other silverware. There's a spoon for picking up the delicious melange of flavors of your identity. There are chopsticks which make connections across the brain.

And then there are also things like marrow spoons which go into the nooks and crannies of your brain to find pieces of information that focus would never be able to find. And so with this new set of silverware that the unfocused circuit will actually bring to the fore, you have a much fuller sense of self. And with this fuller sense of self, you can have a greater sense of motivation, you can feel more energized, and also more creative. And that's exactly what the studies show. Wow. And now I'm hungry from your... So you said something a moment ago, though, that this works better if you're doing something like

knitting rather than just lying there being wiped out. Am I correct? That's correct. The whole idea about this unfocused circuit is it actually uses 20% of the body's energy. So the brain just occupies 2% of the body's volume. And at rest, it uses 20% of the energy to perform what's needed, meaning all these different things that I just described. And effort just adds on another 5%. So if you have no energy left, then doing this particular kind of activity is not going to actually be helpful, because your brain needs that energy in order to do something. So is it kind of like you're distracting yourself from something so that the brain is kind of free to do what the brain does, because if you try to think about it too much,

you can't really get it. Yes, absolutely. In fact, the reality is that most experts would agree that between 90 to 98% of mental activity is unconscious. And I think we've spent a lot of time, I think, in learning at schools and organizations, focusing on just the 2% of conscious learning. And essentially, what I'm describing in this book is how do you actually get into this 90% to 98% of what's happening under the radar and begin to develop those circuits. And because the brain does most of its intelligent work under the radar, we really need to be able to work with those circuits to get the results that we want. You know what this kind of reminds me of, and you tell me if this is a reasonable analogy, is you know those pictures, those computer-generated 3D pictures that if you try too hard you can't see it,

but if you kind of let your vision unfocus, all of a sudden you get it? That's exactly right. You know, it's exactly right, and I think it's that kind of metaphor that applies. You know, it's like using low beams and high beams. You basically need both in order to navigate any terrain. Or if you're on a stage, you need a spotlight and sometimes you need floodlights. And I think what a lot of people do is they operate in one or the other mode, either super focused or very distracted, not recognizing that when you are unfocused, it actually helps give your focus brain a rest

so that when it's time to focus, you can focus optimally as well. Well, and you talked about doing things like knitting and gardening and that kind of thing, but the title of your book makes it sound as if you don't have to specifically have a hobby. You can just doodle and just anything else to kind of take your mind somewhere else? That's correct. In fact, doodling has been shown to increase retention of information 29% more than not doodling. So there was a study by Jackie Andrade that actually looked at two groups of people

while they were listening to a tape, and they had to remember names and places that were actually mentioned during that tape. And what she found was that the group that doodled remembered 29% more than the group that did not. And in part, you know, I think that's a balance between focus and unfocus. You're not so focused that you're going after everything and anxiously forgetting, but you're not completely off task because your mind is on the page and so your mind is somewhere in the vicinity grasping this information and then integrating this.

In fact, one of the main functions of the unfocused circuit in the brain is to actually pick up memories and to integrate them. So even when you're doing something like doodling, that's helpful. And I think with dabbling, there are a lot of examples of dabbling where people have dabbled in different fields and actually had major discoveries. So, for example, Albert Einstein dabbled in the mathematics of Poincaré. And by using what we call possibility thinking, he extended Poincaré's theories to actually develop the theory of relativity. Poincaré developed his theory actually develop the theory of relativity. Poincaré developed his theory based on what he could see. And then when there was no more evidence, he stopped.

Albert Einstein said, what if? So he asked a possibility question, and by just dabbling in the mathematics, was able to make a connection with his own field in physics. And similarly, Picasso, by studying and dabbling in the mathematics of Poincaré, was also able to think about the fourth dimension, and thus started the cubist movement in art. So even though these were not their primary modes of interest, simply by dabbling, they were able to make connections in their own fields and feed their own imaginations to move their own fields forward. So yes, it doesn't necessarily involve daydreaming.

The whole idea is that if we remain fixed in our interests and if we remain fixed in the way we think about things, we're not likely to get anywhere fast. And just as a point in question, there's been a lot of talk about grit recently. And there's now been a meta-analysis that's looked at grit. And grit has two components to it. One is consistency of interest, which is stay at what you do, never leave it. And the other is persevere, which is try hard. And what the meta-analyses have shown of more than 60,000 people is that grit only has a weak correlation with success. And in particular, the piece that

has to do with consistency has no correlation with success at all. And so what I want to do in this book is encourage people to follow their interests, to measure their meanderings, to find ways in which they can meander that can help their unfocused brains get them exactly what they want to get. So knowing what you know, what's the prescription if you have a problem, you need to come up with an idea, you need to do something, what should you do as opposed to just sitting there with a blank piece of paper trying to come up with an idea? What do you recommend works better? So there are a lot of different things, and these things are actually used throughout the book. One of the things you can do is firstly build unfocused times into your day.

And I would suggest two to three 15-minute periods at times when you know your brain is going to be lagging. So in the morning, for example, you could have some kind of meditation or a walk. Just after lunch, a 10-minute nap actually improves clarity. A 90-minute nap improves creativity. So if you want to come up with a creative idea and you're feeling completely sluggish, know that you'll need at least 90 minutes to refresh your brain. And then when you have that afternoon slump again, you can then build in an activity like doodling or again like daydreaming that will reactivate your brain. So the main thing I think when you're trying to be creative is to make sure that you're not running on empty and

that your brain actually has the ability to be fresh and to come up with ideas. When you are in this state, the next thing I would recommend is not to feel compelled by starting at the beginning. So a lot of people, for example, when they have writer's block, will just start in the middle of an idea, and they will jot down whatever they want to in the middle of an idea, and out of that contemplation, they'll suddenly work their way backwards to try to understand where they want to start. And I think that the creative process becomes halted when we try to go in a very logical way from the beginning to the middle to the end, because the creative process is anything but that. You can put it together coherently at the end, but in terms of how it originates, in terms of its genesis,

you can really start anywhere along the process so that you can get going. I'm speaking with Dr. Srini Pillay. He is a psychiatrist and author of the book, Tinker, Dabble, Doodle, Try. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most.

Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career

choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back. And in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events.

Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our Lister poll results from But Am I Wrong? And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. So Srini, we've talked about all this daydreaming

and doodling and dabbling and tinkering, but at what point do you say, okay, that's enough of that, let's stop that and take what we've got here and turn it into something real? And we can't just keep doing this forever. Absolutely. Well, in the creative process, there are two pieces to it. There's the divergent process, which is what I just described, and there's the convergent process. And I actually gave a talk recently at London Business School where I talked to some chief innovation officers of different organizations. And I think everybody agreed that one way you could go about doing this is determine what your benchmarks for productivity are now, this week. So let's say you want to come up with two ideas or finish a particular report in a certain amount of time. Measure how much time

it takes you. Then try out different kinds of unfocused activities like daydreaming or possibility thinking or doodling or any of the suggestions in the book and measure your own productivity because the reality is that certain examples are going to work better for some people than for others. So once you get a sense of what that is, as long as you have some kind of productivity measure, you can then say to yourself, okay, I'm going to spend this number of days being in brainstorming mode, and these two days I'm going to be pulling my ideas together. And I think that way, by moving between focus and unfocus, you're really utilizing both of the circuits that are important in creativity in the brain, rather than simply driving yourself through to the finish line with focus only

or being completely distracted. But there has to be a time limit to this. I mean, you can only sit there and doodle and daydream for so long before there's a point of diminishing returns, right? I would say that that differs for different people. So in my practice, for example, where people do try this out, there are some people who can go at this for 30 to 45 minutes and be great. There are some people who can't tolerate it for more than five minutes. My recommendation would be start small, two to five minutes, learning that every time you give yourself an unfocused break,

you are giving your brain a break and figure out for yourself what that amount is. If you're asking, is there an optimal time? I would say no, because I think it's different for different people. Does this count as what you're talking about? For example, when I do this podcast, and I put it all together, the last thing I do is actually the beginning of the podcast, and how I'm going to open the program. And every time I do, what I do is actually the beginning of the podcast and how I'm going to open the program. And every time I do, what I do is I go over to the couch in my office, I lie down and I close my eyes and I just let my mind go. And then I come up with a different or unique way to open the program that I would have never gotten if I stood here and tried to think, how am I going to start this? How am I going to start this? How am I going to start this? How am I going to start this? Absolutely. In fact, I think that that's a beautiful way to do it

because your brain, what the unconscious can do much better than the conscious brain is that it can very quickly shuttle ideas across your brain and then it activates these chopsticks and you start getting these different associations and connections. So for this conversation, you could use the framework of focus or unfocus, or you could use the framework of re-energizing your brain, or you could use the framework of changing the way you work for productivity. I mean, whatever it is that struck you.

But I think for you to actually express something that's authentic for you, spending that time allows your brain to activate these elements of self that will make the podcast relevant to you and it will express your authenticity. In fact, this network, the unfocused network, which is also called the default mode network, DMN, which if you can't remember that, I think the easy way to remember that is we used to think of it as the do-mostly-nothing network. This network actually represents elements of self. And so to the extent that this podcast is going to reflect who you are as an individual in the way in which you bring ideas together, I think that that's a fantastic way to actually bring those ideas together.

Because then it will be what I'm saying, what you're saying in the framework of who you are. Is the brilliant idea in the shower part of this? Yes, it is. In fact, the brilliant idea in the shower is when you let go of this controlling brain and you allow your mind to float. But when I was at this conference, one of the people said to me, you know, I definitely buy the idea that my best ideas come to me in the shower. The problem is when my mind drifts off, I start to feel guilty. Well, one of the things we need to remember is that most of us drift off about 46.9% of our day is spent with our minds drifting off. And if we're already spending that much time drifting off,

wouldn't we rather drift off using techniques that can activate the circuit rather than the fact that anxiety was about the dizziness of freedom. And that even though we say we want to be free, we actually find it really quite anxiety-provoking to be free because it's like being without gravity. And if you look at studies in terms of what goes on in the unconscious when we want to be creative, the findings are rather surprising. What we find from those studies is that even though we say we love creativity and we think it's amazing and we want to be creative, the kinds of words that we associate unconsciously with creativity are words like vomit and agony. And so I think what that teaches us is that even though on the surface we want to be free,

we'd love for our minds to roam, we want to have these eureka experiences, we are going to get this pushback from the brain to try to over-focus because the brain's default mechanism is to try to stay on target and on task. The problem is that eventually that can lead to depletion and thereby affect both your productivity and creativity. But I think as long as we're aware that that's going to be the brain's default mechanism, the next time you start to feel guilty and you start to want to reject this, recognize that you can take a step back, reframe this as, this is my brain. It's getting anxious. Let me try to maybe do smaller periods of time so that I don't

completely freak out so that I can re-energize my brain. This must clearly have applications in education because I think of kids, you know, who are told to, you know, sit still, pay attention, don't doodle, and all of the things that you're talking about are taught to kids not to do if they want to succeed. Absolutely. And in fact, I think the landscape of education is changing in this regard. So some of the research around this has to do with play. And rough and tumble play, for example, has actually been shown to improve attention. So people will often say, you know, stop playing and start focusing.

But the truth is having those moments of play can improve attention. And as part of the research of this book, I actually visited a school called Brightworks in San Francisco, which also had a summer school called a tinkering school. And it was really an astounding experience for me because I was there on a Friday, and I have never been at any school on a Friday where the kids look like they're crying because they have to go home because they love to go home, because they love being at school so much. And at Brightworks, there's no organized curriculum, both in terms of math and in terms of language, yet by, and I forget the exact grade, but it's something like the fifth grade, there are two grades more advanced than the rest of the country,

suggesting that when you are left to your own devices, you are more likely to tap into your ingenuity and come up with a sense of intelligence that you would otherwise not come up with. And I think a good example of this is the One Laptop for All project, where this particular company dropped tablets in rural Ethiopia, where kids had never, ever seen any kind of technology before. And part of what they thought was, you know, what will the kids do? Will they sit on it? Will they want to eat it? Will they touch it? And what they found was that within a couple of hours, they had learned where the on and off button was. And then a few hours after that, they learned ABC songs. And

within a week, they were able to hack Android. And all of this is in kids who had never before encountered technology, suggesting that education is great for structuring intelligence, but it is not necessarily the source of intelligence and that this ingenuity exists in all of us if we allow it to come out. And as an experiment, when I was actually doing an executive coaching seminar once, I had come up with a new technology with a very, very bright group of executive coaches. And I said, you know, why don't you just take the next half hour,

play around with it, and see what you could come up with. And because they were all very highly educated adults, all of them said, you know, there's no instruction manual. We don't know how to work this. And imagine if the kids in Ethiopia had said that. And so I think that the message for a lot of people now is that exploration and curiosity are extremely important,

and that education may be used to shape that experience, rather than to replace the ingenuity that every person comes with. Well, I love this take on creativity, because I've never thought, and I've never had the experience of being creative by, you know, sitting up straight in a chair with a pencil in my hand and, you know, trying to be creative. It always happens seemingly when I'm doing something else or my mind's on something else or my mind's not on anything at all, but not so much when I'm trying. So I appreciate you sharing all this with us. My guest has been Dr. Srini Pillay. His book is Tinker, Dabble, Doodle, Try. There's a link to his book on Amazon

on the show notes page for this episode of the podcast. Thank you, Srini. Thank you very much. I'm really excited to share these ideas and it's wonderful talking to someone who's as curious as you are as well. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our

hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun

facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney countdown, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Brennan store. I'm Paul best all. We're the ghost story guys.

And every two weeks we explore first person stories of encounters with the paranormal from all around the world. Then we have some fun reacting to those stories. We like to say our goal is to scare the hell out of you, then make you laugh. Belief in the paranormal is not required. All you need is a love of great storytelling and curiosity about the world around you. Come find the Ghost Story Guys on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and everywhere else fine podcasts live, or at ghoststoryguys.com Video games are huge. Whether it's a little game you play on your phone or tablet

or whether you're playing one of those big epic games on an Xbox or a PlayStation, video games are everywhere. They're big business. But except as mindless entertainment, are they really something worth looking at more closely? Could they in fact be an art form? And should we care? Here to discuss that is Andrew Irvin. He is a novelist, a writer, and his new book is called Bit by Bit, How Video Games Transformed Our World.

Welcome, Andrew. Thank you, Mike. It's good to be here. So what is it that you see as so significant about video games that may be lost on the rest of us? I guess since we lived in caves, we used smoke and fire and shadow to animate the pictures we drew on the walls. We're doing something very similar now.

That innate human need for telling and sharing stories is being done right now by video games in ways that are super interesting and super exciting. Well, one of the concerns I know a lot of people have about video games is, yes, they're telling stories, but the most popular games, the ones people play, are stories about shooting people and blowing things up, and that's kind of what video games are. That's sad and true. You're absolutely right, Mike, that that is the common perception, and it has that perception with good reason, that the best-selling games every year are

first-person shooters. And these games are as disturbing to me as I think they would be to you or anybody. They're very upsetting for the most part. Even shooting digital representations of things bothers me a great deal. But just as the most popular Hollywood movies tend to be superheroes beating each other up and blowing up the world or saving the world, video games do the same thing. But that doesn't mean there aren't also great cinema movies coming around. The local art house is showing great stories. Video games work much the same way. Yes, there are huge explosive blockbusters, and those tend to be the ones that

get all the attention and get the most fans, but there's still these great little games out there that I hope more people will start paying attention to. Games like what? Well, the Museum of Modern Art in New York has started to add some video games to their collection, and that's a good place to start. Everybody I know now has an iPhone, so there's one game in MoMA's collection called Passage. It takes five minutes to play, and within that five minutes of a very simple

and even crude-looking game, we experience the entire lifetime of one character, of one avatar. And it's a profoundly moving experience because every decision we make in the game opens up new options and closes off some, which to me sounds an awful lot like my real life. What's the game? That's called Passage. It's by a man named Jason Rohrer. Another great iPhone game in the MoMA

collection is called Canabalt. It's by a man named Adam Saltzman, and this is almost the exact opposite. It's this kinetic, frantic runner game that the music is pounding and it gets your heart pumping, and one can feel a true adrenaline rush from this little simple game played on a phone. So the range of human experiences and human emotions now possible with this medium is very interesting to me. But this is a tiny piece of the video game world. I mean, this is not what, when you talk to gaming people, this is not what they talk about.

No, that's true. There are also great games across every platform. On your home computer, if you have a console to hook up to your television, like an Xbox or a PlayStation, we're getting to the point now, Mike, where on whatever the technology that you have at your disposal, you can now find truly artistic experiences with video games. So where are we headed with this? Where are video games going? Or have we reached a bit of a plateau in the sense that the majority of them are going to be violent and they're going to be shooting things,

because that's who plays the game are teenage boys who like to shoot things and blow things up. That's who plays those games for sure. What I've learned in my research is that almost 50% of gamers are women. That came as quite a surprise to me. There are more people playing video games than ever before. The age range is higher than I would have thought. It's grown-ups. I'm in my mid-40s.

I'm a literary novelist. I used to be an art critic and a classical music critic. Not a very likely person to be writing a book about video games. But for those of us with real intellectual curiosity, it's at the point now where we can't ignore what this medium has to teach us. And what does this medium have to teach us? All the things that we would want from any work of art. A great novel can teach us empathy. A great painting, an opera, all of

these things can broaden our emotional palates. It can teach us different ways of thinking about ourselves and thinking about our world. There are great video games such as Journey, which is on the PlayStation, created by a man named Jenova Chen. The experience of feeling lost and lonely and searching for something and trying to solve puzzles, it is as beautiful and transformative as an artistic experience as Citizen Kane or Ulysses. And I say this as a huge Wells fan, as the world's biggest Joyce fan. It's really exciting to see that this new form, a new medium, is able to do some of the same things. Well, you know, it's interesting.

I have two boys, 15 and 10, and the other day I saw them playing Pong. Oh, really? I thought, well, that's interesting. Now that's a game I can play that. Yeah, Pong's a classic. It is. And what's going to happen with Owen is he's learning at this new high-speed visual rhetoric, visual vernacular that we didn't learn growing up, that he's being subjected to or having access to a whole new kind of reading the

world. And he's doing it with his fingertips. He's doing it with his eyes. He's doing it with a set of tools that we weren't using in quite the same way. And I think that's spectacular. I think this is great. And what's going to happen is, or I think what happened to us for a previous generation, is we got to a point where the controllers that we would use to play the game got so complicated and so complex, and they had so many buttons, that it began to feel like work. It began to feel like this is no longer fun to play a game. And I think part of the popularity of something like the Wii with the different kind of controllers

is that it brought some of us old-timers back into the fold. But someone like Owen, he's never going to have that learning curve the way we did. Well, but he had a Wii, and he doesn't play it anymore. I wonder why that is. Maybe he'll get back to it. Maybe because it was so radical to us is exactly why it's mundane to him. That, you know, what made that compelling to those of us who grew up with one joystick and one button, you know, maybe that that's no longer exciting for, you know, someone who's used to 3D graphics and, you know, all these other elements.

Right. And when I think of Wii, I think of like Wii bowling and Wii tennis and Wii ping pong and, you know, where you, you know, you're hitting a ball or you're doing something as opposed to fantasy, total fantasy, where you're, you know, on another planet blowing up monsters. That's right. The interface of the Wii, though, is what made it radical. And I don't think that Nintendo's creators really found the right games for that console to bring out that potential. The actual way we interact with the game was fantastic. But then it's interesting how it works that because the games aren't what people want, then there's fewer games, and then there's fewer games, and that even if they wanted to play it, there's no games for it. No, that's exactly it. And it's like the Hollywood syndrome with the superhero movies. And I enjoy these movies. I'll go see them and everything, but it's the same story retold in different costumes.

And we see that with video games, the know, the sequel after sequel after sequel of the blockbusters. But it is worth searching out the more thoughtful and the more interesting games, the ones that are created by some artists and people who work in academia. My book is trying to address those of us who want to know more about this medium, but don't really trust the violence and the blockbuster mentality. Well, I've often joked with my son about how, you know, why don't you get a game about, you know, cake decorating or something? And, you know, he said, well, there aren't any, and why would I want to play that? And I think that, you know, there is a concern that parents have that just like they have about violent movies,

that this breeds violence and that this is something to be concerned about if you're a parent of a boy or a girl that's playing these games. There's definitely been a huge debate about that, the difference or the combination of real-world violence and video game violence. And I don't think there's ever going to be a firm answer to that. I personally don't enjoy violent games. I don't have kids, but I don't play them with my young nephews. It's simply a kind of experience that doesn't interest me. But there are games, if not about cake decorating, and I wouldn't be surprised if you could find that.

There's a game called Flower, and the entire game involves flying around through flower gardens. And it sounds kind of silly, maybe, but it's also this new kind of storytelling, this new kind of digital interaction that is beautiful, and the music's interesting, and we can connect to things in this medium that aren't violent and aren't angry and aren't aggressive.

They are out there, and those are the exact games that I. They are out there. And those are the exact games that I've tried to write about. Yeah. Well, it's interesting that I think a lot of us would think that there aren't enough of those to write a book about, that it's really, that's a very fringy part of the video game business. That's right. And those games probably don't make a lot of money, so there's very little incentive to keep making them. But writing a novel is a leap of faith. You can trust me on that. Creating a painting in your studio is a leap of faith. if the work an artist does is ever going to find an audience, if she's ever going to have viewers. But there are people taking that same mentality, sitting at their computers, designing things,

interactive experiences, emotional experiences, not knowing if people are ever going to look at them or not. And obviously there are many of them that we'll never hear of. Every once in a while a game will come out that's truly remarkable, and I hope I can help point people to those. So we sort of talked about it, but we went a different direction, but where do you see the future of video games? What's the next big thing, do you think? Well, people have been talking about

virtual reality for so long that it's sort of the boy who cried wolf a little bit. Maybe there will be some good virtual reality games soon, but I'm not going to hold my breath on that one, Mike. I think there's far more potential for what's being called virtual, what's the term, augmented reality games. Did Owen play Pokemon Go on his phone last year? Yeah, just for a while, and then he quickly bailed on that, but my 7-year-old still likes it. Oh, great. Yeah, so this is the perfect example of augmented reality where you're looking at a map of your neighborhood or your street or your town,

and then the programmers have digitized experiences that overlay on top of it. I use a very similar technology for stargazing. I have an app where I can see the stars and constellations superimposed on the dark sky, and it gives some clarity to what I'm looking at. I think video games are going to continue to use that technology, and the mobile technology, in really fun ways. Well, great. I think that's really interesting. You know what? It's kind of refreshing to hear, because I'm not that into it, so I think of video games as the kind of games that Owen plays,

the violent, blow-em-up superhero games. And it's nice to hear that there's this whole other side to it that I think most people don't even know about. No, it's true. They have their own subculture regions of fans, but it's not really crossing over into mainstream culture yet. But again, like the Museum of Modern Art bringing games in, that's going to help. The Smithsonian had an exhibition a few years ago on the art of video games. So we're going to start seeing this overlap a bit more. The subculture is not as sub as it once was. Well, it's interesting because I think it shows a side of video games most people aren't

aware of or don't really think much about. Andrew Irvin has been my guest. His book is Bit by Bit, How Video Games Transformed Our World, and you will find a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Andrew. Mike, I'm grateful for you having me on, and thanks so much. This is something I've thought about since I was a kid, and apparently so have some other people thought about it. You know who Dr. Shefali is, Oprah Winfrey's go-to parenting expert?

Well, among her many messages to parents is to stop the double standard parenting. For example, if you as a parent accidentally knock over and break a lamp in your house, do you then punish yourself and take away privileges and make yourself feel shame and ridicule? Of course not, because it was just an accident. But what happens if your kid accidentally knocks over and breaks a lamp? A lot of parents do exactly those things. They punish the child and they take away privileges. We don't expect ourselves or our spouse or our friends to be perfect. So why do we expect our kids to be? Why aren't they allowed to make mistakes and have accidents

without suffering all sorts of serious consequences? An accident is an accident, whether you do it or your child does it. And the advice is to hold your kid to the same standards you hold yourself to, but not to a higher one. And that's the program today. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook,

where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer,

unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts.

Contained herein are the heresies of Rudolf Buntwine, erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator. Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children. The Heresies of Adolf Buntwine, wherever podcasts are available.