After you have chosen an article of interest to you, go through the article and highlight passages to which you wanted to respond. As you read, note thoughts or questions that occur to you in the marg

“Why Games are Good for You ” by Steven Joh nson Quote #1: "So it is with games. It's not what you are thinking about when you're playing a game, it's the way you're thinking that matters" (493). I found this logic a little dubious. Surely what you are thinking about when playing a game matters. For example, what about reductionist types of thinking in a game like sexist, racist, or homophobic sentiment? Isn't what you are thinking and how you are thinking linked? I feel like his separation between these two terms is problem atic. Quote #2: "But almost all the standards we use to measure reading's cognitive benefits --attention, memory, following threads, and so on --the nonliterary popular culture has been steadily growing more challenging over the past thirty years." When I read this quote, I noticed that Johnson focuses mainly on "cognitive benefits." But what about content? I agree that video games may require more cognitive skills, but this eschews the idea that what we learn is important. Do, for example, children get a s ense of literary technique, writing style, or character building? It would be hard to argue that video games can convey the complexities and nuance of great literature. Quote #3: "The question is why kids are so eager to soak up that much information when it is delivered to them in game form." I felt that this statement held an assumption with which I disagree. Johnson assumes the goal of education is to "soak up [...] information" and the easier this is done the better. The benefits of reading are exactl y because it is a more difficult task, one that draws more attention to how knowledge is created and less toward receiving it unquestioned. In his example about Sim City the child learns that lowering industrial taxes helps spur business, but this is a mod el built to stress one particular ideological truth, that growth and industry are de facto public goods. If we were to look through another lens, say environmental, or religious, then the choice becomes clouded.