The Sleeper Curve

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
by Steven Johnson

Forget everything you've ever read about the age of dumbed-down, instant-gratification culture. In this provocative, unfailingly intelligent, thoroughly researched, and surprisingly convincing book, Steven Johnson draws from fields as diverse as neuroscience, economics, and media theory to argue that the pop culture we soak in every day - from Lord of the Rings to Grand Theft Auto to The Simpsons -has been growing more sophisticated with each passing year, and, far from rotting our brains, is actually posing new cognitive challenges that are actually making our minds measurably sharper. You will never regard the glow of the video game or television screen the same way again.

Every childhood has its talismans, the sacred objects that look innocuous enough to the outside world, but that trigger an onslaught of vivid memories when the grown child confronts them. For me, it's a sheaf of xeroxed numbers that my father brought home from his law firm when I was nine. These pages didn't seem, at first glance, like the sort of thing that would send a grade-schooler into rapture. From a distance you might have guessed that they were payroll reports, until you got close enough to notice that the names were familiar ones, even famous: Catfish Hunter, Pete Rose, Vida Blue. Baseball names, stranded in a sea of random numbers.

Those pages my dad brought home were part of a game, though it was a game unlike any I had ever played. It was a baseball simulation called APBA, short for American Professional Baseball Association. APBA was a game of dice and data. A company in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, had analyzed the preceding season's statistics and created a collection of cards, one for each player who had played more than a dozen games that year. The cards contained a cryptic grid of digits that captured numerically each player's aptitudes on the baseball diamond: the sluggers and the strikeout prone, the control artists and the speed demons. In the simplest sense, APBA was a way of playing baseball with cards, or at least pretending to be a baseball manager: you'd pick out a lineup, decide on your starting pitchers, choose when to bunt and when to steal.

APBA sounds entertaining enough at that level of generality-what kid wouldn't want to manage a sports team?-but actually playing the game was a more complicated affair. On the simplest level, the game followed this basic sequence: you picked your players, decided on a strategy, rolled a few dice, and then consulted a "lookup chart" to figure out what happened-a strikeout, or a home run, a grounder to third.

But it was never quite that simple with APBA. You could play against a human opponent, or manage both teams yourself, and the decisions made for the opposing team transformed the variables in subtle but crucial ways. At the beginning of each game-and anytime you made a substitution-you had to add up all the fielding ratings for each player in your lineup. Certain performance results would change if your team was unusually adept with the glove, while teams that were less talented defensively would generate more errors. There were completely different charts depending on the number of runners on base: if you had a man on third, you consulted the "Runner on Third" chart. Certain performance numbers came with different results, depending on the quality of the pitcher: if you were facing a "grade A" pitcher, according to the data on his card, you'd get a strikeout, while a "grade C" pitcher would generate a single to right field. And that was just scratching the surface of the game's complexity. Here's the full entry for "Pitching" on the main "Bases Empty" chart:

The hitting numbers under which lines appear may be altered according to the grade of the pitcher against whom the team is batting. Always observe the grade of the pitcher and look for possible changes of those numbers which are underlined. "No Change" always refers back to the D, or left, column and always means a base hit. Against Grade D pitchers there is never any change-the left hand column only is used. When a pitcher is withdrawn from the game make a note of the grade of the pitcher who relieves him. If his grade is different, a different column must be referred to when the underlined numbers come up. Certain players may have the numbers 7, 8, and/or 11 in the second columns of their cards. When any of these numbers is found in the second column of a player card, it is not subject to normal grade changes. Always use the left (Grade D) column in these cases, no matter what the pitcher's grade is. Occasionally, pitchers may have A & C or A & B ratings. Always consider these pitchers as Grade A pitchers unless the A column happens to be a base hit. Then use the C or B column, as the case may be, for the final play result.

Got that? They might as well be the tax form instructions you'd happily pay an accountant to decipher. Reading these words now, I have to slow myself down just to follow the syntax, but my ten-year-old self had so thoroughly internalized this arcana that I played hundreds of APBA games without having to consult the fine print. An 11 in the second column on the batter's card? Obviously, obviously that means ignore the normal grade changes for the pitcher. It'd be crazy not to!

The creators of APBA devised such an elaborate system for understandable reasons: they were pushing the limits of the dice-and-cards genre to accommodate the statistical complexity of baseball. This mathematical intricacy was not limited to baseball simulations, of course. Comparable games existed for most popular sports: basketball sims that let you call a zone defense or toss a last-minute three-point Hail Mary before the clock ran out; boxing games that let you replay Ali/Foreman without the rope-a-dope strategy. British football fans played games like Soccerboss and Wembley that let you manage entire franchises, trading players and maintaining the financial health of the virtual organization. A host of dice-based military simulations re-created historical battles or entire world wars with painstaking fidelity.

Perhaps most famously, players of Dungeons & Dragons and its many imitators built elaborate fantasy narratives-all by rolling twenty-sided dice and consulting bewildering charts that accounted for a staggering number of variables. The three primary manuals for playing the game were more than five hundred pages long, with hundreds of lookup charts that players consulted as though they were reading from scripture. (By comparison, consulting the APBA charts was like reading the back of a cereal box.) Here's the Player's Handbook describing the process by which a sample character is created:

Copyright © 2005 Steven Johnson, published by Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., all rights reserved, reprinted with permission from the publisher.

About the Author

Steven Johnson is the author of the national bestsellers Everything Bad Is Good for You and Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life, as well as Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software and Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate.