The Sleeper Curve, Part 2

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

(Page 2 of 3)

Monte wants to create a new character. He rolls four six-sided dice (4d6) and gets 5, 4, 4, and 1. Ignoring the lowest die, he records the result on scratch paper, 13. He does this five more times and gets these six scores: 13, 10, 15, 12, 8, and 14. Monte decides to play a strong, tough Dwarven fighter. Now he assigns his rolls to abilities. Strength gets the highest score, 15. His character has a +2 Strength bonus that will serve him well in combat. Constitution gets the next highest score, 14. The Dwarf's +2 Constitution racial ability adjustment [see Table 2-1: Racial Ability Adjustments, pg. 12] improves his Constitution score to 16, for a +3 bonus. . . . Monte has two bonus-range scores left (13 and 12) plus an average score (10). Dexterity gets the 13 (+1 bonus).

And that's merely defining the basic faculties for a character. Once you released your Dwarven fighter into the world, the calculations involved in determining the effects of his actions-attacking a specific creature with a specific weapon under specific circumstances with a specific squad of comrades fighting alongside you-would leave most kids weeping if you put the same charts on a math quiz.

Which gets to the ultimate question of why a ten-year-old found any of this fun. For me, the embarrassing truth of the matter is that I did ultimately grow frustrated with my baseball simulation, but not for the reasons you might expect. It wasn't that arcane language wore me down, or that I grew tired of switching columns on the Bases Empty chart, or that I decided that six hours was too long to spend alone in my room on a Saturday afternoon in July.

No, I moved on from APBA because it wasn't realistic enough.

My list of complaints grew as my experience with APBA deepened. Playing hundreds of simulated games revealed the blind spots and strange skews of the simulation. APBA neglected the importance of whether your players were left-handed or right-handed, crucial to the strategy of baseball. The fielding talents of individual players were largely ignored. The vital decision to throw different kinds of pitches-sliders and curveballs and sinkers-was entirely absent. The game took no notice of where the games were being played: you couldn't simulate the vulnerable left-field fence in Fenway Park, so tempting to right-handed hitters, or the swirling winds of San Francisco's old Candlestick Park. And while APBA included historic teams, there was no way to factor in historical changes in the game when playing teams from different eras against each other.

And so over the next three years, I embarked on a long journey through the surprisingly populated world of dice-baseball simulations, ordering them from ads printed in the back of the Sporting News and Street and Smith's annual baseball guide. I dabbled with Strat-o-Matic, the most popular of the baseball sims; I sampled Statis Pro Baseball from Avalon Hill, maker of the then-popular Diplomacy board game; I toyed with one title called Time Travel baseball that specialized in drafting fantasy teams from a pool of historic players. I lost several months to a game called Extra Innings that bypassed cards and boards altogether; it didn't even come packaged in a box-just an oversized envelope stuffed with pages and pages of data. You rolled six separate dice to complete a play, sometimes consulting five or six separate pages to determine what had happened.

Eventually, like some kind of crazed addict searching for an ever-purer high, I found myself designing my own simulations, building entire games from scratch. I borrowed a twenty-sided die from my Dungeons & Dragons set-the math was far easier to do with twenty sides than it was with six. I scrawled out my play charts on yellow legal pads, and translated the last season's statistics into my own home-brewed player cards. For some people, I suppose, thinking of youthful baseball games conjures up the smell of leather gloves and fresh-cut grass. For me, what comes to mind is the statistical purity of the twenty-sided die.

This story, I freely admit, used to have a self-congratulatory moral to it. As a grownup, I would tell new friends about my fifth-grade days building elaborate simulations in my room, and on the surface I'd make a joke about how uncool I was back then, huddled alone with my twenty-sided dice while the other kids roamed outside playing capture the flag or, God forbid, real baseball. But the latent message of my story was clear: I was some kind of statistical prodigy, building simulated worlds out of legal pads and probability charts.

But I no longer think that my experience was all that unusual. I suspect millions of people from my generation probably have comparable stories to tell: if not of sports simulations then of Dungeons & Dragons, or the geopolitical strategy of games like Diplomacy, a kind of chess superimposed onto actual history. More important, in the quarter century that has passed since I first began exploring those xeroxed APBA pages, what once felt like a maverick obsession has become a thoroughly mainstream pursuit.

This book is, ultimately, the story of how the kind of thinking that I was doing on my bedroom floor became an everyday component of mass entertainment. It's the story of how systems analysis, probability theory, pattern recognition, and-amazingly enough-old-fashioned patience became indispensable tools for anyone trying to make sense of modern pop culture. Because the truth is my solitary obsession with modeling complex simulations is now ordinary behavior for most consumers of digital age entertainment. This kind of education is not happening in classrooms or museums; it's happening in living rooms and basements, on PCs and television screens. This is the Sleeper Curve: The most debased forms of mass diversion-video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms-turn out to be nutritional after all. For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the "masses" want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want. But in fact, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more intellectually demanding, not less.

Most of the time, criticism that takes pop culture seriously involves performing some kind of symbolic analysis, decoding the work to demonstrate the way it represents some other aspect of society. You can see this symbolic approach at work in academic cultural studies programs analyzing the ways in which pop forms expressed the struggle of various disenfranchised groups: gays and lesbians, people of color, women, the third world. You can see it at work in the "zeitgeist" criticism featured in media sections of newspapers and newsweeklies, where the critic establishes a symbolic relationship between the work and some spirit of the age: yuppie self-indulgence, say, or post-9/11 anxiety.

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.