The 'Bad' Guy

The author and his wife talked about steeling themselves for a negative reaction -- because if "Everything Bad" did its job, it was going to make some people mad.

Sure enough, there's a mad person sitting in their dining room right now.

'Exploring an Environment'

You want to start shouting at him right away.

What about the stuff "Everything Bad" ignores? What about all that sex and violence you don't want your kids exposed to in second grade? Or the highly addictive nature of video games? Or the toxic sea of commercialism in which all that televised complexity must float? What does Johnson really mean when he says these things are "good for you"?

But it would be best, perhaps, to start with some points of agreement.

Okay. It's true, as Johnson says, that video games can be intensely challenging and absorbing, and that book-loving snobs tend to be oblivious to this fact. It's true that "The Sopranos" is complicated and subtle as well as violent. And although you yourself don't watch "24," your smart colleagues talk endlessly about its intricate plotting.

What's more: You love how comfortable your kids are with new technology. You totally agree that "the ability to take in a complex system and learn its rules on the fly is a talent with great real-world applicability." Maybe they can support you in your old age!

In fact, if you ignore the absurdly sweeping assertion of Johnson's title -- and hey, he says, if you can't see that "Everything Bad Is Good for You" is winking at the reader, we've really got a failure to communicate -- his core argument seems reasonable enough.

To summarize briefly: He's talking trends, not absolutes, and over the past 30 years, the trend in both video games and television shows has been toward forms that are more cognitively demanding. (He doesn't dwell on the Internet, which he thinks needs little defense.)

Why the upward trends? When it comes to gaming, Johnson invokes some of the neuroscience he studied for his last book. Human brains are drawn to systems, he suggests, in which "rewards are both clearly defined and achieved by exploring an environment." The exploration part is key: Gamers have to figure out the rules as they go along, and "no other pop cultural form directly engages the brain's decision-making apparatus" the way video games do.

With television, Johnson's argument rests more on economics. Complex narratives that "force you to work to make sense of them" have been rewarded by a marketplace where profit now depends heavily on repeat performances, whether on DVD or in syndication. Making shows more challenging to decode makes perfect sense if you're assuming they'll be watched more than once.

Games aren't "Hamlet" or "The Great Gatsby," Johnson writes; they're more like mathematical logic problems. As such, "they are good for the mind on some fundamental level: They teach abstract skills in probability, in pattern recognition, in understanding causal relations that can be applied in countless situations, both personal and professional."