Tuesday is game night, so I hoped to flip through a couple of articles and come back with a snappy readers digest. Maybe some original material.
My chosen topic: Why do we feel guilty when we enjoy narratives through movies, television, video games, but not when we read books? Seems like a pretty universal experience.
I was surprised that no body of literature exists on the subject that was quickly Google searchable. I found an Atlantic article about Americans’ perennial guilt about watching TV. And I remembered some pieces of Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You, which argues, among other things, that books would be viewed with suspicion if they were invented after video games somehow. That argument is mostly about how new media is also good, not the reverse: why reading is better. As far as I remember.
In fact, “why reading is better” is mostly how that question got phrased online. People wondered why reading is better than television, like it was a mathematical principle they just didn’t understand. Others were there to answer them. “It engages the imagination.” “It takes longer to read a book than watch a movie.”
Those things are true, but I wonder why they’re considered advantages and not differences. One centerpoint of TV guilt comes from parents feeling the need to “sneak away” from family duties if they want to watch an hour episode of TV. In that case, isn’t it more of an advantage to have a shorter platform than books?
A plausible explanation, in my opinion, would be that reading and writing are just older than those other media. They’ve had time to mature. One note the Atlantic article makes about TV guilt is that marketers discovered shows with a seemingly intellectual center do better in the “guilt market.” Hence the procedural crime drama, which Steven Johnson describes as setting of the explosion in smart TV (so to say).
(Aside) Writing tip: all you need to start developing ideas of your own is to read two things and then smash them together. Flint, meet steel. He-Man action figure, meet Hot Wheel truck.
Early novels, as far as I understand them, weren’t particularly complex. I’ll tell you about Lucian of Samosata’s A True Story some other time, but I think it’s basically unreadable. It took novels a while to sort themselves out.
(Aside) I thought I was onto something: shousetsu, the word for “novel” in Japanese, uses the characters for “small” and “rumor.” I thought I was onto something, like the etymology of this word expresses some suspicion about the novel format. Alas, I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. It did let me stumble into the “cell phone novel,” though, which I am over the moon to explore.
Unfortunately, I’ll leave it — and the guilt market — for another time. I’m going to go enjoy game night. And I’m going to feel great about it.