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The Super-Thumb Generation
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After TV what? Video games. This craze among the young is breeding a new culture and body shape. Will it also create an imagination-challenged new race?
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TWO MILLION years after we learned to stand upright and hold tools in our hands, the tools continue to change us in extraordinary ways. The agent of change acting upon the current new generation is the ubiquitous video game that is seemingly glued to the hands of youngsters. The changes are visually more apparent in western countries where the fancy for games has gone past being pure entertainment and relaxation, to an all-consuming obsession for many kids and young adults.
Better technology
With advances in the sharpness of graphics, quality of animation, fidelity of sound and gripping game designs, over the past ten years, games went from a niche-audience passion to a fixation of a much broader population. Video games have now overtaken most of the traditional forms of entertainment. With each new iteration of game systems, the technology to keep people immersed just keeps getting better. And the audience keeps getting hooked deeper. Classic after-school activities such as homework, reading a good book and even watching a TV show compete uneasily with the video game monster that has the child wrapped nice and tight. Even parents who exercise a stronger control over the extracurricular activities of the child by limiting gaming privileges at home, struggle with the ever-increasing methods of gaming.
Cell phones to play games on are just the beginning. Portable game systems such as GameBoy, Sony PSP and N-Gage; watches, hand-held computers and the Internet; game-machines in arcades; game systems in new cars and entertainment systems in flights are some of the ever-increasing modes that deliver video games to a voracious generation giddy for the latest and greatest virtual entertainment.
Glued to a game
The child who is seen reading a storybook in public is a dwindling species in many parts of the West. Similarly, the typical young man who walks into his apartment after a hard day's work is more liable to plunk on his couch, fire up his Xbox and join his buddies online to pulverise aliens and monsters.
The effect the games have on the young generation — physically and emotionally — is gently beginning to manifest. Throughout westernised countries, children have been growing heavier the past decade. Morbidly obese children as young as eight walking down shopping-malls, nose buried in a portable game console is a common sight.
A good portion of the blame is being laid on a general decrease in physical activities, and a proportional increase in sedentary activities such as playing video games. Critics also lament that the youngsters' poor reading habits may be creating a generation with a weakly developed intellect and imagination. The counter argument is equally fascinating: video games should be credited to gifting the youngsters an important game skill — an acutely developed awareness of their surroundings, and orientation. Indeed, certain shooting games are known to be regularly used by no less than the US Army to sharpen their "finger-twitch-response" to pull the trigger a fraction of a second faster than the hapless computer generated enemy.
The fingers of the gamer may be the centre of a whole new evolutionary story, if one is to believe some recently discussed ideas in anthropological circles. The intriguing proposition is that the human thumb has, in no point of our evolution, been subject to the vigorous workout it gets today, manipulating 20th Century tools — controlling game console controls, scrolling screens on a palm-held computer, playing games on a cell-phone, and of course, dialling them and sending text messages.
What's unusual is not just the application of the thumb to operate these modern day tools, but its unprecedented rate of use by the human population as a whole, almost constantly. These gadgets are in fact designed carefully with the ergonomic use of the opposable thumb in mind. It is no wonder children as young as eight are notorious for foiling and thoroughly beating grown-ups at video games that demand dexterity.
It is quite possible that several decades from now, when these game-generation children are senior citizens, the earth may be populated by an imagination-challenged, mostly illiterate, hunched, but hyper-alert and obese race with super-thumbs. What's a super-thumb deprived adult to do today?
A good idea might be to create games that educate the intellect and stimulate the imagination of the player in addition to merely entertaining him. There certainly have been several popular and imaginative games made within the past few years, but they have not come close to the noble goal of nourishing the intellect of the audience.
Several edu-tainment games have been successful in educating niche-audiences in specific subjects such as geography and math, but the scope of such games traditionally lack the lustre and lure of high-budget thriller games, and therefore do not generally connect to the global gamer generation.
As of today, the noble game remains an elusive dream. And our gamer generation dangerously continues to evolve.
SUNIL THANKAMUSHY
(Sunil Thankamushy is the animation director for Spark Unlimited Inc, a video game studio based in California, USA)
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