A response to Steven Johnson's "Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Pop Culture is Actually Making us Smarter"

I really did not like this essay or the way that it was written. Johnson spent more than half of his essay describing the difficulties faced in a Legend of Zelda game. He then compared the methods of solving the difficultiers to the was that we solve problems in life. Johnson uses the word telescoping to describe the way that objectives in video games work because for the majority of the time you have to complete one objective before you can move onto another one. Hence there are different layers of problems and they somewhat resemble a telescope.

I didn't like the way that Johnson wrote this mainly mainly because of the lists that he used in the piece. I think that he overused them and still didn't prove his point to me. Here is an example of one of the lists that he actually used twice in his essay:

"With the letter to the Prince, you must now befriend the Prince
To do this, you need to get to the top of Dragon Roost Mt.
To do this, you must get to the other side of the gorge.
To do this. you must fill up the gorge with water so you can swim across.
To do this, you must use a bomb to blow up the rock blocking the water.
To do this, you must make the bomb plant grow.
To do this, you must collect water in a jar that the girl gave you."

I know that some people probably liked the way that Johnson wrote this piece, but for me it was easy to lose interest. I had a hard time trying to concentrate and follow what his point was. It was probably harder for me to follow his point because he didn;t really get to the comparison of video game to human life until the second to last page of his essay. Overall Johnson could have spent a little less time describing the Zelda game and spent more time on actually getting his point through.