Wired’s Balanced Media Diet Snubs Gaming

Wired’s New Rules for Highly Evolved Living has some fantastic new social rules for integrating technology do’s and dont’s in the modern era.  It has good suggestions, like “dont lie with your Facebook picture” and “dont Google stalk before a first date“.  Seriously, read the whole thing.  It’s a very well thought out series of articles that will cause debate and discussion for years… and it provides a one place location for tech-nerds to point back to and say, “See, Wired says it’s ok to text in the company of others... so shut up”.

However, I have a gripe about their balanced media diet article.  The basic premise is that most people spend up to 9 hours a day in front of some sort of screen and social interaction and entertainment are going to be a part of everyone’s tech lifestyle.

Here’s the media diet breakdown:

• Entertainment: Podcasts/ YouTube/ DVR/ TV – 3.5 hours
• News: Blogs/ Digg/ Gizmodo/ NYT/ Wired – 2.5 ours
• Microblogging: Twitter – 0.75 hours
• Social Networking: Facebook/ MySpace/ LinkedIn – 1.25 hours
• Gaming: Xbox, Wii, PSP, iPhone, MMORPGs – 1 hour

I have to take issue with this pyramid.  As a gamer, I’m involved with my games whenever it’s appropriate.  When I’m at work, I have my iPhone near me, but I’m not playing.  When I step out for a 10 minute coffee break, it’s fine if I fire up a little game of Tris, or Lux Touch (Risk for the iPhone) or even some Tap Defense.  During lunch, if I’m not working or being social, I’ll take down a couple levels of Assassin’s Creed: Altair’s Chronicles.

After work, I’ll head home, make dinner and play with the three boys.  If the oldest one’s been really good, on Sundays and Wednesdays we have gaming night.  We’ll play Cars on the Wii, or NASCAR 09 on the 360.  After the boys go to bed, and I have some free time, I’ll log on to Lord of the Rings Online or play some of my dozens of games from my library.  (I’m currently re-playing The Orange Box)

To budget slightly more time for video games than Twitter seems to me completely unreasonable.  Microblogging is cool, don’t get me wrong, but there’s a core difference between all of these activities and the time they’ve allotted for them in their “balanced media diet”.  Of all of these media activities, only watching movies and playing video games are often done with another person, right there with you.  I use Facebook, Twitter and read blogs next to people, I share interesting things with people, but even with the most social of online activities, it’s generally a virtually communal experience.  With TV and movies, you’re still with someone else, and there is definately direct social interaction but playing video games, in a room with your partner or friend provides direct, stimulated interaction between people.

For me, gaming with my friends is equally about spending time with my friends and interacting with the technology.  I think that Wired is on the right path with these new rules, but it ignores the fact that gaming is becoming less and less a solitary experience and much more a social experience.  I think that they’ve missed the idea that as games become more social, more time will be invested into them.  If I only have an hour and a half to play a game, I often don’t even log into Lord of the Rings Online, I know that I’ll need to find a group, pacify guild drama, and herd my friends into figuring out we’ll be doing, and then we go and storm the gates in our shiny armor.  If I dont have that time to commit, I fire up the Xbox and play some Portal instead.

If you want to see how games are becoming more and more social, check out GamerDNA.com.  It’s a site where gamers log their hours, games, achievements and other raw gaming statistics to create their own gaming profile (hence: GamerDNA).  The social gaming platform churns the statistics you enter as well as gamers like you, into suggestions of games that you’d like.  It becomes a platform where you can meet new gamers who like the same things you do, and allows you to compare and compete with them.  On the surface, GamerDNA doesn’t seem like it provides a lot to gamers, but under the hood is a statistical powerhouse of data that, when enough data is put into it, can make it extremely useful.

Maybe Wired, to give them the benefit of the doubt, is not putting these new rules out to people who’ve been living in this space for years already.  Maybe Wired is trying to inform all of the latest Twitterers, Facebookers and Net-Denizens.  These “new rules” are the rules we’ve known about and broken for years now.  We know how to use them, we know how and when to break them.  So, maybe this is more for non-geeks who don’t know how to live in the tech integrated world  and bring their own social rules and try to apply them.

I believe that Wired’s intention was not to actively snub games and gamers, but the effect is the same.  I think it over-simplifies the relationships between the very human urge to play games and puts them in a position where it’s more of an afterthought than an integral part of our evolution, our learning and our entertainment.  It justt seems disingenuous to put gaming, which can be a very social, relationship-building, creative and productive activity at the top of the media period, a space that’s reserved for (on the food pyramid) for things like chocolate, sweets and stuff you know is bad for you but you’re going to eat anyway.

Wired’s Balanced Media Diet Snubs Gaming