Playing Video Games are greater in benefits than reading Fiction Books.

1. The hardware is standard.Here's one half of a phone conversation I heard this week at GameStop: "Okay, well,Little Big Planet is a PS3-only title, so you probably don't want to purchase that if he has an Xbox." But if my mom buys a book for me for Christmas, she doesn't have to worry about whether I have an Xbox or a PS3 or the right graphics card or enough RAM. As long as I have a functioning set of eyes and can read at a 6th grade level, I'm good to go with 90% of the books out there. (Did you catch that back-handed slap at the publishing industry? Ok, good.) 2. Books are always backwards-compatible.Man I loved Burnout 3: Takedown. There was nothing more fun than pointing your Dominator muscle car into an oncoming lane of traffic and launching off the overpass in an explosive rain of fiery destruction. That game was super fun. Super fun until I got a PS3. One of the newer, gimped PS3's that wouldn't play Burnout 3. That's cool, I'll just buy Burnout Paradise. What's sixty bucks, right? Oh, except Burnout Paradise took everything that was fun about the franchise, neutered it, and overstuffed the game in favor of an "open" world with a lot of wrong turns and terrible timed events. Compared to Burnout 3, Burnout Paradise sucks. You know what's great? When I pick up my dog-eared copy of Breakfast of Champions - the one I bought in 1989, it's still just as fun and interesting to read as it was back then. 3. Better hardware specs.Your PS3 is capable of approximately 2,018 Gigaflops (Floating Point Operations perSecond.)Your brain runs roughly 10 times faster. Advantage: Books. Put another way, the graphics in video games are limited by memory, available processing power, and resolution of the target display. In a book, the chicks are literally as hot as you can imagine. 4. No tutorials.Imagine if every book started like this: "Welcome to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. This book is formatted for Western English readers. Begin reading at the upper left of the page and continue scanning your eyes to the right until you come to the end of a line. Look down one row of type, andresume reading across to end of the row. Let's try it: Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense. "Did you successfully read the two sentences? Good! You're almost ready to begin enjoying this book. One last step: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is divided intopages. Pages are denoted by a sudden stoppage of paper. When you reach the end of a page, continue reading by grasping the right-hand page with your right thumb and forefingerand manually flipping it the left. This move is called a turn and once you master it, the sentence from the previous page will continue seamlessly." Seems ridiculous, right? But I can't tell you how many games I've played where I have to spend 10 minutes learning how to pick up a box or read a piece of paper. 5. No load screens.When I want to start a book, I don't have to watch some lame, jittery animation that's filled with inane "tips" like "Hiding under cover for a while will restore your shield and health." Eyes + book = READING! PS3 + game disc = BATHROOM BREAK! 6. No save points or timed missions. GRAVITY'S RAINBOW[TIME'S UP - MISSION FAILED.]YOU HAD TEN MINUTES TO FINISH EPISODE 31 OF "IN THE ZONE."DO YOU WISH TO[Q]UITOR[L]OAD NOVEL FROM THE BEGINNING? Note to video game developers: In a book, every page is a save point. Take a lesson and quit padding out your expected play time. 7. Video games are at the bottom of the entertainment food chain.Here's something I like to call The Inverse Laws of Entertainment: Good book = crappy movie. Good movie = crappy video game. Good video game = years of "development talks," reams of lame/disturbing fan fiction, or -- in the worst possible scenario -- "An Uwe Boll production." Let's face facts people, the bar was set with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (the movie-to-video game conversion they literally had to bury in a landfill) and it has not gone up much from there. 8. Variety.Video games come in three basic genres: Shooter. Platformer. Incomprehensible Japanese RPG. Books, on the other hand, are not solely targeted to appeal to 15 year-old boys. Some, for instance, are targeted to appeal to 15 year-old girls. (Ha, publishing industry! IN YOUR FACE!) And, unlike a video game, if you buy an RPG book, you can actually ROLE-PLAY. Like, have an interesting, nuanced conversation with that orc mercenary before you get out your +3 Axe of Mighty Cleaving and whack him into finely-minced chunks. Believe it or not, there's more to role-playing than just Circle, Skip, Attack. And if you miss your beautiful, perplexing Japanese video games, the fine people who invented books have this thing called manga and not only is it just as incomprehensible, but it's dirtier than you'd expect. Just remember to start in the back. (If you just mumbled "That's what she said" please click away from my blog now and go back to your Halo: Reach Team Deathmatch. You are fired.) 9. Value.Your average paperback book: $6.Your average videogame: $60. If you complain that the time/value proposition of a video game is way higher because you can get more total hours of play from a video game than the time it takes to read ten books, I suggest you need to graduate to a better class of book, check out this thing called a LIBRARY, and stop playing so many games with scarce save points and narrowly-timed missions. A study was released this week that demonstrates that prolonged video game-play affects the brain. Professor Akio Mori, of Nihon University's College of Humanities and Sciences in Japan, measured the brain activity 240 subjects aged between 6 and 29. Mori measured beta waves, which indicate activity in the prefrontal lobe, and alpha waves, which often appear when the brain is resting. The prefrontal lobe is thought to be the center of emotion and creativity in the brain. Mori divided the brain activity of participants into four categories: normal, visual, half-videogame, and videogame. Normal subjects, who rarely played video games, were found to have much stronger beta waves than alpha waves. Little change was seen while these subjects did play video games. The half-video game group, which played video games for 1-3 hours 3-4 days a week, had roughly equal strength beta and alpha waves when not playing video games; but when they did play video games their beta waves fell below their alpha waves. The video game group, which played video games for 2-7 hours daily, showed nearly zero beta activity all the time, even when they were not playing video games. This means there was little to no activity in their prefrontal lobes. These subjects reported being easily angered, having difficulty concentrating, and having trouble socializing. The visual group, comprised of people who largely engage in visual stimulation such as television, was found to easily develop symptoms similar to the video game group. Mori says that the only active areas in the brain during video game play are the sight and motion areas. He notes that the video games he observed “stir up tension and a feeling of fear,” and that “this could have an effect on the autonomic nerves.” Mori's advice is: “During childhood, playing outside with friends, not videogames, is the best option.” The study will be presented here in the U.S. in the fall at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.In conclusion I think that we should ban video games and read books.