Chapter 15: Invaders (The Attention Merchants)

By 1980, in the United States alone, video games were consuming 11.2 billion quarters annually, yielding $2.8 billion in revenue; by the early 1980s, the estimate was $5 billion, exceeding, for a while, the income of the film industry. Video games also consumed something else, human attention, in a way that was both old and new at the same time. As in any real game—be it tennis, pinball, or blackjack —the fast-flowing stimuli constantly engage the visual cortex, which reacts automatically to movement.

No intentional focus is required, which explains why children and adults with Attention Deficit Disorder find the action of video games as engrossing as anyone else. Unlike games in reality, however, video games are not constrained by the laws of physics, making possible a more incremental calibration of the challenges involved, duration, and related factors in the attempt to keep players coming back.4 But there were big differences between the new games and other things we have discussed that get us to pay attention, whether it be listening to Amos ’n’ Andy, watching a sitcom, or reading email. For one, the business model: it was cash for an experience, rather like seeing a play or reading a book.

The attention merchant model would not be contemplated until much later. Second, playing a game like Space Invaders was, as we’ve said, challenging—to the point of utter frustration. Most couldn’t last longer than a minute. The games, at this stage at least, aimed for something completely different. The early players of Space Invaders were captured not by the dazzling graphics and sounds of today’s narrative-based games, but by the urge to match their skills against the machine in the hope of finding, if only for a moment, that perfect balance between their abilities and the ghosts or space monsters chasing them. In this way, you might say they effected another form of operant conditioning. Only a few games seem to have successfully achieved that balance.

Some were simply too hard, others too easy, and those aren’t really the only variables anyhow. But the best could sustain excitement, or even induce a “flow state,” that form of contentment, of “optimal experience,” described by the cognitive scientist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, in which people feel “strong, alert, in effortless control, unselfconscious, and at the peak of their abilities.” It was more than enough to keep people coming back, in their billions, across the world, and parting with their hard-earned money for a chance at such transcendence.

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Related posts:

1. Will It Fly Summary (7/10)
2. Modern Man in Search of a Soul Summary (8/10)
3. Part 2: Stir Up The Transgressive and Taboo (The Art of Seduction)
4. Chapter 19: And They Lived Happily Every After (Sapiens)