Boy! The side roads I wander down! Ellen Goodman took a shot at Steven Johnson last weekend:

In “Everything Bad Is Good for You,'’ maverick Steven Johnson swears that today’s popular culture is making us smarter. It isn’t the content but “collateral learning'’ that matters, says this unabashed fan of “Grand Theft Auto.'’ We should worry less about “the tyranny of the morality play,'’ he says, and smile more about the way the games challenge skills. But if the culture now provides a “cognitive workout,'’ what muscle is it building? Better and smarter pornographers? Maybe everything bad is worse for you.

I mentioned Johnson’s book, Everything Bad Is Good for You, a couple times just recently – I’m intrigued by the idea that video games are good brain training. But her point is well taken – I imagine a majority of the games being played are violent, and apparently some of them (I haven’t played “Grand Theft Auto") would not be great manuals for good Boy Scouts.

When I read , “the tyranny of the morality play,'’ there it was: I had indeed wandered into a medieval morality play, with Ellen Goodman taking on Everyman’s Evil Twin, John’s Son!

The result was inevitable – I got totally off track, and spent most of the evening googling around the general territory of the morality play. The obvious first jump was to Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown, where I quickly discovered that I don’t get Hawthorne any more than I did in high school.

But I did hit some good general advice about arguments in Everyman itself:

Thou art but a fool to complain,
You spend your speech and waste your brain;

And then I found just what I wanted in Pilgrim’s Progress,, which I’ve been really meaning to read for several decades now:

Take heed also, that thou be not extreme,
In playing with the out-side of my Dream:
Nor let my figure or similitude
Put thee into a laughter or a feud;
Leave this for Boys and Fools; but as for thee,
Do thou the substance of my matter see.
 
Put by the Curtains, look within my Vail;
Turn up my Metaphors, and do not fail
There, if thou seekest them, such things to find
As will be helpful to an honest mind.
 
What of my dross thou findest there, be bold
To throw away, but yet preserve the Gold;
What if my Gold be wrapped up in Ore?
None throws away the Apple for the Core.

Our culture seems to have a good deal of trouble with any argument more subtle than Good vs. Bad. Johnson certainly intended to walk straight into the firing range with his Good-Bad title. And I think Goodman took the bait with an uncharacteristically one-dimensional response. But let’s not throw away the Apple for the Core:

* The process of playing video games may foster some cognitive skills.

* The content of some video games may be bad for kids.

The one statement has no necessary connection to the other. “Grand Theft Auto” may foster problem solving, thinking on your e-feet, planning and anticipation – while at the same time destroying a kid’s moral framework and giving him specific instruction in how to Go Directly to Jail.

That’s not about Video Games. It’s about this particular video game.

Can we get out of the morality play and start asking questions that might get us somewhere? Are there games that can teach the same skills using a morally defensible framework? Do they already exist? Can we write them of they don’t? Would kids play them? Would parents buy them? Have Ellen Goodman and Hilary Clinton played “Grand Theft Auto,” and if they did, who won? Is anyone reading this who actually knows something about “Grand Theft Auto"? Am I old enough to get it for my birthday?