Johnson and "Everthing Bad is Good..."

Johnson, in his book "Everything Bad is Good for you...", argues that ostensibly "bad" habits such as video gaming may actually be "good" for you. In corroboration, he asserts that TV shows are getting smarter and video games sharpen certain skills such as hand-eye-coordination and motor skills.

I find the whole argument rather specious. After all, if video gaming was such a useful skill, they would have taught it as a subject in schools. The problem is that the skills that your are taught by video games are not general enough to be useful in other walks of life. Moreover, TV shows and video games shorten your attention span and weaken your ability to think in abstract.

Typically, valuable skills are those which are sufficiently general to be useful to solve a broad class of problems. Therefore, video games may be challanging to master, they have a diminishing marginal utility in relation to the time spent.