After the 2007 publication of Tree of Smoke, his stupendous 600-page Vietnam-war epic, Denis Johnson might well have wanted to kick back and let off a little steam. He does so in grand style here. Nobody Move is a terse little hardboiled entertainment that originally ran last year as a four-part serial in Playboy magazine. Relatively speaking, the author may be slumming it, but he can’t help slathering the story’s pages in his usual idiosyncratic brilliance. It’s a story of small-time gamblers, crooks and gangsters in the contemporary American west, which opens on a scene of insouciant incongruity. Our hero, Jimmy Luntz, is singing on stage in a barbershop chorus competition. Two pages later he is in a car with a melancholic villain, Gambol, sent by the guy to whom Jimmy owes money. Four pages after that, Jimmy has shot him. Unfortunately, Gambol survives. He and his boss will come after Jimmy hard.

Meanwhile, there is also a dame: Anita, who has been framed for her husband’s embezzlement of $2.3m. She gets drunk in afternoon cinemas, shoots jars of nuts and bolts for target practice, and has “a smile that would have blown the doors off Jesus Christ”. She and Jimmy meet and hook up, planning to steal her husband’s stolen money.

Johnson concocts a loving sensorium of interstitial America: neon reflected in wet small-town streets, bars and drugstores and anonymous motels. Checking in to one of the latter, Jimmy notices:

the walls of this small room looked like logs. He put his hand out and discovered he touched real wood. He hadn’t known they still made things out of actual logs. He’d assumed all logs were fake.

Later on, he will be riding in a Jaguar and touching the dashboard to make sure that, too, is real wood.

The book is dialogue-heavy, which is good, because Johnson is superb at dialogue. At one point the hero and the heroine wonder who will come off better if there is a shootout with their pursuers:

Luntz said, ‘You’re the sure shot. In my whole life, I’ve fired exactly one bullet.’
Anita said, ‘I can knock bottles off a fence all day. But I’m not the guy who shot a guy.’

You feel the Coen brothers might do the caper justice on celluloid. The jacket blurb does not fail to namecheck Cormac McCarthy (whose No Country for Old Men was filmed by the Coens) as well as Chandler; but, though there is something of Chigurh in the implacable killer, Gambol, a more apt reference for the story’s snappy talk and comic incompetence is Elmore Leonard.

Johnson’s own special ingredient, though, is his attention to moments when people slip the moorings of a logical narrative: as in Tree of Smoke, certain scenes bloom with a kind of poetry of dissociation. One encounter, for example, is narrated first from Gambol’s point of view, and then from Luntz’s. The part that belongs to Gambol, a practised killer, hums with the precision of movement and reconnaissance: examining a door, he has time to notice that “Dead wasps and dead flies littered the threshold”. In dramatic contrast, when we cut to Luntz, who does not make a habit of this kind of thing, the action is shot through with lacunae that surgically reproduce the character’s panic:

Luntz turned and flung himself to the ground, hearing gunshots, and his senses ceased functioning. When the darkness and silence ended he was over the side of the hill and standing behind the building and hearing the river, and now his senses were sharp, precise.

(Even so, Johnson creates the leisure for an extraordinary observation, as Jimmy reaches under his bed for a bag that contains a shotgun: “Rather than pulling it to him, he found himself floundering toward it under the bed.”)

The story motors on, dispensing wisecracks and style-bombs on every page. Anita’s husband, Frank, “wasn’t that good-looking. He simply had this way about him that suggested it was his party, and the human race was lucky to be his guest.” Someone gets shot: “The back of the head had been scooped away and flung against the oven’s door.” When the sun rises over the action, “The morning seemed lit by a blowtorch.”

Eventually we hear of, and then meet, a bad guy who is much worse than the bad guys we already know. He is known as “The Tall Man”, even though he is five foot eight inches tall. There is something wrong with his face. What is wrong with it? Johnson won’t say, but that’s all right. He knows what to leave out, as well as what to put in. Reaching the end, the exhilarated reader is blindsided by the hint of something huge.

It’s when I have two men and a dog happily balanced on the undulating form of my giant quadrupedal anthropomorphic caterpillar and then eat a house that I realise this is either one of the most important videogames of recent years, or somehow not a videogame at all. What is this crazy thing called Noby Noby Boy?

The core pleasure of Boy’s stretchiness is the kind of thing that is sometimes loosely called a “mechanic”, but that word implies a sense of linear rigidity belied by Boy’s twangy and twirly acrobatics. It’s more about the simulation of a recognisable material quality, like my preference for blue denim when I am Sackboy (a texture I in some way stroke with my eyes), or the peculiarly satisfying way in which MGS’s iconic cardboard box flops down around Snake. Some kind of stylised “physics” had been around in videogames for a long time, of course (think of the crucial role played by versions of “inertia” in Asteroids or the 2D Mario games), but gradually more interest was directed not just to how objects move but what they are like in themselves. This is one obscure thread, indeed, by which you could trace the evolution of videogames: from hard and rigid (the only halfway “realistic” representations for a long time could be of shiny metal objects) to soft and deformable.

Like its predecessor Katamari (and before that, Stretch Panic), Noby Noby Boy is an example of what we could call a physical-property toy. The much-lauded indie game Gish, meanwhile, was built on the physical property of viscosity (a ball of tar), paving the way for the delightful squishiness of LocoRoco. There appears to be something inherently thrilling about bounciness (not just for the obvious psychosexual reasons to do with the stereotypical videogamer demographic): the word (64 or 128 bits long) is made flesh (of a naturalistic or surreal kind). A curious joy is awoken in witnessing a representation of what is attractively tactile, locked away or sublimated to a realm where you can’t actually touch it, as with Salvador Dalí’s famous soft clocks.

To call it a “toy” is to recognise the most radical aspect of Noby Noby Boy, which is that there is nothing to do. Or, if you prefer, there is everything to do. It’s just that, aside from sending statistics of your length increases to Girl, the system does not predetermine some set of actions as a win and another as a fail. Similarly a child’s plastic truck comes with no rules, strategies or definitions of success that are extrinsic to how the truck actually works as a physical thing. You play a game, but you play with a toy.

If playing with a toy sounds somehow like an “immature” pursuit, we ought to recognise that it fits into everyday adult life very nicely. After all, huge numbers of non-gaming grown-ups play with toys, too: it’s just that the toys in question are cunningly disguised as sports equipment, or vehicles, or “productivity” devices. (The dazed masses who cannot stop fiddling with their iPhones in the pub or at the bus stop or over romantic candlelit dinners are surely entranced as much by the functioning of the device itself as by whatever they are “doing” on it.)

As a toy, Noby Noby Boy also takes a polemical position on what we call “freedom” in videogames. It ought to remind us that there are actually two sorts of freedom we care about. The more restricted kind can be called “freedom how”: the game gives you an objective or issues you an order, and you then explore the freedom of combining tools and tactics to accomplish the mandated task in your own way. “Freedom how” is what we value in MGS, or Far Cry 2. But those games offer very little of the other kind of freedom, “freedom to”: the liberty to define your own tasks in the first place, or just to act in a way that isn’t task-oriented at all. Often, the more a game tries to give us a little taste of “freedom to” — as in GTA4 — the more frustrated we become by its limitations (you can’t go into /that/ building; you can’t wander off and try a pottery class).

Noby Noby Boy splats gaily down into this argumentative space by showing us an extreme execution of “freedom to”, not telling us what the hell we are supposed to be doing in its ridiculous universe, and relying on no other motivational structure to keep the player going than its innate charm and the vague feel-good communalism of sending Girl further out into space. It is a gauntlet thrown down to videogame designers and players, demanding that we ask whether it is a videogame at all, what we want out of videogames, and whether the pleasures of the form, like Boy himself, can be teased and stretched in surprising new directions.

Can a videogame be like a poem? Well, back in the 1980s, Tir Na Nog and Dun Darach raided the mythology of the Celtic sagas; and Lara Croft has just finished doing the same for Norse mythology. Perhaps the Metal Gear Solid series updates the medieval allegory Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, replacing the Green Knight with nuclear-armed giant robots, which is obviously an improvement. The Zelda saga rehearses the epic, episodic romance quest narrative of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Maybe cracking a particularly tough battle in Advance Wars sparks a dopamine rush akin to that furnished by one of William Empson’s anfractuous, hyper-dense poems, and Killzone 2 is the digital equivalent of the comforting ditties of Pam Ayres.

A poem is a marriage of determinacy and indeterminacy. The words in their unalterable order predictably generate a literal meaning, but also give off a cloud of association and implication whose extent is unforeseeable, keeping ambiguities eternally in play. A videogame, too, runs on determinate code to produce predictable effects, but also allows a larger set of possible outputs that cannot be delineated in advance.

Well, perhaps now we are cheating, having moved from the proposition that a videogame is like a poem, to the more concrete comparison of the videogame’s written instruction set to the written poem, taking advantage of the old saw that “code is poetry”, and noticing the distant din of PlayStation3 developers complaining that they are forced to write The Waste Land while their Xbox colleagues can still get away with scribbling rhyming couplets.

Such speculations arise from thatgamecompany’s PR claim that Flower is “Our video game version of a poem”. It bespeaks simultaneously a cringeworthy medium anxiety (no one respects videogames; poetry is the thing to aspire to) and a fey artistic hubris (look, we are poets!). Well, to me, Flower does not feel like a poem. In fact, it suggests nothing so much a version of Space Harrier customized for the personal pleasure of Alan Titchmarsh. I am just glad that I did not come across the claim that Flower was somehow a “poem” before I had played it, because otherwise I would have settled down to the game saying to myself “Okay, what is this conceited bullshit?”, rather than just downloading it, playing it, and saying “Wow”.

The developers claim that Flower “challenges traditional gaming conventions”, which is disingenuous. For a start, it is blatantly heavily indebted to two games: Okami (the way in which verdure and colour ripple out across the landscape from an epicentre of player success is torn straight from that game) and Rez (for the way aural feedback is incorporated into the musical score).

But those two titles were definitively gamers’ games. You and I might agree that they were more dense, varied and satisfying works than Flower. What the latter has done very successfully, on the other hand, is not to abandon gaming conventions but, on the contrary, to take a handful of conventions and purify them to the point where they seem “natural” even to the non-habitual gamer. A fine example of this is its path indication. Where many games tell you where to go next with glowing arrow that is not ontologically rooted in the gameworld, Flower uses rows of little white plants that nudge you in the right direction without breaking the organic illusion.

The fact that such path indication is even present, of course, points to the truth that the game at heart is utterly conventional in its sequential task-based nature: you basically collect stuff to open doors. What is remarkable about Flower is the illusion of liberation it manages to create within this labour-based structure owing to its extraordinarily pleasurable sense of flight. The developers say that “the player controls the lead petal”, but it feels to me as though my “character” is really the wind itself, and thus that I am playing from an indeterminate perspective: neither first-person nor third-person, but a depersonalized plurality.

Thatgamecompany’s ambitious claims for Flower have already worked, to the extent that you can read countless reviews happily babbling about how it’s like “a Zen poem“, like no other videogame ever made. But this is the wrong way to honour its achievement. A stern critical pragmatism is required. Flower is nothing like a poem, we ought to insist: it is a really interesting videogame, one which does things that many other videogames have already done, but with a more focused finesse, in the service of a clear artistic vision. It does not stand outside the medium’s history but is embedded within it. And it is for that reason that I look forward with interest to whatever the developers produce next, while steeling myself for the inevitable puffery claiming that it is somehow like a Da Vinci sketchbook or a Wagnerian opera.

Number theory — what Gauss called “the queen of mathematics”, devoted to the study of numbers and their arcane interrelationships — does not perhaps sound like the most fruitful basis for a poignant domestic drama. And yet this novel, with its skilful admixture of tender atmospherics and stealthy education, has sold more than four million copies in its native Japan. Its unnamed characters suggest archetype or myth; its rapturous concentration on the details of weather and cooking provide a satisfyingly textured foundation.

The book is narrated by the housekeeper of the title, a single mother employed by an agency, who is assigned a new client. He lives in a dingy two-room apartment, and his suit jacket is covered with reminder notes he scribbles to himself. This is the Professor, a brilliant mathematician who suffered brain damage in a car accident in 1975, and since then cannot remember anything for more than an hour and 20 minutes at a time. “It’s as if he has a single, eighty-minute videotape inside his head,” the narrator explains, “and when he records anything new, he has to record over the existing memories.”

What he can remember is mathematics. He asks for her shoe size and telephone number, and reflects on the mathematical properties of each. Once he has drawn a picture of her and clipped it to his suit so that he is not altogether surprised to see her every day, he begins to induct her into number theory. We learn about primes, triangular numbers, the invention of zero, and so on, in surprisingly warm-hearted scenes of exposition. Perhaps the Professor’s most splendid speech dramatizes prime-hunting as a quest through inhospitable country. At first, the prime numbers are frequent, but:

“When you get to much bigger numbers — a million or ten million — you’re venturing into a wasteland where the primes are terribly far apart [...] that’s right, a desert. No matter how far you go, you don’t find any. Just sand as far as the eye can see. The sun shines down mercilessly, your throat is parched, your eyes glaze over. Then you think you see one, a prime number at last, and you go running toward it — only to find that it’s just a mirage, nothing but hot wind. Still, you refuse to give up, staggering on step by step, determined to continue the search… until you see it at last, the oasis of another prime number, a place of rest and cool, clear water…”

Soon the housekeeper begins to take her young son to work, and he and the old man become friends. (The professor decides to call him Root, after the square-root sign, because the top of his head is flat: his mother never refers to him by any other name.) Subsequently, nothing much happens. There is a subplot about baseball, which may excite American readers more than British ones. The housekeeper takes the Professor to get his hair cut, after which she remarks, perfectly: “For once he smelled of shaving cream rather than of paper.” A conflict with the Professor’s over-protective sister-in-law is somehow defused by the writing down of Euler’s formula on a scrap of paper. The Professor wins a contest in a mathematical magazine and waves away congratulations, saying he just “peeked in God’s notebook”. An old box is rummaged through. The characters age.

The book as a whole is an exercise in delicate understatement, of the careful arrangement of feather-light materials into a surprisingly strong structure. The pure mountain air of number theory blows gently through all its pages, even if at one point there appears to be a blip in plausibility. The housekeeper, newly entranced by “amicable numbers” (a pair of numbers A and B such that the factors of A add up to B, and vice versa), says that she spends part of one evening testing all the pairs of even numbers between 10 and 100 manually to see if they are amicable. By my calculation there are 1,035 possible pairs of even numbers between 10 and 100 inclusive, so this might take rather longer than she claims.¹

Only at length does the reader wonder whether the touching illusion that Ogawa creates — of a lasting friendship with a man whose memory only lasts 80 minutes — was just that, an illusion. One prefers to dismiss the thought, as one is sometimes reluctant to wake up from a beautiful dream.

1. All she actually needs to do is to sum the factors of each of the 46 even numbers and then look for matches, but that’s not what she says she does; and even this would take a while by hand. «

The Immortals: A Novel
by Amit Chaudhuri (Picador)

A fifth of the way through this novel, one of its characters, a serious-minded teenage boy called Nirmalya, has a presentiment that he is about to figure in a narrative with a particular theme:

It was as if [...] he was now to be caught up, if not as a player then as bystander, in a story of ambition; he wasn’t sure whose — perhaps his own, but if not his entirely, then his parents’, or other people’s, or could it be even the city’s itself?

Indeed, it could be. The city in question is Bombay, whose ambition is visualized, over the book’s chronological span of several years in the 1980s, in passages that observe new building on land reclaimed from the sea, or luxury apartment blocks sprouting incongruously in the middle of treeless wastelands.

Nirmalya himself lives in one such luxury apartment thanks to his business-executive father, Apurva Sengupta, whose job furnishes the family with chauffeur-driven cars and tea clubs. His mother, Mallika, is a talented singer, but her voice is not of the timbre currently fashionable. Her music teacher, Shyamji, the son of a revered Indian classical musician, shuttles between the worlds of serious and popular music. Soon Nirmalya too begins to learn from Shyamji, who becomes his guru.

So the stage is set for the story of ambition. Mallika’s musical gift is untrammelled by traffic with commerce, and to threaten her family life by pursuing “personal ambition” is unthinkable to her. Nirmalya — who, as it is wryly put, has “recently become aware of the fact that he existed” and is voraciously consuming philosophy — thinks his teacher ought to devote himself seriously to his high calling with no thought of material gain; but Shyamji himself thinks he can do both, to teach and play “the lighter forms” now, and retire to what is serious at some indefinite, ever-receding point in the future. “You cannot practise art on an empty stomach,” he complains.

This weighty schema is balanced by a comedy of manners. Minor characters fade in and out of the urban saga with a lovely ironic twinkle. Apurva’s boss is an Englishman named Dyer, “who loved Bombay, who loved ‘India’, that mythical composite of colour and smell and anonymous human beings and daylight”. There is a mournful, illiterate musician who “kept himself in the background (even his withdrawals were dramatic and meant to draw attention)”. And a bad painter whose work finds popularity with the rich is said, exquisitely, to make “pictures of smoky huts and indecisive village maidens”.

The city of Bombay is also figured as a character by the narrative voice, which, when not aligned with the consciousness of one character or another, often implies a generalized community of gossip. There are appeals to what is “seen by many”, and statements are justified “according to unofficial information”. Ascribable to this communal perspective, perhaps, are the sententious opinions that occasionally interrupt scenes, such as about the Senguptas’ maid: “the poor have a special ability, after all, to understand the torments of their employers, to empathise with them”; or when it is said of a flower arranger that she has “the efficient but somewhat provisional air of a working woman”.

An unusual kind of omniscience also regularly enables the narrator, or narrative collective, to observe and report upon what is said to be happening “imperceptibly”; the style can at times be creakingly ugly, particularly in the book’s overused neither-nor or both-and constructions. On the other hand, there are many sweet felicities, as when Nirmalya, enduring a treadmill test at the doctor’s, is said to be “stoic in his obscure errand”; when we are introduced to “an old man in white who sat on the carpet in a way that made it seem he could see all the way to the horizon”; or when the voice poses questions directly to the reader: “Recognition is partly imagination, isn’t it?”

Chaudhuri, himself a composer and musician, excels in the passages devoted to music itself, “the miracle of song and its pleasure”. The scenes of characters practising in private are subtly thrilling; and there are also more general arguments about the role of music in East and West; in the marketplace and in society. At one point Shyamji remarks upon the increasing popularity in India of the easily domesticable western guitar, in contrast to the traditional four-stringed tanbura, which is described thus: “its sound shocked you every time you heard it — like a god humming to itself, its vibrations difficult to describe or report on, the solipsism of the heavens”; at another point, when Nirmalya is playing the same instrument, it is described with marvellous compression simply as: “aloof sentinel”.

The Immortals begins by cramming in a lot of pluperfect exposition and often thereafter seems in a hurry to recount things in a general way (“Often, that evening”) rather than to linger in scenic detail. This somewhat alienating procedure makes sense if one reads Chaudhuri as deliberately contrasting the mere quotidian flux of events with a kind of timeless, otherwordly stasis to which his musician characters aspire in their art. The “immortals” of the title are those who have achieved such sublimation: “there are some singers whose voices are so melodious that they bring to existence, for their listeners, the fictive world of kinnars, gods, and apsaras, from which they seem to be briefly visiting us [...] their music brings to this world the message of that other one, to which they’ll eventually return”. The novel’s perfectly judged final page performs an analogous return, like the reverberation of a plucked string dissolving gradually into air.

With all the guff surrounding the coming of President Barack Obama, it was easy to overlook one thing: that he had declared war on videogames. “The time has come,” he said in his inauguration address, “to set aside childish things.” He then outlined a vast programme of console destruction, with videogames to be replaced by enforced listening to Brahms, and communal readings of the Federalist Papers and Goethe. America needed to grow up, because playing with virtual soldiers on your Xbox inevitably makes you want to play with real soldiers and send them en masse to attack far-off countries — which had been, after all, one of the many lamentably childish habits of the outgoing administration. Dick Cheney, watching from his wheelchair, muttered “Go fuck yourself”, and then tilted the giant calcified potato of his head back downwards to continue his game of Advance Wars. (Cheney is a particular fan of levels involving Fog of War, and hallucinates unseen weapons of mass destruction in every obscured square.)

Oh, all right then, that wasn’t exactly Obama’s message. By “childish things”, Obama really meant Beltway bickering. But it has long been a criticism of videogames, too, that they are childish. The normal response of the videogame industry is to intone the latest demographic statistics (the average age of a videogamer is now seventy-six), or to point to “mature” themes treated in videogames, such as neoliberal interstellar economics. (One awaits the first videogame about a galactic recession.) Both responses, however, miss the point. An awful lot of videogames, I’m afraid, are childish, in the sense of that word that conveys disapprobation: immature, simplistic, illogical, given to irrational tantrums and unjustified outbursts of violence.

Many of the most childish videogames, in fact, are those targeted precisely at older adolescents or adults. Most games of “realistic” warfare or fantasy ultraviolence are no more sophisticated than a children’s game of cowboys and Indians, and less interesting in their intersubjective phenomenology. I recently tried playing the PSP God of War and, after thirty incredulous minutes, I decided I would rather be reading Harry Potter. (When I had tried to read Harry Potter, I decided after twenty incredulous pages that I would rather be reading something for grown-ups.) A childish videogame’s idea of novelty is: “Hey, now you can slice off the limbs of your enemies one by one!” Developing psychopaths who enjoyed pulling the legs off spiders earlier in their youth no doubt rejoiced (along with Dick Cheney). But it is clear that Dead Space is a much more childish videogame than Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass, even though the latter is drawn in a more apparently child-friendly style. Similarly, Far Cry 2 is more childish than World of Goo; and Fallout 3 is more childish than Professor Layton and the Curious Village.

The best games are not childish, but they are likely to be childlike, in that they invoke a sense of innocent wonder and experiment. It is always meant as laudatory when it is said of some fantastic doddering old genius in science, philosophy or art that he maintained a “childlike” attitude towards the world, taking nothing for granted. Similarly, World of Goo, Phantom Hourglass or Professor Layton are childlike not because of their warm’n'fuzzy, cartoony aesthetics but because of the opportunities they provide for joyful experimentation. (More naturalistically rendered games can also be childlike in this sense: for example, MGS3 or the best Tomb Raider levels.)

The stunning art direction of LittleBigPlanet, meanwhile, seems itself to be presenting a subtle visual argument about the relationship between the childish and the childlike. A priori, it seems a childish thing to construct make-believe games from scraps of cardboard and fabric. But once those materials can be realistically simulated, we are ushered into a second-order realm where it is possible to reflect pleasurably on the cutely juvenile physical resources that are being replicated, at the same time as we marvel (in properly childlike fashion) at the ingenuity with which they have been combined, and attempt to solve (with gleeful childlike fearlessness) the puzzles they present. During a recent session of LBP, in which a friend and I played through the co-op parts, we were both giggling like six-year-olds when a bomb went off too near one of us and he got covered in soot; but we weren’t being childish, we were being childlike. It would have been substantially more childish, I propose, for us to have watched some TV show in which men with tight jeans tell a mooing audience how brilliant it is to drive cars.

Instead, in LittleBigPlanet, we were working out strategies, experimenting, and discovering things in a sublimely funny alternative reality. And it is that childlike potential that is among the the most important virtues of the form. Every child, it has been said, is naturally a scientist. The best videogames enable us all to practise science as pleasure.

As everyone knows, the two best podcasts on the planet are BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time and Resonance.fm’s One Life Left. You can imagine how thrilled I was this week to appear as a guest on the final episode of OLL’s current season. Or, instead of just imagining it, you can actually listen to the show, here or on iTunes.

A great self-help current of philosophy, from the Stoics to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, conveys one simple message: you cannot change the world, but if you understand the bad habits of your thinking you can change how you react to the world, and that way lies wisdom. Modern popular neuroscience often holds out the same promise: armed with the knowledge of what scientists have learned from magnetic imaging of the brain, the reader will end up master of his own mind. If you know how that muscle inside your head works, you can exploit it better.

That is the thesis of Jonah Lehrer’s The Decisive Moment, which marries grandiose claims of revelation with a predictably formulaic structure: each chapter opens with a magazine-drama mini-story — a period in an American football game; a pilot dealing with a cockpit crisis; a military emergency, and so on. He begins confidently:

In this book, you will learn how those three pounds of flesh inside the skull determine all of your decisions, from the most mundane choices in the supermarket to the weightiest of moral dilemmas.

The crux is in that little word “how”. An increasing amount is known about what sort of patterns of neuron firing generally precede and accompany various kinds of decision — but exactly how they translate into what we experience as decisions is a much trickier proposition. And this difficulty is embedded in Lehrer’s language. He is driven to anthropomorphize neurons themselves.

Of a British naval commander who somehow knew to shoot down an enemy missile that had the same radar profile as a US jet, Lehrer hypothesizes: “a dopamine neuron somewhere in Riley’s midbrain was surprised”. How can a neuron be surprised, any more than a neuron can be happy, or a neuron can prefer Chopin to Wagner? Only if the neuron itself has a mind, which implies a useless infinite regress. Lehrer says: “Dopamine neurons constantly generate patterns based on experience: if this, then that. They learn that the tone predicts the juice…” But if you are trying to explain learning by appeal to certain kinds of neurons, it doesn’t help to say that the neurons themselves “learn”. Learning is not thereby explained but merely packed into a smaller space. With no apparent irony, Lehrer even calls dopamine, in one sub-heading, “The Molecule of Intuition”, which rather recalls George Lucas’s attempt to explain the Force by appeal to Midi-Chlorians in the Jedi bloodstream.

One of the main messages of Lehrer’s book is that making decisions is not a purely rational affair but depends also on the emotions (which are the result, as he claims, of lots of unconscious information-processing done by the dopamine neurons). As usual, Lehrer overstates the novelty of his lesson. “The history of Western thought,” he claims, “is so full of paeans to the virtues of rationality that people have neglected to fully consider its limitations.” Except all those philosophers who did precisely that, of course; and elsewhere Lehrer does remember to credit some of those poor benighted pre-neuroscience thinkers, such as Hume.

Throughout his book, indeed, we find familiar wisdom dressed up in shiny new scientific vocabulary. One lesson of those useful dopamine neurons, for example, is that you can only learn by focusing on your mistakes — something my chess teacher used to drill into me while pitilessly analysing my poor moves. The new empirical justification for the old cliché “learn from your mistakes” does, though, allow for stronger arguments in the field of educational policy, as Lehrer usefully shows. Telling children that they are intelligent has much worse results than telling them that they worked hard.

A similar argument is made in Ken Robinson’s sympathetic and interesting book, The Element, which is about helping people to find out what matters most to them, and then to do it — if not as their job, then at least in their “recreation” time. Naturally a lot depends on the educational system: “[I]f you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” Robinson, too, emphasizes that there is a lot more to be valued in the mind than higher reasoning: there are “multiple intelligences … linguistic, musical, mathematical, spatial, kinesthetic, interpersonal… and intra-personal”. This kind of thing is always a useful corrective to the kind of smug liberal-arts columnist who mocks the alleged “stupidity” of footballers, though the danger is that if you protest too much in the other direction, as both Robinson and Lehrer sometimes do, it looks as though you are arguing that what is needed in the world is less reason, rather than more.

But Robinson goes even further in one sense, citing research on the enteric nervous system, “a ’second brain’ inside the intestines” (so “gut feelings” are not wholly metaphorical). In comparison, Lehrer’s book seems to suffer from a rather old-fashioned kind of cranial bias, according to which everything of subjective interest happens inside the skull and nowhere else.

Halfway through Lehrer’s book, however, things are turned upside down in that cranium. Lest we be tempted to leave everything up to our magic dopamine neurons from now on, the book begins to concentrate instead on situations in which we’d be foolish to rely on our emotions: for instance if we were flying a plane that had lost all hydraulic control, or trying to figure a way out of a forest fire. Sometimes, Lehrer reveals, we should take the time to consciously and rationally think through a decision, because (believe it or not!) our emotions can be misleading.

Well, any self-help manual worth its salt would not leave the reader hanging on the horns of this dilemma without some general rule of thumb — when should we trust our feelings, and when shouldn’t we? Both Aristotle and William James already knew, after all, that the key was choosing the right deliberative system for the job at hand. And now, promises Lehrer, neuroscience can explain how. He builds up slowly to the big payoff (enjoy the casual Oedipal swipe at Malcolm Gladwell in his use of the word “blink”):

It is the easy problems — the mundane math problems of daily life — that are best suited to the conscious brain. These simple decisions won’t overwhelm the prefrontal cortex. In fact, they are so simple that they tend to trip up the emotions, which don’t know how to compare prices or compute the odds of a poker hand…. Complex problems, on the other hand, require the processing powers of the emotional brain, the supercomputer of the mind. This doesn’t mean you can just blink and know what to do — even the unconscious takes a little time to process information — but it does suggest that there’s a better way to make difficult decisions. When choosing a couch, or holding a mysterious set of cards, always listen to your feelings. They know more than you do [...] Think less about those items that you care a lot about. Don’t be afraid to let your emotions choose.

You might be surprised to be told that the most important choices we make are those involving a couch or other consumer “items”. Still, Lehrer’s system would no doubt help Robinson, who grumbles about the “excessive decision-making” involved in choosing a hire car. But it is Robinson who describes more explicitly the therapeutic ambition of both authors: “Many people have not found their Element because they don’t understand their own powers.” Falling back, in the face of an intractable world, on trying to understand one’s own powers, is surely a major theme of our age — what else, for example, is the TV series Heroes about?

A citation from William James in The Element could serve as an epigraph for both these books: “The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitude of mind… If you change your mind, you can change your life.” Whether you become a dancer or drummer (as Robinson hopes), or just hunker down and make better shopping decisions (according to Lehrer’s depressing assumption of his readers’ interests), it seems happiness really is within your grasp.

When you’re just a node on the network, no one can hear you scream. James Harkins’s dystopian essay portrays users of Facebook et al as people staring out of their windows on a suburban street, signalling to one another by flashing lamps on and off. The only winner is the disembodied “system”, which passes information around itself to no scrutable purpose, using us as its automata.

But at least we feel that we are “in the loop”. We feel important, too, if asked to provide “feedback”. Harkin’s book is at its best in its enjoyable excavation of such metaphors. He traces them back to the birth of “cybernetics”, when a mathematician named Norbert Wiener tried to improve the performance of anti-aircraft gunners during the second world war. Wiener took the engineering concept of “feedback” — in which information at the output of a system is plugged back into the input — and applied it to living organisms. So an anti-aircraft gun, the gunner, and the enemy plane constituted a single system whose performance was to be optimized. Now, Harkin argues, the inhabitants of “Cyburbia” happily volunteer to become mere cogs in a smoothly functioning global machine.

Much of the character of modern media was predicted by Marshall McLuhan, about whom Harkin spends a lot of time being gratuitously rude. McLuhan “looked,” we are informed, “like a slightly effete gentleman rogue’, and trafficked, apparently, in “blithe apologetics for media’s hall of mirrors”. Yet the main thrust of Cyburbia is indeed that “the medium is the message”. Harkin even suggests, very much in McLuhanite style, that Google might be “affecting our neural circuitry”.

Sometimes, though, the message is the message. Harkin writes: “There are now [...] several hundred million blogs in Cyburbia. Most of them are very dull [...] their value lies less in what they have to say than in the relationships between them.” I don’t doubt that most blogs are very dull, but I also know that some of them are not. Indeed, at their best (modesty forbids me from mentioning my own), blogs are fora for extremely intelligent discussion. Ideas are not necessarily more superficial or malign for being communicated over a digital network instead of a paper-and-ink one.

The global explosion of creativity in music, video or photography enabled by cheap digital tools and internet distribution channels, meanwhile, is also blithely dismissed: “Two-thirds of Americans between the ages of twelve and seventeen who spend time online [...] have cobbled together some kind of digital content and uploaded it directly to the internet.” That’s a remarkable statistic, almost obscured by the condescension of “cobbled together”.

Harkin’s story is most seriously muddled by his misuse of the buzzphrase “peer-to-peer”. It describes file-”sharing” programs such as Bittorrent, where instead of storing illegally copied albums on a central server, users connect directly to one another. But Harkin also defines Google, YouTube, and Facebook as “peer to peer”, which technically they just aren’t. They route “their traffic through a website,” he concedes, “but only so as to enable communication between peers.” In fact, Google and Facebook route traffic through their own central servers so as to make money: datamining our information to “target” us with ads (another military metaphor, of course).

The tentacles of the network, meanwhile, extend also to an influence on “old media”. Harkin perceives a new mode of “cyber-realism” in TV shows such as Lost and films such as 21 Grams. “A cyber-realist story,” he explains, “contains at least one of four different elements: the puzzle, the loop, multiplicity and the tie.” From his description of these elements I was able to determine that Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone is a “cyber-realist” work: pretty good going for 1868.

Cyber-realism, Harkin says, “allows us much more freedom to meander our way through stories and cinema and discover our own path”. That sounds fashionable, and nonsensical. Does anyone watch episodes of Lost in a random order? The show’s suspense depends on the viewer obediently following its linear sequence of narrative revelations. So you don’t just choose your “own path” through it in the same way that the Israeli army (as Harkin relates, in a rather tasteless analogy) “chose its own path” through the West Bank in 2002, by simply blasting its way through buildings.

In the end, the most worrying effect of contemporary “social media” is the quantity of airy pontificating they inspire. Cyburbia itself is over-reliant on other pontificators, such as Cass Sunstein and Steven Johnson, and would have benefited from more direct engagement with the enemy. Describing Wiener’s anti-aircraft problem, for example, Harkin says that German bombers in the second world war flew “at speeds above three thousand miles an hour”. At around Mach 4, that’s faster than any 21st-century jet fighter; the maximum speed achieved by Nazi bombers was actually around 460mph, as I learned in twenty seconds from an aeronautical-history website. Sometimes spending a little more time with Google can be a good thing.

In the snowy early days of 2009, I am setting my metronome and practising fingering studies on my beautiful new guitar. Every few days or so, I find I can bump the tempo up a notch, getting a satisfying confirmation of my improvement; and then I will allow myself to plug into Guitar Rig and lay down some punishing heavy-metal nonsense. All told, it’s much more fun than a videogame.

Knowing this, friends often ask me what I think about Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Well, from a few casual plays, I have developed no interest in learning to play an oversimplified imitation of my axe. But for a musician to express contempt towards the game, and insist that Guitar Hero fans should dump it and go learn to play a real guitar, would be a harshly purist view of how one should spend one’s dwindling stock of hours on Earth. It would also be a little like saying to a Tomb Raider fan: Why don’t you just go outside and climb some rocks and shoot some bears for real? Sure, it would be more challenging, and maybe even more fun, but the game is not intended as a perfect simulation of the real thing.

On the other hand, these games do inevitably represent “playing” music as robotic, supervised work. Despite the limited space made for “improvisation” in such games of late, most of the time you are required to do exactly what is preprogrammed into the game. There is no room to drag the tempo a bit in the verse, or to suddenly make up a cute lead harmony in the chorus. Essentially you are trained into a Pavlovian response to a series of QuickTime Events, the reward for which is that you get to hear a prerecorded song the way it should be.

One of the great pleasures of playing music for real, though, is doing it your own way: making innumerable micro-decisions about timing and phrasing that add up to an interpretation. But the stern box-like structures that music games force the player into make this difficult. I was reminded this in another way recently when duetting on Aha’s “Take On Me” with Lips developer Keiichi Yano (who, luckily for me, has a beautiful falsetto), on stage in a futuristic Zürich cyber-mall. Lips tries to carve out opportunities for player expression by encouraging you to pose or use the mic as a tambourine, but its scoring system, as in all karaoke games, is still pedantically rigid. Part of the fun of real karaoke is singing a familiar song in an unexpected way, but that’s something a videogame system doesn’t know how to evaluate.

In general this is part of a larger conversation about the extent to which a videogame allows you to “play with style”. The best videogames, I propose, have a certain excess of potential built into their control system that allows the player to show off while accomplishing the preset tasks. The game doesn’t just give you the tools to do the job; it gives you tools that are flexible enough to do the job in different ways. This is as true of Defender as it is of GTAIV, or as it was of a certain epoch in the development of Tomb Raider, where one could somersault and backflip at will. (The increased fluidity of movement in Underworld, unfortunately, has come at the expense of some of this freedom.)

Real musical instruments, too, of course, boast extremely deep interfaces that have been honed over centuries to allow for expressive nuance. In Guitar Hero or Rock Band, by contrast, it is an understandable disappointment that you are not allowed to free solo over your favourite Aerosmith or Sabbath track: the interface simply wouldn’t be up to the job.

And yet — practising to the rigid structures of Guitar Hero, like playing dry studies along to a metronome, is at least likely to improve your command of rhythm. And, looking away from that depressing plastic nullification of the beautiful complexity of a real guitar, I find myself rather tempted by those drum controllers. Playing the drums in Rock Band or World Tour is far closer to actually playing the drums. That skill is transferable to a real set of Ludwigs and Zildjians in a way that facility with the plastic “guitar” obviously isn’t.

Maybe, after all, we can hope for the best of both worlds. According to a survey by UK music charity Youth Music released at the end of last year, of the six million young people who play music videogames, nearly half of them have been inspired to take up a real instrument. If Guitar Hero becomes a gateway drug to a lifelong addiction to Les Pauls or Stratocasters, then everyone can be happy (even if they don’t work for Gibson or Fender). I’ve been playing guitar, on and off, for twenty years, which is a lot longer than I ever expect to be interested in any single videogame. Games are for christmas, but a musical instrument is for life.