« "Where Do Babies Come From?" Minigame on Japanese Cellphones | Main | Link of the Day - Everything Bad is Good For You »
January 06, 2006
Hillary vs. the Xbox
We somehow missed this editorial during the Hot Coffee controversy. Steven Johnson (of Everything Bad Is Good For You fame) asks Senator Clinton to use some of that $90M of the proposed videogame study to investigate how games are helping children.
The great secret of today's video games that has been lost in the moral panic over "Grand Theft Auto" is how difficult the games have become. That difficulty is not merely a question of hand-eye coordination; most of today's games force kids to learn complex rule systems, master challenging new interfaces, follow dozens of shifting variables in real time and prioritize between multiple objectives.
In short, precisely the sorts of skills that they're going to need in the digital workplace of tomorrow.
Posted by IanSchreiber at January 6, 2006 09:54 AM | Discuss this post on our forums