2 October

A child could read for hours and we’d all beam and say how wonderful. And yet a few hours on an XBox and apparently the kid needs to get back into the ’real world’ (never defined). We’re very moralistic about our own modern world, we love it and yet we don’t seem to trust or understand it at the same time. Kids playing on XBoxes are *way* more connected to reality than kids reading books. Connected to thousands of other people, for starters, but also physically connected - the networks that support online gaming are vast, physical things, generating not only fun but also jobs for programmers, artists, and even kids in the developing world. Whereas a reader is in total isolation - as ‘virtual’ as you can get. As with most things, reality is ignoring the moralising wowsers and sentimentalists and shaping our world without them. Gaming is a global phenomenon. I once worked on a research project where games were used to solve otherwise impossibly complex equations - what kids are experiencing through gaming is fantastically complex, orders of magnitude more than if they were reading.