Editor’s Letter: Back to School
These digital objects we spend so much time with—what wisdom do they impart?
My father used to work for IBM, so my family was always a little bit ahead of the curve in terms of technology. Since he worked in sales, every year or so we’d have a new machine tucked neatly in the front-right corner of our dining room between the armoire and the radiator. He was always thinking about how his kids were going to be using technology, and so when the first fleet of educational games started hitting the shelves of Circuit City, he leapt at the opportunity to teach us something “useful” with this brand-new medium. Ironically, console videogames had no place at the Warren household after a particularly disastrous outing with Contra at a friend’s house in Chicago (a story for another time).
And so my weekends were filled with learning. The Oregon Trail, Math Blaster, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, and The Incredible Machine became my first real interactions with the world of games. My father was forward-thinking, but like many in his generation, believed the connection between learning and games had to be explicit. If you weren’t learning grammar or math or science directly, if these videogames weren’t going to polish your report card, if clacking away for hours on the keyboard wasn’t going to be a passport to the higher-ed institution of your choosing, then games were nothing but amusements to be consumed when the rest of your “real” work was done.
Of course, this is wrong.
