Hillary vs. the Xbox: Game over

Steven Johnson has a must read rebuttal to Hillary Clinton's call for a video game investigation in the LA Times. Here is a teaser:

Kids have always played games. A hundred years ago they were playing stickball and kick the can; now they're playing 'World of Warcraft,' 'Halo 2' and 'Madden 2005.' And parents have to drag their kids away from the games to get them to do their algebra homework, but parents have been dragging kids away from whatever the kids were into since the dawn of civilization. So any sensible investigation into video games must ask the 'compared to what' question. If the alternative to playing 'Halo 2' is reading 'The Portrait of a Lady,' then of course 'The Portrait of a Lady' is better for you. But it's not as though kids have been reading Henry James for 100 years and then suddenly dropped him for Pokemon.

Great stuff!