IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

156 Chapter 7
for a hybrid cash and time barter economy are in place. It’s just a matter of
combining them in new ways.
Design Factor 9: Playtime
The film director Jean-Luc Godard regretted that growing up meant losing
permission to play: ‘‘It takes a lifetime to become the child that you should
be,’’ he lamented. 55 Play informs our culture, our imaginations, our experiences.
But most educational policies—and nearly all projects to wire up
classrooms to the Internet—take us in the opposite direction. Rather than
make space for all of us to learn in new and playful ways, most ‘‘wired classrooms’’
are more like cages filled with experimental rats. Only the rats are
our children—or ourselves.
It is a welcome irony that budgets for school Internet projects are increasingly
overshadowed by the amounts now being spent each year on computer
games. The market for video, computer, online, and wireless games
is growing far faster than the market for e-learning, and the games industry
has overtaken Hollywood in terms of its gross revenues. Many parents
worry about the shoot-and-slash storylines of computer games and fear
their children’s minds are being turned to mush. But experts who study
these effects tend to be more sanguine. When Sonia Livingstone, a professor
at the London School of Economics, studied the media habits and
expectations of children and the impacts of the stroboscopic effects of fastmoving
multimedia on children, her results were surprising. She discovered
no measurable deterioration in terms of their powers of persuasion, retention,
and recall—and observed that computer gaming often demands
extraordinary feats of skill, intelligence, and motor coordination. She concluded
that children were learning to learn in new ways. 56
For the writer Douglas Rushkoff, too, ‘‘the television remote-control, the
videogame joystick, and the computer mouse, have irrevocably changed
young people’s relationship to media . . . young people have adapted
well to this constant barrage on their senses and have mutated into ‘screenagers.’
’’ 57 Where children have led, business now follows. Gaming theory
in general, and visual simulations in particular, are a hot topic in business.
When it comes to understanding how an economy, a company, or an ecosystem
works, modeling and simulation—which provide a rich mixture of
learning and doing—are a remarkably powerful tool for genuine under-