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More important than that historic ruling is the reminder by a U.S. Supreme Court Justice that video games, like books, plays and movies, communicate ideas.

Reading Dante is unquestionably more cultured and intellectually edifying than playing Mortal Kombat," Scalia wrote. "But these cultural and intellectual differences are not constitutional." It raises the question, what video games live up to that legacy of great literary works? And why aren't there more of them?

if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.

When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.