Gaming and the liberal arts

Children (on the Autism spectrum) take games that call you a loser or say other things like that very personally

Garth Chouteau, spokesman for PopCap Games, says the company has received an immense amount of calls and letters from parents of children with an ASD diagnosis, such as Schramek, stating the positive effects their games have had on children. "These games are created with no purpose in mind other than fun, but people say these games help them relax and provide cognitive activity for their children. These are side effects of a really good game," says Chouteau.

"Kids on the autism spectrum have a hard time with emotional control. From a social standpoint, one of the things the games are helpful with is teaching the children to take turns."

I discuss his key idea: that systemic thinking is a liberal art, and I explain a corollary idea, that textbooks suck

if you don’t have a category for an idea, it’s very difficult to receive that idea

the story of the last few hundred years is that we’ve quickly developed important ideas, which society needs to have to improve and perhaps even to continue to exist, and for which there are no pre-existing, genetically created categories. So there’s an idea-receiving capacity gap.

The value of Mass Effect as a science fiction universe is that it is a critical starting point for discussion about the purpose of humanity in a materialistic universe. Without an answer to that question, there is no real reason for Ender to defeat the Buggers, or for humanity to seek out new life and new civilizations, or for us to not let non-organic life be the torch bearer for intelligence in the universe. Mass Effect confronts us with a female hero of our own creating, with the deepest implications of diversity, with the most dramatic questioning of the value of what it means to be human. Whether you are a feminist, a transhumanist, a theologist, a proponent of space exploration, a pacifist, a human exceptionalist, a bioethicist, a scientist, or a philosopher, Mass Effect demands you rethink your world.