Deepest thanks to Antoine Clarke for emailing me the link to this. This being Professor Instapundit himself, holding forth for Tech Central Station about the educational benefits of computer games, one in particular:

A while back, I speculated that videogames were good for children. My focus there was primarily violent computer/videogames (and porn!), but on further reflection I think that even non-violent videogames just might be helping America's kids.

I came to this realization when I heard my daughter and one of her friends having an earnest discussion:

"You have to have a job to buy food and things, and if you don't go to work, you get fired. And if you spend all your money buying stuff, you have to make more."

All true enough, and worthy of Clark Howard or Dave Ramsey. And it's certainly something my daughter has heard from me over the years. But they were talking about The Sims, which has swept through my neck of little-girl-land faster than a mutant strain of flu through Shanghai. Thanks to The Sims, they know how to make a budget, and how to read an income statement -- and to be worried when cash flow goes negative. They understand comparison shopping. They're also picking up some pointers on human interaction, though The Sims characters seem a bit dense in that department at times. (Then again, so do real people, now and then).

And, shortly, The Sims 2 will up the stakes. Among other things, it will allow you to "Mix Genes: Your Sims have DNA and inherit physical and personality traits. Take your Sims through an infinite number of generations as you evolve their family tree." What more could a father want, than a game that will teach his daughter that if you marry a loser, he'll likely stay a loser, and your kids have a good chance of being losers, too?

All joking aside, though, I'm impressed with the things that these games teach. …

Indeed.

Thanks again Antoine. I would probably have got to it on my own eventually. After all, Instapundit himself linked to this piece. But my surfing is erratic and certainly doesn't, as they say in America, cover all the bases. So emails to interesting pieces are always extremely welcome.

However, I still haven't got around to sorting out brian@brianmicklethwait.com, so try brian@libertarian.co.uk instead. Sorting out brian@brianmicklethwait.com is no doubt extremely easy. As are the 7,354 other things I also need to do urgently, a lot of them before I can do any of the others.

Maybe there's a computer game I need to play, where you are rewarded for doing lots of little things right. Maybe all computer games are like this. So, thing 7,355: get into computer games (apart from Solitaire I mean). I will not be doing that actually.