Doug, Doug, Doug, you unabashed baby boomer!
I remember my grandfather saying that anybody who loves rock and roll has to be culturally illiterate and functionally deaf. Your prejudice against these game players is the same kind of generational prejudice exhibited by my grandfather. In short it is a form of old-fogeyism.
I feel compelled to speak up since there was once a time I shared such prejudice until I met ...
My wonderful girlfriend who only monitors this list but is a game player. She was a top student in highschool, college and law school. She reads you, Stephen J. Gould, histories and of course fantasy and science fiction. She goes to many plays, both avant garde and traditional, and thus shows her high cultural literacy. She is trying very hard to learn to love _film noir_ and screwball comedy, simply because I love those movies, and such reaching for good art shows a certain amount of generational open mindedness, which I can highly recommend. She is trying hard to understand why I Iove Bob Dylan and Frank Sinatra. She has very, very weird theories about Shakespeare. Sometimes when she plays one of her civilization games I read to her from the book on evolution or history or philosophy that I am currently reading. In short she has some of the cultural aspirations of a nerd. She is of generation X where as I am in one of the last cohorts of the baby boom. One thing she is not, is functionally illerterate.
So beware of close mindedness! (By the way I think my grandfather was right about the deaf part and he did try to turn me onto Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington, so he wasn't completely wrong about the world.)
Jerry
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