Educational Games
This is a bit of a tangent, but in this video, they mentioned a lot of people cringe at 'edutaintment' - when I was a little kid those games were so awesome and the helped me both to learn things and to have fun; and I LOVED THEM - a lot of games from The Learning Company which have fallen to the wasteside really show a decay in culture. In my local mall we had a store dedicated to The Learning Company Games. - When I was growing up I LOVED Math Munchers, Math/Reading Blaster, all the Trail (Oregon/Yukon/Amazon) games, Where in the World is Carmen Santiego. Even if those games are available, the outlets which offer them seem really to have disappeared, (The Learning Company went from "The Discovery Store" to a Cingular shop - I think that's AT&T now) and I think it reflects really negatively on American culture. Obviously, I have an impulse to romanticize the 90's, but I still think there was so much more to offer for children than there is nowadays. I can expand on this more, but for an intro...