Lasting Impact
Long, long ago, on my family's... 386? 486? computer, I played a game called Sim Ant. Made by the creators of Sim City, Sim Ant had you attempting to take over a lawn & house with an ant colony, doing many of the actions an ant might do. The game also had a bunch of trivia for you to learn about ants - how there are gazillions more of them in the world than we tend to think about, how they don't take over the world only because of fighting between different colonies/species, and various tidbits about their day to day life. As a young curious child, I absorbed this information and was happy that I knew a bunch of stuff about ants.
Nowadays, I'm still a relatively curious person, but that's tempered by the vast amount of information available to me on the interweb tubes. So a Digg article labeled "Super Fruit Fly Taking Over Europe" might trigger a "hm, interesting" from me, but I probably would not follow the link except on a really really slow day. However, when the article actually said "Super Ant Taking Over Europe" instead, I got excited and quickly followed the link to read more about the world of ants that I felt I still somehow belonged to. This excitement came purely from that game long ago (I haven't studied ants or taken ant-ological classes since then), and I found its long-reaching effects interesting. I wonder what things will impact my own children this way someday.
Nowadays, I'm still a relatively curious person, but that's tempered by the vast amount of information available to me on the interweb tubes. So a Digg article labeled "Super Fruit Fly Taking Over Europe" might trigger a "hm, interesting" from me, but I probably would not follow the link except on a really really slow day. However, when the article actually said "Super Ant Taking Over Europe" instead, I got excited and quickly followed the link to read more about the world of ants that I felt I still somehow belonged to. This excitement came purely from that game long ago (I haven't studied ants or taken ant-ological classes since then), and I found its long-reaching effects interesting. I wonder what things will impact my own children this way someday.