Economics and life
In an intriguing discussion of Henry Jenkins' work on games, Torill Mortensen observes that games have always been about learning. She worries, though, that today's games are less educational than they ought to be:
The modern problem is that children's play has been colonised by commercial interests, and split from the adult tasks....We are reducing the playfulness and the pleasure of being adults, limiting our playing to the spheres where children should not be involved: competitions or sexual games...
Nothing can be colonized, I think, by commercial interests: if we have learnt nothing else from Marx, we should by now have learned that economics are everywhere, always. You can't get outside the economy, because there is no outside.
(The notion that childrens' games aren't sexual was, I thought, an American fantasy, part of the puritan streak that makes our attorney general want to put clothes on neoclassical statues. But perhaps its also a peculiar American fantasy that Scandinavians know better.)