ABSTRACT
In the summer of 1997, Senator Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina led the charge in Congress to ban games from computers used by civil servants. “We don't condone the loafing that goes on,” he said, citing the diabolical ‘boss key,’ a tool included with some games that allows a guilty player to quickly shift his screen to a convincing-looking spreadsheet the moment a supervisor appears. Other businesses also banned computer games on the job, fearing that they interfered with job performance (New York Times, 1997; International Herald Tribune, 1997). Does work suffer as a result of electronic games? Do the contents of games, for example, violent themes or sexual stereotypes, have deleterious consequences on players? Have computer games no redeeming value? If they do not, why are they played by nearly all children and a growing percent of the adult population?
