Once upon a time, as they say, it was my privilege to know a boy who, when the time came for him to go out in to the world and interact with other kids, was indentified as having a learning difficulty. Simply put, he had trouble talking. Putting a sentence together was visibly a hard effort for him. His older sisters were pretty good about it, and only made occasional attempts on his life when he happened to do something little-brotherish, such as wreck a painstakingly-made school project.

As with most families with kids, there was a Playstation in their home. It arrived shortly after he was born. When he was old enough to use it he quickly got better at it than the girls. In fact by the time he started school he was amazingly good. Some people – even me, once or twice – suggested that spending so much time playing games might have something to do with his difficulty in speaking. His mum wouldn’t hear of it. "It’ll all work out," she said, and because she was very definite about those kind of things you didn’t argue.

One day I was at his place, out in the sun. He was playing with a little friend of his – who, BTW, could speak perfectly – and I realized that the kid with the learning difficulty was the one making the major contribution to the imaginary world they were creating. Despite, or maybe because of near-unrestricted access to a Mark 1 Playstation and his dad's Mac G4, he’d cooked up a whole world of giants and dragons, using rocks and bits of stick. I won't bother trying to explain about the proper way to pull weeds up so that their souls go straight up to weed heaven, but that was in there too. If it was inspired by a video game, well fine, it sounds like it’d be a good one.

Now he talks as well as, maybe better than, any kid of his age. His mum was right, it all worked out. I mention this kid because when I saw Beyond Good and Evil running in last Friday’s workshop I recognized that it came from the same stable as Spiro the Dragon, his favourite game. You never forget great art, and it’s always good to discover new examples. I’m convinced, more than ever after having done this course, that having the means to extend ourselves in to new areas is the best thing about being alive right now. Of course it helps to be exposed to this stuff when you’re a kid, but as there were no Playstations back in my day I enrolled in ENGL242 partly as an attempt to compensate. I do hope that constitutes a legitimate reason.

Highlights of the course – discovering Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s surprisingly fresh (for me) way of analyzing sometimes already familiar texts, and Stuart Moulthrop. Hegirascope is a huge heap of smart-ass one-liners, hokey geek-jokes, and occasionally brilliant writing – plus, of course, a bunch of other stuff which I’m presently unable to adequately categorise. Towed out into the international waters of the web some years back, it sits there blinking, possibly incubating, maybe decomposing. I had no idea it was there, but I’m definitely going back for another look.