Two examples that exist today.
A first is the experience of simulating a person of another gender in cyberspace. This happens routinely when men play women and women play men in virtual environments. They might be doing it in a MUD; they might be doing it in a conversation in a chat room. When you present yourself as a person of another gender, you quickly realize things about "being" that gender in social interactions that might have been invisible to you before. Men who play women routinely comment on how much more "help" they are offered on-line. Conversely, women who experiment with playing men routinely comment on how little help they are offered. The men may go on to reflect on how it feels to be offered unsolicited assistance. Does it feel like nurturing or condescension, seduction or harassment? The women may go on to reflect on how "help" has shaped them: has its availability made them more likely to see themselves as people who needed it?
A second example is playing a simulation game such as SimCity. It has been noted that race is an "absent" category in this game at the same time that it is "present" as an unnamed, ghostly factor in urban violence. When we subject our simulations to this kind of scrutiny (what is there in social life that we are unwilling to see and name and acknowledge?), we can begin to deconstruct our simulations. This is important to do for games such as SimCity because they will increasingly be the tools through which children learn to think through the complexities of social life.
