The pressure's building. Bells. Whistles. Clack, clack, clack. Zonk zonk. Swish, swoosh. Kapowie. Level one, level two, level three. Wah, wah. Game over.
Help! My precious kids want deluxe video games for the holidays. Almost all of their friends (so they say) have them: Wii. X-Box. PlayStation. Game Boy.
So far, for the most part, we've kept these addictive, brain-numbing, time-destroying technologies away from our household. My kids actually read books, believe it or not. They play outdoors. They distinguish between their friends who are "indoors" kids (i.e., gamers) versus those who are "outdoors" kids (basketball, soccer, tag, pogo-sticking, skateboarding, roller skating, jump roping, running around, play-playing).
Mind you, we're not latter-day Luddites. We haven't sealed our kids off completely from the steady-stream of corporate-sponsored electronic gadgetry aimed right at their neural pleasure points. Along the way we've granted them limited and screened access to television, movies, and some low-level computer games (especially the educational variety aimed at really young children). But long ago they graduated from Dora the Explorer and Arthur. They want more. And the next round of high-definition, eye-popping, adrenalin-pumping graphics and world-enveloping interactivity frightens me. I just see the potential for wasting a good chunk of their young lives on a time-devouring activity that produces negligible derivative benefits (don't tell me about improved hand-eye coordination from hitting the space key). I'm afraid that these glitzy entertainment centers will crowd out the slower virtues of life: Creativity. Character. Community.
Am I being old-fashioned? Am I wrong about this? Should we, as parents, be holding the line, or should we just let them go at it, acceding to the ubiquity of digitization, trusting that cultural advances come in generational waves that make sense only in retrospect, like the Beatles and disco.
We made the crucial mistake a while back of allowing just a few of these insidious devices into their lives. Last year, we bought each of them a tamagotchi. The little thing looked cute and harmless--and lots of their friends had them clipped to their school backpacks. We thought (read: rationalized) that taking care of your on-screen tamagotchi pet might impart a small lesson in responsibility. But then tamagotchis connect to an on-line world called Tamagotchi Town, with seductive games and spellbinding whatnot.
That gateway drug led to something called Club Penguin. And that on-line experience led to something called Webkinz. Does the general Huffpo readership realize how wildly popular the Webkinz stuffed animals, along with their computer-based avatars, are among the grade school crowd?
My kids now request "Webkinz play dates," where they get together with their flesh-and-bones friends to play on-line with their respective Webkinz on-screen animals, apparently obviating the need for playing with each other face-to-face outdoors. When your graphics engine produces a much more fast-paced, technicolored experience than does the sun-drenched outside world, why settle for the latter?
From my perspective, my little boy needs a new bike. My little girl could use a new tennis racket. It kind of breaks my heart to know in advance that if they receive a new bike and a new tennis racket for Christmas instead of a new Wii, they will be sorely disappointed. They think they'd rather learn to play Wii tennis, which they can master instantly with a wave of the magic wand, whereas learning to play tennis on a true-to-life hard court takes some time and discipline. Problem is, for young kids, learning Wii tennis versus learning actual tennis is a mutually exclusive, zero-sum proposition.
My wife is weakening. "Maybe we can strike a balance and limit their playing time." I just don't think it works that way, much like you don't allow just a few drags from a crack pipe. But who wants to play the heavy during the holidays? And what parents want their kids to be ostracized as the non-Wii nerds? Maybe it's a lost cause: We can't just stuff their stockings with retro-toys from our childhood eras.
Huffpo readers: Give us strength! Give us advice! Give us reassurance! Give us perspective! Make sense of this Wii-world for us. Maybe a virtual community of knowledgeable insiders is the best place to look for the proper limits to our techno-mediated activities. Or is it too late to draw a line in the sand?