Dear Dave

  Nintendo - not so stupid after all

Dear Dave,

I picked up a secondhand Nintendo DSi the other day. We had two DSs already but Marie has suddenly taken quite an interest in Mario and the investment was worth it in order to ensure peace on our next long train journey. Four hundred miles of my three children taking it in turns to whine, 'Is it my turn yet?' doesn't sound like fun. Now they can all play Mario Party together wirelessly and I can have a nap. Fantastic.

Before I told the kids about the DSi, I got them to decide how much they'd be willing to pay towards a hypothetical one from their Christmas cash reserves. I was quite surprised how enthusiastic they were about the whole idea. After a little negotiating, I even managed to turn a small profit...

I had a little secret play on it before handing it over (for research purposes, of course). After the Wii, I'm a little suspicious of Nintendo's hardware output. The pointing and motion controls of a wiimote seem to be harder for small children to get to grips with than the sticks and buttons of a normal control pad. Even for adults, the experience can often be fiddly and intrusive. Only a handful of games wouldn't work just as well (if not better) on the GameCube. Half of that handful have involved me buying extra gizmos and attachments. All in all, the Wii has been hype over substance.

The DS is different, though. The combination of touch screen and normal buttons make it in many ways a superior games machine than either the PlayStation Portable or iPod Touch. This fact has just been rather obscured by a deluge of low-budget brain training software, cartoon tie-ins and pony simulators.

The DSi plays DS games and has some interesting but inessential extra features - internet browsing over wi-fi, game downloads, MP3 playback, two cameras and some photo manipulation software. These are fun but the machine doesn't do much which I haven't got two gadgets capable of doing already. It wouldn't have been worth upgrading from a DS but seeing as we needed an extra one...

I couldn't help noticing a couple of design flaws, however. The lack of a slot for Game Boy Advance games is something of a loss, for instance. That said, the biggest problem is that although the thing is compatible with WPA wi-fi encryption, the DS games it plays are not - they still only work with WEP. This sounds technical and dull and it is. You can't really imagine exactly how technical, dull and frustrating it actually is unless you have a Pokémon-mad nine-year-old who wants to trade virtual creatures with strangers in Puerto Rico but can't do so without you re-configuring your entire home network in a security-compromising fashion... Gah.

I also discovered that however low you set the console's volume, it still makes a lound whirr-click noise when a photo is taken. I shook my head at this, envisioning the irritation and embarrassment this is liable to cause me everywhere we go. There are plenty of places that I'd prefer we didn't draw attention to ourselves. Four hundred miles of whirr-click could easily surround us with irate fellow passenger. Not only that but they're all going to be aware that my kids are taking photos of them, merging their faces together and then defacing them with technicolour beards. This could severely hamper my napping.

The morning after the children got their hands on the DSi, however, I began to understand some of Nintendo's reasoning a little better. As I wandered the house, I heard the kids giggling close by. They were clearly up to something but I almost didn't investigate. It was early, I didn't have my glasses on and I wasn't sure I wanted to know what they were waving around in my general direction.

Since the DSi can post photos directly to Facebook and I was only wearing a towel, I was quite glad of a whirr-click noise to let me know what was going on...

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

Labels: computer games

 
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2:45 PM - Permanent Link - 0 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  Crime and punishment

Dear Dave,

I miss owning a cage.

I suppose that technically it was a play-pen but that's just marketing spin. It was a cage. When the kids were small, I could simply banish them to the cage whenever they were acting up. A few minutes of sulking or yelling in there and they soon calmed down. As a bonus, while incarcerated, they were much less of a danger to themselves, me or each other.

If they attempted escape, I could lift them back in. If things got really bad, I could leave the kids loose and climb in myself, curling up for a quick doze, safe from the screaming horde. (Ours had a nice padded base - soft, warm and machine-washable. Bliss.)

Merely the threat of a quick stint behind bars was often enough to cool any situation. As they got bigger, though, toddler prison became less convincing (and, besides, we needed more floor space to cope with the piles of LEGO and Pokémon). The play-pen went the way of the crib, cot, and high-chair.

Now the kids get sent to their rooms when they've been misbehaving. This is OK but not the same. Their rooms are too full of fun stuff to act as successful penitentiaries. It's like open prison compared with the high-security lockdown of the play-pen. There's no saying they'll actually want to leave when the five minutes is up.

Also, Marie and Lewis share a room so if they get both get banished at the same, the resulting pandemonium can be worse than whatever went before.

I'm actually finding it quite hard to think of ways to encourage Marie to behave. My boys aren't too fussed about being sent to their rooms but it's usually enough for them to get the message. Marie, however, can be completely unfazed by the experience. Even when her bed is emptied of its normal 507 toys and she's told to sit on it until she's willing to comply with household regulations, there's no guessing how long she'll stubbornly hold out. Sometimes she'd rather whine for two hours than say sorry.

Another example of her resistance involves breakfast. On school days, the kids have to be done with their toast by 8:30 or we're struggling to get to school on time. When Fraser was in Primary 1, he struggled with this concept, no matter how many times I told him to hurry up. He overran almost every day. Then I told him he wouldn't get to take a snack with him if he wasn't finished on time... I still had to goad him on but I only had to follow through with the threat a couple of times. The possibility of missing out on his Coco-Pop bar was sufficient incentive to eat quickly.

Marie doesn't care. She happily goes without her tub of raisins every other day. If some different misdemeanour means she doesn't get her tea-time dessert, she just shrugs. If her behaviour costs her a treat or some stickers or a trip, she knows there'll be another day. In the meantime, she's deriving too much satisfaction from digging in her heels and shrieking.

She can be hard work.

Of course, the way to virtually guarantee cooperation from the boys is to suggest they're jeopardising their computer game privileges. The prospect of a day or two devoid of Mario can bring them into line almost instantly. I don't invoke the possibility frequently, though - things have to be pretty desperate before I'm willing to risk a couple of days of having to entertain them without the aid of an implausibly acrobatic Italian plumber and his pals. Like the nuclear deterrent, it's only going to lead to mutually assured destruction.

I did decide to try the tactic on Marie at the weekend, however. She's been showing some interest in the Wii and DS since Christmas - nowhere near as much as the boys but enough to make the threat of their withdrawal worth a shot. She'd gone into meltdown at the mention of putting on her shoes and wasn't responding to any other bribes or cajoling, so I thought I might as well give it a go.

No dice. The tantrum didn't abate and she brought down 36 Nintendo-free hours upon herself. She didn't care...

...at first.

By the following afternoon, barely ten minutes went by without her saying, "Can I play computer games yet? I've been really good." I stuck to my guns. She didn't get to play until the next morning. She wasn't sweating and shaking by then but it may have been close.

That evening, she started a strop when told to get ready for bed. I casually mentioned another computer game embargo. To my astonishment, she instantly leapt up and scurried off to locate her pyjamas.

It's still not as good as a cage but it's getting there...

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

PS A couple of discipline points that have come to my attention recently:

• After my kids have served their time, I always ask them, "Do you know why you were sent to your room?"
  
  They always reply, "Yes."
  
  On cross-examination, however, they never do.
• When I want the children to do something, they hardly ever do it immediately. I find giving them a count of five in which to obey works well. It allows them time to argue and whinge but sets a definite deadline. I can also speed up and slow down the count to chivvy them along or give them some leeway.
  
  Unfortunately, they do have a tendency to leave compliance to the very last moment. I end up counting, "One... Two... ... Three... ... ... Four... ... ... ... F... F... Fi-nally." They come within micro-seconds of punishment. To my mind, this is leaving things a touch too late.
  
  It turns out this may be down to miscommunication rather than brinkmanship, though. I discovered yesterday that when Sarah's in charge, she counts to six.
  
  This explains a lot.

Labels: children, computer games

 
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9:45 AM - Permanent Link - 0 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  When computer games go bad

Dear Dave,

The kids are all finally back at school. Hurrah! That only took a week. Doubtless one of them will come down with something else in a couple of days but, in the meantime, it makes a nice change not having anyone in the house lying around under a blanket, sighing deeply. Being stuck inside for so long as been a little much on occasion. At last there's no more bickering over whose turn it is to play the Wii and I can open a window and do something about the smell of stale children in the lounge.

Phew.

Anyway, it's been a long week full of grumpiness, illness and TV involving annoying puppets. My patience is running low. I've also had to witness the kids play quite a number of computer games. Some of them have been good and some of them have been bad but the children have been too under the weather to care.

I haven't.

It's set me to pondering where bad games come from. Obviously, at a basic level, making a bad computer game is incredibly easy. You hire the cheapest team you can find, set them to work on an interactive version of an upcoming animated family movie and then insist they have it finished by a fortnight on Thursday. This technique never fails. That said, it's also a bit like creating a TV movie about three blokes digging a hole. The chances of it being anything but awful are so slim, no one will go near it. They might give it a quick shot if they're lying around under a blanket, sighing deeply on a weekday afternoon, but they'll soon switch over to something else.

Far worse are games that are good enough to want to finish but that contain easily fixed issues which cause the player to swear in frustration on a regular basis. Where do these games come from? It's stupefying. I so frequently play games with major flaws that could have been corrected with minimal effort, I can only assume that designers introduce the problems on purpose. Perhaps it's a clever trick to give them some straightforward improvements for the sequel.

In case you ever get the urge to design a bad computer game yourself, here's a list of stuff to include:

• A final boss that's ten times harder than the rest of the game - Game too short? You could add extra levels, different game modes and some additional side challenges. Or you could just triple the length of the final enemy's life bar and force the player to do the last half hour of the game over and over again until they finally get lucky and kill the thing...
  
  ...only to discover it's not really dead and they have to fight it again. In the dark. Armed with only a carrot.
  
  Hey, if they get totally stuck, they can always go watch the ending on YouTube.


• The whole game again... but backwards! - Not content with merely making the final boss too hard? Make the player traipse back through the entire game to find it.


• And then forwards again - Even better, leave the boss at the end but put a door in the way. Make the player have to traipse back to find the key.
  
  Players will really love the extra value for money they're receiving. They may even like the idea so much that the next time they go to the cinema, they'll insist on watching the middle of the film three times before they get to see the last ten minutes.


• An unhelpful save system - This is perhaps the simplest way to make a great game almost unplayable for normal people. Just don't put save points in the middle of long levels. That way, if there's a power cut or they have to stop (because a child is vomiting, for instance), it's right back to the start. To really rub it in, include mid-level checkpoints but no way to save them.
  
  For an extra element of surprise, make save points twenty minutes apart, except for a few that have an hour in between them. This will regularly catch out players attempting to sneak in a quick section before bed.


• Excessive darkness - Make the game full of shadows and coal mines so players spend the whole time leaning forward and squinting at the screen to locate all the important small, black objects they need to find...


• Excessive brightness - ...but then throw in the occasional jaunt to the surface of the sun so they're spending more time fighting with the brightness menu on their TV than playing.


• Fiddly motion control - Why let players press a button to open a door when you can force them to reach out with the controller, turn it and pull it back? That's far more immersive. Particularly since it's uncomfortable when sitting down and doesn't work half the time.
  
  Making a quick shake in one direction perform a reload while also having a quick shake in a very similar direction perform a 180 degree turn is always good for a laugh.
  
  This is option is currently restricted to Wii but it's coming to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in 2010. Start coding now!


• Meaningless difficulty selection - Designing something that's too easy or too hard is a slightly lazy way of creating a bad game. Add a touch of style by making it the player's fault. Let them choose a difficulty level from at least five options but without giving them any clue as to what difference the choice makes. Only allow them to choose before the game starts and don't let them change their mind without starting a new game. They're bound to get halfway through and wish they'd made a different choice.
  
  Of course, you could make the game do exactly the same thing whichever option they choose. But that would be evil...


• A complicated, but dull, back story - So, you have a bald space marine who has to run through endless corridors fighting horrific creatures? That's kind of generic. Better make your game stand out by having it all to do with a war between the Volban and Arg'jan over the future of Hascan supplies left behind by the GRR/kan, as retold by fffffffFxxx units scattered throughout Losdan by the advance Saswan team consisting of the marine's ex-wife and best friends. Add some incomprehensible flashbacks and a touch of betrayal.
  
  Sigh.


• No plot recap - For best results, briefly mention several vital plot details at about half an hour into the game. Don't refer to them again for the next fifteen levels until they turn the whole story on its head. At this point, assume the player recalls the information perfectly. So what if it's been six weeks since they played that bit? They should have been paying attention.
  
  Bonus points if the info is in the original game but the big reveal isn't until the sequel...


• A dodgy translation - Nothing makes a hackneyed plot and complicated back story more enjoyable than a stack of non sequiturs and some garbled grammar (apart from maybe plenty of atrocious voice acting and characters who spakest in pretendye Medieval parlance, forsoothe!).
  
  Watch out, though. Mess up and poor translation can become a bonus feature. I was playing a game the other day in which I kept having to open lots of 'difficult chests'. These were impressive and gaudy but, strangely, they all opened really easily. I only figured out what was going on when I was opening one of the plain, ordinary, 'simple chests' that were also lying around. I laughed quite hard.


• Lots of alarms - If someone is breaking out of a prison or breaking into an alien stronghold or just plain breaking stuff almost anywhere, they should expect that some alarms are going to go off eventually. It's even a good indicator that they've been detected and it's time to run away. Alarms are great... in moderation.
  
  When a fire alarm goes off in real life, it should keep blaring until the fire brigade arrives or the building burns down. It's only sensible. In a game, however, ten seconds is plenty long enough to blast out a noise which is designed to be grating. This being the case, you should consider having the thing wail for at least fifteen minutes.
  
  For added irritation, make the section after the alarms go off really difficult so the player has to repeat it many times. Also throw in plenty of dialogue and verbal instructions so they can't turn the sound down.

And there we have it. A few suggestions to get you going. How they normally get past QA is a mystery, though. Many of these issues could be fixed in an afternoon. Maybe they're such a fundamental part of gaming culture that everyone simply puts up with them. No one thinks, 'Hey, it doesn't have to be this way...'

...

Hmmm... Maybe this sort of thing doesn't just happen with games. Perhaps I should go ask the kids what I do all the time that really drives them up the wall. You never know, I might be able to improve their customer experience without much effort.

First, however, I think I'll go test the batteries in the smoke alarms...

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

Labels: computer games, PS3, sickness, Wii, Xbox 360

 
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10:15 AM - Permanent Link - 0 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  PEGI peril

Dear Dave,

That's an interesting question. There really are plenty of factors to be taken into consideration. You have to reflect on any number of emotional, moral, philosophical and logistical issues. Even then, the answer is by no means clear cut and the ramifications of your decision could still be affecting your dealings with your children when they're teenagers. It's tricky. I mean, seriously, good luck. Great men and women have pondered this one for decades and still not found a definitive response. Perhaps there isn't one. Perhaps every parent must find their own way...

Yes, I'm afraid you're going to have to decide for yourself. Is Scooby Doo! suitable for a nearly two-year-old? I couldn't tell you. Is Scooby-Doo! suitable for your nearly two-year-old? Well, that's up to you.

If it's any help, the live-action version was Lewis' favourite movie at that age and we saw it every meal time for a month. Marie, meanwhile, still shrieks and hides under the table while viewing the cartoon. That doesn't stop her wanting to watch it but it's pretty annoying if I'm trying to have a quiet lunch and makes me less inclined to put the show on. She's nearly five.

Of course, I never had these problems when Fraser was small. Without older children around to work a remote, I was able to keep him blissfully unaware for years of any programmes other than Teletubbies and Balamory. If anything, I was concerned he was living in a sheltered world of cute, fluffy creatures and twee aphorisms well past an age where he should have been learning from a gluttonous dog how to spot con-artists in rubber masks. It was actually a relief when he graduated to trashy cartoons and started watching animated cats and mice beat seven shades of slapstick out of each other.

For the last couple of years, though, it's been a struggle to maintain an appropriate viewing schedule that keeps all three children mostly happy most of the time while still providing an adequate number of fluffy aphorisms to morally educate the youngest and a sufficient supply of villains and comic peril to entertain the other two. I've messed up on occasion - the Dr Who spin-off, The Sarah Jane Adventures, is still way too scary for Marie, for example - but generally it's gone OK. Thanks to my prior knowledge of many of the shows available and to the usually sensible broadcasting policies of kids' TV channels, I can effectively evaluate what's on and judiciously censor what my children see. Sorted.

Life is even easier with computer games. They have handy age ratings on the box to let me know whether they contain material unsuitable for my assorted offspring.

At least they used to...

Someone somewhere is clearly trying to make my life harder. Games used to have the possibility of two age ratings on them, one from Pan European Game Information (PEGI) and the other from the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). All games had a PEGI rating of 3+, 7+, 12+, 16+ or 18+ and those given a 12+ or higher were also examined by the BBFC to see whether they needed a legally enforceable* 12, 15 or 18 rating. The BBFC ratings were the important ones since they were based on the same criteria as for films and had the same logos. Any parent paying the slightest bit of attention could spot a BBFC rating and know what kind of thing to expect, no matter whether they played games themselves or not.

Unfortunately, having two rating systems was confusing. Last year, the Byron Report into the risks faced by children from the internet and video games noted that many people mistook the PEGI rating as an indicator of difficulty rather than of mature content. Tanya Byron recommended stream-lining the system and concentrating on the BBFC ratings because everyone knows what they mean.

I'm guessing some European politics and a lack of resources at the BBFC got in the way of that. The government opted to go solely for the PEGI ratings and they're now legally enforceable.

The problem is, PEGI ratings make no sense.

Really. I can't tell from a PEGI rating whether a game is suitable for my kids or not. I play games - goodness knows what it's like for parents who don't.

For a start, PEGI has to cater to the sensibilities of every member country. If the Portuguese happen to find the mere image of a banana sexually suggestive or the Danes have a problem with boomerangs or the Swiss find rabbits terrifying, then it affects the rating in a way that's incomprehensible to a UK audience.

PEGI is also much stricter than the BBFC system. Almost any violence involving humans brings a minimum rating of 12+. I recently played G.I. Joe on the Wii and was truly amazed to find it has a 16+ certificate. It involves lots of shooting but it's about as realistic and immersive as Space Invaders. Enemies in the game are faceless, bloodless and gormless - paint them silver and they'd be robots. The whole thing is totally what you'd expect from a game based around action figure soldiers for under-10s and contains less questionable material than the old black-and-white war films I used to watch as a kid on weekday afternoons on BBC2. Nonetheless, a fifteen-year-old can't buy it. To put this in perspective, a twelve-year-old can pick up a copy of Quantum of Solace on DVD without a problem.

As a bonus, there's no obvious consistency to the PEGI ratings. Ratchet & Clank involves a similar gameplay style and level of shooting as G.I. Joe but that's a 7+. (Remember children, it's wrong to shoot people. It's absolutely fine to go nuclear on any aliens you happen to meet, though...) Trials HD features motorcycle assault courses where your realistically-modelled rider comes to life-threatening grief every few seconds with a splatter of blood and the snap of bone. I'm all for my children associating motorbikes with horrifying injury, but 3+? I'm not convinced. Obscure 2 has mutilated corpses, shooting, chainsaws, drug use, extensive sexual references, gore and evil monsters which leap out of the undergrowth. It's understandably a 16+ but this makes the rating of G.I. Joe yet more bizarre. The two games are on the same shelf but in different leagues.

To add to the confusion, PEGI seems to have made its ratings harsher at some point. Take the Super Smash Brothers series, for instance. Super Smash Brothers Melee on the GameCube is a 3+ but Super Smash Brothers Brawl on Wii is a 12+ despite being nearly identical in terms of gameplay and graphics. In both, Nintendo characters attempt to knock each other off the screen using Popeye levels of violence. I would struggle to tell them apart and yet the age ratings are radically different. One is allegedly fine for a passing toddler to watch while the other should be kept away from anyone who isn't at least at secondary school.

After a quick glance through my kids' game collection, I suspect this change in criteria happened in the last year or two, meaning there'll be a good mix of games graded differently still in stores. Great.

The upshot of all this is that in spite of having a keen interest in monitoring my childrens' viewing choices, I'm reasonably happy to ignore the PEGI rating on a game. The things are simply unreliable. Worse, they're almost certain to make me look like a totalitarian idiot if I try to enforce them:

12-year-old: I want to play G.I. Joe.
Parent: You can't. It's a 16+.
12-year-old: I saw Dan playing it at his house. It's just like Ratchet & Clank and you let me play that.
Parent: That's a 7+.
12-year-old: But they're the same. One's just got action figures instead of aliens.
Parent: Yeah, I know.
12-year-old: So I can play it?
Parent: No.
12-year-old: Why not?
Parent: Because it says on the box.
12-year-old: But why?
Parent: I dunno. Maybe it has boomerangs and bananas.
12-year-old: What?
Parent: Er...
12-year-old: So can I play it or not?
Parent: Well... I... Erm... Look here's a DVD. Leave me alone and go watch James Bond graphically kill some people in cold-blooded revenge, will you?

The PEGI system might be legally enforceable at point of sale now but it would be an idiotic struggle for parents to comprehensively police it at home. If some 12+ games seem acceptable for a pre-schooler and some 16+ releases appear vastly more suitable for a seven-year-old than the average episode of Emmerdale, the ratings are bound to be disregarded sometimes. This makes them counter-productive. Every game purchase is open to becoming a pester-power nightmare as kids whine at length that a title isn't any more mature than something else they've already played. Without a reliable rating scheme, parents are left to discern suitability from the publisher's blurb on the back of the box. More than that, there's a huge risk that parents and children alike will assume that all the ratings handed out are overly restrictive. If one 16+ has no discernible dubious content, then maybe the others are all fine too. Thus the chance of children playing unsuitable games is actually increased.

Don't get me wrong. I'm heavily in favour of a strong, consistent rating system where, when my children demand an inappropriate game, I can point to an age on the box and end the argument. I'm just a little upset that we don't have that anymore.

I took the kids to GAME recently to blow the last of the vouchers we had lying around from Christmas. Thanks to a convenient sale, we collected an impressively high tower of merchandise and headed for the till. The haul included a primate-exploitation simulator, a recreation of post-Apocalyptic survival, a replica plumber-eating monster and a game about heroically saving the world from extra-terrestrial invasion. The assistant scanned Super Monkey Ball, Wall-E: The Game and the fluffy Goomba without a second glance and then raised an eyebrow as he held up a box with a stark picture of an alien skull on the front. "Is this for you, sir?"

"Uh-huh," I nodded, resisting the urge to make a smart comment about how the cuddly toy was for me but my four-year-old was really looking forward to turning E.T. into entrails.

"We have to check. Sometimes parents don't notice the age ratings. We can't sell to adults if they're getting the game for a child."

I considered mentioning that although the kids would never see me slaughtering aliens, my four-year-old was quite likely to witness her brothers rolling cartoon monkeys around a maze (which apparently rates a 7+). On reflection, however, I concluded that this might not be such a wise conversational gambit. Instead, I muttered, "Yeah, I know," and then handed over the vouchers and made a hasty retreat, pausing in my escape only long enough to subject the poor bloke to a five minute rant on the shortcomings of the PEGI system...

So, yeah, ultimately only you can decide about Scooby-Doo!. Think of it as practice for when Sam and Daisy are older. This censorship issue only gets harder and, frankly, as far as games go, we're on our own.

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

*STOP PRESS: Would you believe it? Someone in Margaret Thatcher's government forgot to phone the European Commission twenty-five years ago and so it turns out that none of the age restrictions on pre-recorded material have been legally binding in the UK since then. Shhhh! Nobody tell any teenagers for a few months until the current regime has rushed through some emergency legislation...

UPDATE: I emailed PEGI about Trials HD because I simply couldn't believe the 3+ rating and thought it was a mistake. They were very nice but gave the following explanation:

"We have examined the game Trials HD before the rating licence was issued and we did not encounter any violence in this game. The biker can fall of his bike, but then he becomes a ragged doll. We did not encounter any clear depictions of injuries.

"The difference between this game and a game like Super Smash Brothers, is that in Super Smash Brothers, you can find depictions of violence. You can actively beat someone up, this is the whole purpose of the game. Trials HD is in essence a bike-game and does not show any violent acts."

I'm a little bemused. Personally, when it comes to my four-year-old daughter watching her brothers play computer games, I'm OK with the Tom & Jerry style violence of Super Smash Brothers Brawl but I'm much less certain about a guy endlessly breaking his neck in a warehouse full of shadows and flame. Just call me old-fashioned...

Oh, and I was apparently right about them having drastically changed their criteria. Fantastic.

Labels: computer games, PS3, Wii, Xbox 360

 
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9:15 AM - Permanent Link - 2 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  Play hard, work hard

Dear Dave,

There are many issues facing a stay-at-home dad. Some are practical, such as when to get sleep, where to take the kids when it's raining and how to avoid standing in puddles of pee. Others are more psychological, from maintaining a healthy level of self-worth in a society obsessed with status and the acquisition of material goods, to learning to phase out children's television before suffering excessive mental trauma. It always surprises me, however, that even with all my preparation and experience, I still face fresh challenges on a regular basis.

My current dilemma is to do with hobbies:

Try as I might, I can't keep the kid's TV out of my brain entirely and I've noticed many stories about pushy fathers teaching their hobbies to their offspring, desperate for their children to be like them. You know the kind of thing: lumberjack dad wants short-sighted, geeky son to turn off his computer and take up bear wrestling, or professor dad wants girlie daughter to cast aside her dreams of pop stardom and give entomology a proper chance... It usually plays out with the child gaining the self-confidence to argue back and persuade their parents to let them be themselves.

Real life is seldom as extreme. For instance, my dad would probably have liked me to enjoy sailing - he enjoys sailing himself and having an extra crew member is always useful. Unfortunately, I have mild agoraphobia which is brought on by a light wind and lots of open sky and that is exacerbated by engine noise. A hobby involving flapping sails, the Norfolk broads and an outboard motor was never really going to be my thing. I put up with our infrequent Sunday afternoon excursions but I didn't volunteer for them.

I have fonder memories of making Airfix models with my dad. The smell of solvents still takes me back to happy times attempting to glue little bits of plastic together to produce a vaguely recognisable representation of a ship or airplane. In retrospect it must have been torture for him as I waved a sharp knife around and then clumsily attached pieces squint.

We frequently stuck our own fingers together.

Even when I was eight, I couldn't help noticing that HMS Victory was a trifle shonky and Titanic looked somewhat post-iceberg (particularly after it fell off its display on top of the TV a couple of times). Nonetheless, I'm glad we had those evenings together. Dads sharing the occasional evening or Sunday afternoon inflicting their favourite pastime on their children is part of growing up.

Well, at least it is when the dad is out at work the rest of the week. My boys have a different experience. Just like me, they love board games involving little plastic orcs and also any sort of computer game. They're always wanting to share my hobbies.

Always.

Don't get me wrong - it's great digging out a board game I haven't played for twenty years and playing it with them. The problem is that I'm not merely around at weekends and for the hour before bed-time. I'm here all the time. They can pester me constantly and demand to play games over and over again.

Worse still, they have a tendency to beat me. I can hold my own when playing them one-on-one in a game of pure strategy, such as Chess, but in a three-player game which involves both strategy and luck they've quickly learnt that the best tactic is to gang up on me first before fighting it out with each other. I lose a lot. Although that's better than when I play them at computer games - with those, the boys have had so much practice, they can defeat me before I've entirely worked out which buttons to press. This leaves them extra time to remorselessly mock me...

Getting soundly thrashed ten times in a row at New Super Mario Brothers, despite my best efforts and spraining my thumbs, isn't fun. Having to set up an army of plastic goblins for the third epic battle of the afternoon (while also entertaining Marie) starts to wear thin. It's all a little too much like work.

I suppose, on the bright side, it's better than having to repeatedly play Scrabble or Mouse Trap with them but sometimes I'd love to slip away to get some peace. What would I do, though? My favourite pastimes are becoming subverted. I normally take a break by playing a game. What do I do to take a break from playing games?

I need to find a new hobby that I know the boys will hate, just to get some space. Let's see. What's going to put them off the most?

• Being outdoors.
• Plenty of physical work.
• A lack of gadgets.
• Wind and rain.
• Having to go a long way to get there.
• Loud engine noises.
• A high probability of getting wet.
• Lots of...

Hey... Hang on a minute...

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

Labels: computer games, housedad

 
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9:30 AM - Permanent Link - 2 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  Sex, cake and direction of travel

Dear Dave,

I was thinking the other day that it must be time to have another rant about a survey to do with parenting. I didn't have a particular survey in mind but, you know, it's been a while. I considered hunting around for one, then I decided not to bother. Poorly reported pieces of research are like health scares - there's bound to be one before long.

Sure enough, three have been brought to my attention in the last week or so. At least one of them is also a health scare. Yeh!

I had to laugh when I saw a tagline asking 'Is there too much sex in videogames?' because sex barely features in games at all. On investigation, I found the related article cites a recent YouGov survey as finding 74% of parents are worried about sexual content in games. It then goes on to list the ten most sexually explicit games ever in an effort to show that, really, there's not much to worry about. Sadly, that's all very well, but the survey actually found that 74% of parents are concerned about the content in general of some videogames. To be honest, this is only right and proper - there are plenty of games out there that children shouldn't have access to. Parents ought to be keeping an eye on what they're kids are playing. Even the game companies are quick to encourage this, since parents exerting more control over their childrens' habits is really the only way to stop the kids encountering inappropriate material. The big news here is, in fact, that 26% of parents don't know or don't care about the content of any videogames. Let's just hope their kids don't play them...

Meanwhile, in England, the government is running a health campaign trying to persuade parents that getting their kids to do some exercise and eat healthier food is good for them and will help them live longer. Allegedly, feeding children cake the whole time simply isn't good parenting:



Obvious? Er, yeah. Unfortunately, the games industry hasn't been too pleased with some of the adverts:



There have been loud rumblings that it's unfair to single out computer games, since there's no definitive evidence linking them with obesity and surely everything from books to cars are blame. What about the exercise people get from playing the Wii? How dare the government denigrate such an important and creative industry!? Sony should sue!

Unfortunately, this makes games industry spokespeople sound like tobacco execs from the 1970s. Clearly, sitting around playing computer games every day while eating cakes isn't going to do wonders for anyone's health. Better to admit it and move on. Computer games aren't being singled out as an easy target, they're simply top of the list of sedentary pastimes favoured by kids. The adverts aren't claiming computer games are evil, they're encouraging parents to exert more control over their kids' habits to make sure they get some exercise. This is exactly the same kind of control the games industry is constantly trying to encourage in an effort to shift onto parents the responsibility for controlling access to violent games. Videogames already have age restrictions and scary warnings about taking regular breaks in order to avoid photosensitive seizures. Including some suggestions to go and play outside every so often to avoid turning into a tub of lard wouldn't be hard.

Of course, it should be noted that parents can get too concerned about controlling what experiences their children encounter. I stumbled across the whole forwards/backwards buggy thing again this week as well. The University of Dundee did some research into whether it makes a difference which way toddlers face while riding around. Apparently, those facing the world tend to have a slightly higher heart rate, while those facing their parent get talked to more, laugh more, cry more and are more likely to fall asleep. Somewhere along the line these results got interpreted by the papers to show that forward-facing buggies produce stressed kids with poor communication skills. This certainly isn't a justified conclusion, however. Kids facing out-the-way see lots of stuff to get excited about and those facing in-the-way get more of a chat. Who knows which is 'better' in the long-run?

Although I frequently had my kids in our forward-facing buggy for a couple of hours a day when they were small, there were only three normal scenarios:

• They were asleep, so chatting wouldn't have been hugely worthwhile.
• I was trying to get them to sleep, so I was avoiding chatting to them.
• I was desperately trying to keep them awake, so I was chatting to them for all I was worth or getting them to do the actions to a rousing chorus of If you're happy and you know it as we manoeuvred round Tesco.

With a rear-facing buggy I wouldn't have had to shout and I might have frightened fewer little old ladies at the shops with my singing but that would have been the only major difference. It's probably safe to say that any child with a parent concerned enough for their well-being to be worried about the effects of buggy-facing, isn't going to be lacking in attention or stimulation, whichever option is eventually picked. If I ever have to buy another buggy, it will be easily reclinable and foldable, and come with high enough handles, a wipe-clean cover and good storage space underneath. Only after dealing with these issues will I think about whether I want the vomit, coughs and sneezes to travel towards or away from me...

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

Labels: computer games, statistics, stuff

 
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10:30 AM - Permanent Link - 0 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  The scary blue yonder

Dear Dave,

The days are getting longer, the weather is unlikely to get much worse before it gets better and it's only a few weeks until the first flowers start coming out. Cheer up. In another couple of months you can start taking the kids to the swing-park on a regular basis again, rather than having to fight your way to the softplay through the icy rain. For now, enjoy the excuse to stay Inside. Crank up the heating, plonk Daisy in front of some Teletubbies and have a little doze on the sofa. You deserve it.

The rant in your last letter about being stuck indoors actually reminded me of something I read recently. I was helping a friend who is applying for UK residency revise for her Britishness Exam. This involved flicking through a book of multiple choice questions and asking any that caught my eye. I tended to home in on ones which were obscure or scary: How many members of the Scottish Parliament are there? When is St George's Day? Do women get the vote? Is it necessary to pass a test before driving a car?

The one that really got my attention, however, was about childcare. Without the book to hand, I can't remember the exact wording but it went something along these lines:

'Children in the UK do not play outside as much as they used to in the past. What reason is often given for this?

A - Increased danger from strangers.
B - They'd rather stay home and watch TV or play videogames.
C - Many parts of the country are infested with hordes of radioactive zombies.
D - Geoff Hurst in the 1966 World Cup final.'

Since glowing undead are restricted to small pockets of East Anglia and 'D' was clearly a trap for people who are too English (we've enough of them already and we don't need more), this only left 'A' and 'B' as likely options. It couldn't be 'A', though. Despite some dreadful cases receiving vast publicity, there's no evidence that attacks on children from strangers are increasing.

With a feeling of resignation, I checked the answer. It was, indeed, 'B'.

When I got to a computer, I looked up the study guide online. The reasons it gives for children staying home more are: TV and increased parental fear of attacks by strangers.

But is this really the case? For a start, TV and computer games are a symptom as much as a cause. If kids are at home anyway, they need something to do. And, let's face it, at the moment they're going to be at home a lot:

I helped out on a nursery trip yesterday. We took a bus to the general vicinity of Edinburgh Castle and then hiked up the Royal Mile to have our picture taken in front of the gate as part of Scottish Week. It was a chance for fresh air, exercise and a little culture - all the things kids allegedly can't be doing with these days. Sure enough, half of them were crying or pleading to go home after only ten minutes. This had more to do with the weather than a desire to plug themselves into a PlayStation, however. It was cold. The kind of cold where small children judder up and down uncontrollably while making noises like a moped. The snot wasn't quite freezing on their faces but it was close.

I haven't seen the photos yet. If there's one where we're all smiling, I'll be astonished...

Add to the miserable weather the fact that it's dark an hour after the boys emerge from school this time of year, and there's not much chance of us doing a great deal of outdoor playing. I'm glad they have their computer games to keep them occupied or they'd be constantly squabbling and amusing themselves by working out how to build Weapons of Mass Destruction from LEGO.

Of course, there's no saying my boys won't spend plenty of July Inside with the curtains drawn, waving wiimotes around. Even when the weather is nice, Outside can be pretty dull without friends around (unless you like hunting grasshoppers or talking to trees). This isn't the fault of computer games, as such. I used to spend my summer holidays reading books and playing board games against myself rather than venture into the garden. When a friend came round, that still didn't make enough people to play Tig, so we stayed Inside and played Monopoly.

I suppose once upon a time, in the good old days, there were always packs of children roaming the streets, so kids could head out the door and know there would almost certainly be someone to interact with. This critical mass of youngsters with the power to pull in others is now much less common. The problem becomes self-perpetuating - there's no one Outside to play with, so kids have no incentive to go Outside to be there for others to play with.

It's up to parents to shove them Outside to enjoy themselves, whether it's lonely and raining or not. So why isn't this happening? Well, I suspect that in the good old days, when people had twenty-seven children and only two rooms, they were only too desperate to chuck the kids out the door and clear some space to put the laundry on to boil. With a modern ratio of children to bedrooms that is much closer to parity, there's more stress to be had worrying what the kids are up to Outside than from tripping over them if they're lurking around Inside.

Never mind the potential danger from strangers, I'm much more afraid of cars, four-year-olds with sharpened sticks and climbing frames. Small children can find any number of ways to get themselves into difficulties, no matter how safe the environment seems.

Marie saw some other children playing in the small, enclosed park out the back door at the weekend and asked to join them. I was busy making lunch, so I got her coat on her and sent her out to fend for herself. I had some trepidation after last time, however. At the end of the summer, I let her run free in the park with a couple of older children but, within five minutes, one of the others came hurrying to get me. Marie needed help. She'd slid herself headfirst along a bench and halfway through the armrest at the end before getting stuck, leaving herself dangling over backwards in a painful fashion.

She'd been barely out of my sight, I had the door wide open and I was listening for trouble. I was still caught out.

Things went better this time but I was nervous, nonetheless. When the kids are Inside, I can hear what they're doing and I know instantly if there's a problem. Sometimes they can be left to their own devices for an hour at a time. If they're Outside, life isn't so simple. Once they're beyond the end of the garden, who knows what's going on?

The official guideline is that children under thirteen shouldn't be left unsupervised at home. If children are left in the care of an under-sixteen, then their parents are still legally responsible. And that's in the house. What about the world beyond that's full of cars, pointy sticks and malicious park benches? Surely the same principle applies?

Essentially, this means that if one of my kids wants to go Outside, I have to go with them. If I go, the others have to come too. A quick breath of fresh air becomes a family expedition and is much less likely to happen.

It's not the fault of computer games that kids don't play Outside so much. It's more to do with parents' justified fear of cars, public seating and just about everything else. Most of us are too afraid to admit it, though. It's easier blaming Nintendo.

Ho well, maybe that's too complicated for the Britishness Test to deal with. Perhaps the questions should stick to common knowledge that is less open to debate and will help people blend in. Might I suggest asking who won X Factor and which buttons to press in Wii Bowling?

Happy dozing.

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

Labels: children (vol.5), computer games

 
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8:00 AM - Permanent Link - 0 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  Stereotype confusion

Dear Dave,

I think our correspondence has affected me.

After years of sitting around at parent and toddler listening to mums share about their childbirth experiences, clueless partners and babies with sharp teeth, I'd got used to being the only man in the room. I'd learnt to blend. I knew when to interject with heartfelt opinions on child-wrangling and when to keep quiet and hide behind my cup of tea. This allowed me to fit in, even though I stood out. I was an honorary mum. I hadn't quite reached the stage of getting confused and referring to Sarah as 'my husband', but it was close.

Our letters have changed my outlook, however. It's been a relief to discuss computer games, gadgets, children and everything else from a properly male perspective; to talk about being a man in this woman's world with someone who understands.

Unfortunately, I've got a little too used to it.

Now the kids are older and I'm not at parent and toddler three times a week, I'm no longer constantly reminded that we're pretty much the only two housedads out there. People ask me what my job is, I tell them I look after my three kids and then I'm surprised when they do a double-take and start acting like they've chanced upon some bizarre combination of madman, Jedi and dodo. Fear and awe compete for control of their faces before being overcome by mild bewilderment. A housedad? Really?

You'd imagine I'd be used to this response but, after a year and a half of these letters, I've got to the point of thinking that housedads are commonplace.

I was reading a newspaper article about childcare last week and was totally thrown at the end of the second paragraph when the writer started talking about her husband. I'd totally assumed the piece had been written by a man. When I realised my mistake, I was momentarily astonished.

Honestly, who leaves a woman in charge of children? What next? Male doctors? It's just not right...

Upon returning to reality, I began to wonder in what other ways I've become confused.

The same day, I got sent some publicity material about a game called Baby Life that's coming out on the DS for Christmas. Players get to create their own baby and then help it grow up from 9 to 15 months, encouraging her/him to speak, move and behave.

My initial reaction, having had to help three children grow from 9 to 15 months in real life, was to experience nasty flashbacks to sleep deprivation and being covered in porridge. Why would anyone go through that for fun? Once the trauma had passed, though, I realised that the DS doesn't have smell-o-vision (or, indeed, splat-o-vision) and can be switched off at night. Hopefully this means the game gives the opportunity to feed a child unhealthy food, disrupt their sleep patterns and teach them bad habits without having to live through the consequences. (You know, like being a grandparent.) Even if not, it might be fun to experience the smiles and giggles without the nappies.

On consideration, I thought Marie might actually quite enjoy the game in a year or two...

Then I stopped the thought. Why had I assumed the boys wouldn't be interested? They're much more into computer games than Marie and they've already had practice nurturing animated pets - they spent days earning enough rings in some Sonic game in order to buy a little bird-creature its own TV. They didn't even mind too much when the bird-creature almost totally ignored the TV. They're natural parents.

Despite being a housedad myself, I'd jumped to the conclusion that a game about babies is for girls. Maybe this was because the publishers are aiming it at girls. Maybe it was because (despite my best efforts) my little girl is such a little girl, complete with an entirely pink wardrobe, nail varnish, sparkling jewellery, a love of art-and-craft and an obsession with princesses. Maybe it was simply plain old gender stereotyping.

I don't know. It did make me stop to consider how all three of my children might experience the game, though:

Fraser would teach the baby tricks but eventually become fed up with the lack of challenges and complain that there wasn't a Boss Baby to fight. Lewis, meanwhile, could become quite attached to his virtual offspring. He'd call her Splungewobble, care for her incessantly and insist I set a place for her at the kitchen table.

All in all, it's Marie who would play the game in the scariest way. She'd make a big fuss of understanding her baby's needs but then conduct experiments on him. ('He's hungry. Isn't he cute? I'll turn him upside down and put the porridge in his nappy. That will teach him to say please.')

Worryingly, she wants to be a doctor when she grows up.

I'm not going to try and work out how my kids would react to the accompanying Horse Life game. Between my stereotype confusion and their unwillingness to be pigeon-holed, there's little chance of guesswork and reality coinciding. I suppose I'll just have to put my preconceptions behind me and see what happens...

You never know, when the kids are older, things may have moved on to the point where men and women are able to fit in, whatever career or role they choose. Housedads will become commonplace and this whole topic will be academic.

Er... Probably best not to count on that, however.

We should let the kids know that society's expectations of them may differ from what they've experienced in our role-reversed households. Good luck explaining to Sam that not all men get to send a woman out to work while they stay home and play with LEGO.

If my boys are anything to go by, it may be a while before the poor little guy believes you.

Yours in a woman's world (still),

Ed.

Labels: computer games, housedad (vol.3)

 
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9:00 AM - Permanent Link - 2 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  No, Lara, left. Left!

Dear Dave,

Computer games have changed rather a lot in the twenty-five years since I started playing them. Back in the day, guiding a green spludge (that was allegedly a frog) up the screen, avoiding 'trucks' (long blue spludges) and leaping onto logs (long brown spludges), was the cutting edge of interactive entertainment. Now I can control incredibly detailed heroes through vast three-dimensional cities, exploring, stopping time and setting zombies on fire. (Ooh! Look at the reflections of the flames in the puddle!)

That's quite a change.

I've changed, too. I noticed hair growing out of my ears the other day. (This isn't such a welcome development.)

One thing which hasn't changed, however, is the strangled cry of frustrated rage I hear every so often. It usually comes from a young boy around about the time that whatever they're playing produces a definite GAME OVER noise. This tends to be something like a sinking scale on a trumpet: Wah, waah, waaaaah, waaaaaaah! It's not quite as iconic as the shrill scream of Lara falling off a high cliff but you can't miss it. The child concerned has been banished back to the last save point. They're not too happy about it.

I remember that cry from my own youth. It's the natural reaction when a green spludge dodges its way through a horde of long blue spludges only to drown in the middle of a river because there aren't anywhere near enough long brown spludges. (Surely if it really was a frog, it could swim? Oh, the injustice...)

I suppose there are two main types of frustration associated with computer games. The first is where you simply don't know what to. This is best exemplified by those old text adventures:

>You enter a dank cave. It is dark and smells bad. You see a goblin.
>HIT GOBLIN WITH AXE
>I don't understand.
>KILL GOBLIN WITH AXE
>You can't do that.
>USE AXE TO KILL GOBLIN
>You can't use that.
>CHOP GOBLIN
>You don't have the knife.
>CHOP GOBLIN WITH AXE
>You can't chop an axe!
>CHOP GOBLIN WITH AXE IN FATAL FASHION
>It doesn't fit.
>CUT GOBLIN
>You blunt your scissors.
>MURDER GOBLIN
>I don't understand.
>WHY NOT?
>What!?
>WHY DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?
>There is no understand.
>THAT'S OBVIOUS
>No.
>PLEASE LET ME KILL THE FLIPPING GOBLIN. I HAVE AN AXE.
>Hah, hah! That's impossible.
>QUIT
>Are you sure?
>YES
>That's interesting.
>WHAT?
>What!?
>HELP
>The goblin doesn't want to help you.
>EXIT
>Please specify a direction.
>LET ME OUT, I'M BEGGING YOU
>You can't go that way.
>CTRL-ALT-DEL
>As if. The goblin looks at you and licks its lips...

Fortunately, the days of this kind of annoyance are mostly in the past. A quick google can reveal that THROW AXE AT GOBLIN is the solution. Simple, eh?

The other main type of computer game frustration is where you know exactly what to do but can't manage the thumb gymnastics.

OK. I need to jump across the gap, grab the ledge, swing over there, dodge the spinning blades, turn, shoot the target, turn back, jump the other gap and roll through the doorway before it closes and crushes me. Easy...

First Go: Jump, grab, swing, mince, re-load checkpoint... ... ... Try again.
Second Go: Jump, grab, swing, dodge, turn, shoot, jump the wrong way, splat, re-load checkpoint... ... ... Try again.
Third Go: Jump, grab, swing, dodge, turn, turn, mince, re-load checkpoint... ... ... Try again.
Fourth Go: Jump, splat, re-load checkpoint... ... ... Try again.
...
...
Twenty-ninth Go: Jump, grab, swing, dodge, turn, shoot, jump, roll a milli-second too late, CRUSH, re-load checkpoint, fling controller through screen, call fire brigade, explain to wife, evacuate building... ... ...

Grrr...

(STOP PRESS: I've just played the new Alone in the Dark. There is a third way for a game to elicit teeth grinding from a player. It involves having to use a clunky control system and struggle with insane camera angles in near-total gloom... while being chased by zombies. Double grrr...)

So where's the attraction in computer games?

Well, the truth is that these moments of frustration are actually pretty infrequent. Most games are no longer punishing tests of reaction time and manual dexterity. Advances in design and technology have brought the opportunity for exploration, discovery, creativity and immersion. There's still a sense of achievement from overcoming obstacles and puzzles but it's no longer merely about being able to press buttons quickly enough.

In general, games are relaxing and cathartic. Occasionally, however, the balance between challenge and entertainment gets messed up, resulting in those familiar cries of irritation. I suspect this will always be the case and, even though these moments are annoying, I wouldn't want them to disappear entirely - finally beating the big robot that just won't die is rather exhilarating. It's like putting the last pair on top of a house of cards, winning a game of pool and getting a sofa up a flight of stairs without injury, all rolled into one.

I might have to sympathise with half an hour of annoyed grunts from one of the boys every so often but the ordeal nearly always ends in shouts of delight, the thunder of feet rushing to find me and a little dance of delight as the child in question tells me about the monster he's vanquished.

Is it teaching them anything? Let's see:

Patience. Yeah, right.
Concentration. Maybe.
Coordination. Nope.
Maths and reading. Oh, yes.
How to work the system. Definitely.

That's not bad.

It's probably worth it just for the little dance, though...

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

PS I had an email about something called Dancing Cherubs in London. It's supposed to be like a night club for families, with dancing and extra activities. I've no idea if it's any good (and we have ceilidhs for that up here, anyway) but if you're in the area...

Labels: computer games

 
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10:15 AM - Permanent Link - 0 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  Cut-price time travelling

Dear Dave,

One of the arguments presented against the possibility of time travel is that, if it worked, we'd know about it - we'd have been visited by bus-loads of very smug people from the future by now.

Personally, I think there are a number of reasons why any successful time traveller would try to remain inconspicuous. More than that, they're bound to be very rare, since there's every chance they'd fail to pass on technical details of their discovery. For a start, travelling in time is extremely dangerous. It's well known that time travel almost always ends in being eaten by a dinosaur, enslaved by intelligent chimpanzees or exterminated by a Dalek. None of these outcomes is really conducive to getting scientific papers widely published.

Then there's the issue of paradoxes:

Thanks to Back to the Future, everyone is aware of the unfortunate consequences of chatting up their own mum. These simply aren't worth the happy side-effect of creating rock'n'roll. While this particular situation is easy to anticipate, other kinks in the chain of cause and effect are harder to avoid. For example, anyone who devotes their life to saving a loved one killed in a tragic pogo stick accident is asking for trouble.

What if, after years of expensive and exhausting work, they manage to make that leap back in time and warn their childhood sweetheart not crank up the spring and go for a bounce through the firing range next to the old, abandoned mine by the cliffs? If they avert the disaster, their past self has no reason to toil away inventing a time machine in order to travel back and avert the disaster. Worst case scenario, the entire fabric of the universe unravels like a toddler's knitted sweater snagged at the top of a helter-skelter. At the very least, someone's going to disappear up their own worm-hole.

Again, publications will to be few and far between.

Even if a time traveller were to avoid immediate mishap, there are only two likely uses for a time machine:

1. Travelling back in time and betting on the horses.
2. Travelling forwards in time and stealing some cool technology.

Both of these activities require secrecy. Too many people muscle in on the gambling scam and odds and outcomes change, inflation rockets and shadowy Italian crimelords begin to get upset. Too many people start leaping about stealing technology and someone's going to get the smart idea to cut down on the competition by travelling backwards, nicking the time machine plans and giving them to their earlier selves. In both cases, the risk of a paradox or a beating rises sharply with the number of travellers.

Yep, anyone who invents a time machine is going to keep it to themselves.

This is annoying because there are all sorts of advantages to living in the past. You don't have to go back that far at all before the music's better, for instance. Go back a little further and you won't have to worry about the environment because you'll be too busy worrying about nuclear Armageddon. Go back far enough and you can impress people with nothing more than a box of matches.

No matter how far you go, however, it's just plain cheaper:

A month after its release, I saw a computer game second-hand for half the original price. I resisted the urge to buy it and waited another couple of months. By then it was that price new and the second-hand price had halved again. Sure, when I took it home, I was playing a game that had been out for three months, but by living only a quarter of a year in the past, I'd made a saving of seventy-five percent.

It's the same with DVDs. One month a film is fifteen quid, the next it's in a 5 for 30 offer. By linking my home cinema via a time-warp directly to 1996, I save a fortune.

Interestingly, though, it's not the case that the further back in time one lives, the greater the saving made. With computer games, there's a point when older games start being harder to find. Really old games can become more expensive again as supply diminishes. With DVDs, the cheap version may be withdrawn in favour of the premium priced Special Edition.

What's the sweet spot? How far in the past is it necessary to live in order to enjoy the best deals?

For computer games, I'd say it's about three years. For DVDs, it's maybe only two. For music, perhaps it's five years but this is going to increase as digital downloads take over. There aren't going to be many CDs of recent music available to buy in the carboot sales of the future. Choice will be limited to the old, decent stuff bought by people like us. (Shame.)

Clothes require a little foresight. It's more complicated than simply popping down to the charity shop and seeing what fits. Very old clothes are cheap but they're likely to be falling apart and have a totally unshiftable smell of grannies about them. Relatively new clothes will be expensive and look remarkably dated. The trick is to buy clothes from ten years ago but then stick them out of harm's way in a cupboard for another five until they come back into fashion again. It's maybe time to pick up some outfits in lime green and bright orange that are going for a song...

As for fresh food, it's a case of living in last week and buying all the items that are marked down because they're rapidly approaching their use-by dates. Of course, the crunchy food will be soft and the soft food will be crunchy, so make sure to purchase a selection and choose recipes which require a variety of ingredients. It will all even out in the end.

Bear these tips in mind and your ears, eyes, mouth and wardrobe will be living in different temporal eras, but you'll save a pile of cash.

Don't tell anyone, though. We can't all do it. Someone's got to be seduced by the hype and pay over the odds for stuff on day of release in order for us to buy it second-hand later. And think of our pensions - if no one feeds the corporate machine, the stock markets will collapse and we're all doomed.

Remember: Time travel - keep it secret.

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

PS We'd all have a Star Trek style holo-deck in our living-rooms if they weren't just as beguiling as time machines. A guy in Pasadena invented the technology years ago. He was going to go next door and tell his neighbour but then he popped into the thing to give it a quick test-drive. That was 1993. It was simply too much fun to come out again. (Of course, he thinks he came out in 2001...)

Labels: computer games, science, stuff

 
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10:25 AM - Permanent Link - 1 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  Laying down the law

Dear Dave,

Sometimes it feels like I'm drowning in rules - rules of my own creation, put there to save my sanity but then warped and twisted by my children in an effort to drive me mad. I'm forever having to create new ones as well. Only this week, I said to Fraser, "If I have to wait for you to catch up before crossing a road one more time, there'll be no dessert for a day. Don't dawdle along twenty feet behind, leave it until the rest of us are standing at the kerb and then sprint towards traffic."

On another occasion, I had to say to Lewis, "If you're going to carry a stick around with you, don't make it such a large one. You keep poking people in the face by accident."

"No, I don't," said Lewis, turning round to look at me and accidentally poking his sister in the face with three-and-a-half feet of shrubbery.

"There! See!"

"What?" said Lewis, turning to look the other way in an effort to find out what I was talking about and accidentally forcing his brother to eat twigs. Then he turned back to look at me again and shoved leaves up my nose. "What?" he repeated as I mumbled retribution at him nasally. "I didn't do anything."

A rule or two every now and then wouldn't be so bad but each rule quickly develops its own legal small print. How short does a stick have to be before it's an acceptable length to carry around, for instance? Does proximity to other people make a difference? Does it matter whether those people are friends, relatives or strangers? What if it's Grandad's walking stick and he's asked for it? What if it's a yellow stick? What if it's pointy? What if it's pretend?

I have to have answers for all these questions. That isn't so hard - the hard part is remembering my often arbitrary responses for next time so I can remain consistent.

Then, of course, there's the issue of rule interaction. What if it's bedtime but there hasn't been a chance for homework? What if getting shoes on quickly involves shoving a brother out the way? What if two separate misdemeanours both result in no dessert for a day?

In the last case, adding the days together drags the punishment out too long. Allowing the sentences to be served concurrently, however, introduces too many opportunities for abuse of the system. ('Right. Since I'm not getting dessert already, I'm going to dawdle as much as I like... then I'm going to take my shoes off and use them to shove my brother out of the way...')

I had to introduce Fraser to the concept of probation last week. This is all getting too complicated.

The problem is made more obvious when visitors come round.

My nephew Ned has started turning up after school on a fairly regular basis. He lurks about playing computer games, doesn't say much and then slopes off home. Since he could go home straight off and lurk about there playing computer games while not saying much, I'm not sure what's going on, but he doesn't get in the way, so I don't mind.

Yesterday, I caught him loading up The Darkness on my Xbox, though.

"That's 18-rated - you can't play that," I said as I stuck my head in the study.

"Why not?" he grunted.

"You're not eighteen. You're fourteen."

"I'm nearly fifteen. My parents don't mind," he said, genuinely confused what I was talking about.

"They probably should," I replied. The Darkness is not a game about a glam rock band from Lowestoft - you play a mafia hitman possessed by an ancient evil. Even as you attempt to resist its influence, you must use its abilities to complete a bloody quest for vengeance through the grotty underbelly of New York. This involves a good deal of shooting, swearing and ripping out opponents' hearts and eating them. Not much worse than a Saturday night in Lowestoft, admittedly, but it's clearly not suitable for a fourteen-year-old. "This isn't your parents' house, Xbox, rules or electricity. You can't play it here."

"Can I borrow it then?"

"No."

"Oh," he put the game back in its case and rifled through my collection. "Can I play this?" He held up BioShock.

Whereas The Darkness lacks restraint, subtlety or beauty, Bioshock is a mature adventure set in a magnificent but crumbling underwater city. There's an examination of the corrupting nature of power and a struggle for self-knowledge and redemption. There's exploration, philosophy and difficult moral choices. Truth to be told, though, there's also a great deal of whacking psycho junkies in the face with a wrench.

"Sorry," I said. "That's an 18 as well."

"All these other games are boring," he said sulkily.

"Well, come upstairs and talk to your cousins for a while then. Once they've told you in endless detail how to complete the first fifteen levels of Super Mario Galaxy, I'm sure everything else will seem far more exciting."

Ned shrugged and followed me to the lounge.

"Take your shoes off," I said as we reached the stairs.

"Do I have to?"

Technically, he didn't. The rule about taking shoes off was originally aimed at my children. I know where they've been - I don't want them traipsing remnants of those locations round the house. Nonetheless, they've long since taken to applying the rule to everyone else and then policing it vociferously.

"No, but the kids will have a go at you until you do. You'd be better off doing it now. Just be pleased you don't have a time limit."

As always seems to happen, the rule has become more complicated through use. The boys kept entering the building and then sitting in the hall on the bottom step for ten minutes while squabbling and wiping their dirty shoes on every surface and object within reach. 'Take your shoes off when you come in' became 'Take your shoes off quickly when you come in'. Before long, 'quickly' needed defined. It was 'the time taken for Daddy to take his shoes and coat off, take Marie's shoes and coat off, check the answering machine and make a cup of coffee'. Unfortunately, this time-frame varied too much depending on when in the sequence I switched on the kettle. Worse, Marie learnt to take her own shoes and coat off. She joined in with the squabbling and the definition became circular - she had until she'd taken her shoes off to take her shoes off. I had to decide on an actual time limit. After some negotiation and plenty of trial-and-error, we've settled on forty-seven and a half seconds. Failure to have shoes off and put away in this amount of time results in loss of dessert... unless they've already lost dessert, in which case a number of factors have to be taken into consideration, oracles consulted and - oh, never mind, you get the idea...

Ned pulled off his shoes without unlacing them. I resisted the urge to criticise this and we went upstairs.

In the lounge, Lewis was playing a Sonic the Hedgehog game on the Wii, Fraser was reading the final Harry Potter book and Marie was kicking a ball round the room. They all ignored us.

"How come he gets to play that?" said Ned. He picked up the box of the Sonic game and pointed to the 7+ age-rating on the cover. Lewis is six.

I took a closer look. The reason given for the rating was the element of violence in the game. I was bemused. True, there is plenty of fighting in the game but it's the kind of fighting that involves a blue hedgehog breaking a robot by jumping on its head. It's nothing compared to an episode of Tom & Jerry. Heck, The Little Mermaid contains more anger and aggression. Both of these are rated as suitable for all.

Aware of all this, I was happy to let Lewis continue playing but I didn't fancy my chances of explaining the nuances of the argument to Ned. "He's nearly seven," I said. This was something of a stretch - he's only recently turned six. Besides, Marie was in the room and occasionally watching the action. She's only three.

"Can I play a 15 on the Xbox then?" said Ned, detecting a loop-hole in the local by-laws and exploiting it.

"I suppose," I said reluctantly.

"Can I watch him?" asked Fraser, looking up from the book he probably shouldn't have been reading for another two or three years. (When we gave him the first in the series we really didn't count on him obsessively working his way through the lot without reading anything else in between.)

"No. You're not old enough," I said, somewhat disturbed that neither of them was overly concerned what the game was, as long as it was inappropriate.

"But Marie's watching Lewis," whined Fraser.

"You still can't watch Ned," I said firmly.

"Why not?"

The whole legal framework of my parental control was crashing down around me. Reasoned argument was failing and logic was being used against me. I was back to the bottom line. "Because I said so," I sighed.

"But..."

I needed to take control of events and move away from controversy before I spent the rest of the afternoon in wrangling. "Ned, any chance you could play Risk with Fraser just now?"

"What?" he said. "That's like, I dunno, the board game of world domination and dictatorship and, erm, you know, ruthlessness conquest and stuff. How's he allowed to play that?"

I glared at him. He'd picked a particularly annoying moment to discover multi-syllable words. I was about to lose it with him when I detected the faintest glimmer of a grin underneath his teenage scowl. He was having me on. That boy is definitely smarter than he smells.

I cut off Fraser's shrill protestations that he was allowed to play Risk and he really liked it and he was old enough and that Marie played it sometimes. "It's OK, Fraser," I said. "You're allowed to play. I'll play too. Go through to your room and set the game up."

Fraser complied and Ned went with him. Lewis, meanwhile, put his controller down and started kicking Marie's ball around.

"You're too big to kick a ball around inside," I said.

"Can I bounce it then?"

I pointed to a smaller ball in amongst a pile of toys. "You can roll that other one."

"Can I throw that one?" Lewis asked.

"You can't throw either of them," I said, unearthing a foam ball from behind the sofa. "You can throw this soft one if you do it carefully, under-arm, and you don't throw it in the direction of the telly. Break anything and you won't get dessert."

"For how many days?" he said, not taking the ball.

"That depends..."

"On what?"

There were any number of variables to be analysed. These included the value of the destroyed object, degree of culpability, previous convictions, extenuating circumstances, involvement of siblings and my own state of mind. I decided not to get bogged down in a definitive list of punitive tariffs. Life is too short and it would have involved a spreadsheet. "Just be careful, OK?" I said. "You could always go outside."

"Nah," he said. Then, without touching any of the balls, he returned to Sonic.

I went through to Fraser's room. He was busy explaining the rules of Risk to Ned. They seemed refreshingly simple. We played the game and I made the mistake of starting a land war in Asia. Ned won. Fraser asked him what a dictatorship is.

"It's bad," said Ned. "It's kinda like when Bowser takes over the Mushroom Kingdom and he, erm, you know, puts Mario in prison and makes Princess Peach clean the floors or something."

My respect for him grew. Fraser seemed to get the idea.

It was time for Ned to go. "Thanks for that," I said when we were downstairs again and he was putting his shoes on. (He still didn't unlace them - I had to bite my tongue.)

"S'OK," he muttered. "Can I come back tomorrow?"

"Yeah. If you like."

"Uh-huh," he said and headed out the door. Then, over his shoulder, he added "You're not as crazy as Mum and Dad."

This was sort of reassuring but difficult to reply to. "OK," I said.

He was gone and I was left to consider improvements to my current censorship system. In the end, I gave up and decided to fill out my tax return. It was simpler.

I suppose I'm hoping that through making the household rules clear and well-defined, the children will come to understand the reasoning behind them. I'm hoping that one day they'll develop some sense and I won't need the rules. I'm hoping that they'll be able to work it out for themselves and it won't always come down to, 'Because I say so.' It will be like a glorious move from the Old Testament into the New.

On the other hand, there's a possibility I'm just raising my own pack of lawyers and I've got decades of legalistic nit-picking to go.

Ho hum. They'd better put me in a good nursing home when the time comes, that's all I can say. In fact, I may even make that a rule...

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

Labels: computer games, Ned

 
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  Living without Wii Fit

Dear Dave,

I forgot to pre-order Wii Fit. I will probably be the only person in the country not spending the weekend hopping on top of a white plastic tea-tray in the vain hope that a videogame can make them slim and athletic.

Since everyone at Nintendo is currently buried under an ever-increasing mountain of cash and it will take a while to dig them out, there may not be any more stock for some time. What am I going to do? I was relying on this game to make exercise fun and enticing. What better way to lose weight and increase muscle tone than by jumping up and down on a plastic slab in front of the TV in the comfort of my own living room? I've been chain-eating biscuits in nervous anticipation.

Now I'm going to have to go outside and run around or something...

Wait! Surely I must be able to avoid that. Let's see... Hmm... How about...? Yes... These things should do it:



Bear with me while I try a quick work-out...

...

gasp... wheeze...

... ... irk... gasp...

... boing... ...

ouch... wheeze... ... ...

... twiddle... Argh!

wheeze...

Ooh... thud...

...

...

limp...

...

OK, well, that wasn't so bad. It transpires that I already have enough interactive entertainment to get myself leaping about in an aerobic fashion. I could have been slim and athletic years ago. If only switching the stuff on and putting the right disc in didn't seem like such an effort...

I started my work-out with a shot on Sony's EyeToy, the motion-detecting camera for the PlayStation 2. Once I'd blown the dust off it and booted up one of the many minigame collections, I spent quite a while waving my arms about frantically to wash windows, set off fireworks and slap ninjas. Getting the lighting right was tricky and navigating the menus was a pain but I'd forgotten how much fun the thing is. The maraca-wielding antics of Sega Superstars are particularly invigorating. As with all the most energetic EyeToy games, however, it made my arms sore pretty quick but didn't really utilise the rest of my muscles. (At least I didn't put my back out this time, though.)

In an attempt to mimic the full Wii Fit experience and exercise my entire body, I played EyeToy while hopping up and down on one leg. This worked great for the five seconds until I fell over. Then I tried it on the trampoline. This was maybe a little ambitious - my scoring went out the window. It was nearly followed by me.

I moved on to Wii Sports, the collection of sporting simulations which comes bundled with the Wii. You know you're out of shape when pretending to hit a baseball thirty times brings you out in a sweat. I switched to tennis and spent a couple of minutes leaping round the room like a loon, trying to smash a backhand winner past my cartoon opponent. Then I remembered that sitting down and flicking my wrist every so often would work just as well. It wasn't as much fun or exercise but I was getting tired and I didn't care.

I took a breather and did some bowling. After a while, this made my elbow twinge, so I opted for Mario and Sonic at the Olympics (also on Wii). There was something deeply surreal about waggling my arms really fast in an attempt to get Bowser to win a gold medal. I broke some world records, got sore shoulders and was hugely glad that I don't yet have man-boobs big enough to require a sports bra. I quickly changed games to Link's Crossbow Training and started shooting targets with the Wii Zapper. My arms started to complain almost instantly once more and, again, the trampoline didn't do wonders for my high score.

Last up was the dance mat. This was a bit more like it in terms of getting my whole body moving. At least it would have been, if only I had rhythm and coordination. The good feeling from the exercise was counteracted by the frustration of being rubbish at stepping on the correct pad in time to the beat. It was like a Twister-related torture device. I collapsed in a contorted heap of limbs and gimmicky videogame controllers.

I crawled off to play Tomb Raider. I knew I needed to do some stretching as a warm down but I was too tired. I decided to watch Lara do some instead. Unfortunately, this somehow made me lose track of time and I forgot about going to collect Marie from nursery. I had to sprint along the road in order to avoid being overdue and getting a telling off from the teachers. This was easily a harder work-out than everything else put together. I did look rather a sight as I panted and perspired my way into the cloakroom, though.

The only conclusion I can draw from all this is that being late for things results in more effective exercise than videogames. It's cheaper, too. The videogames just ensure there are fewer witnesses. So, if you have managed to get your own copy of Wii Fit, the best way to maximise its potential is to close the curtains before you switch it on and then hide all your clocks. (You know it makes sense.)

Now... I'm going to go have a lie down.

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

Labels: computer games, stuff, Wii

 
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  Virtual wedgies

Dear Dave,

Congratulations on managing to locate and purchase a Wii. I'm sure Sam will thank you in a year or two when he finally gets to grips with the controller and stops battering the cat with it. In the meantime, you can break the console in with a bit of Zelda and some Mario Galaxy. It will also be invaluable for keeping yourself entertained on long nights sitting up with a grumpy baby - being able to surf the internet effectively from the comfort of the sofa using only small movements of one hand is genius. You no longer need to suffer hours of phone-in quizzes presented by people who smile too much. Hurrah! (Remember to keep a spare wiimote with fresh batteries handy, though, just in case.)

Sorry to hear, however, that Liz's parents are worried it's going to corrupt the children and turn them into over-weight, psychopathic, criminal, illiterate loners. Good luck convincing them otherwise.

I can kind of see where they're coming from. If they think computer games are for kids but all they know about them is what the newspapers and TV tell them, then it's not surprising that they're nervous. The press for computer games hasn't improved much since the last time I wrote about it. If anything, it's got more hysterical. The science fiction role-playing game Mass Effect was recently described on prime time American TV as Luke Skywalker meets Debbie does Dallas. After extensive playing of Mass Effect, however, I can report that there's a single, non-interactive sex scene. It's half a minute long and the only nudity is a split second of out-of-focus alien butt. I can't really see this warping the mind of the average thirteen-year-old, to be honest.

Admittedly, the claim was retracted a couple of days later, when it was pointed out as abject nonsense, but it was a bit late by then. An 'expert' had already slated the game. The scary thing is that she'd done so on the basis of a single comment made to her before the show. She'd asked what it was like and been told it was pornography and gone from there. That she believed this statement, shows the level of misunderstanding that videogames are facing.

There are hardly any games released in the western world that feature sex, let alone anything explicit. Maybe one or two a year surface that deserve an 18 rating in the UK due to sexual content.

If I were told that a major release featured actual pornography I'd be sceptical. It would be a bit like being told Gordon Brown wears ladies' underwear - not entirely impossible but I'd want some evidence before repeating it. I certainly wouldn't go blabbing about it on TV.

Still, computer games are an easy target and getting rid of them seems like a quick fix for everything. I mean, wouldn't it be nice if all society's woes were down to those Nintendo PlayStation Box thingies? We could just dump the whole lot in the sea, safe in the knowledge we were releasing the nation's youth to return to the good old days of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll...

Unfortunately, the madness isn't limited to America. Over here, Bully's in the news again. It's been re-released on the 360 and Wii and teachers' unions are calling for shops to stop selling it because it 'rewards bullies and those who engage in brutal and savage attacks'.

Who told them this? Was it newspaper reporters looking for a quote? Bully is, in an odd way, one of the most charming games I've played in the last couple of years. (Bear in mind here that I haven't just been playing lots of games involving bald space marines shooting things - the kids have ensured a steady supply to our house of games involving plumbers, princesses and super-fast hedgehogs.)

In Bully, you're a new pupil dumped at a rough American boarding school and it's up to you to make the most of it. Yep, you get into fights but these are the kind of fights that involve catapults and stink bombs. You seldom have any reason to start them. Anyone the game sends you after usually has it coming to them for picking on other people and, after some fisticuffs, you get to embarrass them in front of their friends by giving them a wedgie. You're just trying to bring some order to a school that's gone off the rails and where the teachers are patently useless. You tend to do this by helping people out and making allies.

You can attack other pupils, teachers and police officers indiscriminately but there's no advantage to this. In fact, the normal outcomes in these situations are getting beaten to a pulp, put in detention or arrested. Most of the time, backing off or running away are far better options than violence. Avoiding having to outrun a squad car while on a BMX is always advisable.

The whole thing actually feels like a gritty Harry Potter or a contemporary, American version of Jennings. It's a dog-eat-dog setting but school can be like that. The bullies are portrayed as idiots, however, and there's no reason to play in a malicious way.

The game is also rated 15, so most school children shouldn't even be playing it. (Which is a bit harsh, honestly. This puts Bully in the same category as the film Brick which has a similar setting but the added bonus of murder, guns, knives and drug dealing.)

There are only two primary reasons the game is getting this kind of press:

• The title.
• It's by Rockstar, the company behind Grand Theft Auto.

That it's set in a school doesn't help but it's a school so divorced from real life that that wouldn't be an issue if the game was called something else. Compared to the 'trash' I was forced to read in English Literature class when I was fourteen, it's pretty innocuous. Let's take a look at that reading list, shall we:

Macbeth - witchcraft, murder, treason, suicide and crude sexual jokes.
Brighton Rock - murder, spite, a gang of criminal youths and a couple of hundred pages of psychosis inducing tedium followed by some face-melting acid.
Up the Line to Death - World War I, death, rats, death, despair, more death, violence, death, more despair and, let me think... ah, yes, some death.
Modern short stories in English - under-age sex and doughnuts.

I might well have learnt more from Bully. It's one of the few games around that would stand up to serious literary analysis. It would actually make a great game for Standard Grade students to write essays about. 'To what extent is violence acceptable when it involves sticking up for others and yourself?' might be a good place to start.

It would be nice to answer that there are always non-violent ways out. It may even be true... but I doubt it's necessarily the commonly held view even among teachers. I was bullied at school. The only adult I can remember telling, told me to fight back. She was the school nurse. In fact, I got the impression that adults in general reckoned that a swift kick to the privates was by far the simplest way to get bullies to leave me alone. (As long as no one saw me, of course. That would have involved paperwork.) It never really worked but I certainly never felt that reporting things would help either.

Maybe attitudes have changed. Schools take bullying more seriously these days and I'm encouraging my kids to talk about any problems they have. Ultimately, though, it can still be dog-eat-dog in the playground (or anywhere else) and much of how they get on will be up to them. Look past the catapults and egg-related petty vandalism, and Bully actually has some useful lessons. Fighting back is all very well but the best thing to do is make friends with everyone else by helping them out. More than that, the main character's greatest strength is that he simply doesn't care what everyone thinks of him:

Bullies are idiots. There was one guy at school who made me miserable when I was thirteen. He called me names, said nasty stuff and occasionally kicked and punched me. It was horrible. When I was seventeen, though, the same behaviour just seemed laughably pathetic.

I wish I'd been able to see things that way sooner. A game like Bully might have helped.

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

PS One thing to come out of all this, is just how well Nintendo's advertising is working. Another spokesperson was quoted as saying that, 'young people will physically act out the violence they want to inflict on a classmate and that is frightening'. That's right: Nintendo Wii - makes videogames just like real life! If only. Unless they've brought in a new mini-game where you batter someone about by frantically waggling a couple of remote controls at them, I don't think there's much to be frightened about. (And even then...) If anyone wants evidence of the flimsy connection between wiimote mastery and actual proficiency in reality, they should come watch my boys bowl. Typical Wii score - 191. Typical real life score (on a good day and with the bumpers up) - 53.

The defence rests.

Labels: computer games, school

 
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9:30 AM - Permanent Link - 0 comments - Post comment - Links to this post