Recently, a clip of a pro baseball coach imparting some life lessons to a young boy went viral online. One of those lessons: “Do you play video games? Don’t do that either, or you’ll be dumb like the rest of these idiots. That’s all they do is play video games. You come home from school and the first thing you do is your homework, you understand that? ”
The clip is embedded above.
Earlier this week, while he was making the rounds to promote the Nintendo 2DS and Wii U price drop, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime appeared on CNBC. They showed him the clip.
His reaction:
Fils-Aime advised playing games in moderation, but the CNBC anchor made a salient observation: ‘Somehow the video game industry has become the whipping boy for laziness and everything else.”
The Nintendo man cited his company’s creation of self-help games like Wii Fit and Brain Age to point out that games ain’t all bad. But I think the CNBC anchor zeroed in on the issue correctly. Video games remain the perpetual outsider, the threat, the time suck, the non-nutritious meal in many people’s minds. Hard to shake that. And maybe it’s not something that video games, amusements by their very nature, can’t or shouldn’t even try to shed.
Leave a Reply