Word: nintendo
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...have become scarily sophisticated; they are connoisseurs of carnage. They know that in a blood ballet like Total Recall everybody gets killed but nobody gets hurt -- because the characters aren't human beings but ciphers, cyborgs, stunt people and stunted characters, no more real than the creatures vaporized in Nintendo games...
America's most fashionable doll appeared on grocery shelves last year. Breakfast With Barbie offers a bowl of itty-bitty hearts, bows and stars in lollipop colors. Ghostbusters contains marshmallow specters, and Nintendo Cereal Systems boasts fruity-flavored video-game characters. Hot Wheels, for fans of Mattell's little toy cars, blends marshmallow vehicles with frosted oat "mag wheels." Batman comes in an ominous black box, but the little bats inside are gold. Not even a nine-year-old caped-crusader freak will eat black food. The market for children's cereals is toothsome. Almost one-third...
...Poor Nintendo. The Japanese conglomerate may have enthralled youngsters with the world's most popular home-video games, but it gets no respect from adults. An antiviolence watchdog group has rated some 70% of the company's games "harmful for children." Physicians warn that too much rapid-fire button pushing can lead to hand strain, a condition dubbed Nintendinitis. And many parents, seeing their kids play Super Mario Bros. for hours on end, are asking what a nonstop diet of synthetic reality is doing to impressionable young minds...
...Nintendo, with a $2.7 billion U.S. market to protect, may be trying to buy some respect. It has created a $3 million fund at M.I.T.'s Media Laboratory to study "how children learn while they play." "This is not guilt money," insists Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte. The cash will be given, apparently with no strings attached, to support the work of Professor Seymour Papert, creator of the Logo computer language and one of the most influential names in computer education. His research could eventually lead to new and better kinds of Nintendo games...
...Nintendo has so far squandered a rare opportunity to use its market position to do some good. The 40 million Nintendo systems installed around the world are powerful little computers that could deliver rich and rewarding experiences. Instead, Nintendo chose to give the world's children RoboCop and Bionic Commando. Too bad the company did not seek out Papert, or people like him, long before this...