Word: toying
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Computers are good games players, and the best games this year are fiendishly addictive challenges to physical dexterity and mental sharpness. Not all of the addicts are children, and this pleases toy manufacturers because it is beginning to be clear that adults can be very self-indulgent in buying expensive computer games for themselves. Indeed, adults usually outnumbered the kids last week in the fast-growing electronic games departments of stores across the nation...
What is even more interesting than prospective riches for the toy companies, however, is the feet that many of the computer gadgets are both toys and teaching machines. As teachers they can form bonds of a sort-friendships?-with their pupils. And though two or more human beings can sometimes play against each other in computer games, it is clear to anyone who has tried the machines that the most fascinating interaction is between one person and one computer. Computer gaming, and learning, are solitary activities that do not seem solitary. The computer toys are starting to teach their owners...
...Irak is a six-wheeled tank that is quite endearing, as war machines go. Milton Bradley's big computer action toy chirps merrily as it sets out on its rounds, plays a little tune when it is finished, and then yips five times like an anxious puppy when it is left turned on and unattended. Twenty-four glorious buttons on its carapace accomplish the programming. An eight-year-old achieves something impressive when he plans a complicated route under the dining room table to attack the cat and then translates his intentions into an orderly series of commands...
Superstar 3000 is a not-so-cheap ($39.95) toy electric guitar with a sound synthesizer instead of strings and the ability to remember and play back tunes. The player presses touch-sensitive colored panels instead of frets; pressure at the top of the guitar neck produces a wah-wah or vibrato effect. But Superstar 3000 looks and feels like junk, and doesn't sound like much. Toy musical instruments have always been disappointing, and computer chips haven't changed things...
When hand-held computer toys and games first appeared on the market two years ago, retail sales climbed briskly to between $35 million and $40 million. This year's retail sales should be ten times greater (against total toy sales of about $5.5 billion). The great beep forward came when Milton Bradley noticed that adults were buying its innovative Simon -for themselves, and not just in the weeks before Christmas. The highly seasonal nature of toy buying has always been an industry bugaboo; after Christmas, retailers can get stuck with toys that won't sell...