Digital Smart Ass

     It is Christmas Day and I am faced with my gremlin for an eight year old nephew. He and his equally as spoilt five year old brother were given iPods from Jesus Santa (my sister) and proceeded to spend their week long stay in Auckland on the couch hocking my mothers Internet and downloading as many apps as they could, purchasing game after game with their multitudes of iTunes cards.

   "What a waste," I had sniped to Mama, "they don't even listen to music that isn't church hymns or Rihanna."

 "They don't use them for music, they use them to play games." Oh okay, that's cool.

   So it was a nice day but I mostly just wanted the living room to myself when I said, "when I was your age I didn't have an iPod to monopolise all my time."

  "When you were my age iPods didn't exist."
Well, shit. You got me there kid.

 I started babbling on about how I had a SEGA, a Playstation, a Gameboy Colour, and how they are the equivalents to what the iPod is now (at least in the way these boys are using them) but how I still managed to get off my ass and go outside. These games and consoles I was raised on encouraged my imagination to the point that I would create my own worlds, go exploring in forests and enact a game within the real world -- how many of us became water Pokemon in our friends pools?-- and have perhaps had a greater inspirational impact on me than film or literature. Now, of course, my argument was wasted because he went back to his iPod games and becoming a pixelated zombie.

  This recent generation of kids born in the 2nd Millennium baffle me. They are an entirely different species in how un-phased they are by the technology which surrounds them, they expect and they understand, and obviously not every child is this way, everything is situational, but a lot of them are siphoned to their virtual worlds. Now it would be hypocritical of me on so many different levels to be anti videogames but I can see how behaviour like that of my oldest nephew is regressive or unhealthy. Maybe I'm just a judgmental super bitch of an aunt but there needs to be a balance. But why do I think there needs to be a balance?

 How do those of you who consider themselves "gamers" view this? And those of you who don't? Perhaps this is a case of too much of a good thing can warp you into a serial killer, but to be playing videogames from morning until evening at the ages of five and eight seems excessive and, frankly, like a waste of the youth many of us wish we could return to and, eventually, my nephews will too.

  Wow, that didn't mean to take such a depressing turn.