Monday April 09, 2007

The Lego Rule

wired.com :

... gamers like me have spent years railing against ill-informed parents and politicians who've blamed games for making kids violent, unimaginative, fat or worse. But now we're in a weird position: We're the first generation that is young enough to have grown up playing games, but old enough to have kids. So it turns out that, whoops, now we've got to make sober calls about what sort of entertainment is good or bad for our children. And what, precisely, are we deciding?

... Chris Anderson, my uber-boss - the editor in chief of Wired magazine and lead editor on Geekdad - suggested a even more intriguing strategy: the "Lego Rule." The Lego Company, it seems, has a policy of not producing toys that replicate 20th century weapons. "You can have swords, and you can have laser guns in space, but no actual 20th century guns," Anderson says.

- Now that's interesting. I might get the hang of it. So lasers and swords can be in, but not M-16's and AK-47's. That rules out Counter-Strike, obviously.

The elder one sometimes asks me to load up StarSiege 2845 ("the robot game"). Sci-fi lasers and particle beams, ok so that's in. But that one really isn't even alpha-quality yet, takes too long to load, and crashes too often.

Hmm, what about a futuristic 21st-century stealth attack helicopter that will never be built? (It was cancelled). Yep, I'm talking about the RAH-66 Comanche. He'll ask me for the "helicopter game" from time to time. Gray area, huh. 20th-century missiles, machine guns, and rockets, but on a sci-fi-like helicopter platform that takes care of the targeting and almost (nearly) the flying by itself. Hmm.

Perhaps the "Lego Rule" might be more precisely defined as, "no personal 20th-century weapons". If I recall correctly, they do have an F-14-Tomcat-like swing-wing fighter jet. Maybe fighter jets and helicopters are fine. Nothing personal, huh.

We could always fall back to racing games. Like Trackmania Nations. The kids like this one. We all know it's unreal right? Like the level where the racing sim turns into a flight sim, or rather, "falling with style" (cough) sim. Furthermore, it's free, and runs pretty well on my $200 graphics card (well, it had better, since it came *with* the card).

(2007-04-09 13:12:21 SGT) [Tech] Permalink

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