Who Needs a TV to Play Video Games?

Later on, my niece and younger nephew demanded pony rides, a form of play as old as the domestication of the horse. When Uncle Ronnie became tired, he was sent to his "stable" underneath the card table in the living room. I had used the same table as tent, castle and fort when I was 10. Furniture doesn't get thrown out in my family.

There was no evidence that television and video games had stifled the kids' creativity. Nor was there any evidence that technology had made them smarter than earlier generations. They simply had a different frame of reference, one that included video games and computers as well as ponies, pet stores and sword fights.

Children play with the tools at hand, and they're great at thinking metaphorically -- at imagining that a landspeeder is a sentient robot or that a stick is a gun or that salt-and-pepper shakers are a bride and groom or that a card table is a horse's stable.

They're also geniuses at figuring out simple mechanics. My 6-year-old nephew had to explain to me that miniature low-rider cars don't roll very well on carpet and will flip over more than if racing on hardwood floors. Novice that I was, I was choosing cars that looked the coolest.

And they are geniuses at intuiting rules and systems, and at re-creating these rules and systems in their own play. Children who play lots of card games will invent their own card games. Children who play lots of board games will invent their own board games. And children who play lots of video games will invent their own video-game-like games when they don't have access to the game controllers.

Some people who don't have children might be horrified by the amount of time my niece and nephews spend playing video games. They might raise their eyebrows at the number of product and movie tie-ins mentioned in this article. Let me reassure you that I haven't been paid by any member of the toy industry for this work.

I gave my niece a book by Ursula K. Le Guin for Christmas last year. I bought my younger nephew a set of paints, brushes and wooden initials to paint. They loved their presents.

For my older nephew, the one struggling to finish his homework, I bought a video game.