The Challenges of Summer

My wife Karen and our son Niko and I were coming home from a movie recently. It was one he wanted us all to go see: a picture about a "save the world" character played by Brad Pitt who secures a vaccine that makes humans "invisible" to the zombies threatening to take over the world.

As far as these kinds of movies go, "World War Z" wasn't actually that bad. It had a decent plot, okay acting (some of those playing zombies deserve an Oscar nomination) and better-than- average cinematography. There was an underlying message about the parallels to a world succumbing to climate change.

On the way to the car, Niko (now 15) began talking about video games. Natu- rally, there's a first-person mobile game called World War Z that features 28 lev- els of zombie combat, and it's far from the only digital game in which the "undead' are the target.

Then talk turned quickly to the new release of Mi- crosoft's Xbox One, a $499 game console which the company calls "the ultimate all-in-one entertainment sys- tem - one system for a new generation."

Surely, that would be a new generation of zombies.

Niko quickly rattled off Xbox One's more realistic hi-def resolution and gam- ing features while Karen and I fell quiet. Where will it end? Until our son is finally the perfect zombie himself, sucked into a life deprived of light and sleep from summer gaming marathons?

I don't want to pick on Microsoft here. There's plenty of blame to go around for Nintendo and Sony as well. But it kills me every time I hear the slogan for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foun- dation, which claims on public radio that "everyone has a right to a healthy and productive life." Let me vent a little here about the challenges of keep- ing the video game zombies at bay. It reminds me of our trips to the video store when Niko was younger. We would go in to look for wholesome family entertain- ment on DVD and leave with a fight on our hands from re- sisting pleas and tantrums in front of the eye-level candy counter.

Of course any manufac- turer skirting responsibility for creating a product with an undeniable potential for harm will tell you to "consume" what they offer in moderation. But we all know most kids aren't born with any sense of moderation. Left to their own (console) devices, teenagers might just throw their most impor- tant years away completely possessed by this mindless pursuit.

I'm sure many parents in the Touchet Valley agree that steering teens away from video games, particularly in the summer, can be a con- stant battle. It's even more difficult for families where both parents have full-time jobs and those who live a ways out of town.

The upside, you might say, is that gamers are home and staying out of trouble. But don't let that argument kill your imagination as parents in our rural towns seemingly less endowed with kids' activities.

For those families that can't afford to send their kids to camp or don't have a farm where their kids help with harvest, volunteers at our libraries, youth groups, sports programs and so on are trying hard to offer them "healthy and productive" alternatives.

The anti-zombie vaccine is there. Reach for it and help save the world from intellec- tual ruin.