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The Return of Toys
valdean writes "With videogames becoming so ubiquitous, it sometimes seems like kids have less and less time for toys these days. Toy makers, however, are pushing back with high tech toys designed to be more compelling than a game of Supreme Commander. The New York Times reports that remote controlled vehicles in particular seem to be up for some friendly competition. As one designer suggests, 'navigating well-designed vehicles in the physical world... is vastly more compelling than steering a virtual vehicle in a computer-generated universe.' Will toys ever be able to compete with videogames again?"
My mom gave me a brick and told me to go play outdoors
-Eod
No nothing can stop... The Animal!
I for one welcome our new plastic, assembly required, batteries not included overlords!
I used to play a lot with GI Joe's. Now, I am killing iraqi terrorists. It's cool.
In other news:
For the 1,000 consecutive year the ball has won best toy of the year again.
if you want to ship it to me, i'll hold on to it for him until he feels like using it.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I beg to differ. Hi-tech toys are making a comeback.
My 10-year-old, who has a PSP and a PS2 (and occasional access to his grandma's XBox) and stacks of games, hardly ever plays with them anymore. He prefers to spend his time playing with an odd device called a "basket ball", which he throws into a "basket" from various locations relative to it. This device is programmed to bounce when you throw it on the ground, and to do it far more realistically than the bouncing I've seen in most video games. The hardware inside seems to be pretty resilient too. He's even joined some sort of club involving other kids his age. They compete with other such clubs by throwing a shared basket ball around. Seems strange to me, since a basket ball isn't even very expensive.
Given the number of kids I've seen doing this, and their apparent enthusiasm for the activity, I predict the era of non-video-based hi-tech toys is upon us.
I played with my sister's Barbies. It didn't affect me at all. I became an actor.
Check me out in my latest movie, "Broke Mast Galleon"
Avast ye matey, get ready to swap my poop deck, there be gold in dat booty!
Yeah, I've usually got (or can get) the latest, greatest video game platform(s). And yeah, there's fun to be had there. But there are aspects of the games we enjoyed as kids, that STILL can't be simulated on video games.
I'm not just talking about "free form play" here, although there will always be that. I'm talking about the basic physics of well, destroying things. No pre-set destruct area can compete with the slow destruction of a Lego or Girder and Panel metropolis by means of endless dart gun barrages. No race-car damage modeling will ever be quite as interesting as what happens to a Tonka Truck set rolling down a very long concrete drive-way. No "rag-doll" engine can compete with the viceral thrill of taking a Lysol Blow torch to a GI Joe Doll. Even games which cater to the frustrated Juvenille deliquent in us, such as the Soldier of Fortune series, still can't hold a candle the mind-boggling gore of opening up with a cheap airsoft machine gun on a crowd of raw eggs with faces drawn on. Even when video games go "too far", they still fall short of what kid's real-life imagination can do (PS2 + Hot coffee mod VS hand lotion + privacy).
So the question is not whether toys can ever compete with video games, but whether video games will ever be able to compete with toys.
My guess is that yes, but only if the politicians keep their damn noses out of it. A lot of the really fun toys I played with when I was kid are banned now, because some unsupervised, stupid kid hurt themselves with them. Usually be trying to eat them. It was huge mistake to ban those toys because a)there are only stupid-children toys left now and b)it makes it harder to identify stupid adults by looking for things like "fire-cracker face", "lego-lung" or other evidence of childhood brushes with natural selection. And now we have dolts like Joe Liberman who seek to suck the life out of video games too (read their actual words before assuming they're only trying to "think of the children"). At some point in the not-too-distant future, consumer grade video game machines will be technically capable of showing what it would really looking like if you crashed your Grand Turismo car, your WOW guild caught fire, or shot a Doom 3 alien in the face with a shot gun. But without some common sense voting, those games will either not exist or only be available to adults aged 90 and up.
Which is fine by me, because that's roughly the age I'll be when Duke Nukem forever gets released. But this a post about toys, so it's not about adults like me. It's about the children.
Won't someone *please* think of the children?