Aslanna wrote:The point is people should be grateful for what they get not bitching about what they didn't. That's what's wrong with the world today. Entitled fucks. ANGER SHARKS!
They should be happy that all of their friends are having fun together while they have a different console? If you aren't sure what your kid wants, give them a gift certificate! That or give them a telescope. That's what I got when I was a kid! I was checking out the moons of Jupiter and getting up at 4am to view Venus when I was 10 years old, learning to ski, to play the piano (fuck that, feel free to skip musical instruments) playing soccer, and reading all the books I could check out from the library about dinosaurs, asked for and was given a metal detector for another xmas gift and spent weekends digging up old coins, researching ghost towns to find good locations to explore.
Game consoles are for older people. Kids should be doing other stuff. When I was 13 I didn't get an Atari 2600, I got a Commodore 64 and learned how to program it, and ended up with an entirely different set of friends where I learned how to hack, phreak and run a BBS. Games weren't handed to me. I figured out on my own how to "obtain" Sprint and Metro codes, hack into the phone system, set up my own bbs on a 300 baud modem and had people upload games to my floppy drives overnight, all in the mid 80's before 99% of the population had a PC. Made friends with the valedictorian of my high school who also happened to be great at hacking. Met my life long friend via a C-64 BBS, ending up in weekend visits to share games and programs, introducing me to my first girlfriend who knew fuckall about computers but it was the beauty of the baud that caused the connection. My friend ended up going to Stanford and working on Spy satellite guidance systems for the CIA...another successful pirate!
The point? Ferris Beuller's sister got a car while he got a computer. As a parent, I'd be much more impressed with the kid that figured out how to use his PC to play hooky than a brown nosing kid expecting a car for good behavior.
Give your kids something that makes them think and at least use their brain to get into trouble. Spark their imagination. I met the smartest people I know through hacking/phreaking, not from playing Space Invaders on the Atari 2600. Ignoring gaming/pc's altogether, kids should be encouraged to read, discover, and find hobbies that develop their minds. My fondest memory of Ultima III wasn't beating the game, it was figuring out how to hack the game, understand the code and create my own bridge to cross the lava pit, bypassing the final boss to win the game. These days people just use a cheat code...so lame.
Console games...pffft! In a round about way, that answers your question about what's wrong with the world today. Lazy people that just want to sit on their ass and be entertained instead of finding ways to entertain themselves while maybe learning something along the way, which is much more satisfying.