Obligatory link to an essay I wrote five years ago covering the larger picture, what drives this problem and some way forward: http://www.whattofix.com/blog/arc

Obligatory link to an essay I wrote five years ago covering the larger picture, what drives this problem and some way forward: http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is-h.php http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is... It's freaking sad, and it's just getting worse. 1992 or so. I'm a computer guy, gamer (arcade and old Atari) and we've got this cool new thing called a Nintendo for my two boys, 6 and 4. Being a good dad, I sit down next to them and "help" them get started playing a game. We went through Super Mario, then started on Zelda. Wow! This was a lot better than those arcade games where you only got 3 or 4 minutes and had to pay. Here you could play, well, you could play forever. And then it hit me. You could play forever. That was the whole gimmick. I stood up and left the room. Never played another console game again, unless it was something very brief and involved having people over. During that time, I watched every other member of my family get involved in games that took literally hundreds of hours of their time. I'm still watching my second-youngest son struggle with online games and college work. It's depressing as hell. Today as I type this, I realize that I've spent 3 or 4 hours fucking around online that I should have been doing something useful. That's just Facebook, Twitter, G+, and so forth. This is not a coincidence. Every piece of tech I pick up is trying as hard as it can to be "sticky" Same shit, different platform. I'm still the big hunk of dumb meat I used to be. Computerized gaming just keeps getting better. The trajectory is not good.