You guys should probably sit down for this.
At the UK Daily Mail, an exasperated mother has written an excoriating screed, blaming the Nintendo DS for making her children "turn into monsters":
Hand over the Nintendo and without any effort, you have a window of about two hours of peace, with your child doing something quietly constructive.
Except, it's not. What is constructive about playing football on a tiny screen, or washing a virtual dog, or watching a hideous pink pony trot around a pink palace decorated with shells?
Fighting to get onto the machine was bad enough, but it was worse when they were forcibly dragged from it.
Our Nintendo had taken the guise of a small but toxic drug which, little by little, was poisoning my children.
This breed of article may seem to exist solely for the purpose of raising gamers' blood pressure, and yet in defense of our medium — which at its core has the potential to be educational, relaxing and family-friendly — we must take on the task of dissecting these accusations in as dignified and level-headed a fashion as we can manage.
First of all, a mother with four children aged 10, eight, five and three decides it would be a good idea to instruct them to share one DS? Did no one instruct her as to the nature of siblings at these ages? In an act defying sense, she blames video games for making them fight and hit one another — even when she admits openly she was hoping that giving her kids the device would indulge her "sneaking and totally selfish wish to be Mother of the Year."
The mother describes how the kids were completely bored with brain training games, irresponsibly mishandled the hardware and generally fought and abused one another and her for the DS — and the conclusion that she draws is that the device ruined her serene family life.
Can anyone pick out what's wrong with this picture?
Ninten-Don't... How I watched my children turn into monsters the minute I bought them a computer game [Daily Mail]