Contributor Kate Collins’ nostalgic posting of a previous generation’s childhood pastimes (scroll down through this “Perspectives” section's articles, and read it first ) elicited a flurry of comments among our Demos community, which morphed to modern games’ impact on mind, body, patience, and socialization. Since internal Demos comments aren’t yet available in their entirety to non-members, I have her permission to reproduce them here:

George Sullivan: Don’t forget those ingenious wooden puzzles from the fifties shaped like a barrel or sphere, which had notched parts that successively and ingeniously interlocked and slid into place. They were easy to disassemble, but the devil to reconstruct . I remember spending happy hours too at a wooden box game that had a tiltable upper face over which one had to maneuver a steel ball through a maze by means of two rotator dials. Also, we loved skittles, those odd tops on a skinny stick that one spun with a string and coaxed through doorways from one little wooden chamber to the next.

Herb Poole: How about pinball, the predecessor at resorts or arcades to this virtual stuff.

Sakurachan: Do I detect a snide tone to the Mario/computer segue? Aside from the downside of lurking carpal syndrome, it did enable this generation to become instantly fluent and comfortable in the workings and opportunities of the information age. Remember too that when they were young, math was taught with more sensitivity to number sets and patterns than previously, which facilitated the segue as well.

Raphael: I am one of those Nintendo children and I fiercely defend their utility. I played sports, got tons of exercise, and spent a ton of free time with friends, however for a half-dozen years or so I also passed many hours problem-solving in the electronic medium of video games. I credit series like SimCity, Mario, and the NHL with presenting realistic, complex challenges to the brain at a formative juncture, nurturing traits such as assiduity, ambition, investigation, eye-hand reflexivity, teamwork, and—ho, ho, ho—game theory. What pre-video-game pundits may discount as flashing colors and too much time before the boob tube was, for me at least, a forum for learning the same lessons the toys of yore imparted more quickly, more widely, and more inventively. No disrespect to stilts, but how many new scenarios unfold while walking around a foot off the ground?

Sara Hartley: To me, the down side of the computer stuff is that so much of it happens alone. There’s something special about a long afternoon with flesh and blood cronies, making popcorn, shooting the breeze between games, goofing around with the dog together.

M. Brun: Sara, I agree with you one hundred percent. I also understand Raphael's point which might speak to solitary exercise as a general pastime. Within the solo spectrum, video games certainly offer a vastly different array of stimuli than reading, for example. (Reading vs. Nintendo is a debate unto itself.) Might I point out, however, that it is a definite error to equate video games with solitude. Easily half of the best-selling games of all time are intended for group play--racing, shoot-em-up, sport, and fighting games routinely draws crowds. These are hugely social magnets. Whether they fulfill a sense of good old-fashioned fun is probably a matter of perspective--after all, aren't these the 21st-century variants of Cowboys & Indians, baseball cards?

Ravimehta: I would add that even if gaming does not involve other players, it need not be considered a "solitary" activity. If one is playing against the machine, one is in fact playing against a number of people who have created computer code that allow them to be omnipresent and "play" with any number of people in the future under a range of scenarios. These programmers have thought through what moves a person might make and why, and have created countermoves accordingly. In this way, I think games can be just as effective in ingraining in children problem solving skills, good reflexes, pattern recognition. One thing games do not teach children is how to communicate face to face with others....