I think that most people in power, and in general, are missing a key factor that affects kids that grew up from my generation (born 1990) on. At age six my grandfather could walk five miles away to a swimming pond or field to play, my parents could walk a mile to either the schoolyard or the playground. At age six, I couldn't walk more than fifty feet away from my house without my parents ushuring my back inside/demanding that I stayed close to the house. I started playing video games, and was rushed off to the worlds of Link and Fox and Banjo. Now, after a while, what do you think I found more interesting, Hyrule, the Lylat System, and the musical world of an anthropomorphic bear, or a 100 foot diameter circle of generic American suburbia? Even if my experience was interupted, say, by a red-ring-of-death, or a power outage, I still didn't go outside, I went to books (fantasy/sci-fi of course) and sat in a chair or my bed all day, reading. By the time I reached an age that my parents felt safe about me leaving their watchful eyes for more than thirty seconds (16) playing outside had simply lost its appeal. Swings? Jungle Gym? See-saw? Pass. And even more "exciting" things, like sports, fishing, or biking, had no appeal to me whatsoever. Basically, the environent of a medium sized town, even with my newly aquired freedom, did not stack up to the years of experiences in far-off lands through video games.
Now I don't blame my parents, or society, or the world, or the media, and most certainly not video games for this fact. Because, for me, it is simply that, a fact. The reason I bring it up is that if we're going to change the status quo for the better, we need to understand the forces behind the current situation, treating the disease (bordom/apathy concerning the real world) instead of treating/blaming the various symptoms (playing a lot of video games, watching a lot of TV, reading a lot of books, and using the internet for extended periods). If the kids of the next generation are going to go outside, we need to give them a long, LONG leash so that they can get out of suburbia and actually DO SOMETHING! Now, I turned out alright, I'm not obese, not even overwieght, nor am I homeless or undereducated, I graduated in the top 15% of my high school class and am currently working through college, but we need to give the next generation the kind of freedom in the real world that they can so far only experience in an open-world game (A wide, varied environment with flexable boundries), otherwise, they're going to miss out on what the real world has to offer them, like I did.
