Wii Ennui

by John Christmann

On a hot Chicago day in late August I lay on the soft grass in back of my house with my best friend correctly identifying a high flying cumulous cloud as an X-ray of Jimmy Durante’s nose. We are eight years old, it is the last week of summer vacation, and save for the few words we utter, we are functionally comatose. Not even a Cubs game on TV can save us, even if there was one scheduled. We have long played out bicycle races and swimming pools and all-day monopoly tournaments. We are so bored we are seeing things in the clouds.

In one short week on my first day in the third grade I will be asked to write an essay. And it is this dead day of summer that I will conveniently dredge up. What I did on my summer vacation, I will write at the top of a fresh white page of loose leaf paper. And without the slightest trace of guilt I will expanded fully: Nothing. It will come back marked in big bold red ink: More imagination!!!!

But this humiliation is not for another week. I still have a few days to waste with my best friend.
“Whada you wanna do?” I ask him.
After a minute or two he replies, “I dunno. Whada you wanna do?”
I think about it a minute, but I arrive at the same conclusion I came to when I first asked.
“I dunno,” I manage to say with some effort, “Whada you wanna do . . . ?”

I think most of us can remember those long summer days of our youth with nothing to do. Of course, they are long gone, because nowadays there is always something to do, and when we don’t do anything we call it relaxing and then feel guilty about it. The last time I actually felt bored through inactivity was shortly after I got married and foolishly volunteered to shop for home furnishings with my wife. But I certainly remember the summer doldrums of youth. I remember because my kids remind me almost every day: “Dad, there’s nothing to do.”
They say this as if I am their personal tour director.

As you might expect, sometime over the course of the summer my kids ran out of new and exciting activities to occupy their time. Everything I suggested they had already done many times over. They became so bored they couldn’t even come up with creative excuses. A book from the library? Read them all. Lemonade Stand? Can’t get a permit. Play Monopoly? SEC violation. Build a fort? Need steel. And so on.

And so it was, as involuntary tour director for my children, that I bought, against my better judgment, a Nintendo Wii game station to keep them occupied.

For the uninitiated, the Wii (pronounced We, as in We just spent a fortune on another piece of electronics equipment ) is a gaming console that enables one or more players to simultaneously monopolize a couch and a television set as they advance their way through an assortment of video games that have no end. Vigorously waving hand-held controllers the players nimbly manipulate a complex array of buttons with their thumbs to make characters jump, spin, run, hit, catch, shoot, and blow up anything around them, including lamps when the controllers are not gripped securely.

Playing the Wii requires zombie-like concentration and the development of double jointed thumbs and lightning fast wrist flicks, skills which prepare gamers for future success in important endeavors such as text messaging and hailing taxis. The enjoyment comes from being fully engaged in numerous attempts to advance through ever more challenging levels, many which have no apparent solution, until someone with common sense makes you quit because your eyes are bloodshot and you haven’t eaten for two days. Add to this a mix of high-resolution graphics, sports, action, fantasy, science fiction, and random violence and it is clear why game systems like the Wii are so popular.

For years I put off buying various versions of these game consoles and in the process, if you believe them, turned my children into social outcasts. But I was only trying to be a responsible parent. Responsible because I knew the minute there was a video game in the house, I would be the one playing 24x7. If I wasn’t challenging my children to a game of Madden Football, I knew I would be slinking away after dinner to embark on another mission in Grand Theft Auto.

You see, when it comes to electronic games, I have absolutely no self control. This is something I came to realize early in my corporate career when I found myself occupying needless conference calls mastering Tetris on the computer. At the time my rationale for this career-limiting behavior seemed pretty sound: How can you be an effective manager if you can’t fill a hole with blocks? But this is not the sort of obsessive behavior I want my kids to see. And so, as a responsible parent who knows that he is irresponsible, I refused to indulge their many requests for a game system.

The collapse of my resolve coincided with the approach of my older son’s birthday. As summer began he very cleverly began laying the groundwork for a Wii acquisition, first to his mother and then to me.
“There are only two things that I want for my birthday,” he informed us, “the Wii or a set of drums.”
Then he thoughtfully explained the merits of each to help us with our gift decision.
“With the Wii I can actually get some exercise swinging the controllers. But with the drums I can release all my energy at night in the living room because that is the only place they will fit.”
His younger brother and sister immediately joined in with some compelling arguments of their own: “If we had a Wii we wouldn’t ask to watch TV all the time.”
“Yes, but you would ask to play the Wii all the time.” I told them.
“But if we play it too much you can turn it off so we would have to watch TV.”
“I’ll think about it.” I told them without thinking about it.

But it wasn’t until the novelty of summer vacation wore off and they started depending on me for things to do that I finally gave it some serious thought. I was at the mall and spied a Wii demonstration unit in a gaming store. On a big, crisp, flat screen TV was a cartoon man in overalls and a mustache battling a dragon-like turtle named Bowser. The graphics were fantastic. I muscled my way in through a group of young teens who were playing intently and grabbed a free controller.
“I’ll be gone in a minute,” I told them. “I just want to see if this is appropriate for my children.”
A few minutes later there was a tap on my shoulder. It was the store salesman.
“Sir, you need to finish, the store is closing.”
I was shocked. “What do you mean closing? The mall just opened!”
“Sir, that was eight hours ago.”
I looked around. The kids were gone and the store was empty, except for another clerk who was vacuuming the carpet.
“OK, OK,” I said, “Just let me finish this one level . . .”
“I am sorry sir,” the salesman said reaching behind the Wii controller. The TV went dark and he reemerged holding a plug in his hand.

And that’s how I found myself walking out of the mall with a brand new Nintendo Wii and some explaining to do to my wife.

For a couple of weeks I was extremely popular in my house. The kids enjoyed playing video versions of baseball and tennis and golf, and as their controller thumb skills improved they soon moved on to some challenging games with Super Mario, the cartoon guy in overalls and a moustache. I even managed to exhibit self control, although one night after the kids went to bed I got lost for a few hours battling a pink nerf ball with ears named Kirby. But best of all, the kids could be plunked in a room and occupied for nice chunks of time allowing me some free time to relax and feel guilty about it.

Unfortunately it didn’t last long. Soon I noticed that the kids were becoming cranky and irritable. They fought among each other vying for turns. They grew frustrated trying to vanquish exotic monsters and advance through new levels. They demanded—not asked—to play on the Wii for longer and longer periods of time. The last straw came when I asked my son to terminate his game for dinner and he wiggled the controller at me in a vain attempt to do a jumping back flip and stomp on my head. I had no choice but to put strict limits on their Wii play time and become an unpopular parent once again.

They were horrified. “But Dad, what are we supposed to do?”
As their incompetent tour director, I really had no idea what they were supposed to do.
“It’s a beautiful day,” I said holding the door open for them. “Why don’t you go outside and play?”
“Play what?” they asked in desperation.
“I don’t know!” I said closing the door behind them, “Use your imagination . . .”

Out the kitchen window I saw my kids lie down on the soft grass. Their heads were together and they were pointing at puffy white clouds that rested like sculptures on the mantle of the afternoon sky. The rhythmic din of cicadas swelled about them. Whadayawannado whadayawanna do? they sang.
In the next room the Wii sat silent and . . . available.

And so, with renewed imagination and energy, I would like to re-submit my back-to-school essay to my third grade teacher:

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

On my summer vacation I explored many different galaxies and defeated many formidable monsters in my quest to save the Princess Peach from the hands of Bowser, King of the Koopas. I also beat Tiger Woods by two strokes at Pebble Beach and careened down the Great Wall of China on a skateboard with Tony Hawk.

What did you do?