I’ve made some mistakes in my time.  Some were relatively minor, where others were real doozies.  The doozies involved leasing a Nissan 240SX in 1992 and not reading the small print so I ended up locked into a closed lease and paid $40,000 for a $22,000 car.  Another doozie was marrying a hairy lesbian in 1994 and losing the house I paid for after putting her through college.  My personal fave doozy was mistaking a jar of Vicks Vapor Rub for Vaseline when I was 12, and not realizing it until my cock was screaming in hot searing pain.  Where the minor ones are usually relatively painless, they can still endure.  Recently I agreed, rather stupidly I know, to host a kid’s videogame party.

I had such hopes.  This was going to be a great time filled with creativity and immersion in the cultural significance of videogames as art as well as entertainment.  Aside from the obvious Wii Sports, and Mario Kart, I downloaded Flower, and Everyday Shooter for the PS3.  I had Rock Band locked and loaded as well all of the Lego games.  Finally, I had spent a fair amount of time on Little Big Planet and even picked up extra controllers so that four kids could play and create at the same time.

The kids were a small collection of my elder son’s friends: there were four six-year-olds, and one five-year-old, all boys.  So, was this the creative and fun time I had hoped for?  Well not exactly.  You see one thing that definitely came out of this experience was the realization that we who are somewhat obsessed by videogames seem to forget that the vast majority of the world around us don’t give a crap about many of the things we find important.  A case in point: Little Big Planet was a resounding failure.  The boys couldn’t be bothered to spend the time learning how to latch onto some items and as for dressing up their sackboys?  They said that was stupid and girly.

Wii Sports was a failure as well.  They all have it at home and were bored months ago with it, and they didn’t care for Mario Galaxy either.  Mario Kart kept them somewhat amused for about fifteen minutes, but again, they all already had it at their own homes.  What was the big winner?  What was the game that captured their imaginations and generated the most attention and enjoyment?  Ben 10: Alien Force on the Wii.  Lego Batman was a distant second.  Ben 10 Alien Force is a simplistic little side-scrolling Beat’Em Up that probably made someone at Nickelodeon a lot of money.  It also had become the bane of my existence because it actually has co-op and my son could coast through most of the levels and if he got into trouble I was able to help him out because there is a skill-tree system and I was able to unlock a fair bit for him.

So as my failure of a videogame party was winding down the boys discovered that my son is one of the lucky ones whose parents let him have toy guns.  After they all discovered this they spent the next hour in my basement screaming at the tops of their lungs, and having an excellent time. 

After about an hour, it got very quiet downstairs and I decided to lurk a bit and try to listen in on what was going on downstairs.  This is what I heard: ‘œI dare you to pee on the cat.’

‘œWhoa!’  I said, and stumbled downstairs to find this…

What have I learned from this experience?  Licensed games will always make money because of children and their stupid parents … and that I am easily outsmarted by even a bunch of six-year-olds.  Fuck.