Candyland versus Mario

I've mentioned before how awesome Steven Johnson is, but I think this particular blog post exemplifies how adept and fascinating Johnson's worldview is.

In this guest spot for Boingboing he discusses playing video games with his kids, then trying to introduce the games he played as a youth (Battleship, Candyland, and Sorry! for example) to his own children. The generation gap becomes rapidly apparent...and argues even more forcefully that kids today aren't dumber than those of previous generations (though they may not be in the best shape ever - childhood obesity has doubled over the past 20 years). In fact, the torrent of media that they endure on a daily basis has made them exceptional at multi-tasking and quite media savvy when it comes to advertising and biased messages.

It used to be that the advertisers tried to be one step ahead of the consumer, or that they always underestimated their intelligence. What's going to happen when those consumers haven't started high school, and easily see through the thinly-veiled product propaganda of most of today's Madison Avenue?