Video Games Are Destroying Our National Parks
July 27, 2006 - Games
Listening to GameSpot's HotSpot this morning, I heard the story of how Video Games are responsible for the decline of our National Parks. Apparently, a recent NPR Story laid out the story: The rise in at-home entertainment activities such as video games corresponds with a decline, in per capita terms, in visits to U.S. national parks. In other news, venganza.org has discovered a disturbing correlation between the rise in global temperature and the decline in number of pirates globally.
Honestly, it isn't too hard to believe that people are going to parks less. Usually the really nice national parks are fairly distant from most people, and with gas prices what they are today, who wants to make the drive?
It's also true that home entertainment has come a long way, and that certainly might be an incentive for people to stay home. But why blame video games? Blame that eighty inch high definition plasma TV. Blame the internet. Blame the TiVo box and your surround sound system. But no - it's as trendy today to blame society's problems on video games as it was to blame them on Dungeons and Dragons in the eighties and on Rock and Roll in the fifties.
In the 1950s, everybody said TV was going to put movie theaters out of business.
In the 1950s-1970s, record companies said cheap transistor radios and tape recoders would hurt their sales (ever _hear_ a 1950s home-made tape? [shudder]).
In the 1980s, Disney, et. al., said VCRs would drive them out of business.
Now the music people are back, going after digital recordings this time.
Can't these people think up anything new?
BTW--if all this is true, why is that a Bad Thing? I'd like to go to someplace like Yellowstone and not see mobs of kids running (or waddling) around with their earbuds or screaming into cell phones.