Gaming and Literacy: Mom's Reservations

My husband wanted to buy some kind of gaming system for our son this Christmas.  His sister talked him out of it (he never believes me:).  They got one for their five year-old son along with the Lego Star Wars game, and it's like heroin.  Little Ryan can't turn it off. He didn't even want to open presents on his birthday because he was too busy playing. I'm just not up for that battle.  I already have it with TV time and pokemonaholic.com.

Then in last Sunday's USA Weekend, I read an article about how childhood play has changed.  Jane Healey, author of Failure to Connect:  How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds--and What We Can Do About It claims:

...many of the most popular and exciting video games engage and build the basic 'fight or flee' part of the brain rather than the centers of higher reasoning.  Some games...are more reflective, and...[may require] intelligent reasoning.  In many cases, children 'look like they're solving problems on a video game, but they're really just responding on a sensory level...If you watch kids on a computer, most of them, they're just hitting keys or moving the mouse as fast as they can.  It really reminds me of rats running in a maze.'

So I feel good about holding off for another year.  At home and in my classroom, I need to learn how to integrate gaming, or gaming principles in a way that isn't a collision with what I'm doing already.