The Blog of Hans Eisenman

How to Steal Your Boyfriend Back From the PlayStation

This could also be titled "How to get your girlfriend/wife to let you play video games as much as you want.

I've never been a video game type, but this is a fun attempt at bringing two opposing points of view together to solve both their needs so I can appreciate it as a marketeer.

How to Steal Your Boyfriend Back From the PlayStation | Design & Innovation | Fast Company.

Plenty of girlfriends, wives, and loved ones have seen their significant others disappear into the black hole of gaming. And that's what the Massage Me gaming interface aims to combat. Created by Mika Satomi and Hannah Perner-Wilson, two students at the University of Art and Industrial Design Linz, it's a vest embedded with sensors. When connected to a PlayStation console, the vest becomes a gamepad. As they write:

Atari Invites Parents to Travel Back to the '70s

My daughters are about to turn 5 and 4.  They aren't ready for Xbox-type games.  Heck, they aren't even really ready for cable TV (which is why we don't subscribe to it right now--there are MadMen [Madison ave Men] who work 24/7 to find a way into my kids' heads and I'm going to do all I can to get there first).

But if  my wife and I were going to turn them on to the wonders of "modern" gaming technology, I'd want them to start with this blast from the past Atari console.  Why?  It's simple, there is not a lot of violence to screen via ratings.  Also, they might even come to appreciate the essence of "the game" as such and without all the emotional additives that come from a well-marketed, hi-tech production that is computer gaming as we know it today.

Link: Atari Invites Parents to Travel Back to the '70s.

Long past its prime, Pong -- that simple '70s video game with two paddles and a bouncing ball -- is back.

Thirty years after it was first introduced to American homes, Pong is part of a retro plug-and-play gaming console that Atari Inc. is selling to parents nostalgic for the homely, simple video games of their youth.

The company has shipped nearly 500,000 of the Atari Flashback 2, in a bet that kids raised on the Xbox and the Sony Playstation will take to rudimentary video games that, for most of them, are prehistoric. Whether today's kids will roll their eyes at the Atari Flashback 2 or join their parents on a trip down memory lane is still unknown.