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I am currently reading a book (the telly's broken) titled Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. It's the autobiographical account of one woman's attempt to raise her Western-born children according to "the Chinese model". This involves banning all television, playdates and sleepovers, and insisting on hours of academic drilling and violin practice. The aim is to produce prodigiously talented and successful adults who are ultimately grateful for being forced to work so hard. It's inspiring. My son, Charlie, is only 18 months old, but I don't think that's too early to start developing his talents in one particular area. I'm adapting the model as I couldn't care less about maths (praise be to the great god Casio for blessing us with calculators) or classical music (sure, Mozart wrote the odd foot-tapper, but he's no Carly Rae Jepsen). I'm calling my plan Operation Tiger Gamer.
Kids today have no appreciation of what it was like to grow up gaming in the eighties. It's all automatic saves here and reasonably short loading times there. They have no idea what it's like to wait for an entire cassette to play itself through before you can start a gaming session. (Respect, however, to Sony and Microsoft, for keeping old traditions alive with all those downloadable updates.)
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