Watch Them? Do We Have To?

At 1:12 pm yesterday, I got the call: the Wiis were in. "I've got a few here," said Brett at the Bellevue Best Buy, sounding for all the world like Lex Luthor with his finger on the button. "I can hold one for an hour, if you want to come get it." Acutely aware of the stakes involved, but not in a position to drop everything and race over the I-90 bridge at that very moment, I quickly alerted the Bellevue arm of the Kidde-Woodward parental partnership, who somehow managed to persuade young Brett that it would be worth his while to hang on to at least one of these marvelous devices for a full twenty-four hourse, until someone could get over there with a vehicle. (We did not mention any of this to Simon, in case the plan should unravel. We could not afford to lose any more credibility, you see.)

Fortunately the plan did not unravel. And once the little white box was safely in the house, we allowed ourselves to (tentatively) count a few chickens. On the way home from D&D, Simon was informed by his father that the Wii had arrived -- and by the time the car had come to a complete stop in front of our house, he had flung open the door and was halfway up the front stairs.

Sadists that we are, we made him swallow three full bites of his dinner before letting him open the box. And he had to wait for the rest of us to finish eating before we all went down to the basement to set up a suitable Wii Arena. This was no simple operation: we had to load a Goodwill run into the back of my car, sweep several decades of chimney soot off the concrete floor, shake out Josie's old rag rug, reassemble an old futon couch frame that seemed to have at least two pieces too many and wrestle a lumpy futon onto it, before dusting off the massive television (inoperative since last June when HDTV arrived and we failed to get The Box, mothballed six months later when we realized nobody had missed it) and heaving it onto an old desk.

Through all of this, Simon alternated between racing around trying to speed things along (fetching the dustpan, tightening the wingnuts), and rapturously fondling the various white plastic components he had unpacked from the box and arrayed on the floor. There was also a certain amount of gleeful jumping up and down, a fist pump or two, and some triumphant chanting: "It's a Wi-i, Oh ye-ah, its a Wi-i, Oh ye-ah..." He'd been wanting a Wii for three years, he repeatedly reminded us -- yet he nearly didn't survive the three minute delay while we located a working electrical outlet and scared up an extension cord.

Finally I opened the manual. Flipping quickly through the Health and Safety Information on my way to the System Setup page, I came across the following:

Parents should watch their children play video games. Stop playing and consult a doctor if you or your child has any of the following symptoms:

Convulsions
Eye or muscle twitching
Loss of awareness
Altered vision
Involuntary movements
Disorientation

Leaving aside the question of whether there's an activity more likely to cause eye-twitching than having to watch your children squander their precious childhoods in front of the screen, we are still left wondering what Nintendo would advise in the case of a child who exhibits these behaviors before you have even turned on the machine.