On the way home from church today, the kids were discussing the latest Harry Potter movie. After minutes of loud enthusing, Maggie boldly proclaimed, “You know, they should really make a book out of that movie!”

During the time I was working at Origin, I bought and sold computer games at an alarming rate. This wasn’t because I spent endless hours playing games, but because the part of the games I most enjoyed was learning how to play. Once I had the mechanics of a game pretty well figured out, playing it through to the end had little appeal unless it had a particularly strong story I wanted to see the end of. I discussed this with a couple of my coworkers, and they confessed to the same thing — games held their attention only as long as it took to figure out new play mechanics, to sort through novel techniques, etc.

Thus, it was with considerable interest that I read this paragraph from Roger Ebert’s review of Silent Hill, the movie based on the video game of the same name:

Dr. Shlain made the most interesting comment on the panel. He said they took some four and five year-olds and gave them video games and asked them to figure out how to play them without instructions. Then they watched their brain activity with real-time monitors. “At first, when they were figuring out the games,” he said, “the whole brain lit up. But by the time they knew how to play the games, the brain went dark, except for one little point.”

Apparently in many cases, the meta-game of figuring out how a game works is a much more mentally engaging activity than the game itself. I would guess that the results — the “one little point” — would be different depending on the game, but I at least now have some empirical support for my short attention span.

Here’s some video from our previously-mentioned Water Rocket building adventures. Share and enjoy!

Things have been pretty busy around here with a dozen people living under our roof, so I haven’t gotten around to posting much lately. A few recent highlights in the family news department:

• Have been enjoying time with The Adams Family (snap, snap) immensely. I’ve tried to drag them around Texas in high speed tourist mode, but they’ve been content to relax and enjoy time of leisure and communion (as much as possible with 8 kiddos running around the house). It’s been great to have the time together.
• I took the three eldest kids to the beach this past weekend to camp on the sands of Port Aransas, where we met up with Meara, and to enjoy Sandfest 2006. We had a great time; there were some super sculptures, and the beach is always a treat for us — one of the places where we can stop being in a hurry and worrying about what needs doing and just play. Bliss! (You can see some of the photos on Flickr.)
• Jeff, my buddy Jason and I yesterday build a water rocket based on these plans. While we didn’t get it finished until 9:30pm or so, the project was a huge success — we estimated our best launches at about 150 feet into the air. Plus, as an added bonus, we didn’t get arrested! Between this, the trebuchet, and the cannon, I’ve got a pretty good arsenal going now.

  Check out Jason’s typically better and more thorough writeup here.