Gaming Addict? Gadget Curbs Game Play
Is there a gaming addict living under your roof? Someone who doesn’t know when to stop trying to get to that next level, get the top score or can’t pull themselves away from their alternate reality. There is - no doubt - countless parents out there who would love to obtain some magical gadget to limit their kids game play. A 79-year-old thinks he has the solution. The answer? His invention - the GameDr.
This device is akin to a fancy schmancy egg timer. Mom or Dad just sets the time for how long they’ll allow game playing. When the allotted time has run out, the GameDr immediately shuts off the gaming system. The password protected unit connects to your power cord so it’ll work with any console out there. “There are moms who say they love this, and that they know 10 people who need one,” said a marketing director of the company that sells GameDr. “And there are gamers who say it’s terrible and that parents should just monitor their kids.”
Hopefully your kids will just accept the limits you set for them and they won’t figure out that they can “circumvent the GameDr by using a spare power cord”. Guess you’ll just have to hide all of those too.
Do you think an item like this is totally superfluous? And that just saying “time to stop playing”, using a regular old kitchen timer, or just turning it off yourself is enough?
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Tags: GameDr, gaming, video games
6 Comments
feefifoto commented on Jul 10 09 at 1:49 pmI’d definitely resort tom something like this if it could take some of the heat off of me for declaring that video game time is over. There’s no other way to describe it: my son suffers from an acute hangover for at least thirty minutes after turning off a video game, by which I mean he’s angry and abusive. The constant urging to move onto the next level gets to him and he can’t separate fantasy from reality. I’d get rid of the darn thing in a minute. Maybe I will.
carefree childhood commented on Jul 10 09 at 7:04 pmactually I won’t mind having that for myself to limit my TV time and get me to bed earlier
bettywu commented on Jul 11 09 at 5:11 pmFeefifoto, we had the same problem, so we pulled the plug. Period. I figured that his reaction was telling me that his little nervous system wasn’t ready for that kind of stimulation yet. We waited a year and put him on a 1 hour, 1x a week schedule to see how it went. Over the months we upped it a little but when we got to two hours, some of the behavior started coming back, so we went right back down. We tell him he’s not being punished and we try to find other fun things to do. He’s got a whole lotta years ahead to play video games, I figure.
Anonymous commented on Jul 20 09 at 5:17 amFrankly, this device is silly. As a parent, YOU control things like this. Kid getting out of hand and “won’t listen”? Take the system and the games; if need be ban the child from playing games at friends’ houses to break the addiction. I promise, growing up without video games is not the end of the world; I did it.
Ri-chan commented on Nov 11 09 at 1:52 pmI play video games sometimes, this would be horrible. If you weren’t in a place where you could save your game all you’d be left with is anger and a lot of waster effort.
Ri-chan commented on Nov 11 09 at 1:54 pmwaster? I meant wasted btw.
