Normally I try to ignore everything Mark Cuban does. At one point, I almost edited the wikipedia entry for "douchebag" and inserted his picture. But he makes a valid point in his op-ed for MSNBC:
You can book it right now that it will be the product that kids of this generation grow up with and look back on with affection just like we did with the first video games. Video games changed how we grew up. The iPad will change how kids today grow up.
With this, I can agree. Not to stroll down memory lane, but when I was a little kid, the Nintendo and Nintendo 64 were epic...until the GameBoy came along and changed everything. Suddenly you didn't have to be at home to game. Suddenly car rides with bored kids became car rides where the kids were silent the entire trip, glued to their GameBoy. Imitators popped up, and the portable gaming revolution was on!
Fast forward ten years, and we have cell phones suddenly making the jump to games. And then that market exploded with the iPhone, and now most phones have touchscreens, accelerometers, and games galore.
We may be at the cusp of a new youth gaming explosion. The iPad, as I mentioned before, is reaching a critical limit on size of a portable device; much bigger and it becomes just another tablet PC. But assuming it is small enough that kids love it, and assuming that all the gaming ferocity of the iPhone are channeled into the iPad...and then a cadre of imitators pop up...and suddenly you have the next generation of portable gaming, and here we are seeing it emerging!
Only, this time I'm not 10, or 15. I'm almost 30, and portable gaming is meaningless to me in my car because I am the daddy/driver. Portable gaming is meaningless to me elsewhere, because when do I ever have time to sit and just "game?"
The truth is, Cuban is right: this could be big for kids. Just as our generation is synonymous with cell phones and Facebook, the truth is that "our generation" is getting old, many of us too old to really, honestly, game. But how awesome would it be to be a ten-year-old right now? How sweet would it be to know you're going to grow into your teens with cell phones more powerful than the original Shuttle computer, with instant access to the internet literally anywhere you go? How amazing would it be to know that you can play a freshly downloaded game on a huge, gorgeous screen, whenever you take a trip? Or bored with your game, you could switch over to your expansive music collection, and download some new tunes off iTunes/torrent as you ride?
In other predictions, I predict my kids will be labeled as hopelessly dorky because their dad makes them go "camping." Not iCamping, some future app from Apple (it probably exists already). Actual, real camping.
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