Card Games, TV or Video Games?

Are you ready for a history lesson? Nearly everyone has a card game that they love to play. If not love, at least enjoy playing with friends from time to time. According to Wikipedia it is almost certain that playing cards originated in China after the invention of paper. The first formal printing of cards was in the mid 10th or early 11th century. They were used as money cards. These money cards evolved over the next few hundred years taking on many different uses. Actual playing cards have been traced back to the 13th century in England. With such a long history, no doubt most of us learned a card game growing up. Also, with such a history, most of us would consider a card game an acceptable way to pass time. On the other hand television and video games have a much shorter history. Electromechanical techniques, which make television possible, were developed from the 1900's into the 1920's, with the first broadcast being made in 1926. The many inventions of Philo T. Farnsworth and others made way for a Television system suitable for mass distribution of television programming. Farnsworth gave the world's first public demonstration of an all-electronic television system at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia on the 25th of August 1934. Regular network broadcasting began in the United States in 1946, and television became common in American homes by the middle of the 1950s. The history of video games traces to 1948 where the idea of a video game was conceived and patented by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann. In 1958, the first video game was introduced to the public, William Higinbotham's Tennis for Two. Since cards have been around for hundreds of years it's easy to see why card games are widely accepted. Of television and video games, the final product both being released in the early to mid 1950's, video games have now been labeled as a social stigma. They have been blamed for the obesity of our youth, attributed to school shootings and violence among teens, and generally viewed as a waste of time. Why are card games and television not viewed as negatively? My friends and I were playing a 3 player card game on the Nintendo DS when the wife of one of my friends entered the room. She said "why don't you do something productive? All you do is play DS." Now I am willing to bet had we been playing that same card game with actual cards nothing would have been said. Why are physical cards better than digital ones? They say that video games are violent. Is TV not? Being a lover of both television and video games, I can tell you that TV is twice as violent as video games. Crimes dramas such as CSI, Law and Order as well as many others show gruesome crimes being committed. In one CSI I saw a recreation of a murder where the murder weapon was an ice pick and it was repeatedly jabbed into the neck of someone. Is that not violent? Don't get me wrong, video games are violent. But it could be argued that they are just dots, lines, and pixels. As far as video games making our youth obese, they do. But we need to add television to that list. We are sitting on the couch getting fat whether our TV is hooked to a coaxial cable bringing us "quality" programing, or hooked to a gaming machine bringing us "violent " video games. As for card games, Solitaire on our computers in the workplace is one of the biggest contributers to non productivity out there. Oh, but wait, that is a video game right? Card Games, TV or Video Games? If one is accepted they all should be. If one is a stigma they all are. Choose your evil wisely.