Is there life after PS4?

Once you’ve gone over to the PS4, will you ever go back?

The high-definition intense graphics, the online multiplayer competitions, the story lines, the gruesome killings and road-hugging racing–how can anyone ever go back to the real world?

Forget Disneyland, don’t even bother with a tablet and save your 18 dollars on an IMAX movie when you’re not even in control of the players? Think that reality might win over? Don’t book that ticket to Borneo just yet. Why hang out with a slow-moving orangutan when there’s probably a game where you can hunt them down with an automatic weapon and unlimited ammo?

Especially if you’re a 12-year old boy, the attraction of the PS4 is almost too strong to resist.

Where’s the balance?

How can we find the balance between taking in all of the stimulating action of a PS4 game and still enjoying stuff that a 12-year old boy is supposed to still find interesting? If limits are set to playing times are the kids only looking forward to that time and barely conscious of whatever they’re doing before then? Can we (still) influenced kids to “enjoy” the non-PS4 world in a way that’s not forced or heavy handed or just because my parents said so?

I’ve heard all corners of the spectrum as far as strategies to curb the addiction, but it seems to be more of a question of the child’s personality than rules and regulations. Of course, if there is no option, no PS4, then it’s like abstinence (which seems to work for monks, usually). But is the longing gone? That magnetic force that the game marketers know so well that draws the kids in and holds onto them like a pit bull on the neck of a poodle.

Is there life after the initiation to the fantastic and über-reality of the PS4?

I sure hope so.