Dr. Nintendo

Poor Nintendo. The Japanese conglomerate may have enthralled youngsters with the world's most popular home-video games, but it gets no respect from adults. An antiviolence watchdog group has rated some 70% of the company's games "harmful for children." Physicians warn that too much rapid-fire button pushing can lead to hand strain, a condition dubbed Nintendinitis. And many parents, seeing their kids play Super Mario Bros. for hours on end, are asking what a nonstop diet of synthetic reality is doing to impressionable young minds.

Now Nintendo, with a $2.7 billion U.S. market to protect, may be trying to buy some respect. It has created a $3 million fund at M.I.T.'s Media Laboratory to study "how children learn while they play." "This is not guilt money," insists Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte. The cash will be given, apparently with no strings attached, to support the work of Professor Seymour Papert, creator of the Logo computer language and one of the most influential names in computer education. His research could eventually lead to new and better kinds of Nintendo games.

For a distinguished educator to take money from the purveyor of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video game may seem like the American Cancer Society soliciting funds from a cigarette company. But Papert has always been a maverick. In his seminal book Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas, he advocates a self-motivated approach to education that gives as much importance to the lessons learned in computer play as those drilled home in textbooks. He has received funding in the past from the National Science Foundation, IBM and Lego Systems.

Nintendo has so far squandered a rare opportunity to use its market position to do some good. The 40 million Nintendo systems installed around the world are powerful little computers that could deliver rich and rewarding experiences. Instead, Nintendo chose to give the world's children RoboCop and Bionic Commando. Too bad the company did not seek out Papert, or people like him, long before this.