The piece is satirical, of course, but I think many parents have felt the same kind of disappointment that the dad in this Onion article felt.
Child Unimpressed With Aurora Borealis After Whole Day Of Tekken 3
The Onion
November 17, 1999
INTERNATIONAL FALLS, MN–A wide-eyed gaze of childlike wonderment over the incomprehensible majesty of creation was not elicited Monday, when 7-year-old Kenny Meier, son of local high-school science teacher Stan Meier, was unmoved by the Aurora Borealis after spending an estimated 12 hours playing Tekken 3.
“I have never forgotten the magic night that my own father, like his father and his father’s father before him, gently woke me, bundled me up in a warm blanket and quietly led me outside to see the Northern Lights for the first time,” said the elder Meier, dejectedly sipping a cup of hot cocoa on the back porch as his uninterested son ran back inside to his Sony PlayStation. “It was a moment I’d always looked forward to sharing with my own son.”
“Well, so much for that dream,” added Meier, heading to the kitchen to pour the boy’s untouched mug of cocoa into the sink.
The shimmering curtain of iridescent light known as Aurora Borealis is fabled in story and song as one of nature’s most beautiful and awe-inspiring phenomena. For Kenny, however, it paled in comparison to Tekken 3’s 3-D graphics and impressive 64-bit motion-capture animation, inspiring him to say, “I’m cold, Dad. Can we go back in now?”
The Northern Lights occur when the Earth’s magnetic field interacts with the “solar wind”–charged particles blowing away from the sun. The resultant luminescent display, visible in most northern latitudes during the winter months, stretches from 40 miles above the Earth’s surface in its lowest fringes to upwards of 600 miles above the Earth.
Though the sheer immensity of the glowing nocturnal spectacle makes it one of the most glorious sights in all of nature, the Aurora Borealis nonetheless fell far short of Tekken 3, Kenny said, due to its lack of interactive combat-mode features, substandard two-dimensional interface and undynamic, non-action-packed graphics.
Read the full article here.