Ten O'Clock News

You have to beat the first four levels in [Unintelligible ???] [Reporter] 'The vocabulary alone is enough to make the uninitiated grumble with irritation. Eight year old Eric Lyons is a two year veteran of Nintendo. He's something of an expert. [Eric] 'At the end of the board, there's a monster you have to defeat. He throws hammers and fire, you have to beat that, and then you have to-- and then you save the princess. [Reporter] Children can be mesmerized by the games. Eric was sitting in front of his set for three hours a day. His parents decided they had to put the brakes on. [Eric] The limit's 30 minutes a day, that's it. [Eric's Mother ???] He did get frustrated, he did get frustrated, at first. He felt, there would be lots of times he'd be complaining that the controls weren't working properly, or the computer was out to beat him, or the computer cheats, we hear that, a lot, the computer cheats. [Reporter] Some parents have packed up and put away Nintendo, all together. They blame the game for making their normally happy go lucky children overly anxious. [game music] [Background, children]

[Reporter] It's a fast paced world of never-ending challenges. With each blunder, you have to start the game all over again. One parent compared it to getting stuck in rush hour traffic. [Eric's Mother] I think it can be very frustrating. I know that there are a lot of kids that do get angry with it. [Eric] When you think something shouldn't have happened, or should have happened, that didn't, and you like really think that you were like, you really should have, sometimes you can get really aggravated, that it didn't, or did. [Reporter] Eric's house is just one of millions of homes across the country which boast a home video game. As of now, the new Nintendo company has 80 percent of the home video market. They project that by the end of this year, home video games will be in 26 percent of American households. They're raising the same sorts of concerns that video arcade games did a few years ago. The difference here is that the at-home version attracts a much younger group of players. [New Gamer] Go for it, you're going to have to kidnap, get a kidnapped boy back. Take him into

town. [Reporter] The Nintendo Company has set up a telephone hotline with 80 counselors on hand to help frustrated players deal with their problems. [Gamer] But... you kind of have to deal with it, otherwise you're going to let the aggravation set in a lot harder. [Pediatrician] Nintendo, as a game, is marvelous. As an individual piece of technology, it's remarkable. [Reporter] Pediatrician Bill Deedes has tracked the effect of television on children for many years. He refused to buy Nintendo for his daughter. [Pediatrician] My daughter had played Nintendo a fair amount, at her cousins', and really, became hypnotized by it. [Reporter] It's a far cry from the old kick'n the can games, or a nice match of dominoes. But this is the way children play these days. The Council for Children's Television reports dozens of phone calls from parents worried about Nintendo-obsessed children. The remedy seems to be moderation, and in some cases, it's the moms and dads who need

turn off the game, and walk away. [Eric] I like it maybe a little bit more than my father. I mean like, I think, a few days ago, I beat him, and he got, he got really mad, and he was like "aaa", and he's tellin' me not to get really mad, when I lose? And I'm like, "why are you telling me telling me that? I should be tellin' you that." [Reporter] For the 10 O'Clock News, I'm Jan Von Mehren.