From Kroc's article for today:

“Kids toys aren’t what they used to be. I look at the adverts for kids toys today and the single flaw I see that permutates the industry is that most toys do too much now. There’s no room left for imagination. What the child is really interested in is the infinite-possibility of the cardboard box rather than the guided-play of the toy itself. The toys I enjoyed the most were the ones that did the least. Lego (before it became too pre-defined) and toy cars (the realistic model kind that just roll and don’t have traction motors and such).”

What do you guys think of what this implies?

The (non-electronic) games I enjoy the most leave up a lot to the imagination. Simple dice games (Farkel, Liar's Dice), card games (Gin, Poker), and similar "abstract" games like Rummikub occupy much of my time spent playing games that don't require a power brick. (And yeah, there's Magic, but I would argue that there is still *plenty* imagination involved in deck-building and strategy.)

Of course, the same applies to electronic games. The Commodore 64, NES/Famicom, SNES, Sega Genesis, and those similar systems (i.e. before the PlayStation came along) are what I tend to play. Some people seem to think that it's just the "nostalgia factor" that makes these games fun, but I still spend more time playing these than anything that has come out in the past ten years, with very, very few exceptions. Nostalgia doesn't take that long to wear off. Crappy games with killer graphics lose their appeal much faster.

It seems to me that this marketing of things that think for you (i.e. that leave nothing to the imagination) is making us all more soft in the brain. In this forum, there are no avatars, or fancy font transitions, or crazy background images. It's (for the most part) people's conversations. It does what it needs to, and nothing else. People have the ability to imagine their own avatars for people -- or not, if that's what they prefer.

I don't know where I'm going with this exactly... just jotting down some thoughts. Feel free to expand upon them (or better yet, brainstorm some ideas to counter over-imagined things).