Steven Johnson is best known to me for the book Everything Bad Is Good For You, in which he argues that video games and television are making us smarter, not dumber. (Check out his 2005 Fresh Air interview here.) He's recently been guest-blogging at the very popular Boing Boing, where today, he talked about how boring he found old-school board games when he played them with his kids.

Battleship, he argues, is mostly guessing followed by very simple pattern-following; Candy Land contains absolutely no decision-making at all. (In the Candy Land commercial above, they seem to stress that you don't have to know anything to play Candy Land, so he may be missing the point.) What's great about the post is the spirited, largely respectful discussion it spawned in the comments about games, kids, nostalgia, and whether the purpose of Candy Land is mostly to teach you how to play a game at all — we're not born knowing how to take turns, after all.

It turned into a neat little chat, definitely worth checking out if you're interested in games for kids, or even if you're not.