Playing video games? Living? That's not living. That's staying indoors with the curtains drawn.

So the just-launched Playstation 3 is being advertised as the giver of some vital, life-enhancing, crest-chafing, nose-dribbling, void-touching, cubegleaming experience. Well that's advertising for you.

But isn't the timing of the launch curious? Coming just on the cusp of summer, instead of before last Christmas . . . which, you'd think, would have made more sense . . . it's almost as if Sony actually wants to ruin your children's chances of being healthy, active and alert.

I'm speaking from a position of some experience here. For my 16th birthday, my brother got me a Sega Megadrive, the Playstation's Cromagnon, early-'90s ancestor. I had absolutely no interest in owning a Sega Megadrive at the time. Really, it was my brother who wanted it. But, needless to say, within a week, I was a slave to the thing, taking more interest in playing God with small blue hedgehogs (I'm not speaking euphemistically) than in chatting to girls with a view to propagating my race. And that lasted an entire summer. Until the machine packed it in.

Whereupon I emerged blinking into the sunlight, my pupils dilated to the size of communion wafers, my skin the shade of a fish's underside and my blood dangerously devoid of important antibodies due to prolonged lack of exposure to pollen.

Except for the bit about emerging into the sunlight, similar situations are being played out en masse across much of the western world right now. Already, an entire country (Scotland) has lost a generation of sportsmen and -women because, instead of playing soccer and rugby these last number of years, Scottish kids have been sat inside living vicarious cyber-lives, in which the only engagement with reality involves eating deep-fried Wham bars.

So don't cave in to your kids' whining for the latest 630-worth of whiz-bang Playstation. Show them what real living is. Don't leave them with hyperrealised Japanese people; bring them to a Japanese garden instead. Bring them to the Irish Museum of Country Life. Show them how to make a plaster cast of a badger's footprint. For pity's sake, don't let them be thumbers this summer.