I don't really see coloring books to have anything to do with art.
It would certainly be highly inconvenient to see that and admit it. Coloring involves happily filling in someone else's artwork, and involves putting one's creative imagination on hold while that's done. Why draw when one can color? Here's an interesting experiment to try: take a child who loves to color, buy her a new coloring book, and sit her next to a stack of blank paper and the coloring book, and see which she chooses.
I wouldn't say a child coloring in a coloring book is making art
They certainly aren't.
It sounds on the other hand like people were suggesting that playing a video game is a way for children to have experiences or develop imagination.
Everything we do involves "having experiences". I don't think anyone was suggesting that playing a battle simulation, for example, would develop imagination; someone suggesting that using creative tools would do so.
I wrote, "I think that these sorts of computer activities can have a lot of aspects of good board games and building sets about them, except that there's the extra aspect of simulation involved, and of course a great deal more of detail." I stand by that. One doesn't get the experience of actually managing a city using wooden blocks the way one does playing Sim City; one doesn't get the same practice in building strategic skills playing with plastic army men that one does in playing a battle simulation.
I suppose that with plastic army men one is forced to imagine more detail because it's not supplied, but that doesn't mean that it's clearly harmful to play with things featuring detail, or we'd all have our children playing with cornhusk dolls in the closest Waldorf academy.
Playing a game is also different from moving dolls around; one involves rules and the other not. That doesn't make me worry about stunting DS6's creativity when we play strategy games. Learning to work within the confines of a rule-based system exercises problem-solving skills.
My answer is that children for generations have had these experiences by using imagination and by creating with self created stories.
Children have not had the experience of struggling against an alien race to conquer a galaxy by creating with self created stories; they've imagined someone else doing them. One involves more strategic and tactical problem solving, the other creative writing or imaginative play.
Take my word for it or not, but DS6 is very highly creative. I can't imagine that playing games has stunted his growth, just as you can't imagine that your children's coloring has stunted theirs.
