Sorry, I'm totally confused. Filling in line drawings on the back of a kids' placement is not art. It seems odd to me that anyone would believe it is producing art. It is a time wasting activity with potential fine motor benefits. Just like when the kid practices handwriting by copying down a sentence they aren't engaging in constructing a story.
I'm sorry you're confused. Coloring in someone else's art does indeed have something to do with art-- it's filling in or completing someone else's art, but subtracting out the chance for creative expression nearly completely. In a similar vein, doing
touchups on Thomas Kinkade masterworks is undeniably art-related, but completely devoid of any artistic creative benefit.
If the issue is that they are being exposed to unattractive versions of art as a consumer I wonder how you reconcile that with having the child consume any kind of kid media, like Leapfrog that you mentioned, that is full of pretty poorly done unattractive art.
The issue is that they're doing an art activity that discourages creative outlet, beyond the choice of color for a certain region. Watching a Leapfrog video is not an art activity, it's a fact-memorization activity that involves the consumption of information. Let's not get silly.
Kid play is full of incredible richness of detail
No amount of imaginative kid play replicates the sort of detail I'm talking about, which specifically deals with rule-based play in a strategy game. Playing with dolls is not chess, and playing with plastic army men is not a full-on battle simulation with real working parts. Playing a battle simulation of an actual WW II battle is simply different by design from freeform play with figurines (it's intended to heighten the realism available), and any comparison that decries the loss of imaginative possibilities is intentionally missing the point.
What's happening with the computer isn't just playing chess, but the illusion that the child is engaging in imagination when they are acting as a consumer of a world, story, and rules created by someone else.
There's no illusion. I'm astounded that you keep trying to claim that they are one and the same. I never claimed that. However, one could imagine that one is a commander of a real-world army when one is commanding a simulated army, no less than one could engage in the same fantasy while playing with molded motionless plastic soldiers.
ETA: I think that maybe what is rankling with you is that you feel that my statement was overreaching before, in that the aspect of freeform play is partly discarded in a simulation in exchange for the imposition of more rules, so in your opinion it is much different and an important part is lost. I do feel that they are different, and I thought that this was understood: one does allow more scope for imagination; the other allows more scope for strategy and a more realistic experience of actually controlling soldiers in a real battle, despite the loss of the ability for tanks to teleport at will and other physically impossible feats, for superhuman abilities to save the day, space aliens to land and intervene, etc. (This is why before computers, detailed battle simulations with small figurines were created-- which kids often love.)
So, if you like, I will modify my previous statement from "To me, that doesn't seem much different from using a set of army men" to "To me, that doesn't seem much different from using a set of army men to conduct realistic battles".
Let's not argue as if I am advocating discarding free play (my son has a ginormous set of plastic army men, complete with plastic tanks, helicopters, concertina wire, etc. and plays with them too). The burden is on you to show that playing with a simulation is bad; I think that you can show no proof, any more than you can prove that playing chess is bad, though even more constrained.
If I were to use your style of reasoning above, I'd be inserting a statement or question here suggesting that by your logic, we can't expose our children to any sort of story or media created by another, due to the risk that they'd just be acting as a "consumer of a world".
It is also acting devoid of an integrated sensory and motor experience.
This doesn't hold water. Does one not reap the benefits of playing chess when one uses a board displayed on a computer screen, instead of holding the pieces in one's hand? (If you have a Windows machine with Windows 7, the game "Chess Titans" lets you do just this, for example. You can play against a human on the screen.) But what of the terrible loss of the "integrated sensory and motor experience"?
See, the main problem with the set of fallacies you're stubbornly trying to present is that you are suggesting without any foundation that just because something is on a computer, it's bound to be bad. And you will continue to fail as long as you so badly overstate the case.
A child can practice flying a plane with software today, actually feel what it might feel like to look out of the cockpit (even engage with an enemy aircraft), etc., whereas almost no one ever gets that chance in the real world; that's just an example. I've provided others.
... and there are
scads of others. In fact, a child studying WW II can engage in a full-fledged battle recreation where they're right in the thick of the action.
Your baseless argument against simulation just doesn't make sense because it's, well, baseless. Mathematicians and scientists use simulations all the time because they're useful learning tools. You haven't presented any evidence that playing with simulations (or any other strategy games) is bad. You haven't presented any evidence that the loss of an "integrated experience", exchanging it for the "integrated experience" of computer use, is bad.
Here's another thing that can't be replicated outside of a computer: hypertext. Computers indisputably offer opportunities that can't be duplicated otherwise for learning because of the enhanced browsing and multimedia presentation options. How about learning about the forementioned WW II with an
interactive atlas that lets one drill down into fine detail at each step of the war? What about using an
interactive model of the human body?
Chess is a good example. If you play on the computer you play by the rules of the computer and only the rules of the computer. When kids play with a IRL physical chess set they may play according to the traditional rules of the game. That's always an option. Or, they may conceive something entirely new - what happens if we incorporate Lego people with super powers, what happens if we add an element of chance through incorporating rock paper scissors or a dice roll, what happens if we add bowling as a new game mechanic, what happens if alter the movements of the queen, what happens if we change the rules to make it so our chess game is epic and runs for weeks at a time.
Uh oh. We'd better recommend that people have their children avoid playing with the standard rules of chess-- and better stay away from those incredibly limiting chess tournaments!
