Hear, hear!

But the classiness isn't only in the content! It's also in the form with clear, uncluttered sections that attract people who don't need fluff.
All the elements that lure "cool gaming kids" are missing: Countless posts every day, excessive signatures with pictures that need more bytes than a venerable 8-bit had on a floppy disk, a section concerning everyday stuff (I surely don't want to read about their puberty experiences, about their school or about the latest - what they call - "music" or cell phone ring tones) and cool nicknames (ahem! ;-)

I'll play until I'm dead (or blind - which is the same to me) but the things that I play change. The fact that I'm more and more interested in older machines would have made me shake my head had I thought about it as a teen. I was only concerned with faster, bigger, better back then (first an 8-bit Atari, then an Amiga, then PCs and their annual upgrades...). I'm more and more disgusted with games that need 10.000 files on my harddisk because they were either rushed to the market or their designers were either incompetent or simply lazy as hell.

I don't think that Matt really meant ill children but the generalized picture of a modern child that isn't really interested in doing stuff that needs a larger amount of time (like reading a book or watching a complete movie). The problem with the kids of today is that they are bombarded with stuff all the time (Buy this! Watch that! Play this! Listen to that!) and the internet is just another medium that makes it easy for them to skip to the "interesting parts" - even if it needs an active effort compared to TV.

Kids are no less intelligent than they were, say, twenty years ago - but they are clearly different. Their handwriting is generally worse (I'm astounded of the spelling mistakes - even though I'm not a native English speaker - but it's the same situation in Germany), they have a general knowledge which often seems completely different to kids back then - and thanks to the internet they already know things they shouldn't at this age. Cell phone porn being only the tip of the iceberg.
How many children have had more sex partners with 12 years than their parents in their whole lifetime? How many experimented with drugs at that age? The kids in Germany are exactly the same - except perhaps with less weapons ;-)

How should a kid react to all this? If the parents don't have time to bring them on the right track when they are young because both struggle with earning enough money to stay afloat in this world. Children aren't pets - they need attention and they need direction until they can judge by themselves. In other words: They need love and they need time - for example by "baby-sitting" them in the internet to show them that this is a fascinating and powerful tool and not a train station toilet.

Enough off-topic stuff from the single, childless, know-it-all
Calibrator