Viva Pinata
As my stalkers know, my Xbox Live profile has come to be dominated by pinatas — not because I am obsessively playing Viva Pinata myself, but because my kids have been. Endlessly. Perpetually. Mind-numbingly.
(Let me take this moment to apologize to Matt Mihaly for the death of the critter he sent us. We locked it in a box because it was testy and kept attacking other pinatas. And apparently it starved to death in there.)
The interesting thing about Viva Pinata to me is that it isn’t what you think it is. It looks like yet another take on the whole pet thing — virtual critters, only this time you have a garden to keep them in. But it’s nothing nearly so innocuous. No, you see, Viva Pinata is actually a game about animal husbandry in the “raise ’em and kill ’em for food” sense, and all of the cute little hats you can buy for them and amusing nicknames you can give them are just ways to tug at your heartstrings in the moment before you casually put them to death.
