You can fire up your Kindle and read “Dumbo.” You can plug in your PlayStation and strum along with the Beatles. And soon, you’ll be able to power up your XBox and play with Elmo, Big Bird and the rest of the “Sesame Street” gang.
Warner Brothers has announced that they are partnering with Sesame Workshop to develop a series of video games featuring the characters and concepts that have been educating children on “Sesame Street” for the last four decades. Details haven’t been hammered out, but the games are expected to be both educational and entertaining, and will be for use with both the XBox 360 and PlayStation 3.
My initial thought was that turning “Sesame Street” into a video game was near sacrilege. Growing up, “Sesame Street” was one of the few TV shows I was allowed to watch with reckless abandon. While requests to watch “The Smurfs” or “She-Ra, Princess of Power” were rapidly declined, there was an “open door policy” of sorts with “Sesame Street.” I never fully understood my mom’s logic on this one until I became a parent myself. Though there are plenty of shows on TV that are educational, none compares to “Sesame Street” in its consistent onslaught of phonics, numbers and social sensitivity. While I feel these concepts are best taught in a parent to child relationship, I appreciate the benefit of having “Sesame Street” as a resource to help.
If somehow Warner Brothers is able to translate the best parts of the show into a video game, more power to them. Though we don’t have an Xbox 360 or a PlayStation 3, a lot of households do, and these may in fact be households that don’t honor or simply have time for that one-on-one teaching that takes place in ours. Let’s just hope there’s no “Grand Theft Cookie” involved.
