Wired onlinehas asked me to start writing a regular column about video games, and this week it began running. The debut column is online now — and it’s about Nintendogs, the insanely cute DS game where you train and care for little digital puppies. In the column, I dispute the idea that the game is popular because the dogs are cute; their real allure, I suggest, is that they’re so incredibly helpless.

As it turns out, we’re suckers for babysitting. Sherry Turkle — the digital-age pundit and author of Life on the Screen — has been researching the relationship between robots and people. She’s discovered that the most popular robots are, unexpectedly, the ones that demand we take care of them. They trigger our nurturing impulses, the same ones we deploy toward infants, the elderly or any other vulnerable creature. [snip]

Maybe sci-fi doomsayers have got it all wrong. Artificial intelligence won’t be dominating us with its superhuman cognition and bloodless logic. It’ll be peeing itself and demanding to be taken for a walk.

You can read the rest of the piece online here!