Explain this to me:

My kids have a Gamecube hooked up to a 15” LCD monitor/television in their room.

At some point recently, the screen was damaged. And by damaged I mean that more than half the screen was illegible. The TV was trashed. You can see from the picture included here. If you look very hard you will see that the game Simpsons Hit and Run is on screen. But you have to look very hard.

The other day I walked into the kid’s room to discover that one of my sons was playing Hit and Run, on the broken screen. Apparently he could see just enough to sort of drive around the town—perhaps simulating driving a car with severe glaucoma.

At first, I thought this was an obsessive, or maybe desperate, attempt at entertainment. But my house is filled with games and alternative game systems—including Game Boys and Game Boy Advances among other things. A game critic’s kids are never at a loss for videogame fun. Then, a few days later, I witnessed another kid playing at the house, working his way through Hit and Run on the damaged screen. I asked them what they were doing and they said, “Playing a game.” It was if they didn’t notice most of the graphics were gone.

So, the question I have is this—What’s going on here? Is McLuhan wrong, is the message just more important than the medium? Or is this the perfect example that McLuhan is right—these kids would rather mess with the medium, even when the message is garbled?