Originally appeared in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press

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My psychologist partner Harvey Robbins and I have talked about writing a book for young people that would help them see the world they are inheriting as more livable.

Try to imagine how kids envision the world they're expected to survive in in a few short years. It is a place of speed, stress, complexity, and unrelenting seriousness. Kids feel they know nothing, and the world awaiting them seems to require knowing everything. This gap helps explains our epidemic of childhood depression.

We gave up on the project because we didn't what to say to kids. Hey, kids -- reality is a drag.

Meanwhile, my son Jon, 10, has concocted a scheme to forestall adulthood, Peter Pan-style: he is planning a career in computer game development. If life as a grownup looks unlivable, why not co-opt it by doing something you like to do?

Jon is a gamehead. For the past two years he has lived an intense, deliberately impenetrable life as a warrior in the LucasArts series of 3D games: Dark Forces, Mysteries of the Sith, Jedi Knight, and Shadows of the Empire. And he has been bugging me to explain to him, as the all-knowing techno-poobah that I am, how do you design computer games?

I looked at the assortment of static graphics tools that I have acquired over the years -- CorelDraw, Adobe Photoshop, etc. -- and I had no clue. I knew Virtual Basic and VRML were important languages in game creation, and I knew the big movie studios use big, fast workstations to create spectacular animations. But that's it.

My underlying fear was that game development required such insane amounts of team programming that Jon, who mainly likes to play these games, would find the work repulsive and discouraging. But he's a funny kid. He talks to all his friends about it. And he keeps looking into it. He found out about a special school in the Northwest for brilliant young game developers. They only take the cream of the cream and they pay all their expenses to create high-level games for the next generation. He wants to go there.

Anyway, Jon saw an ad in a catalog for a product called Simply 3D, by Micrografx (http://www.micrografx.com). It doesn't pretend to train you for a career in game development, but it does allow you to create and manipulate 3D objects, which Jon sees as part of the puzzle.

Simply 3D lets you create animated 3D pictures using text and supplied objects, backgrounds and animation and "deformation" patterns. You can create a picture of a melting, Daliesque clock on a background of M&Ms with the legend "Not In Your Hand." The clock can spin around and the letters can split up and regroup (animations) or the elements can be squashed, twisted, and melted (deformation).

So for the last couple of weeks Jon has been toying with these images. He figured out how to create "bodies" out of parts, and make them into moving creatures. The effect isn't as slick as the animated toys in Small Soldiers, but it's more than I could do.

Then, completely on his own, Jon created an animated 3D graphic for his brand new web site, which he also created by himself. It's a simple rotating banner, but it's effective enough to have attracted a half dozen other kids -- I think they're kids -- to his Jedi Clan with it.

What's next for Jonathan? I think he needs some formal training in how to program for onscreen movement. Microsoft Visual Basic comes in a student/learning version that I think he can handle. And there are some good programming guides like Visual Basic for Absolute Beginners (Osborne-McGraw-Hill).

So will Jon -- or Freak_10, as he now prefers to be called -- grow up to take the game development world by storm? Who knows? He reminds me of what I was doing at his age, tracing pictures from "Fantastic Four" comics and plotting to outflank the work world by becoming too good at drawing The Thing (the lumpy orange one) to be denied.

This kind of plotting is probably a kid's best defense against the dull of adulthood. Every generation mounts its own Peter Pan defense against the hooks of the generation before.

For an astute look at how kids are bending technology to their own purposes, check out Don Tapscott's Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (McGraw-Hill). Tapscott shows that kids are using technology to build relationships and shape the world before it's handed over to them.

Anyone who worries that our starworn kids can't possibly cut it in the new millennium -- like me, when I worried over that book idea -- will find Tapscott's findings reassuring.

Meanwhile, Jon keeps plugging away. Don't tell him, as I once did, "Hey, it's only a game." He gave me a look that seemed to say: "Be serious, or stand aside, because I'm coming through."

To see Freak_10's rotating Jedi banner, visit his home page at http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Bunker/6253/. Or visit his dad's duller site at http://mfinley.com.

America's Best-Loved Technology Writer(TM), Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://mfinley.com.