For a while now, I’ve toyed with the “If you can’t beat them, join them” idea as applied to game consoles: Should I embrace instead of enforce? Microsoft’s new marketing campaign for Xbox 360 is geared towards families. Maybe you’ve seen the new commercials in which a series of helium balloons drop onto the roof of a parking garage and all the makings of a family-room session of Guitar Hero are set up, with teens and dads then playing together. And the company just announced a timer for the console will be available in December, hoping to win the hearts of parents.

My family-time fantasy is that the four of us gather around board games till the wee hours (with 8 pm being a wee hour for a four-year-old). Turns out Microsoft and I share the same fantasy, but theirs involves the Xbox: What if we were all huddled around the console? After all, what is the difference, really? Shared experience; interacting with each other; fun, fun, fun. They have a point.

But this week, an AP-AOL Games poll found that parents avoid playing video games with their kids. Apparently four in 10 parents whose kids play video games never play along with them.  

So, why don’t they play together? Here’s my take (OK, I admit to some stereotyping): Of the four in 10 who don’t, one is a bookworm who doesn’t enjoy video games, one is a self-righteous type who believes games are a waste of time, one is a technophobe who doesn’t know how, and one just can’t stand getting beat (and knows his or her kids, who log thousands of hours a month on Halo 3 or Dora’s Fairy Tale Adventure, would whomp them).

For me to embrace this, I’d need to take the first step and allow a console in my house. Which is scary, scary, scary because I fear the electronic slippery slope. I picture the slope as an 8th grade math class graph. As I’d begin to lose interest over time and my hours-per-week logged would chart a steady decline, Andy’s hours-per-week would take a sharp curve up. Until a fateful moment when Andy’s curve would be off the chart at the top, and mine would drop to 0 on the X axis.

For now, I guess I’ll just sit tight. I’ll renew my commitment to family-time games: basketball (a mini version we play in our gym-size dining room), Chutes and Ladders and Star Wars Monopoly. And hide behind the slippery slope argument. But stay tuned.