If Nintendo can make ping pong, paper airplanes and bass fishing addictive, why can’t they do all the parents who pay for those games a favor and come out with Wii Homework?

Every subject could be covered — Wii Lab for physics, biology and chemistry (where if kids blew anything up, they wouldn’t get detention and you wouldn’t get a bill for repairs); any number of Sim City knock-offs for Social Studies and History (e.g. Sim City: Jamestown, in which kids would have to decide between starving to death and turning cannibal); and some kind of battledome for math, where famous mathematicians from history fight each other to the death using the powers of Euclidean Geometry, Algebra, Calculus, etc.

Even grammar could be a game where, say, kids rescue dangling participles, or help a peace-loving race of “nouns” defend themselves against the evil pronoun horde that’s trying to assimilate them, or even assume the role of an ancient wizard who teaches adjectives to stand up to verbs by uttering the magical incantation “l-y.”

Levels would be the same as they are now, K -12, only instead of “graduating” kids would “level up.”

Parents would have to pay a little more attention to what they’re saying, too, as some of those unconscious responses would lead to confusion:

KID: Can I play Wii?
PARENT: Not until you finish your homework.
KID: But… Wii is my homework.

The main problem with Wii Homework would be that as with all Wii games, kids would eventually fight over it. And while this would be satisfying on an ironic level, it would also mean parents would end up taking the Wii away for a week as punishment, leading to an awkward situation where the teacher would ask “How come you didn’t finish your homework like you were supposed to?” and instead of saying “The dog ate it” or “I forgot,” your kid would say “Because my parents wouldn’t let me.”

Game over.