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The ornaments and other holiday decorations are about to be boxed up, and my younger son is still beaming.

"It's been a week since Christmas, and I still can't believe we got a Wii!" said my melodramatic 8-year-old.

The single most exciting moment in my house on Christmas morning was when our boys opened the oversized box under the tree. Inside was a Nintendo Wii console and a couple of new games.

In the week since installing the game console, we have experienced a range of emotional highs and lows — and I have started to see the video-game world in a new light.

Understand that buying a Wii is a big deal in my family. My wife and I had jeopardized our boys' social status for years by refusing to buy a video game system. No Nintendo, no XBox, no PlayStation. We would buy them games for our computer, or let them go online — but since we have an Apple iMac and a dicey DSL connection, the quality and selection of games was limited.

Our boys have played video games at their friends' houses, and developed a taste for playing them — just as I loved playing my friends' Atari games when I was a kid.

So this Christmas, my wife and I bit the bullet and got the boys (and, truth be told, ourselves) a Wii.

The nickname we chose for the console (the game asks for one during the set-up process, if you've never had one of your own) was "the beast." After a week, "the meth lab" might have been more appropriate.

Geez Louise, this thing is addictive.

The games that get the most play, so far, are the ones that come with the console, "Wii Sports" and "Wii Sports Resort." This is because they are the games all four of us, the boys and the parents, can play together. (We bought three extra remotes, and a spare Nunchuk for the games that require two hands.)

We have played golf, tried wakeboarding, hit home runs and dueled with swords. The greatest joy has been seeing my sons' faces when they clobbered their old man in bowling, or sent a tennis shot sailing past me.

So far, the hardest part about having the Wii has been limiting our time on it. Even when the game puts up an onscreen message suggesting we take a break — with the helpful visual of an open window, beckoning us to join the outside world — the boys and I blow through it and go on to the next competition.

Then there are the multi-level games, which suck you in to explore level after level of intricate worlds while pursuing a quest for riches or glory.

I gave my wife the game she most wanted, "Lego Harry Potter," and we each have taken time navigating the corridors of Hogwarts instead of, you know, sleeping.

There has been a ton of discussion about whether video games should be considered art. Roger Ebert, the esteemed film critic, has declared no — that art requires authorial control, a point of view of the artist creating the work, which video games cede to the player.

After playing "Lego Harry Potter" and a bit of "Super Mario Galaxy 2," I'm willing to concede the point that video games are artfully constructed. Game designers create what the author Salman Rushdie has termed "pocket universes," fully realized landscapes inhabited with creatures and characters.

But I still maintain that video games do not tell stories.

Certainly video games amass the components for storytellling. They are "structured very similarly to the quest narrative," Rushdie said in a recent interview with the public radio show "To the Best of Our Knowledge." But the structure is to a story what a foundation is to a house — it's a good start, but it's not the whole thing.

Video games can carry through a story, and the "Lego Harry Potter" game does that by following the narrative laid down by J.K. Rowling's books and the movies adapted from them. But the gameplay — in which the player acts as Harry, Ron, Hermoine or Hagrid to complete puzzles and solve challenges — is an interruption to the prefab story chapters.

That's not storytelling, any more than a children's show like "Blue's Clues" or "Dora the Explorer" is truly interactive because the narrator talks to the camera and pauses before revealing the next answer toward the ultimate quest.

I'm sure I'll hear from video game fans, suggesting titles that will change my mind about the storytelling capabilities of this or that video game. But I still believe that a story requires an author — someone besides me, the guy holding the game controller.

Now, if you'll excuse me, Harry and Hermoine need my help finding the Chamber of Secrets.

Sean P. Means writes the Culture Vulture in daily blog form, at blogs.sltrib.com/vulture.