Billionaire tech exec is "disturbed" by kids who play games all day

Billionaire Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who has made a fortune selling a range of enterprise products, is "disturbed" by the way in which video games cause some children to stay indoors all day.

"I am so disturbed by kids who spend all day playing video games," Ellison said during the HCM World conference in Las Vegas this week as reported by PC World. "When I was a kid the sun rose, I was on my bike, and if my parents were lucky I was home before dark."

Ellison argued that children are drawn to video games, as opposed to real-world activities, because they are easier to take up.

"People have chosen games where there's a virtual ball rather than a real ball, and they prefer virtual games to real games because they're easy," he added.

Ellison's daughter Megan Ellison served as a producer on Spike Jonze's future-set movie Her, which posits a future of highly sophisticated and all-encompassing artificial intelligence systems. The movie also depicts video games as more seamless and engaging than anything available today. Ellison said he enjoyed this movie, but pointed out that this kind of advanced technology can be a double-edged sword.

"Your game playing is more fun because you're more successful, in virtual reality," Ellison said. "The impact of technology on children, right now in different aspects of our lives, is sometimes fabulous, and sometimes terrible."