From the summary:

some online games make your ability to play competitively a question of how much time and money you've invested in a game, rather than the skill you possess.

I get the "money" part (if he means the purchase of game features), but the "time" part is silly. You get skill by investing time. Skill is the payout for a time investment, and time is often the payout for a money investment. It's different if you can buy game components with real money, but if you buy play time ... how is that different than the guy who put in $347 worth of quarters and 4120 hours to get the top score on Space Invaders at an arcade in 198x?

Not really ... try to imagine a jungle or other wild forest habitat/village with the same amount of attention-grabbing distraction as Manhattan; that would be truly bizzare. That is, unless you just mean out in the middle of the wild; but that would be a silly and unreasonable comparison. We could make up all sorts of fantastical scenarios about !!!X-TREME ATTENTION-GRABBING SETTINGS!!! (Next on Fox!) in which a human *might* find himself, but the point of the article is that an urban setting *in which people may commonly be found* is more distracting and energy intensive than a natural setting *in which people may commonly be found*. It's not like jungle dwellers (villages, etc.) fight off 3.9 tigers per hour or swat at 120344 deadly insects per day, though it's probably more intensive than a hike through Yellowstone. That might be the case in a particularly harsh jungle setting, but it's hardly to be counted normative for the considerations of this article, just as it would be to say cities are more focus-intensive because there are more terrorist attacks in cities.

yeah, that extra 1.5" is an unbearable distance to reach..

Hold on. Take a step back and look at the big picture:

Doing some basic, preliminary research while reading the article (and extrapolating the data), I've found that I use the escape key an average of 2983742 times per day. Now, that inch-and-a-half may not seem like much, but do some conversion: that's around seventy extra miles I'm moving my arm per day. Now, I'm an above average escapist, so I figure that if I'm moving my arm an extra 70 miles, the average user is probably moving only about 68 miles per day. I'm not an expert, but from what I gather from 60 Minutes, I'm probably burning calories equivalent to those I would take in consuming an entire cow. We know that forfty percent of cows are fed on the burning corpses of amazon rainforest trees. I saw a movie once (starring Sean Connery and someone else) in which they found the cure for cancer in the Amazon! And think of all the heat emitted from those trees, coupled with the MEGAJOULES of energy being emitted in the form of heat from the burning of the cows (for food) each day, per person. Now, INSFBCL (I'm Not Some Fancy Big City Lawyer), but you don't have to be teh inventor of the intarweb to know that that much heat escaping into the atmosphere is at least quintupling the effects of Global Warning every year.

Move the escape key to the caps-lock slot? Is there really any question? Is there really any choice?

Think of the children. And their melty ice-cream cones.

And cancer.