Background: I’m pretty close to a lifelong gamer. My parents got me an Atari to play with my dad when I was three; when I was five, I got a FamiCom for my birthday; I still have it and it still (mostly, on a good day under the right phase of the moon) works; I’ve loved it to pieces. I’m a textbook case of everything you’ve said should never happen; I played Wolfenstein with my dad from the time I was six, DOOM by the time I was eight, and when I was twelve, I saved my allowance for four months to be about the third person in line to buy Quake when it came out. It turned out that my computer was too slow to play it, but hey! I was the first kid on the block with Quake; I took it over to a friend’s house and we played until my dad came over and told me dinner was waiting. “Busty chickies,” nothing, at twelve I played Tomb Raider, figured out how to use the nude patch when my parents weren’t looking, started trading porn with my buddies over SneakerNet, and started TinySex within another year. I’m not going to recommend giving your kids as much freedom as I stole (I was a sneaky little bastard), but I think I turned out okay.
Right now I live in a house with four other guys and just about every major system from the Genesis up (Genesis, Dreamcast, SNES, N64, PS1, PS2, XBox, GameCube, a handful of GameBoys of various stripes, six or so PCs of varying gaming-worthiness, and one of us just ordered a PSP). Every one of us is pretty close to a lifelong gamer (I started youngest, at 3; Tony started oldest, a little before his sixth birthday). There isn’t a man among us who averages less than half an hour a day gaming, usually violently (that’s me on the low end); Mark averages about four. Ironically enough, he has the second-highest GPA.
Now then:
Frankly, looking around, I’d say that the “brain-waster” theory is so full of it that its eyes went brown.
The lowest GPA in the house is 2.7 (a guy who works two jobs); the highest is 3.8. Most of us clump at the higher end. None of us went below 3.5 in high school. We have a low SAT score of 1310 and a high of 1520. We have an artist in one of the best animation programs in the country and an engineer in the top EE (Okay, tied with MIT; forgive me). Except for Mark, we all pay our own rent, cook our own food, and pay (almost) all of our own bills; our parents only help out with our (public-school) tuitions and let the three cars piggyback on insurance plans (much nicer rates that way). None of us even borders on overweight; the heaviest of us could barely be called stocky. Me, I’m a stick (a touch shy of 5’10", 125 lbs, about 5% fat last time I got a physical).
I think, for students ranging from a sophomore to an upcoming supersenior, we’re doing pretty well for ourselves. None of us feel damaged by our two decades of gaming. We’re reasonably socially adjusted, though we tend more towards quirky little subcultures (indie film and music nerdity rule the house, with art, writing, airsoft, and anime bringing up the rear) than the mainstream. Sure, we’ll sit around and yammer for hours about Halo or WoW, but we’ll do exactly the same thing about WWII, comedy routines, Jorge Louis Borges (three hours straight one weekend), or anything else that happens to catch our interests. That’s… what we do. That’s what we’ve done for years.
I expect, actually, that most of us would say that our lives would be substantially poorer without video games, on one level or another. If anything, console games are better for socialization than PC games. Even in a multiplayer game, there’s only one guy at a time on the PC. On the XBox, there can be four of us. They’re great social lubricant, especially now, as games get increasingly multiplayer. When we sit around playing Halo, shouting and pounding each other on the backs, the point isn’t really the game; it’s hanging out with your buddies, just like if we were playing football or whatever you’d have us do. Some of our best friends in the dorms were made when they stuck their heads in the door, attracted by one particularly cool-looking game or another. No matter how loud my dad and I will shout at each other sometimes, we can always fire up the PlayStation and have at each other, and we know things will work out. If it weren’t for that, I’d be surprised if we even spoke with each other.
Even the TinySex was beneficial; better writers are more desirable partners, so I worked at it, and I got a whole lot of practice in. Today, I make coffee money editing papers for other people around school, even the PhD students. I credit the TinySex. Oh, sure, it jaded me, but I take that as a good thing: I have no real desire to hook up with anyone. Sex is just exercise. If I don’t have a meaningful, emotional connection to someone, what’s the point? Isn’t that a great social value?
I suspect, actually, that enforcing total console-game deprivation might actually promote that sort of addiction (it does happen) that you’re so afraid of (and there’s the cultural-deprivation thing that msmith537 mentioned). Me, I play about half an hour of games a day; it’s not a special thing, just a way to entertain myself. It’s always been a part of my life on one level or another. I have a friend whose parents neurotically banned videogames for him, even calling his friends’ parents when he went over and telling them he couldn’t play. When he got to college, he moved his stuff in, bought his books, and then, first thing, walked over to the E.B. and bought himself an XBox. He’d heard how great it was and wanted to see; it was a symbolic thing for him, this way of asserting that he was a grown-up. He never figured out how to moderate; he’s been on and off academic probation since, just barely clinging to the graduation path.
I think that’s the key. You have to learn to moderate. Video games are perfectly fine, as long as you don’t let them take over, as long as you take care of your schoolwork, as long as you’re playing them with someone, instead of just the machine. It’s a social nexus, just like when families used to gather around the radio, or the TV, way back in yesteryear. If things start to slip, don’t cut it off; that feels punitive and unfair. Cut back and enforce moderation. Really, that’s it. It’s that simple. It’s how you approach it. If your kid becoems an antisocial, monosyllabic, overweight troll boy, if he lacks social skills because he was babysat by the electronic pacifier, it’s not because the Machine Is Evil ™; it’s because you, the parent, let him.
Sidenote: I would exercise a little more caution today than I did back when I was that age; video games are a lot more sophisticated and arguably less morally clear. Quake was a man on a mission to save the world from demons that fell over in pre-chosen death animations; GTA is a punk on a crime spree, killing people who die in unique and clever ways depending on the weapon and hit location at hand. Manhunt just made me want to shower afterwards. You don’t have to coddle your kids (and I suspect that that’s more detrimental than anything), but do exercise some discretion.
