Video Games vs Litteracy

My oldest nephew, Dylan is completed addicted to video games. He's been playing them since he was 1 year old, thanks to me, Aunt Misty.

My sister moved back into the house after her divorce and Dylan was an honery little monster that followed me around like a shadow for years. We soon discovered he had a passion for Star Wars. He liked the music and the action and explosions. At that time, there were only three Star Wars movies available to the world. My family and I hate them all now.

Not that I wasn't a fan. But you have to understand when you watch the same 3 movies 37 times a day, every day, for 2 years... you begin to utterly dispise them.

I had the Star Wars games for my Super Nintendo and Mom begged me to play them when Dylan got fussy. He enjoyed simply just watching me play the same wretched games over and over and over and over.

Living out in the boonies, there's not much else to do when it's too hot to go outside. A water sprinkler can only bring so much fun, especially when you start to get older. Dylan had become so hooked on video games that my sister finnally began to limit his play time and only after homework was done.

These days, Dylan has a little better time management. He's 13 and called me a couple days ago. He's a sort of quiet boy so it suprised me that we chatted for an entire hour. He'd been at his dad's for two weeks and was home for the weekend before going back for another two weeks. I got the impression that he was really just homesick and missed his brother and sisters...and Aunt Misty.

For most of that hour we talked about video games. Anymore, I get the feeling that Dylan might use games the way I used comic books.
As a escape.

Games are expensive but at $3 a pop for comics, you get much more useage out of games. And it's way better than drugs. You wouldn't believe the eye-hand-coordination this kid has!

Dylan falls into that typical boy persona: Hates to read; is good at math. And now that a lot of the RPG games talk and you don't have to read it to follow the story, I wonder how much reading he's actually doing. But that's ok for now. He's thirteen years old and has more important things going on in his life other than reading literature such as:

Girls
Making fart jokes with his friends
Fight with siblings
Video games

He always begs me to come over to my house but the timings alaways wrong. But I think he only wants to come over because Shawn and I have been collecting video games since we were both 15 years old. Coming to our house is a rare occasion but probably like a freakishly huge free arcade to the boy.

Well, it was nice to hear from him anyway. I'm glad he called. The only thing that really terrifies me is the day when he'll call me and talk for an hour about his new girlfirend and what sort of car he wants to buy.

For now, I'm pretty much happy just chatting about video games.