My wife and I got a Wii for Christmas.  In addition to being about a dozen years behind the people of Japan, I realized that I am not even the first member of my immediate family to get a Wii.  Oddly, that award goes to my brother Seth, who has no cable television and did not own a cell phone until 2009 but who acquired a Wii in the same inlaw-related process by which I acquired mine.  In what is sure to be another record, ours is the first video game system owned by either my wife or me in a combined 53 years of living – most of which took place during an era in which some of my friends had subscriptions to Nintendo-specific magazines. 

Despite my parents’ aversion to electronic games, my humble beginnings as an infrequent video game participant and the fact that I have never heard of a Play Station, I became, for a period of 3 months, the single best player of Tony Hawk Pro Skater in all of Bentley College. While rapid, my rise to greatness was not without its problems.  Most of the problems related to the fact that I was ignoring girls, not going to class, and sometimes forgetting to eat dinner or lunch because I was sitting in a beanbag chair alongside my roommate Josh discussing the plausibility of rail sliding the rafters of the warehouse, and whether or not such a move would be better or worse, strictly from a point-getting standpoint, than a traditional rail slide around the entirety of the empty pool and whether we would find the game more or less awesome if it were more realistic in the sense that "skateboarding the sport" is mostly underwhelming and more about counterculture and baggy pants, or tight pants, or whatever is the opposite of normal pop-culture at the time, than it is about doing awesome tricks. 

In the past month we have used the Wii a great deal, and by “we” I mean that I have used the Wii.  I have a battery operated lobster swimming around on my desk as proof that I won the bowling tournament we hosted on New Year’s Eve, a bruise on my elbow as proof that my wife doesn’t understand the intricacies of Wii tennis, and have played enough Tiger Woods Golf that I can readily shoot well below par at Pebble Beach, even with my 78 year-old avatar who I created to have near-fetal-alcohol-syndrome-skull-width, and excessive age spots.  If it were possible to play Wii effectively from a seated position, I would be worried about developing another addiction.

I recently had a discussion with a man in his 40’s about my addictive relationship with the few video games I’ve used, and was surprised when he advocated their extreme use by his children.  To support his position, he referenced an unspecified study or studies that he claimed showed that children who spent a lot of their time playing video games were more likely to succeed in math and science.  I have not read this study, but imagine it also concludes that the same children would not be good at sports, and would not gain the interest of women until such time as they stopped playing video games, or made enough money by being good at math to make people forget they were lame.

My Tony Hawk career came to an abrupt end in May 2000 when I threw up at around two in the afternoon and wasn’t able to say with certainty that my nausea wasn’t related to my having just played 9 hours of electronic skateboarding without rising for any reason.  Surprisingly, the video-game related guilt I felt on that day was second to that which I felt in 1998 when I was late to a hockey game because I got engrossed in a game of computer mini golf, which was not even half as fun as actual mini golf, with my older brother who was visiting for the holidays.  I was so late that I missed warm-ups and was forced to skate without a cup, having left it behind in my haste to reach the rink.  Despite my painful history, I don’t need studies, or even guys pretending they read studies about the value of videogames to convince me that they can do some good; especially for children who would otherwise be playing dungeons and dragons.  The Wii, for example, represents an unparalleled opportunity to bowl a 250 on behalf of a man whose arms are not connected to his body; an amazing feat, though admittedly not as transformational as a game that makes skateboarding seem exciting.