Anyone who knows me knows that I am not in any way a fan of video games. Yeah, I’ve heard the stories of how they improve hand/eye coordination and that surgeons who play games are better at fine details than those who don’t. Yadda yadda yadda. Whatever. Any future benefit, to me anyway, is negated by the fact that they are time-draining, relatively useless wastes of time that suck dry the brains and energy of those dumb enough to spend hours glued to them.
I don’t let the boys play much, but I am outnumbered because my husband truly does not see anything wrong with the games. He and Zach found some new buddies to play with online, friends of ours who recently got a 360, and they’ve spent the entire afternoon battling each other.
Donnie says it’s all a social thing, that it’s no different from me having girl time with my friends. He says this is guy time. And we all know how outnumbered I am in this house when it comes to anything male. I argue until I’m blue in the face, with backing from the numerous studies that show the harm that comes from excessive playing, but no one hears me. It’s maddening, I tell you. I want to limit the time my son wastes on the darn thing, but then the husband goes behind me and undoes it with his own obsession with playing. He seriously thinks there’s something wrong with me for being so concerned about it.
So I just dream of things like strolling by with a bucket of water and accidentally tripping and spilling it all over the console. Or moving the dresser to vacuum behind it and OOPS! It somehow falls over and crushes the precious little thing. Or dusting the actual game disks with some steel wool. I mean, dust can be really hard to get off those darn things. Sometimes you have to really scrub to get it all off. Seriously.