I love tennis on the Wii, Carol has occasionally been lost to the world in PC games, Jake is obsessed with the Web-based games on Nick Jr. and Noah has not one, but two learning laptops. Sheesh. There’s a whole lot of gaming going on here. And yet, I never think of us as gamers. I have friends with an XBox or a Playstation who rattle on about the next big hit game. Halo this, Resident Evil that…and I’m like, “Dude, you’re such a loser,” but it’s just not fair, I guess. We all have our digi-love at some time or another.

I can even remember a time, many years ago, when my brother brought home a Nintendo machine. I was still in High School and he was a college freshman. He’d bought it from a classmate for like 20 bucks because the kid had no cash left to get home. The machine ended up a fixture in our den where my mother, of all people, developed a fast and nasty addiction to Super Mario Brothers. I couldn’t get near her for a couple weeks.

It was especially funny because she’d been the one who shied away from all things computer/gaming from the time my father brought home that first Atari console with a jury-rigged cartridge on which we could mount pirated games. Ah, the early days of pre-hacking. It was the Wild West. 

I even have a couple of joysticks I bought in the last few years that are preloaded with those classic games. Some of the arcade versions like Pac-Man and Dig Dug, and some of the classic home games like Centipede and Breakout. Noah especially likes those. And Jake, who when not on the Web is begging to play Monkey Ball Banana Blitz on the Wii, has recently written a song about loving Video Games.

It is performed very theatrically, a lot of pseudo vibrato, somewhere between Meatloaf and Journey (the singer and the band, not the meal and the noun) and it consists mostly of singing “I love video games! Video games are so cool.”

There are dance moves too.

I think maybe it’s time to go to the library.