I Beg to Differ

By Michelle Slatalla

There was a time when my husband and I would furiously click away for hours on end, barely speaking, as we played a video game called Bust-a-Move 2. I realized we had a problem when the game took over my dreams. All night my unconscious self would arrange rows of colored bubbles, then pop them. I awoke exhausted. My husband (Josh Quittner, writer of the article preceding this one) confessed that he heard the game's treacly theme song whenever our dishwasher hit the rinse cycle.

After that addictive, mind-altering experience, I'm surprised to find Josh doubting that violent video games can have ill effects on children. While our daughters have so far shown little interest in the muscle-bound assassins that populate their dad's beloved Tekken 2 disc, several neighborhood boys play at our house and sit mesmerized by the game, kickboxing their way across the screen. Then they go outside to practice head slams.

Most of us can recall being so immersed in a fantasy world that it changed the way we behaved. At age 11, I developed a case of phantom scarlet fever after reading about Beth's brave death in Little Women. As for TV, I can't watch the local news in New York City without becoming convinced that I'm going to be hit by falling construction debris. Crazy? Maybe. But you won't see me walking under scaffolding in Manhattan.

So has a steady diet of violent video games made Josh behave badly? No. But he's much sweeter than the average boy. That's why I married him. All the same, I'm glad that Quake and Carmageddon weren't around when he was the age of my daughters' little friends.

Slatalla is a freelance tech writer