I’ve got a couple of young boys, 8 and 6, and so of course a large part of their life revolves around video games. They are crazy about videogames, and often I find myself giving them the old, “When I was your age” lecture, telling them how when I was a young boy, I played outside, and read books, and did all kinds of other things that didn’t involve dropping virtual tactical nukes on virtual villages, blowing tiny little virtual people into virtual Kingdom Come. But as I’m telling them this and rounding them up to head outside, I see what they’re playing and I think to myself, “Shit, if video games looked like that when I was a kid, I would never have left the couch.” Because they look AWESOME, and beautiful, and lifelike, and they’re everything I dreamed about when I played video games as a child because what I played looked like someone vomited on a computer and then smashed it with a pipe-wrench. Continue reading