Touring the worlds that my son has settled over the last couple of years, I find a lot of the imagery one might expect from a kid his age. Throughout are standa

Touring the worlds that my son has settled over the last couple of years, I find a lot of the imagery one might expect from a kid his age. Throughout are standard fantasies like living in a treehouse or on a boat. The dominant themes vary as I pass through time: trains in his earliest worlds, then robots, a long streak of pyramids. Pirate ships, particularly half-sunken ones with treasure chests, remain a constant. If only all kids were so innocent. Maybe he's just young. It'd be mildly amusing to read this from the perspective of a parent horrified that their son developed into one of those raging lunatics that occasionally haunt Dota 2. When I was about 14 or so, I used to play this oldschool game called Underlight. It was a roleplaying game unlike any other, before or since: You're forced to play a character. You're not allowed to talk about real life or even admit that real life exists at all. It was so cool, mostly because this was the world of adults. This was also before the era of voice chat, so they had no clue I was 14. It was also around that time that I was discovering myself, and it usually took the form of various relationships with various women. These relationships could feel quite real, though it was solely a text-based medium. And "sex" was obviously involved, or as close to it as you can get. (On the forums it was called "Quality Roleplaying," or QRP, hah.) That was a very small component of the game, but it was there. The point was that it emulated real life in a few ways. There were politics. There were 8 "houses" (basically clans), with various leaders. I even participated in a murder once, an extremely rare event in any game. It was true murder, in a sense, because you're not allowed to log in to your character after that, and only a select few people ever had the ability. It cost 10 points of health permanently. It was basically the world of Harry Potter, and I was in Slytherin. So we had certain abilities that no one knew existed, one of which was the ability to end other characters. As far as I know, this ability was used only three times in the history of the game, so it was quite lucky to see it firsthand. My dad once came down and sat behind me, perhaps out of curiosity. Unfortunately this was right in the middle of one of the QRP sessions. I spent about 20 minutes doing nothing but staring at the screen and frantically clearing the text whenever she said anything. He never understood what was going on. Eventually he got bored and left, and I was able to pick up right where we left off. Quite hilarious in retrospect. He never bothered to try to understand what I spent so much time doing, and I certainly never offered any info. Video games are an increasingly important component of childrens' habits, and we shouldn't be quick to dismiss or trivialize their positive effects. I wasn't so good at writing until a few years of being forced to be.