"Why did you kill me?"
I told my youngest nephew that when he writes his memoirs, he should call them Why Did You Kill Me? This was something he said quite frequently while playing a multiplayer video game called (from what I can reconstruct) Call of Duty: World at War, which appeared to have a World War II setting. In some ways listening to him play the game was like listening to someone on a cellphone. I could only hear his side of the conversation, but he was talking (via a headset) to friends back in Corvallis and who knows where else. Being teenagers, it appeared that they were frequently just horsing around and randomly killing each other in the game just for the heck of it. He was in that game for hours every day over Thanksgiving weekend, and my brother told me that that group of friends use the game to plan get-togethers and other social activities, too. At night he would talk in his sleep about the game, still immersed. "Why did you kill me?!"
I didn't read the article, but I saw a headline recently about a study indicating that these multiplayer games allow teens to develop social skills. I can only imagine how much of relief it was for him to escape the dull political conversations of us adults to interact with his friends in the virtual world. "Sorry I killed you," I heard him say once. "I just wanted to see what would happen." Heh heh heh.
I didn't read the article, but I saw a headline recently about a study indicating that these multiplayer games allow teens to develop social skills. I can only imagine how much of relief it was for him to escape the dull political conversations of us adults to interact with his friends in the virtual world. "Sorry I killed you," I heard him say once. "I just wanted to see what would happen." Heh heh heh.