TIME:

3-1/2 hours a night game playing = 1 day a week lost

(4 days a month, 1-1/2 months per year)

If your kid tells you he's going to spend the next month and a half blowing people away and killing monsters in a simulated reality hall - most halfways competent parents would oppose it rather strongly.

However broken into tiny components makes it far more palatable.

What you need to realize Jacob is that folks need escape mechanisms. They often become addicted to their escape mechanisms because those that produce them profit from such addiction.

You can replace the simulated killing, beheading and slow-motion dying with 3-1/2 hours of TV watching and the same shock is generated when seen in context. A month and a half per year simply sitting on one's posterior watching TV?

Most folks would rightfully see such as a form of torture and would realize how it would not only decay their minds, but their bodies as well.

Surprise! America is rolling in obesity. Why? Very simple. It's that month and a half per year (or more) of torture - video game playing, TV watching, Blockbuster movie renting - whatever.

Yet trying to pry people from this torture is nearly impossible because this torture gives them little imaginary ego perks. A video game is really nothing but an electronic comrade for the emotionally insecure. For every point they score, every level they pass, they are given a tiny quotient of ego reinforcement. The game designers are tasked with including these ego perks, pseudosexual rewards and such for their antisocial target demographic.

Having sat in numerous corporate brain-trusts where the users are thus described in excruciating detail and in far worse teminology than I have employed here has forever turned me off on such things and like the many actors who never watch any TV, while profiting from those who do, I am all too aware of the way video game makers and television producers view the intellectual/emotional depth of their customers.

It's an eye-opener to say the least.

So to sum up, your intentions are noble, but the only person you can change is yourself. Don't expect others to give up their prized escape mechanism just because you tell them tit's not good for them. They have to come to that realization themselves or the true benefit is lost. Just like the drug user, alcoholic or smoker must truly want to quit and not because someone else nags them to do so.

Once folks start dreaming about the games they play and realize how much time they spend in some hellish unreality of another twisted minds making, their mental self-preservation instinct usually kicks in and they wake-up all by themselves.

But I'm not going to stop you from ringing the bells - because basically I agree wholeheartedly.

;-)