My first written English word (I'm from Sweden) was a horribly misspelled FirePower (but phonetically, it was correct!), after the DOS game with the same name. I was 3-4 years old. It was my favorite game. After that came awesome titles such as Bio Menace, Duke Nukem 3D, Doom 2, and that went on to grow into Quake 2, Unreal Tournament (the first one), Max Payne, and onward to lovely things like Doom 3 and Resident Evil 4.
My father bought his first PC the same year I was born. I was raised by computers, almost literally. EGA colored the world and PC speaker beeps were my lullabies. So how has that affected me?
Well... I can only recall actually hurting someone willfully... three times in my entire life. One in self defence (it's not fun to get pushed up against a wall and get a clothes hook between your shoulder blades), the other two were entirely stupidity enduced. I hated having to do it, but apparently some people are too stupid to take threats seriously. I don't like when people piss me off for their own enjoyment! But other than those times, I have never felt the need to take out aggressions on another living being. And in bars around town, at least one drunken person seemed to get beat up every weekend...
The only bad thing I can say about video games is that they're distracting, sometimes addictive, and that too much of them CAN make you lose grip of reality. But so can movies, and even books. Earlier today I told myself to not read Douglas Adams book in bed after I wake up. Only before I go to sleep. Otherwise I get a really random way of phrasing things until after lunch...
Oh, also; Games taught me English. Did I mention I managed to write a four-syllable word in a foreign language at the age of 3 because of some old DOS game? Yep yep. Oh, the video's done loading now...
[edit] By the way... If the world does go terrible and half the population dies because of children becoming murder machines because of video games... You know what? I'm going to accept that as this universe's way of keeping humanity in check. Nature has an uncanny way of restoring balance, and I believe the human race has gone way too far lately. Something's going to happen soon, among the lines of all these terrorist attacks, hurricanes, tsunamis and catastrophic climate changes, but it'll be worse than anything yet. If that's a teenage armageddon, then so be it. I think this world needs it sooner or later. And it's nature's call. [/edit]
