Computer Gaming

I'm 59, and many folks are surprised that an old fart like myself is into computer games. Me too, I suppose..
We got our first computer in late 1998. At that time, I don't think either of us had any clear idea as to what we would be doing with the thing; maybe odd ideas of e-mail and using the word processor. My wife commented, when we got the boxes home, "I hope you'll be happy with your new toy!" Hehe- Within a few weeks, I had to pry her off the thing. She had discovered e-mail, and gaming as well. She was (and still is!) involved with the "Pogo" type of online gaming, mostly card games and such. She uses these things as much for the online chat feature as the game; she has a group who play on an almost nightly basis.
Now, I had been totally divorced from any sort of electronic gaming. Friends of ours had bought an Atari, and we had fooled around with "pong" and such a couple of times. Cute for an hour or so, I thought.
The kid wanted, and got an early platform as well, I don't recall which one. It had "duck hunt" on it, which I played once. Again, pretty thin beer, in my opinion.
I had no idea what was available in terms of such games.

One day, I found that the wife had downloaded a demo of the Star Wars "pod racing" game. We had just seen "Episode One", and I did sort of like racing...
The game was kind of cute, but not quite my cup of tea. I craved a bit more realism.

So, all unknowing, I did some searches and found a huge variety of games available. I had always been interested in WWII, and I wondered if there were any WWII-based games available....Hehe.

My very first game was Combat Flight Simulator, by Microsoft. I sometimes say that I learned everything I know about computers by playing CFS. Over a couple of years, I not only became a deadly "ace" pilot, but learned all about downloads, installations, file management, altering lines of code, creating folders and subfolders, and all the stuff you need to know to operate and maintain a computer properly.
There was a very active community for these flight sims, and I learned about "Mods" as well. CFS came with eight flyable aircraft, as I recall. By the time I gave up on this one, I had almost 200 aircraft, a whole world of scenery to fly in, and a variety of utilities and sub-programs as well.
I still do flightsims, but not quite as actively. My primary is the excellent IL-2 series from Maddox Games. IL-2, Forgotten Battles, and Pacific Fighters. Simply the best and most realistic WWII-themed flightsim available. I have a nice joystick, and the wonderful TracIR system, which ties your head movements to the view feature in the game so that you can "look around" in a very realistic manner. It's almost like actually flying.
I don't know how many games I've purchased or tried demos (or even pirated versions) of; but quite a few.
Standouts include the above-mentioned IL-2 series (other wise known as Sturmovik) Battlefield 1942 and it's excellent "realism" mod, Forgotten Hope, Elder Scrolls III (Morrowind), Half-Life and Half-Life 2, the newly released Red Orchestra, and a few others.
You can see a trend here, I like realistic military-oriented "sims".

I do not like strategy games, turn-based games, or things of that nature. I want to do my own shooting, flying, driving, and so forth.

Oh yes, driving. I had always been sort of interested in motorsports, but I had wanted to try a realistic driving game. There were not many available. The one that kept popping up on forums and such was Grand Prix Legends. Essentially out of print, it was still sort-of available...I found a copy at a discount store for ten bucks.
Grand Prix Legends models (and I do mean models) the 1967 Grand Prix racing season, right before they started to use aerodynamics on the cars, and odd little things like safety features.... Imagine a 1200-pound car with a 400 hp engine, "adequate" brakes, 30 gallons of gasoline (no pitstops)in an unshielded tank, and no safety devices for the drivers. Absolutely insane. Watch "Grand Prix" with James Garner sometime for a good depiction of what this racing was all about.
Grand Prix legends was absolutely uncompromising, and damned difficult. After much practice, and downloading many different training aids and utilities, I found I could manage "benchmark" times on most of the tracks.
I tried several other racing games, including the fine series of sports-car mods for EA's Formula One series of games.
Alas, after several years of flogging all kinds of cars around all kinds of tracks, I decided that racing was simply not for me. I suck. On many tracks, I would be 10-15 seconds slower than the "fast" guys. Just too old and slow, I imagine... My MOMO force-feedback steering wheel is collecting dust.

But enough of my gaming history, on to the "observation" part of this longer-than-I-expected segment.

Computer (and console, of course) gaming has become wildly popular, not only with kids but with adults such as myself. In fact, the electronic gaming industry as a whole made more money last year than the movie industry! That's huge, folks.

Along with this popularity has come the inevitable controversies. Games are making our children fat. (maybe true) They contain naughty images that will warp our children's little impressionable minds, and most of all, they are violent and "desensitize" our children to violence.
"Everyone knows" that the two lads who shot up Columbine "learned" to kill by watching video games.
Violent and sexist images are ruining our youth.

Odd, when I was a kid it was Rock & Roll....

My two bits on all this:

Can excessive gameplaying make kids fat? Maybe, but I read a lot as a kid and didn't get fat. I also went outside and played, which might be the difference. Kids nowdays seem to only play "organized" sports, instead of the knock-around and sandlot games of my youth.
More importantly, the violence. Here is my stock rebuttal; human beings are violent. At least, that's what history shows us. Oh, there have been isolated little groups of people that lived idyllic lives free from warfare and strife, but they have been damned few. The history of the human race is a history of warfare and conquest.
Think about it; the most horrible atrocities committed in all of history, the pogroms, wars, genocides, inquisitions, tortures, slavery, and so forth were all racked up long before there was any "media" whatever. No TV news during the Spanish Inquisition, no newspapers during the Crusades, no TV coverage from Buchenwald. And no video games either.
We have it in us to be violent creatures, we don't need video games to push us over the edge. I don't recall any of the prolific serial killers in recent history being big Streets of LA players...
It's a game, lighten up. It's pixels on a screen, moved around with a mouse and a keyboard or a controller. No one is dying, no one is in pain, and that's not real blood.
Kids can tell the difference; I wonder why adults can't.